The Saga of Billy Haines

William Haines had always existed on the periphery of my awareness - the nice young man who squired Marian Davies and Mary Pickford through silent comedies. His films were never re-issued or shown in Cinematheques and the copies included in the MGM bundle sold to TV were generally the ones not put to air. The fan magazines went silent. It came as a great surprise to find that in 1930 he had been the most popular male lead in Hollywood - which in 1930 meant he was the most popular actor in the world. 

 

Memory Lane - Haines and Frankie Darrow

 

This was even more inexplicable when I saw a few random titles from the Amalgamated collection and a few, more carefully selected, showed up on Warner Archive DVDs. Turned out that William Haines was the all-time least appealing movie star. He pioneered the concept of the hero as a jerk.

Just a Gigolo - C.Aubrey Smith & Haines

In Ed Sedgwick’s 1927 West Point he fakes blindness to get Joan Crawford’s sympathy. Ernest Torrence, his alienated dad, nails it as “You’re a swell headed fool” in Harry Beaumont’s 1929 Speedway. In Sedgewick’s 1930 Remote Control he comes on as broadcaster "The Radio Raspberry" doing on-air bed time stories that scare kids and gets put on chill by Ann Doran "You're quite fresh aren't you?" In Fred Niblo’s 1930 Way out West, he’s a cheating carnival barker who the cowboys are about to lynch. Passing himself of as a professional dance partner in Jack Conway’s 1931 Just a Gigolo, Haines attempts to seduce the charming Irene Purcell, to show his contempt for women. 

However when sound added his jeering voice to the persona already evolving in silents, Haines’ wiseguy character became grating. This did not deter his fans, though increasingly obvious middle age made him harder to accept as a romantic hero.

There are elements of  Haines in later Bob Hope and Mickey Rooney vehicles but it peaks with the character that Alberto Sordi would use more effectively. Throughout the body of the film he would be insensitive and abusive, paying for his sins - and ironically in the case of Haines as it turns out - getting the girl in the last reel, a George Amberson Minifer.

Three years after his popularity peaked, Haines' star career came to an abrupt halt. There was a story there, in fact, a number of stories. In the current climate we are hearing about his falling out with Louis B. Mayer, who thought Haines’ openly gay life style could cause a scandal that would damage MGM and demanded he have a sham marriage that their publicity machine could use to hose down the situation. Haines told him he’d marry a woman and ditch long time companion Jimmy Sheilds, as long as Mayer would dispose of his wife. His contract was not renewed and he never made another film of any significance.

However, as in the auto sales commercials, there’s more! Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s documentary Out of the Closet, Off the Screen: The Life of William Haines, narrated by Stockard Channing and dating from 2001, is an ambitious account of Haines’ life. It predictably features his homosexuality, treating sympathetically his lifetime relationship with Sheilds, nominated as one of the great Hollywood marriages.

Sally, Irene & Mary - Haines & friends

We learn that, popular as a wise cracking teenager, who never disguised his orientation, young Haines moved to Bohemian New York in the 1920s working as a model and  joined George Cukor, Cary Grant and Orry-Kelly in the Gay Community of Hollywood. As a fresh-faced juvenile, he was acceptable in films by major directors - Alan Crosland (Three Weeks), Victor Seastrom (the lost Tower of Lies) Edmund Goulding (Sally Irene & Mary) and King Vidor (Show People) becoming prominent after Tell It To the Marines and Brown of Harvard.

The second portion of the documentary, covering Haines post-MGM career as prestige interior decorator, is more interesting and suggests he had another, more plausible talent.

Craig's Wife - Rozalind Russel.

Haines decided that rich Americans craved Hollywood glamor and set up a business interior designing their homes like movie sets. He’d already taken over the art direction of Just a Gigolo, (see photo above) with department head Cedric Gibbons keeping his distance and, more significantly, and also uncredited, Haines would go on to design the 1936 Craig’s Wife, Dorothy Arzner’s best film and one centered on Hariet Craig’s fetishised home. 

 

Frequent co-star Joan Crawford got him decorating assignments (“She may have been a bad mother but she was a helluva good friend”) and he made a deal with Carol Lombard where he styled her house free, so that the celebrity guests she entertained would see his work.

