The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood
Diana McLellan
440pp, Robson Books, £17.95
If you drew a Venn diagram of Man's Best Fantasy and Man's Worst Nightmare, the middle bit would simply say Lesbians. On the one hand, no piece of porn, however soft, is safe from the prying digits and silky skills of the Sapphic seducer; on the other, the tabloids pant lewdly after butch pieces who have boldly stolen wives and mothers. They say that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two directly opposing points of view at the same time, in which case every man in the nearest pub is a genius, believing as he does that a) whenever two women have sex, they'd always secretly prefer it if a man was there and b) if your wife/girlfriend has sex with a woman she'll be ruined for ever, because only a woman knows what another woman really, really wants. And it's not crusty socks, beer breath and wind-breaking, for starters.
Any old dyke will do when a man and his fist are looking for fun; imagine, then, finding out that a good number of the world's most beautiful women - Hollywood film stars - have always been at it like knives. Just as today, when the Popbitch website (www.popbitch.com) hums with rumours about modern dreamgirls such as Natalie Imbruglia and Cat Deeley, there is a particular sort of male sexual masochism that is unhealthily titillated by the idea of his love object being exquisitely repelled by him. This book should do him nicely.
Diana McLellan is a "reformed gossip columnist" and a contributor to the Ladies Home Journal . In case you're thinking that the latter sounds a bit "Bostonian", the press release hilariously tells us rather more about her husband and her "married daughter Fiona" than we are used to on such occasions. As you might deduce from this, her style is racy and pacy, with little darts of starchiness. And her story is a sparkling, sad one.
The golden age of Hollywood Saphhism ran for three decades - from the 1920s, with the influx of the decadent Europeans (the mainstays of the Sewing Circle, as it was archly known, were Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and the Spanish playgirl Mercedes de Acosta, the Warren Beatty of her day), to the 1950s, when the vicious snooping of the House Un-American Activities Committee (led, ironically, by the closeted gay lawyer Roy Cohn, who would die of Aids in the 1980s) crucified communists, liberals and the sexually flexible alike.
McCarthy was not even searching out Anti-American activities, but Un-American ones; and what could be more the antithesis of American Mom than a smoky-voiced European Sapphic? (Though in her own sweet way, Dietrich was proud of her hausfrau streak, often greeting guests with her sleeves rolled up and her hair in a bandanna, having been suddenly overcome by a wild desire to scrub the kitchen floor.) The city Garbo described in 1926 as "the one place in the world where you can live as you like and nobody will say anything about it, no matter what you do" had become a snakepit of spite and neurotic conformity.
This is not to say that the American girls didn't catch on quickly: Garbo ended up a prisoner of her ruined beauty, spending her days "rousting the dead, brooding, making slipcovers and watching TV in bed", when she wasn't dreaming of a remake of The Picture of Dorian Gray opposite Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn, we are told, "rewarded herself" with women to make up for all the joyless career sex she suffered with men. In the 1946 film The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, all three leading ladies - Barbara Stanwyck, Judith Anderson and Lizabeth Scott - were gay; a distaff version of Giant , where all three male leads, Rock Hudson, James Dean and Sal Mineo, were friends of Dorothy. At one point, it might have been easier to list the Hollywood squares who didn't dabble; gloriously, even the great costume designer Edith Head, whose cheeky name graces some 90% of Hollywood classics, indulged, sparking the inevitable quip: "Edith Head gives good wardrobe."
In the 1940s, a sexy young star like Lizabeth Scott - half Lauren Bacall, half Veronica Lake, but so much darker that her nickname was "The Threat" - could happily reveal in interviews with fan magazines that she always wore male cologne and pyjamas. By the 1950s she was revealed as an habituée of top-flight brothels by the truly horrendous Confidential magazine, whose amazing habit it was to "offer" stories for "buy-back" to their victims, running them only if the required fee was not forthcoming. It was largely due to Confidential that the Sewing Circle eventually scattered, mostly to Europe and Latin America, often accompanied by the gay husbands with whom they had been set up by the sympathetic studios and with whom they enjoyed long and happy arrangements or "twilight tandems".
Interestingly, some of the greatest persecutors of homosexuality in America were Freudian analysts, whose declaration that queerness was a sickness that could poison society was pounced upon by right-wing bigots as much-needed intellectual ballast. The American Psychiatric Association did not remove homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders until the 1970s, when McLellan imagines Garbo pacing the streets of Manhattan dressed as a man, tormented by the young female lovers openly holding hands.
In theory, the story should end on an upswing, with the passionate attachments, clammy jealousies and rather rank-sounding "ranch vacations" of the golden age replaced by the twice-the-fun bisexuality of stars such as Drew Barrymore ("Let's just say I like women sexually. I love a woman's body and I think a woman and a woman together are beautiful"). A group called Lesbians in Film and Television is 1,000 strong. But the downside is that lesbianism is today almost excusively used to titillate men - and, to keep it non-threatening, is purely about sex.
In the past, lesbianism was about many things - mentoring, companionship, emotional sustenance. Now, for Hollywood at least, it's about looking good in a camisole. Women's declining power there (a creeping phenomenon since the 1950s, as if to punish them for the power they were slowly achieving in the real world) means that more than ever they are judged solely on their youth, beauty and appeal to men; being bisexual, as in the case of Barrymore, just makes them more interesting fantasies. Queen Victoria didn't understand how lesbians could have sex; present-day Hollywood doesn't understand how they can do anything but, preferably in glorious Technicolor. It's progress of a kind, I suppose - but not half as much seditious, transgressive fun.
