Queer Auteurism under Censorship: On George Cukor and Mitchell Leisen

Sometimes I think there was more sex within the code than without it.
–George Cukor to Gavin Lambert in On Cukor

No cinephile, or even casual film fan, could deny that film history abounds with queer directors, actors, and artisans. Equally self-evident, though, is the consistent marginalisation of queer narratives, and even queer aesthetics, throughout any given period of cinema’s still-young life. Lest one argue that we surely live in a more enlightened time now, look to GLAAD’s recent report that LGBTQ representation in commercially distributed cinema in the United States is, as they measure it, currently at a three-year low (no doubt influenced by an increasingly hostile political environment for LGBTQ communities, with transgender people being a particular target of discrimination and hateful invective). It is revealing, too, to read between the lines of how contemporary queer directors have navigated their careers: For instance, gay director and screenwriter Bill Condon, in a recent interview, claims that he deliberately brought “a bit of camp” to the final two films in the Twilight franchise, and discussed coding a side character in the live-action Beauty and the Beast as gay. His most recent film, the queer, political musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, was – in contrast to these big-budget studio films – independently financed. At risk of oversimplification: Smaller, independent films, or even studio films made specifically for “niche” audiences, can include queerness at the forefront, but higher-stakes, big-budget fare must push queerness to the margins. 

Condon’s efforts at sneaking a queer sensibility into heterosexual romances with massive budgets is remarkably reminiscent of the way queer directors navigated one of the most notoriously censorious environments in film history: Hollywood during the enforcement of the Production Code, which, among other stringent, conservative requirements, prohibited any depiction of “sex perversion.” Working under far greater constraints than contemporary directors such as Condon, queer artists who operated within this system nevertheless found innumerable opportunities to inflect mainstream, commercial cinema with their distinct sensibilities, even if any explicit reference to non-heterosexual sexuality was officially verboten. Even without hard censorship and with increased legal rights and public representation of queer people, queer filmmakers' working methods still echo those of their pre-Stonewall antecedents – and in a period of retreat from LGBTQ+ inclusion by commercial cinema’s corporate backers, it is particularly valuable to revisit how those in more restrictive systems created bodies of work that were undeniably, vibrantly queer. Beside the pleasures of revisiting undervalued works from great filmmakers, it is instructive to examine how queer directors navigated Code-era censorship on multiple levels: Not only do they provide a counter-narrative to the official erasure of non-normative sexuality from mainstream filmmaking from this era, but the sophisticated, coded, and often camp representations of queerness they offered also created a queer cinematic aesthetic that transcends the dictates of censorship. 

Two of the most prominent queer directors of the Production Code era provide an excellent case study, both in how queer perspectives can enter mainstream cinema, and how queer people’s distinct relationships with their marginalised sexualities might in turn influence the way they approach their work. George Cukor and Mitchell Leisen both entered Hollywood after establishing careers elsewhere: Leisen as an architect in Chicago, and Cukor as a stage director on Broadway and in Rochester, New York. In a wealthy, expanding industry clamoring for talent, both found purchase relatively quickly. The multitalented and enterprising Leisen began his career as a costume and production designer for Cecil B. DeMille, a collaboration which netted him an Oscar nomination in 1930 for his art direction on Dynamite. He eventually became important enough to DeMille’s process to work as his assistant director, before leaving DeMille in the early 1930s to direct his own movies for Paramount. For his part, Cukor benefitted from the sudden rise of talkies; his success as a theatrical director led to his employment as a “dialogue director” for Paramount, and he acquitted himself well enough to begin directing his own movies shortly afterward. Both were established as prominent directors by the early 30s, yet their respective backgrounds remained visible in their work throughout their careers: Leisen’s inveterate craftsmanship and aesthetic sophistication adorn his immaculately designed films, while Cukor evidenced his theatrical experience in his precise handling of dialogue, camera blocking, and performances. 

Their careers spanned virtually the same stretch of time (though Cukor lived and worked for longer than Leisen), and many parallels are easily drawn between the two men. Both had long and successful careers, albeit with as many challenges as achievements – Cukor moved between studios several times and often struggled to bring his preferred material to the screen, while Leisen’s work and reputation began to decline in the early 1950s – and both earned reputations as consummate “women’s directors” for their ability to elicit strong performances from star actresses in melodramas, romantic comedies, and musicals. Both thrived within the studio system, as they made great use of the vast resources they had access to while working quickly and collaboratively, and both consequently struggled as the studios declined. Cukor achieved a greater measure of industry standing, with numerous Oscar nominations and an eventual win for My Fair Lady to his name, but Leisen rivalled him in box office success and actors’ desire to work with him. 

