Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, queerness, like homosexuality according to Foucault, was “a secret whose discovery [was] imperative.”Footnote ¹ In fact, as Alan Sinfield argues, the legitimate theater suppressed queerness not to eliminate but to document its latent visibility; to say to audiences: to find queerness, look for it here.Footnote ² Queerness, as found in the theater in New York and certain other large cities from the 1920s to the 1940s, and as discussed herein, refers not necessarily to homosexuality but rather to gender nonconformity (a sometime touchstone for homosexuality) made visible through what D. A. Miller calls a “redundancy of notation.”Footnote ³ Nowhere were these notations more evident than in the performances and persona of the queer Broadway star Clifton Webb.Footnote ⁴

That oxymoron – star/queer – invites a reassessment of two otherwise convincing assumptions: that a star text weaves a host of disparate traits into a seamless – and heterosexual – whole (as Richard Dyer writes in Stars) and that queerness was considerably less visible in the 1930s and 1940s than it had been in the 1920s (as George Chauncey writes in Gay New York). Dyer defines the star text as a “structured polysemy” consisting of certain meanings and affects, some front and center, others veiled or displaced.Footnote ⁵ While he goes on to say that publicity and even gossip contribute to the polysemy, he tends to scant the queer theatrical star – here, Clifton Webb – who was not only open about his queerness outside the theater but also brought the “threat and promise” of it to his “straight” moments on stage in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote ⁶ Regarding those decades – when censorship and police action made displays of queerness more dangerous – Chauncey concedes that “the complex subcultural codes and semiotics of gay life continued to infuse popular culture.”Footnote ⁷ He lessens the force of his point, however, by drawing on performers of the 1950s (Liberace, Paul Lynde) as examples. In the meantime, well before mid-century, as the following biographical and cultural history shows, Webb was creating a star text that was extraordinary both for its queerness and – even more so during the Depression and war years – for its visibility.

The earliest extant notices of Clifton Webb, when he was billed as Master Webb Raum, principal actor of the Children's Theatre at the Carnegie Lyceum, New York City, centered on masculinity – chiefly its absence, in him rather than the characters he portrayed – and exposed an anxiety about gender that then, as later, troubled the press more than they did the actor. “His appearance yesterday was not particularly robust,” the New York Times (16 March 1902) observed, “but robustness is said not to be one of his strong points.” An admiring article about him in a health magazine concurred: Master Raum, the “true companion” of his mother, was “highly nervous” and “not one who can take hard athletics.” As masculine ballasts to the effeminacy that the boy and his photographs evoked – in an era that hallowed Theodore Roosevelt and the strenuous life – his producers, Klaw and Erlanger, told the newspapers that the young actor was the grandson of former Union Army Brigadier General Green B. Raum and that his flair had so “very much impressed” Mark Twain that, according to the Washington Post (24 August 1902), Twain suggested that Raum play Huck Finn in a forthcoming adaptation. Actually he played Sid Sawyer, “the tattle tale kid” and sissified brother of Tom. He retained that persona when he entered adolescence.Footnote ⁸

As though the theater of the 1910s could cosset him, Webb internalized masculine norms in order to breach them both onstage and (the daring part) off. He remembered his father, Jacob Hollenbeck, the first husband of his mother, Mabel, for “his size, his deep voice and intense masculinity.” He remembered her second husband, Green B. Raum Jr., for his priapic dress – his “stiff white cuffs [and] high stiff collar” – and for his reputation as a persistent “ladies' man.”Footnote ⁹ His further discomfort with the “cult of muscularity” was a matter of public record. The New York Telegraph (22 October 1914) reported that Webb's singing teacher, Victor Maurel, had secured a judgment against Webb for failure to pay for voice lessons. Webb pleaded that his now twice-divorced mother “took all he earned.” The judge, as though he found the defense reprehensible for a twenty-four-year-old man, threatened incarceration. “Webb begged to be allowed to secure bail” since “the idea of a night or so in Ludlow Street Jail was abhorrent to him.” The Telegraph item – a window on the domestic economy of his household – was newsworthy because Webb was by then a prominent figure dancing professionally in vaudeville and nightclubs, where he was, as the Washington Post (29 June 1915) would report, as “dainty and quaint as an old miniature.” The content of the review praised his dancing; the tone snickered at it. Like his shrinking before the judge, his manner on the dance floor was queer, and the press – building a morgue file attuned to what might be called corporeal politics – reported it and his (other) performances as such.

