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  Cukor and Katharine Hepburn on the set of The Philadelphia Story |
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On Cukor, by Gavin Lambert, edited by Robert Trachtenberg. Rizzoli, 208 pp., $50.00
One day in the early 1980s, George Cukor, the octogenarian director of such celebrated Hollywood films as Dinner at Eight, Camille, The Philadelphia Story, Adam's Rib, My Fair Lady, and the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born, unexpectedly appeared at the American Film Institute headquarters in Washington, D.C. Accompanied by a retinue of young male admirers, Cukor had come to the Kennedy Center to lobby unabashedly for the AFI's Life Achievement Award. The award had been presented to such of his peers as John
Ford, Orson Welles, and William Wyler, but Cukor, whose rich body of work unquestionably qualified him for the honor, was at a disadvantage, for he had never achieved a degree of public recognition commensurate with his talent. The AFI could have satisfied its television audience by drawing from a spectacular array of Cukor stars to give testimonials to his subtlety and daring as a director. But it was not to be.
Trying to elicit some sense of why Cukor was bypassed, I mentioned to an AFI staff member that Cukor would have been the AFI's only gay honoree. "How would we know?" came the sensible reply. More likely the AFI was negatively influenced by the longstanding critical condescension toward Cukor as a "woman's director." Until recently, most American film critics had a cultural bias against "women's pictures," seeing them as less serious by definition than films revolving around male preoccupations. The labeling of Cukor as a "woman's director" — promoted by the MGM publicity department, particularly after he directed an all-female cast in The Women (1939) — also served as thinly veiled code for "gay." Today, however, thanks to the feminist movement's influence on film historians, women's pictures (sometimes colloquially referred to as "chick flicks") are seen as deeply expressive of social undercurrents and psychological complexities. This welcome trend helps to account for the current upgrading of Cukor's standing in the critical canon.
 Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford in The Women |
Cukor further belied the "woman's director" label by demonstrating his versatility over a wide range of film material. Part of what distinguishes his body of work is his habitual blurring of genre boundaries, making many of his films difficult to categorize. Is A Star Is Born primarily a musical or a drama? Doesn't Dinner at Eight (based on the Edna Ferber-George S. Kaufman play about ill-assorted guests at a high-society dinner party) flip-flop effortlessly between farce and drama, especially in Barrymore's failed suicide attempt? Is Judy Holliday's madly publicity-seeking New Yorker Gladys Glover in It Should Happen To You the heroine of a charming romantic comedy or the centerpiece of a sharply pointed social satire? And how to categorize Heller in Pink Tights, Cukor's visually opulent Western starring Sophia Loren? Cukor biographer Patrick McGilligan describes that improbable adaptation of a Louis L'Amour novel about a troupe of itinerant frontier entertainers as "a handshake between Toulouse-Lautrec and Frederic Remington." Rather than being seen as a virtue, Cukor's directorial versatility often has been held against him, much as if it were seen as a crime for an orchestra conductor to be ambidextrous.
Cukor emerged from the glittering New York theater scene of the 1920s, and one of his credos was respect for the original author's text; late in life he received an award from the Writers Guild of America for his rare degree of fidelity to the written word. Yet this admirable trait has led many critics to regard Cukor as an impersonal Hollywood craftsman rather than as an artist whose personality is expressed in his work. In the pre-confessional age Cukor inhabited as a partially closeted gay man, his public modesty and discretion served him well, enabling him to navigate the complicated social and professional position he occupied in Hollywood. Cukor strictly divided his socializing at his walled West Hollywood home between his celebrated friends from the worlds of film, literature, and high society, who visited for small lunches or dinner parties, and his loyal coterie of lesser-known gay friends and their handsome young hustlers, who would gather for pool parties on Sundays. Cukor's habit of not proclaiming the secrets of his private life in public kept him a shadowy figure and contributed to the deceptively self-effacing quality of his direction.
At the beginning of the original edition of Gavin Lambert's 1972 interview book On Cukor, Cukor declares: "I'm not an auteur, alas. And the whole auteur theory disconcerts me. To begin with, damn few directors can write. I have too much respect for good writers to think of taking over that job. Also, to be frank, not all directors can direct." Lambert observes in his introduction to that edition, "In making his films, and in talking about them, Cukor's first instinct is to defer — to his actors, his writers, and so on. The 'I' exists but doesn't care to advertise itself."