And, crucially, both were queer men, identities which neither worked too strenuously to hide, and which certainly influenced their aesthetic and narrative preferences, affected (positively and negatively) their relationships with their collaborators, and coloured their contemporary reputations and posthumous legacies – note for example the coded language of “women’s director,” and the ease with which prominent critics across generations have designated them as minor or second-tier directors compared to their heterosexual peers like Howard Hawks or John Ford. One might be tempted to push Cukor and Leisen’s shared queerness to the background as irrelevant speculation on their personal lives, but their sexual identities are vitally important to understanding both as individuals and as artists, and more broadly, to grasping the general shape queerness took in Code-era, pre-Stonewall Hollywood. Both navigated shifting tides of relative acceptance, such as in the bacchanalian 1920s and pre-Code 30s, or outright oppression, most notably during the Lavender Scare of the 1950s; in the process, both made specific choices and compromises in how they would express their marginalised sexual identities. 

As evidenced by the title of Patrick McGilligan’s comprehensive biography – A Double Life, also the name of a 1947 Cukor film – George Cukor rigidly, consistently compartmentalised the manifold aspects of his private and professional lives. Cukor was a sort of social king of Hollywood, hosting innumerable, legendary parties out of his Beverly Hills home (decorated with extravagant flair by gay interior designer and former silent screen idol William Haines). However, he maintained multiple guest lists which were kept strictly separate: Dinner parties were held largely for industry peers and great ladies Cukor idealised, such as Ethel Barrymore and Katharine Hepburn, while his Sunday afternoon soirées were for his gay male friends and their (typically paid) dates. Cukor did not strain to hide his identity to the same extent as some of his peers – he stayed a lifelong bachelor rather than entering a lavender marriage, for instance – but he also maintained firm expectations and boundaries for his behaviour, and that of the other gay men he knew. He did not discuss his sexuality frankly with his colleagues, though the town was well aware that Cukor was a gay man. At his Sunday afternoon parties, certain activities were impermissible: While his friends routinely brought hustlers, Cukor did not tolerate his guests having sex in his home. More generally, Cukor disliked flamboyance, or even effeminacy, in other gay men, believing that they should collectively stay “circumspect.”

It is telling of Cukor and Leisen’s differing viewpoints on sexual identity, then, that Leisen was definitively not in Cukor’s inner circle. The following anecdote, reported by William J. Mann in his comprehensive study of pre-Stonewall queer life in the Hollywood film industry, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969, is telling: When Leisen’s biographer David Chierechetti showed Cukor his completed oral history, Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director, upon publication, Cukor’s response reportedly was only to note its “very nice pictures;” and Mann noted that Cukor’s friends thought Cukor found Leisen to be “crass.” Leisen, indeed, lived in a way that consistently grated against how Cukor thought queer men should comport themselves. Leisen could best be described as bisexual. He had a longstanding, intimate but tumultuous affair with costume designer Natalie Visart, and he would eventually marry Stella Yeager. Yeager was an opera singer whose abilities were not rated highly by Leisen’s acquaintances, and it is unclear to what extent this was a love match, seeing as they lived mostly separate lives. Apart from these relationships, however, most of Leisen’s documented sexual and romantic relationships were with men. Though not without shame – he once attempted to “cure” himself of his sexual desire for men with hormone shots – Leisen lived with less regard for social convention than Cukor, and, at risk of editorialising, perhaps with a bit of impish glee at shocking people. 

Leisen seems to have generally been sexually active throughout his life – including a probable dalliance with iconic costume and fashion designer Adrian, who he mentored – but unlike Cukor, he had multiple longstanding romantic relationships, most prominently with Billy Daniels. Daniels was a dancer who Leisen fell for as another relationship was dissolving, and he integrated Daniels not only into his personal life, but also his professional life. The handsome Daniels would go on to choreograph dance sequences for many of Leisen’s films, and he appeared in some of them as well. Their relationship would deteriorate in the 1950s, coinciding roughly with the decline of Leisen’s own career, and Daniels would die, either by suicide or a heart attack, not long after Leisen broke off their relationship.

Leisen’s career would be affected by his decreasing ability to separate his sex life from his professional life: He had a habit of making sexual advances to male actors he directed that he indulged in more and more frequently as he aged, and this pattern of boundary-crossing behaviour likely played a part in his dismissal from the 1955 film Bedevilled. He would retire from film directing and transition to television soon afterward, until health struggles put an end to his career. Cukor, whose habit of strict compartmentalisation likely blocked him from fully expressing aspects of his personality and identity, but may have also helped him maintain self-control and preserve some measure of health into old age, kept working into the 1980s.