Photos, looking like stills department studies, suggest his designs as accomplished. The hand crafted ornaments and furniture he created do impress and are now high price collector’s items. His younger business partner got to decorate the White House, with Nancy Reagan one of their devoted clients.

Haines claimed that decorating was a more honest living. He didn’t have to wear make up. It wasn’t all plain sailing though. An anti-gay mob beat up Haines and Sheilds at their Manhattan Beach home in 1939. They did survive to a prosperous old age together.

However more intriguing for anyone with an interest in movie history remains how did someone achieve major star status by playing obnoxious in largely dreadful films? He wasn’t particularly handsome, unconvincing as the great lover. He didn’t have the skills of the acrobat comedians and no one would rate him a serious actor. With so many films still inaccessible, I’ve got to admit that I still haven’t sorted that one out but now that more material is finally surfacing there are some indicators.

John M. Stahl’s 1926 Memory Lane is one of the nicest pieces of Hollywood small town Americana common at the time from the hands of people like John Ford and Henry King. The script by Stahl and Benjamin Glazer starts on the night before dignified Eleanor Boardman’s wedding to local Conrad Nagel. Third billed Billy Haines shows up. Turns out that Boardman and Haines had been an item growing up together but he left town without asking her to wait for him and now she’s made her choice. Against her family’s wishes, she slips out and they walk the familiar streets, past the school house and the chorus practicing in the park, lyrics from their songs coming up as intertitles. The atmosphere is irresistible and the tension in the situation bristles.       

Plot complications worthy of a Keaton comedy and involving young tearaway Frankie Darro, place Haines at the wheel of the couple’s car outside the wedding and, after a further misunderstanding, he and Boardman find themselves stranded out of town together, with ‘phone gossip Kate Price stoking a scandal.   

Husband Nagel accepts that the incident was innocent and the newly married couple settle down. Some time later Haines re-appears in town wearing a loud check suit and bragging about his success in the big city. Invited to the house, he proves obnoxious company. At the end of the evening, Nagel drives him to the station. He sees through his pretense “Why the act?” Haines confesses that he was creating an objectionable image so that Boardman wouldn’t worry about her choice. Back home Eleanor says she wonders what she ever saw in Billy. Conrad disagrees. “I’m just getting to like him.”

The bitter sweet ending is impeccably handled by all concerned and should have made this film an enduring favorite. It is the most winning of the accessible early films by Stahl, foreshadowing the peak in his work at Universal in thirties sound with Side Street, Only Yesterday and Magnificent Obsession. It may have been the prototype to which later Haines characters were shaped.

By 1930, Haines was MGM’s big draw card. They seemed unable to capitalise on this with better films being mounted round their other former silent leading men Ramon Novarro and, despite received opinion, John Gilbert. Along with a run with James Cruze, Haines vehicles were shared out among undistinguished MGM contract directors like Jack Conway, Harry Beaumont and Edward Sedgewick.

 The Girl Said No - Leilia Hyams & Haines.

At the time sound arrived, Sam Wood was treated as another of these staff directors, only pulling away to major film status later in the decade with Night at the Opera and Goodbye Mr. Chips. There’s a June 7, 2016 piece on Wood’s early work in this blog. Wood did four of Haines' films and their The Girl Said No is cited, noting that under Wood’s direction Metro’s two grossly unappealing star personalities, Haines and Marie Dressler actually function as a focus for audience sympathy.

At the time I thought that was the end of the matter as their Tell the World (1928) A Tailor Made Man 1931, The Adventures of Get Rich Quick Wallingford (1931) and  The Fast Life, on which Wood is uncredited, seemed lost with no one all that concerned.

Wallingford, we were told, was snared in some kind of rights bind. However while preparing this piece, I found it (without any Haines cross referencing) in a soso lift of the TCM copy on You Tube. I’d been looking for this one all my adult life and I was quite nervous about it being an anti-climax after the long wait.

Armetta, Haines (in chair) Torrence & Charles R. Moore.