Unlike Ramon Novarro, who began as a trained dancer but gravitated away from it as a profession because, in the United States, “I was afraid of being thought a sis,”Footnote ¹⁰ Webb specialized onstage in so-called nance roles. Typical were a French dancing master in heels and frills (The Purple Road, 1913), a dandy in heavy makeup (Love o' Mike, 1917), and Kiki (As You Were, 1920), “a typical ‘nut’ from Washington Square” in Greenwich Village, even then a lure for the sexually unorthodox. The word “nut” was fleshed out in his vocation: according to one review he was “a male designer of costumes” (the gender of a female designer would have been understood), and according to another review an “interior desecrator.”Footnote ¹¹ As Chauncey notes, the model of the fairy – almost as prominent on the street as in the theater – “offered many men a means of constructing public personas they considered more congruent with their ‘inner natures’ than conventional masculine ones.”Footnote ¹² For most queer actors, however, the culture posted boundaries, as female impersonator Julian Eltinge demonstrated when he asserted a palpable manliness outside the theater. Not so Clifton Webb.

For example, in the postwar 1920s, amid growing public interest in new psychological theories of weak fathers and domineering mothers – and their dark implications – Webb made the couple-ness of him and Mabel – and their scorn of his father – a focus of his persona. (Married queer stars Alfred Lunt and Guthrie McClintic made their focus their wives, Lynn Fontanne and Katharine Cornell.) Blurbs about the pair, Clifton and his mother, were part of the “deep gossip” of a press that, during the Great War, had demonized “unnatural” mothers who spawned “unnatural” sons – “cowards, sissies, Milquetoasts, and mollycoddles.”Footnote ¹³ In a forthright erasure of le nom du père, however, “Mabel Parmelee” (her birth name) became “Mabelle Webb” – and the only woman in her son's life.Footnote ¹⁴ She was his “most able assistant and abettor. Indeed, Mr. W, in describing his ‘hobbies,’ gives that mother first and foremost place among them.”Footnote ¹⁵ The quotation marks around “hobbies” underscored their queerness. “I must break away from the musical [read: fairy] thing – for a while at least,” Webb wrote in his diary in 1921 (26 February), but neither in public nor in private had he the intention of breaking away from Mabelle and the queerness their bond connoted.Footnote ¹⁶ The press could not have been more delighted. When Clifton danced in Paris, then in two London shows, according to Town Topics (24 February 1921), Mabelle “acted as chaperon to her boy,” who was then thirty-one years old. Were newspapers and readers aware of the queerness? As Sinfield argues, “Even for the innocent or the resistant, the dim anxiety that there might be more to all this [mothering, effeminacy, bachelorhood, lack of “heterosexual enthusiasm”] than meets the eye was sometimes inescapable.”Footnote ¹⁷

Like the hyperactivity of Eddie Cantor or the silence of Harpo Marx, the queerness of Clifton Webb was his “line of business” (as it was called in the American theater). What queerness meant could be found in sources as diverse as military investigations and theatrical reviews. The United States Navy reported in 1920 that the queer man was known by his “looks and behavior” – his carriage, his speech, his dress, and, in general, his abandonment of “the norms for masculine gender behavior.”Footnote ¹⁸ The description fit Webb like a hand-tailored tuxedo. In New York in 1923, in his first straight comedy, Meet the Wife, he was the rival of Humphrey Bogart for a society hostess's daughter. She loves Bogart; her mother prefers Webb, a “cake eater” (New York World, 27 November 1923) or “tame cat” (American, 29 November 1923) whose photograph in Theatre Magazine (August 1924) showed his “namby-pamby character” dressed and posed as the “very aesthetic young man” he played onstage. He stands with hips cocked, back bent back, draped in a dressing gown, looking arch and relishing it. Filling out the picture, the press warned the comedian's “lady fans” that “when you go to [his] apt you do not ‘meet the wife.’ The only Mrs. Webb is the blond young woman he calls ‘Mabelle.’ She's his mother” (New York Tribune, 10 February 1924). The even more candid Broadway Brevities (which had nicknamed him “Fifi” in November 1922) reported (in November 1923) “that Cliftie Webb, the well-known juvenile, has been seen in public without the better known Mother Mable. How'd he escape? Please write.”Footnote ¹⁹