Through Cukor and Leisen, one could draw several neat distinctions between modes of living a queer life in pre-Stonewall Hollywood: Circumspect or brazen, compartmentalised or integrated, sexually transactive or romantically entangled. One could also draw parallels to the choices and compromises they made in their lives to their preferred aesthetics and narratives in their filmmaking. Every artist’s individual character reverberates in their respective bodies of work, and, conversely, no artist’s work can be defined solely through the narrow lenses of biography and identity politics, but there is still something fascinating and revealing in viewing Cukor and Leisen’s formidable corpuses in conjunction with their queer lives. Though they have long been dismissed because of their queerness, whether through veiled insults or direct homophobia, it is in fact this queerness that, in part, make Cukor and Leisen so significant in the intertwined histories of film artistry and studio-era Hollywood.

Cukor, a theatrical animal and an admirer of classic literature, naturally gravitated toward material that had its roots in the stage or the page. Direct adaptations of plays, like Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight and Philip Barry’s Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, and novels, such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, abounded in his filmography. Even in his films that were invented for the screen, or re-made from earlier films, Cukor always prioritised thorough character development, finely-crafted dialogue, and three-dimensional performances. 

When interviewed later in life by young interlocutors like writer Gavin Lambert, Cukor emphasised his desire to mould his style to the material. Enamoured as he was with writers and actors, and distrustful of excessive aesthetic flourishes, Cukor prided himself on keeping his director’s touch largely invisible. He did, in fact, have his stylistic hallmarks – long takes, dialogue-heavy scenes, and sophisticated camera blocking are features of virtually all of his films – and he skilfully executed technical experiments when he believed a film’s story called for it, but Cukor’s self-assessment is overall an astute one. His films, at their best, captivate precisely because he elevated strong storytelling tied with virtuosic acting, and critics who dinged him for his lack of an individual stamp missed the point of Cukor’s self-evident artistry. 

Cukor’s willingness to cede the spotlight in order to let his films’ stories and actors shine certainly speaks to his theatrical background – where, after all, the director must relinquish control after opening night – yet, I posit, there is also something to be said about the relationship of his directorial ethos to his sexuality. Cukor always had a large, active queer social group, of which he would serve as the nexus when he began hosting his Sunday afternoon parties. In the early 1930s, when homosexuality in Hollywood was something of a trend – drag performance was a brief phenomenon, dubbed the “Pansy Craze” – Cukor was frequently spotted out and about with his group of gay friends who also worked in the industry, though none with the same difficult-to-match level of success and prestige as Cukor. His sexual appetite was well-documented; according to McGilligan, Cukor regularly cruised sailors on Long Beach with his friends. He also liberally gave his gay friends work on his films, encapsulated by a possibly-apocryphal anecdote from the set of the 1936 film Camille: Greta Garbo asked Cukor about an actor who, for no apparent reason, recurred in a number of bit roles; Cukor replied that he was “playing the part of a man who needs a job.” McGilligan posits that Cukor even cast his paid sexual partners in walk-on roles. 

It was within the waning days of this relatively liberated world that Cukor made his most overtly queer film, Sylvia Scarlett, filmed in 1935 following a string of successes and in the early days of the Production Code’s enforcement. Adapted from Compton Mackenzie’s novel Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett, the film is a genre-hopping, gender-bending picaresque that repelled audiences but later gained a cult following. Frequent Cukor collaborator Katherine Hepburn played the titular character, who absconds to England from France with her father, who has stolen a sum of money and is in over his head. To avoid detection, she disguises herself as a young man named Sylvester, but quickly grows more comfortable as a man than as a woman – causing romantic complications with an array of men and women, befitting of Shakespearean comedy. The film’s dramatic tonal shifts and loosely constructed plot baffled critics and audiences, but so did, certainly, its flagrant transgressions of gender and sexual norms. The film is remarkable now for capturing Cukor at his least restrained, and perhaps most transparent: McGilligan notes that the film is an example of Cukor’s consistent, personal identification with the roles he cast Hepburn in, and mentions that he “referred to Sylvia Scarlett as their misbegotten love child.”

Sylvia Scarlett likely spurred Cukor to exercise greater restraint in his future films, both in terms of narrative content and in potentially provocative representations of gender and sexuality. His later films are certainly more disciplined – the daffy, jarring tonal shifts of Sylvia Scarlett are entertaining to witness, but Cukor would handle complicated tones with much more subtlety in his coming films – and depictions of possible queerness are more deeply encoded. This falls in line with the pattern of Cukor’s personal life: His social life would become progressively more confined to his home, with curated guest lists, and his sex life more private. What remains consistent across his entire body of work is Cukor’s deep identification with his female leading characters – especially, as McGilligan noted, those played by Katharine Hepburn, whose screen presence and public image were unique in her dogged refusal to submit to conventional expectations of womanhood. 

