I very much enjoyed reading Samuel Garza Bernstein’s biography of Roddy McDowall (for which many thanks to Nicky Smith) whilst also ending up feeling a bit disappointed and sad. McDowall is one of those rare child ‘stars’ who continued working as an actor into adulthood, a name, often in feature roles, though never quite a star (he himself argued that he and even Elizabeth Taylor weren’t quite child stars: Jackie Coogan and Shirley Temple were — they had entire films built around their personas). McDowall threw celebrated parties for five decades in which all of Hollywood — from silent stars, theatre and tv people, new stars of Indie cinema such as Johnny Depp and Ileona Douglas – came to meet each other. McDowall was legendarily discrete and legendarily kind, and all of this comes out in the book. I did learn something new from reading it – he was lovers with Montgomery Clift in the 50s, he was responsible for burning Rock Hudson’s most intimate papers during the latter’s final illness; the work in theatre radio, tv and films is well documented. I found it disappointing because the author had access to McDowall’s incredible archive at Boston University (ostensibly he saved everything), had three assistants to investigate it, and still came up with a book that feels too much like a listicle, though I did love reading excerpts of McDowall’s correspondence with Noel Coward, Dirk Bogarde, Cukor and so many other celebrated queers of the period. I found it sad because there’s only so much of a market for biographies of Roddy McDowall and we’ll probably have to wait another generation before someone makes better, fuller use of that magnificent holdings in the archive and offers us a deeper, more complex account of the intersections between the life, the career, the sexuality and the time.
José Arroyo