“Masculinity is taken on by the male homosexual [or the male queer] who, presumably, seeks to hide – not from others, but from himself – an ostensible femininity,”Footnote ²⁰ Judith Butler argues in a statement that may have applied to several others (and their star texts) in the twentieth-century theater but not to Clifton Webb in the 1920s. In Parasites (1924), another straight comedy, he was Eliot Phelps III, a “pet parasite” whom a wealthy woman keeps in pearl studs and bridge money. Their relationship was platonic and “Ellie” himself “passionless” (New York Times, 20 November 1924). Later he was hailed for his “grotesque stupidities” (Sunny, New York Times, 23 September 1925) and “hair-brain, tip-toe style of stepping” (Treasure Girl, New York Times, 9 November 1928) as well as his “mincing steps” (The Little Show, New York Times, 1 May 1929), “elegantly spidery” figure (Three's a Crowd, The Bookman, December 1930), and “neatly manicured” bearing (Flying Colors, New York Times, 16 September 1932). But in certain numbers of the last three shows named above – all of them revues – he broke away from the fairy that had made him known. He was more urbane (smartness had arrived with the Depression), and less easy to classify. Because of the queer aura around his private life, however, moments in the theater that might have seemed a bit queer seemed more so.

The standout (and long-remembered) song-and-dance number of The Little Show was a strong – and fashionable – attack on heterosexual comity, one that illustrated what Butler says about masculinity “taken on.” In “Moanin' Low” Libby Holman enters a cheap room and hands her money to Webb, her “high-yaller pimp” (the actor's own description). Wearing an “electric blue suit, orange shirt, green tie, [and] patent leather hair,” her “sweet man,” as she calls him, discovers that she has held back some dollar bills. He slams her to the floor, and as she sings “Moanin' Low” he dances the Snake Hips, a Harlem-inspired “rolling, writhing motion of the hips,” as Webb described it, “complete with bumps.” It was a study in contrasts, with the “slide trombone effects” of the “deep, husky voice” of Holman coming off as more mannish than the hip-swiveling of her partner, “the fastidious Clifton Webb.” Though heterosexuality (if nothing else: the business of it) had occasioned both his character's furor and his pantomime of brute force, theatergoers conditioned by a commonplace association of the “artistic” and the queer would have sensed in the dress and posturing of Webb – his teasing performance of maleness on stage, his steadfast performance of nonnormative maleness in the press – a snapshot of maleness mocked.Footnote ²¹ Reviewer O. O. McIntyre said almost as much. Though he liked Webb, and even predicted that he could become “the Rialto's favorite fop,” he reported that the actor looked “anaemic [sic]” from the sixth row, and furthermore had “a face [and manner] that somehow suggested a smacking.”Footnote ²²

The social dislocations of the Depression – felt as The Little Show extended its run in the months beyond Black Friday, October 1929 – added to a backlash against the pansy roles that Webb had specialized in, associated with (according to Amanda Bailey) “sartorial excess, gender disturbance, moral lassitude, and for lack of a better term (but perhaps an entirely appropriate term), a queer sensibility.”Footnote ²³ Just as lack of employment in the early 1930s robbed men of the esteem accorded them as family breadwinners, the increasing presence of women in the workplace caused cultural theorists to worry about the “feminization” of American society.Footnote ²⁴ Regarding gender roles, it was time to retrench, not rebel. Webb adapted – to a point.