Nothing is flagrantly gay about most of Cukor’s films past the 1930s, but his undeniable queer perspective is all over his films. Take, for example, Holiday, in which the characters played by Hepburn and Cary Grant bond over their shared nonconformity and their lack of identification with conservative values; or Pat and Mike, in which Hepburn’s character is an athletic star who forces her besotted manager, played by Spencer Tracy, to accept that her unique abilities stretch the traditional confines of heteronormative relationships. Though Cukor made the pragmatic choice to work within the confining boundaries of a homophobic society and industry, he did not sacrifice his unique point of view – one that was deeply humanistic but looked askance at social norms, particularly those that governed gender and sexuality.

Leisen simply could not be bothered to conceal and compartmentalise, both in his life and in his films. Within his colourful, sexually adventurous personal life, he carried a tendency to shape the careers and public images of his lovers: He secured Natalie Visart a long-term position as Cecil B. DeMille’s costume designer, designed Stella Yeager’s wedding dress and supported her opera career, and most visibly, was the driving force behind Billy Daniels’ career as a choreographer and screen dancer. He was as hands-on in his art as he was in his life. His background as a production designer and architect naturally led him to involve himself deeply in his films’ scenery, but he also was heavily involved in their cinematography, costume design, script development, and historical research. He typically took great interest in his actors’ performances as well, though his focus on acting tended to wane when he was directing a film from material he did not like, which happened with ever-increasing frequency later in his career. The result of the polymathic Leisen’s heavy involvement in nearly all aspects of production is that each of his films are dense with aesthetic pleasures – take the grand Art Deco hotel of the screwball comedy Easy Living, for instance, or the sumptuous Technicolor cinematography of the swashbuckling romance Frenchman’s Creek – and that each artistic choice seems in tune with Leisen’s singular vision, though he was also a committed collaborator. 

That Leisen was never considered as a top-tier auteur can, at least in part, be chalked up to a lack of consideration of his material as “serious” – it is telling that Andrew Sarris condescendingly categorised Leisen as “Lightly Likable” in his canon-setting The American Cinema. Leisen, after all, was a director mainly of screwball comedies, romantic dramas, and melodramas, nearly all of which centre women and some of which also have a distinctly camp sensibility. Billy Wilder, a frequent screenwriter for Leisen who became so frustrated by Leisen’s interference with his screenplays that he decided to strike out on his own as a director, expressed the subtext of Leisen’s reputation bluntly: Leisen was “too goddamn fey … a stupid fairy.” 

If Cukor’s queer sensibility post-Sylvia Scarlett was firmly encoded, Leisen kept his out in the open. This may in part be because, in the 30s and 40s, none of the films he made were high-stakes disasters like Scarlett, but it also speaks to Leisen’s directness and relative transparency across his life and work. Based on the limited biographical information there is about Leisen – nearly all of which is contained in David Chierechetti’s excellent oral history – Leisen was about as open as a queer man could be in his time. His relationship with Billy Daniels could not even really be called an open secret, as he apparently made it clear to all who knew him that they had a romantic and sexual relationship. He did not hide, or even subdue, his sexuality for his colleagues, given his penchant for coming on to attractive actors. This streak of his personality is likely why, as Chierichetti posited, Cukor found Leisen “crass,” but crassness is in the eye of the beholder. From another perspective, Leisen was ahead of his time in his refusal to bow to a homophobic social order, and this refusal to downplay his sexuality was as present in his films as in his personal life: Leisen directed some of the most obviously queer-coded, homoerotic films of the Production Code era. 

In an audio commentary for the Criterion Collection release of Leisen’s 1939 screwball masterpiece Midnight, critic Michael Koresky makes a recommendation: “Queer cinema seekers should look no further than … No Time for Love,” which he describes as “a delightful display of pre-Stanley Kowalski shenanigans.” Indeed, the 1943 film, an odd-couple screwball romance between a fashion photographer (Claudette Colbert) and a construction worker (Fred MacMurray), is notable for its steadfast commitment to the erotic appeal of the film’s working-class hero. Even the poster, which depicts Colbert pointing her camera at a buff, shirtless MacMurray, says it all: The film’s protagonist and vehicle for audience identification is a cultured sophisticate, while the object of desire is a rugged, muscular man. 