In fact it proved a nice surpise, one of the more accomplished Hollywood features of its day, more assured and enjoyable than the agreeable The Girl Said No, which had been the pick of the gappy list of accessible sound Haines films.

An adaptation of George Randolph Chester’s Cosmopolitan Magazine "The Wallingford Stories",  The New Adventures of Get Rich Quick Wallingford comes polished by a Fred Niblo - J.C. Williamson’s 1916 Australian (!) version, a George M. Cohan stage production and a 1921  film of that by Frank Borzage with Sam Hardy and Norman Kerry. (wouldn’t it be nice to see that one!) The 1931 film arrives in a neat adaptation by then regular Wood collaborator Charles MacArthur, of Hecht and MacArthur.

We get another one of those unnecessary ship board opening sequences of the day, this one showing the meeting between card sharps Haines and Ernest Torrence again, which sets up the nice personal and professional relationship between the pair, Haines demomstrating that a suspicious waiter won’t give him two dollars for the ten dollar note he offers and moving into flim-flamming captain Alfred Allen with the story that he’ll get a raise now that Billy’s new shipping company is taking over the line.

Wallingford - Haines & Hyams

There on the dock is detective Guy Kibbee determined that this time he’s going to nail con-man Wallingford/Haines despite being forever thwarted by his never putting his name on any of his rip-off deals’ paper work. The Haines-Torrence team is soon joined by Jimmy Durante, beginning his long association with MGM, already doing the Schnozzla character and playing a fragment of his “Did You Ever Have the Feeling You Wanted to leave” number. It’s actually quite disconcerting to see him go on to do a scripted character in Victor Fleming’s 1932 The Wet Parade. Durante is a car thief, who keeps on making off with the local Police rifle squad vehicle.

As a hotel scam goes wrong, (the manager he claims to know is actually Edwin Maxwell who he’s talking to) Haines picks up on the reference to employee Leila Hyams’ father selling off the family plot of land and sets out for her small town home to accuse banker Hale Hamilton of cheating the family and concoct a mining company to exploit the deal, selling shares to the locals who are only too anxious to get in on the ground floor of a monstrously profitable enterprise, the news of which Haines spreads by discussing it with town barber Henry Armetta - yet another servile black character present, in Charles R. Moore’s Bootblack.

Suspense comes from the fate of Robert McWade’s bank draft, which Billy was forced to endorse and give to mother Clara Blandick to keep in her sugar bowl. The piece works surprisingly well, as sympathy stays with the con men, who appear so much more agreeable than the greedy respectable citizens and police officers they manipulate. Touches like Billy slipping elderly char lady Lucy Beaumont a thousand dollar “bonus” out of the proceeds, to the admiration of his partners in crime, help things out but it drives on Wood’s ability to keep things moving to the original’s increasingly desperate climax - Durante jumping out of frame and back to animate the dialogue, a train-motor chase, even Haines doing a none too convincing passionate embrace with Hyams.

 Wallingford - Kibee, Torrence & Haines.

Though it’s formula plot has become familiar now, seeing it in an early incarnation intrigues. Wood regulars Armetta and Blandick are part of the polished MGM package. The contributions of first rate studio technicians properly rescourced - editor Frank Sullivan, cameraman Oliver Marsh and designer Gibbons - help make this stand out in the studio’s then frequently machine-made product.

It may be that Hollywood homophobia, stoked by a religious revival in the Great Depression, was responsible for the end of Billy Haines movie career but, looking at pieces like Just a Gigolo, we can see that in obvious middle age, Haines had out grown his screen character, like Adam Sandler, but he lacked Sandlers’ range and intelligence to modify his act. Metro had the Roberts - Montgomery, Young and Taylor - who could all do that William Haines did better than he did. The more personable Ramon Novarro and John Gilbert would face falls from fame more disastrous than Billy Haines experienced at this point.

I find it more astounding that such a limited performer could achieve his prominence, than that he failed to sustain it, but I didn’t experience that period and I can’t get to the Haines films that are its record. Watching Memory Lane and the Sam Wood films does illuminate the Billy Haines phenomenon. I don’t think I’ve exhausted the topic yet.

Norma Shearer, William Haines - Tower of Lies.

Barrie Pattison 2022.