In the brilliantine rendition of the Irving Berlin song “Easter Parade” that Webb introduced in As Thousands Cheer (1933–34) and later recorded, his queerness was present in the prim British English and cool trills – three in “you're in the rotogravure” and one-and-a-half in his idiosyncratic pronunciation of “pur-rade.”Footnote ²⁵ Off the 1930s stage he doubled the exposure of queerness. Touring with Webb during the height of the Depression, comedian Fred Allen wrote to a friend that Three's A Crowd was losing money every night. Worse, the rumored cuts sent Webb “astride his lavender high horse.” Buddy Ebsen, who appeared in Flying Colors, added another brushstroke: the relationship of Webb and his “campy black dresser” (Walter Williams) “was, at best, ambivalent.” Comments like these were retrospective and private – though others like them showed up in the contemporary press. Some were droll, as when Brooks Atkinson called Webb, in As Thousands Cheer, the “king of the decadent pants” (New York Times, 2 October 1933). And some were at once outspoken and tittering. According to popular gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, Webb employed a “colored valet whom he calls Ramona. He fires Ramona almost weekly. Ramona has been with him for three years.”Footnote ²⁶

Skolsky was not merely characterizing Webb but also catering to a public that – with the evolution of the perception of a heterosexual/homosexual divide – remained curious about or titillated by queerness. Tilting at what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called the regime of the open secret, motion pictures like Morocco (1930) had showgirl Dietrich sharing a same-sex kiss with a woman in her audience.Footnote ²⁷ Plays like The Silver Cord (Sidney Howard, 1926), Private Lives (Noël Coward, 1930), and The Green Bay Tree (Mordaunt Shairp, 1933) ushered into the theater a frank treatment of “abnormal” desires and relationships.Footnote ²⁸ That Clifton Webb put his “inner nature” on exhibition behind and before the curtain – and that it contributed to his burgeoning stardom – was obvious: otherwise, “Chanson by Clifton Duckfeet” would have been indecipherable.

In “Chanson” from George White's Music Hall Varieties (1932) Bert Lahr used a parody of “Moanin' Low” to conjure up a cunning portrait of his Broadway colleague. Lahr appeared dressed à la Webb in tuxedo pants, top hat, and bolero jacket. He brought a genial Parisienne to his room, where they changed clothes – “For me pajamas,” he cooed, “Alice blue.” To his surprise she then asked for money. Though the implicit contrast between the fleshy Lahr and the svelte Webb was funny enough, the wit lay in the fact that Duckfeet was more feminine than his would-be, take-charge sexual partner. Lahr swiveled his rounded hips and gasped in girlish wonder at his twinkle-toed steps. He also lisped and thus drew on a stereotype of affected (and effeminate) speech that some might have expected Webb to have even if he did not. In reviewing As Thousands Cheer Don Herold had noted that Webb's dancing “always makes me want to bite my nails and scream.” Lahr comically reinforced the critic's phobic viewpoint.Footnote ²⁹

The star text of Bert Lahr was composed of “a host of disparate traits” that ranged from a butch femininity to a sometimes grotesque masculinity, almost none of which was appreciably complicated or enhanced by press accounts of his personal life. In contrast, Don Herold and others took pains to point out the host of consistent traits in Webb, queer onstage (even if less so in the 1930s than in the 1920s), and queerer off. No newspaperman was as relentless in this regard as O. O. McIntyre. In his widely syndicated column (cited from the Daily Oklahoman), his Webb was “the elfin Clifton Webb,” a “foppish fellow with an upturned nose” who was the musical comedy star of the moment (13 November 1933). On 9 January 1933, McIntyre had reported that “sophisticated dancing boy – Clifton Webb” lived opposite Noël Coward in Sutton Place. The waspish bachelor Alexander Woollcott was “within yoo-hooing distance, a few blocks away. The neighborhood bristles [with] smart sayings, jossy talk and what-have-you.” Some readers would have understood the meaning of that broad, hyphenated wink. Some would even have been aware of the gay overtones of “yoo-hoo” and the McIntyre jibe (22 April 1933 – but a hardy perennial) that “Clifton Webb goes to no parties without his mother.” In the theater – as Broadway Brevities never let its readers forget – queerness was a way of daily life. What was so on one coast, however, was not necessarily so on the other.Footnote ³⁰