No Time for Love is the perfect object lesson in what critic Dennis Drabelle noted in a 1994 Film Comment article was the clearest and most consistent aesthetic signal of Leisen’s sexuality: “Leisen’s sexuality makes its profoundest impact […] in his flair for reversing sex roles, often to the discombobulation of MacMurray.” Simply put: The director identifies with his female protagonists, who, like Cukor’s heroines, were often as pragmatic, intelligent, and inventive as they were desirous, and he views their male interests as objects of erotic fascination and romantic feeling. See, also, Joan Fontaine’s lust for the suave and perpetually half-dressed pirate played by Arturo de Córdova in Frenchman’s Creek, or, in a more chaste vein, Barbara Stanwyck’s soul-sustaining love for Fred MacMurray’s compassionate, family-oriented lawyer who rescued her from a Christmas spent in jail in Remember the Night. 

Leisen also had a penchant for peppering his films with gay-coded supporting characters. This was not an uncommon tactic, particularly among queer directors – Cukor memorably gave his doomed heroine an effete best friend in Camille – but Leisen took it to another level. No Time for Love, again, is the exemplar of this narrative coding, seeing as Colbert’s character has what can only be called a gaggle of twinks perpetually following her around. Leisen pokes good-natured fun at these dilettantish, effete men who attach themselves to cultured women, and portrays them as being just as wowed by MacMurray’s rough-hewn masculinity as Colbert. He gifts Joan Fontaine a jolly, bewigged servant and confidant in Frenchman’s Creek, and he allies a scheming Mary Astor with a gossip-hungry adherent in Midnight (played by the underappreciated Rex O’Malley, who also played Garbo’s bestie in Camille). The inveterate character actor Franklin Pangborn, always a preening figure, is delightful as a boutique owner and engine of the high-society rumour mill in Easy Living. Leisen, of course, did not invent this stereotypical character type, but he used it to more notable and consistent effect than his peers. The silly gay men at the margins of his works are not easy punchlines or objects of ridicule, but fully integrated into the worlds of his films, as likable in their foibles as the lovelorn stars. 

Even in the inescapable censorship of the Production Code, Leisen, somehow, made uncloseted films: He never hesitated to foreground what he found alluring and attractive, whether this be an immaculately decorated hotel suite or a barrel-chested construction worker, and never submitted to a false social order that pretended queer people did not exist. His films were coded only insofar as he did not literally depict the “sex perversion” so despised by chief censor Joseph Breen – but his orientation was clear for any audience member who knew how to look.

From a contemporary perspective, one could easily dismiss the works of the likes of Cukor and Leisen as outmoded relics, good for camp value or Oscar trivia but not much else. One could also view them as sad, cautionary tales of the limitations placed on queer people in censorious, discriminatory times. However, either of these interpretations would be profoundly limiting. In Cukor’s willingness to bend normative gendered and sexual representations – even when taking care not to excessively rock the boat – and in Leisen’s barely-masked worlds of queer desire and identification, both succeeded in bringing idiosyncratic queer perspectives to the conservative landscape of studio filmmaking. Their approaches, in accordance with their individual characters, reflected the unavoidable compromises both made in their lives: Cukor may have blocked himself from an integrated self-conception and long-term companionship in his pragmatic compartmentalisation, while Leisen’s provocative openness incurred a snowballing array of personal and professional consequences that he never fully remedied. Viewing their lives and work in parallel reveals the delicate dance queer men had to navigate when pursuing high-profile careers, and also puts their bodies of work into perspective: Both boasting formidable filmographies of brilliantly crafted films, identity politics aside, their films nevertheless reveal the influence of their sexualities on their lives. 

The tides of social acceptance can shift rapidly and violently, and after a period of quickly accumulating legal rights and social acceptance, the United States and many other nations globally are in a period of homophobic and transphobic retrenchment. In a time of protracted backlash, there is inherent value in taking a closer look at how queer artists in eras of industry-sanctioned censorship found avenues for artistic freedom despite formidable obstacles. One could argue that there is greater value in uplifting cinema that foregrounds explicit representations of queerness – which is certainly a worthy and essential task, but should not happen at the expense of filmmakers like Cukor and Leisen who carved out distinct paths under highly restrictive circumstances. Through cannily subverting conventional narrative and aesthetic codes, they both crafted still-influential visions of how to smuggle queerness into works that officially did not sanction its presence. Cukor and Leisen are but two examples; one could make a sustained examination of any number of queer directors from the studio era, including James Whale, Dorothy Arzner, Vincente Minnelli, and Edmund Goulding. Artistry can, counterintuitively, thrive under constraint, and the work of Code-era queer auteurs exemplifies how subverting the yoke of censorship – whether this censorship is explicit or implicit – can result in cinematic art of remarkable, lasting vitality.