Free Pieces of My Heart by Robert J. Wagner Page A

fairly deep in the closet.
    Clifton lived with his mother, Mabelle, who was a total character and ruled the roost. The father had left when Clifton was very young and he was out of the picture, if he’d ever been in it. Mabelle had opened a dance school in Indianapolis, and she and Clifton gave dancing lessons together. He teamed up with Bonnie Glass and formed a very successful duo that followed in the footsteps of Vernon and Irene Castle. I never saw Clifton dance on the stage, but people who did told me he was a magnificent talent, the equivalent of Astaire but with a fey manner that he managed to get away with and always high-style: white tie and tails. Certainly, he had a major career, starring in shows like Sunny and Irving Berlin’s As Thousands Cheer .
    Clifton and Mabelle were completely devoted to each other; Clifton would dance with her at parties. She was outrageous and would order Clifton around. “We are going to sit here, ” she would announce, “and then we are going to move over there. ” Mabelle was always at the head of the table, and Clifton was very respectful of her, although he had his eccentricities as well: he had an African gray parrot he would wrap in a napkin and put in a brandy snifter at the dinner table.
    It was as if they were competing to see who could be the most like Auntie Mame. They both had a larger-than-life quality, and the bond between them was very thick. Sometimes too thick. One time Noel Coward called Clifton, and Clifton was going on and on about Mabelle, as he tended to do. And Noel said, “Dear boy, if you want to talk about her, do it on your nickel.”
    Clifton was gay, of course, but he never made a pass at me, not that he would have. I never saw Clifton with a man; I never knew of Clifton being with a man, or having a lover.
    Clifton had a very rich deal at the studio, and his house reflected it. It was Victor Fleming’s old place, and Clifton had done it in a bright, comfortable style, in the mode of Billy Haines—the go-to decorator in that era. I remember that at one point Clifton did the bar in a Greek style, full of things he brought back from the location of Boy on a Dolphin . The word was that Clifton earned the same money that Darryl Zanuck earned. He didn’t get the stock that Darryl got, but he earned the same money. Clifton had a string of enormous successes. There was Laura and The Razor’s Edge, then Mr. Belvedere and two sequels, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Stars and Stripes Forever, and Titanic —all big hits.
    I was learning that this kind of moviemaking was typical of Darryl. He never had the money that MGM or Paramount did, so he couldn’t buy stars, he had to make them. If he didn’t have enough stars to make a movie, he had the extraordinary ability to make the movie itself the star. Darryl had the vision to see real possibilities in an effete stage star and to build very effective vehicles around a personality centering on asperity and waspish intelligence—hardly the stuff of mass audience entertainment then or now, but somehow Darryl and Clifton made it work.
    Clifton was very social; he gave wonderful parties, so he had a lot of leverage by dint of his position as well as his commercial cachet. It was Clifton who introduced me to Noel Coward. Noel was playing Las Vegas, and Clifton threw a lunch for him. Eventually, everybody else left, and I was alone with Noel. And he said, “Come and sit over here.” So I went over and sat down, and he put his hand on my leg.
    “Are you by any chance homosexual?” he asked.
    “No, I’m not.”
    And he said, “Ah, what a pity.” His hand came off, and that was it. After that, he couldn’t have been more of a gentleman, and I always adored him.
     
     
    L iving with Barbara, hanging around with a social set that was a generation older, I was very consciously styling myself after an earlier era and in a sense swimming against the tide, which in that era consisted of Marlon Brando and Monty Clift.