By spring 1935, the “most popular of the feather-footed gentry” (Clifton Webb, according to McIntyre, the Daily Oklahoman, 13 November 1933) had signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. That much was progress. On visiting the motion picture capital two years before, on holiday but open to offers, Clifton had told Mabelle that the town was “very suburban about things.”Footnote ³¹ Maybe so, but with the press on watch, he had lunched with Lilyan Tashman, had tea with Mercedes de Acosta, dined with Ivor Novello, gone out with Billy Haines (“grand fun”), and swum (naked) with Guthrie McClintic, all members of the gay set.Footnote ³² In 1935, the Metro intelligence-gathering departments would have known about the company that he kept. But they could also reassure production chief Louis Mayer that MGM contract directors could contain or manage any queerness that might – unwanted – leach out. Most important, MGM needed a star dancer. Astaire, despite his long jaw, large ears, and disappearing hairline, had made audiences disregard his looks when he danced. Perhaps Webb, in a nominally straight role, would also display the grace that had made Astaire an RKO star. To that end MGM announced that Webb, aged forty-five, would soon appear in Elegance, the screen biography of dancer Maurice Mouvet.

Mouvet was married, twice, to dance partners. According to the press, Webb arrived in Los Angeles alone – except for the “complete wardrobe” he had purchased in London and as much luggage as “any society debutante.”Footnote ³³ The allusion to the dandy when linked to the deb marked Webb as queer, and probably concerned MGM. After all, a conventionally integrated star text was supposed to efface – not highlight – a queer persona. The studios were not without protections. Morals clauses allowed the moguls to deal with actors arrested for “degenerate disorderly conduct” – or worse. Likewise, the “sex perversion” section of the 1930 Production Code, which forbade “Sex perversion or any inference to it,” applied to onscreen characters but was also a cautionary rule for actors. That said, these protections documented both the presence of queers and queerness in Hollywood as well as the challenge of controlling them. Joseph Breen, in 1931 the West Coast eyes and ears of the industry's trade association, had reported to his boss in New York that one “very prominent lady star told a group of correspondents who were interviewing her that she is a lesbian. Down at the Los Angeles TIMES they told me the most amazing story of sexual perversion, sexual irregularities, etc., that I have ever heard.”Footnote ³⁴ Named director of the Production Code Administration in 1934, Breen sent a chill through the industry. In his wake MGM let lapse its contract with Webb.

Webb, finished with Hollywood, returned in 1936 not only to his and Mabelle's Fifty-seventh Street New York apartment, according to McIntyre “something of a honey in bizarre deco” (the Daily Oklahoman, 18 September 1936), but also to the theater. Toward the late 1930s, though, transitioning to characters less effeminate than he had once portrayed, he seemed to lose his footing. His unenthusiastically heterosexual character in Julius and Philip Epstein's failed ideological drama And Stars Remain was witty but dramatically inert. His romantic pairing with twenty-nine-year-old Lupe Velez in You Never Know (1938), music by Cole Porter, likewise misfired. Then Webb turned an about face. Closing out the decade, as though the pansy era had never died, he used The Importance of Being Earnest to reintroduce the “fop” (Variety, 18 January 1939) to the American stage. As Jack Worthing, he earned the “first full-bodied laugh of the evening” by wearing “preposterous clothes quite naturally” (Catholic World, March 1939). But then theatergoers, as though the laughter had caught in their throats, “sat rather dubious” through what followed (The Nation, 28 January 1939). The comedy could have been an antidote to a reassertion of customary gender roles toward the end of the decade. But in a production that came closer to assaulting heterosexuality than (as the play itself does) tweaking it, Webb grated on critics. He gave a “brittle” performance (New York Times, 13 January 1939) in which, as Billboard wrote (28 January 1939), he “gawked around the stage like a vaudeville hoofer hell-bent for an eccentric number,” a dance specialty for those who comically deviated from the norm. Meanwhile, as Earnest toured the northeast, Webb once more broadcast his “inner nature” to press and public.