The auteur theory is often misunderstood by its opponents as unfairly claiming for journeyman directors the same kind of authorship as that practiced by such celebrated writer-directors as Billy Wilder, Ingmar Bergman, and Woody Allen. But Cukor is precisely the kind of Hollywood director for whom François Truffaut and other young French critics originally devised their "politique des auteurs" in the 1950s. They did so largely to account for the recognizable visions of such individualistic Hollywood directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Cukor, who managed to put their stamp on their work without writing their own scripts, even if this reliance on other people's material led to an unevenness in their output. "Perhaps I should make the following confession," Truffaut wrote at the time. "I believe in the 'politique des Auteurs,' or, you might say, I refuse to accept the theory, which is so valued in motion picture criticism, of great directors 'aging,' or becoming 'senile.' ... This theory, based on Giraudoux's statement 'There are no works, there are only authors,' consists in denying the axiom dear to our elders, which maintains that films are like mayonnaise, you either succeed in making them or fail."
Cukor may not flag his characteristic themes as obviously as other directors, but his personal preoccupations stand out clearly when one surveys his body of work. Perhaps most strikingly, Cukor always gravitated to socially adventurous, rule-breaking characters. The most outré example of such transgressiveness is Hepburn's title character in Sylvia Scarlett (1936), who masquerades as a boy, attracting the sexual attention of a woman (Dennie Moore) and two men (Cary Grant and Brian Aherne). So ahead of its time that it became the director's most notorious flop, Sylvia Scarlett has been embraced by modern audiences more sympathetic toward its gender-bending drollery.
Like Sylvia Scarlett, many of Cukor's people act for a living, but even if they follow other professions, as do the married lawyers played by Tracy and Hepburn in Adam's Rib, they instinctively practice theatricality as a way of life, a means of creating their own individualized roles in the human comedy. Cukor helps his actors navigate gracefully and delightfully between their public roles and "off-stage" moments of more private emotion. His roster of flamboyantly larger-than-life yet always believable characters spans a vast range of life experiences, as disparate as those embodied by Hepburn's adventurous New England writer Jo March in Little Women, W. C. Fields's sublimely daffy Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, Greta Garbo's dying courtesan Marguerite Gauthier in Camille, Holliday's shrewdly dumb Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday, Tracy's Runyonesque athletic trainer Mike Conovan in Pat and Mike, and Maggie Smith's defiantly eccentric Aunt Augusta in Travels With My Aunt.
"You never had to put a label on the bottle, because it was unmistakable," Katharine Hepburn once told Cukor. "All the people in your pictures are as goddamned good as they can possibly be, and that's your stamp."
If the primary virtues of a Cukor character include poise and independence, the flip side of those qualities is the self-destructiveness seen in the alcoholics who appear with surprising frequency in his films. Besides the characters played by Sherman, Barrymore, and Mason, other memorable alcoholics in Cukor films include Lew Ayres's wealthy young lush in Holiday, whose speech (by playwright Philip Barry) about the joys of drinking is one of the most finely shaded monologues in screen history; and Claire Bloom's suburban "nymphomaniac" in The Chapman Report (1962), a performance of such startling intensity and sensual abandon (even after the studio's recutting) that it suggests how powerfully Cukor could have responded, if he had been given more opportunity, to the increasing sexual freedom in films.
Cukor's preoccupation with the double life of alcoholism, which he often shows as affecting characters of social distinction, has been traced back to his friendship with Barrymore, whose roistering and hospitalizations provided traits and anecdotes that were adapted for What Price Hollywood? But the theme of alcoholic self-destruction is so pervasive in Cukor that it more likely traces back to some lost aspect of his own past or stands as a metaphor for a disruptive side of his personality that he managed to hold in balance. Cukor was sparing in his use of liquor but struggled for much of his life with his weight and was subject to emotional volatility. His understanding of the vagaries of the human psyche ensures that people are rarely reduced to stereotypes in Cukor movies, but are three-dimensional human beings with unpredictable emotions and behavior.
Cukor sometimes displayed the rare self-confidence to keep his camera not only self-effacing but also motionless for long stretches of time, such as when the feminist lawyer in Adam's Rib, Amanda Bonner (Hepburn), plots the defense of a dopey woman (Judy Holliday) who tried to kill her cheating husband. As Hepburn interrogates Holliday, cannily manipulating her into the role of a defensible victim, the actors are allowed to inhabit and explore their roles in all their nuances from ridiculous to sublime. Often the emotions Cukor evoked from his players are delicately shaded; just as often they are raucously comic; and sometimes they are raw and violent. Cukor excelled above all at exploring the dramatic tensions between people’s outer and inner lives. Serving as both a confidant and a cajoler of his actors, he prodded them, usually gently but sometimes with bracing harshness, to delve deeply into emotional areas they usually kept safely hidden.
NEXT PAGE: Emotional breakdown
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