I couldn’t afford the vintage pulp novels that I wanted but saw that there were new equivalents in the same vein, so I tried one: MULHOLLAND MEAT. It’s about a young sexually abused boy who leaves home and is picked up at the bus station by an agent based on Henry Wilson (Tab Hunter, Rock Hudson, Troy Donahue), also the subject of Michael McKeever’s play, THE CODE, currently on in London. It’s the evening of the premiere of THE ROBE in 1953 and by the end of the year the young man will find love and become a star, but not before having to put out to all kinds of creeps, famous and not, up and down Mulholland Drive. It’s badly written soft-core porn with Golden Age Hollywood lore as context. It’s heavily based on Scotty Bowers’ FULL SERVICE: MY ADVENTURES IN HOLLYWOOD AND THE SECRET SEX LIVES OF THE STARS (which was also the case with Ryan Murphy’s HOLLYWOOD TV series). What bothered me most was seeing all the internet gossip being offered up as fact, so representative of this age of digital disinformation. And worst of all to me was the representation of Katharine Hepburn as a sexually rapacious lesbian. And I began to ask why did it bother me? Is it some form of internalised homophobia? After all it’s quite likely that Hepburn did have some same-sex experiences, particularly with her close friend Laura Harding. We’ll never know. What we do have is concrete evidence of marriage and several important affairs with men, heavily documented in all kinds of ways including testimony from all her friends. But be that as it may, I suppose what upset me is that what I suspect drives the re-iteration of this account of her nicked from Scotty Bowers is misogyny, an attempt to reduce one of the great figures of 20th century cinema, all that she meant to people then and now, all that she accomplished and created, to a nasty stereotype: closety, repressed but rapacious, something gay men of today could look down on sneer at, knowingly (but knowing nothing). And this goes for the rest of the real life figures mentioned in the book (Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, Richard Burton etc). And perhaps all of this may be more excusable in a pulp novel than in London play or a tony Netflix mini-series. Perhaps.

José Arroyo