The Man Who Came to Dinner was more of the same. Leading the second company of The Man to Chicago and the hinterlands, Webb tuned his Sheridan Whiteside to a frequency that fully acknowledged the queerness of the character while not overplaying the hand. Rather like film music, his queerness was an “inaudible” but parallel aspect of the performance. Among the telltale queer signs in the character were his fussy elocution, queen-like barbed wit, and amused vilification of all things unsophisticated (and to Whiteside many things were).Footnote ³⁵ Other markers were his attraction to both boys' choirs and rough-trade parolees, his misanthropic verbal jabs directed at women, and – what was crucial – his giggly friendship with Beverly Carleton. A thinly disguised Noël Coward, Carleton heralds his visit by sending a wire signed “Oscar Wilde.” On arrival he calls Whiteside “Sherry darling,” and, rounding out his over-the-top behavior, he brags about “glittering” through the South Seas, “frolicking” through Zambia, and making an entrance at a Hollywood dinner party “in my lemon silk drawers.” The queerness was so transparent that the Production Code agency, when faced with the screen adaptation, cautioned Warner Bros. to “exercise the greatest possible care in order not to suggest that Beverley [sic] is a pansy.” The characterization made (and may have been intended to make) Whiteside appear less queer – though the strategy failed for Webb and also for Alexander Woollcott, on whom the character was based: Woollcott believed – and resented the notion – that Monte Woolley (the original Whiteside) made Whiteside a “pansy.”Footnote ³⁶

Woollcott might have feared as much from Webb, not least because of his persona offstage, where he curbed none of the near-announcements of his queerness that in turn lent a queerer cast to Whiteside. Throughout 1940, for instance, Webb and his mother resided in Chicago at the Ambassador, then later the Drake, as a couple. “The Webbs are building a new house at Greenwich,” Chicago Tribune society columnist June Provines reported (2 December 1940), “with a two story studio for Clifton, who spends his leisure time painting.” He was portrayed as an affected man short on typical male attributes, long on seeking out the (sexless) company of women. Afternoons, he painted in the apartment of socialite Mrs. Howard Ellis (Tribune, 25 March 1940), evenings off he acted out “beauty is truth, truth beauty” in charades with Helen Hayes and Leonore Harris (Tribune, 26 March 1940). A Chicago Symphony concert left him “clapping vigorously for encores, breathless with enjoyment” (Tribune, 8 April 1940). The poses and posturing – what Chauncey might call the semiotics of gay life – were more than enough to brand him someone estranged from heterosexuality. No less important, audiences at The Man were seeing the template for Waldo Lydecker in Laura, the essence of the Clifton Webb persona.

If “homosexuality [in performances of Noël Coward plays] might emerge through the veil of discretion into misty visibility,” writes Sinfield, it stopped short of “the boundary of thought”Footnote ³⁷ – except perhaps when Webb acted Coward, as he did following the end of the long, successful tour of The Man Who Came to Dinner. As the tortured husband in Blithe Spirit, Webb was an “ideal Coward hero” (New York Herald Tribune, 6 November 1941), starring for the first time in his career as a married man. Charles Condomine has two wives, one living (Ruth), the other ectoplasmic (Elvira), both of whom (dimming the heterosexual glow) annoy him – in part because, as Ruth says, he lacks interest in “careless rapture.” Reviewing the production for the Times, Brooks Atkinson anticipated Sinfield's point that theatergoers sensing something queer in the work of Coward divided into those “who would welcome this slight public visibility of homosexuality and those who would dislike it.”Footnote ³⁸ Some theatergoers relish the British dramatist, wrote Atkinson, and others (for whom the public visibility was palpable) become indignant. “You who are laughing resent the presence of your neighbor who is grumbling, and he in turn feels superior to the frivolous and undiscriminating minds that surround him” (New York Times, 16 November 1941). The grouch (“he”) shows masculine good sense, “you” who laugh do not – and no wonder: Coward, notes Atkinson, was “the idol of the boulevardiers,” and Webb (as a feature article called him) “the epitome of the masculine languid race.”Footnote ³⁹ Nourishing the queerness of the characters he played, Webb raised the profile of queerness in a decade not otherwise notable for showing it off.

Condomine was “a moderately gay young man” (Joseph Wood Krutch, The Nation, 15 November 1941, 491) portrayed by an actor whose “slight hint of preciousness” in the role (according to Coward)Footnote ⁴⁰ was overmatched by his preciousness outside the theater. In 1941, according to press reports, it was Webb who stepped out (with Mabelle) in trendsetting, queer-marked burgundy dinner jackets (Herald Tribune, 30 November 1941); who (without Mabelle) attended Broadway's This Is the Army as part of “an unusual threesome” that included Ramon Novarro and Harry Richman; who received importunate letters (made public) from Coward, stranded in war-torn England, asking for “the one thing he wanted from America – a thing unobtainable in Europe – French toilet water.”Footnote ⁴¹ On the road with Blithe Spirit, where Webb expected to recoup his personal investment in the stateside production of the show, even his Condomine became queerer. “You're starting the play in far too high a key,” movie director George Cukor told Webb on seeing the show in San Francisco. “Let it down – underplay it – the effect will come later.” Webb was using what one critic called “an overflow of affected wit”Footnote ⁴² to declare both his and his character's impatience with the manners and mores of the heteronormal – and Cukor had seen through it. They were good friends, though, and Cukor invited Webb to stay with him in Los Angeles. When there, Clifton wrote to Mabelle that he was “very anxious” to be re-signed to a studio contract. “Maybe my face is too old for pictures. I'm going to do a little more hair touching. It's very good at the moment – rather pink in spots but very juvenile.” What looked “urbane” to Webb may have read “queen-like” to others, which may explain in part why in Detroit – as in other places – the house for Blithe Spirit had been (Webb wrote) “awful – [they] didn't understand one word – so!” But in Los Angeles, executives sitting in the best orchestra seats would notice the tint as well as the flutiness (“too high a key”) of his performance, from his breathless delivery and put-on stage laughter to his arch pronunciation of words like “brave” as “bray-ave.”Footnote ⁴³

In the 1940s, as in prior decades, Webb represented the converse of what American culture termed masculine. Indeed, the mere mention of his name for a major role in Laura (1944), which would later become his first sound picture, led the talent director at Twentieth Century Fox to complain, “He doesn't walk, he flies.”Footnote ⁴⁴ That assessment may have been based less on his queerness than on his openness about it during his Metro days as well as the period afterwards. Despite – or because of – the queer signs, producer Otto Preminger insisted on screen-testing Webb for the “gentleman murderer” (Lydecker) in Laura. Once more Cukor tutored his friend. Anticipating resistance at Twentieth Century Fox, repeating some of his earlier advice, Cukor addressed not only Webb's “theatrical” elocution but his dancer's bearing. He also worked to make Webb appear more engaged, specifically when intimacy was called for: a remoteness ideal for Coward was less so for the camera. “George stayed up with me until 2,” Webb wrote on the eve of the test, “and gave me some very helpful hints.” During the test, “I talked very softly as if I were talking to someone in a room.” Had Cukor reasoned that diminished volume would also diminish the fey markers of the actor's persona? Whatever the case, Preminger later wrote that Webb had performed a monologue from Blithe Spirit “in half light and [conceivably for the hair touching] half shadow – and he played it very well.” He “knew what [studio head Darryl] Zanuck's objection might be” (Cukor was probably helpful here again) and “avoided all that completely.” Had the queerness – piquant though it was – been sifted from his screen performance? Yes, apparently, though Preminger may have counted on glints of it in Lydecker since film noir thrived on characters who mirrored the social – and sexual – upheavals of the wartime home front. And so Webb was cast.Footnote ⁴⁵

His performance in Laura earned Webb critical praise, brought him the first of his Academy Award nominations, and intensified press coverage that reported – sometimes with glee – his affectations. Reviewers of Laura called him “waspish” and “prissy.” As the New Republic wrote, his “perfumed literary style of talking expresses a lot of auntyish effeminacy” (Manny Farber, The New Republic, 30 Oct. 1944, 568). Gossip and feature writers routinely helped readers see the Webb persona as a host of consistent traits, the actor offscreen feeding the characters on, and vice versa. Hedda Hopper, for example, called Mabelle his “inseparable pal and sweetest cutie.” Louella Parsons wondered, would Clifton ever marry? Never, she appeared to answer, “principally because his mother, Mybelle [sic], rates so much of his devotion.” The adverb “principally” compelled other reasons, which readers could themselves now easily supply. Far more so than its counterpart in the 1920s, popular literature of the 1940s, from Philip Wylie in his best-selling Generation of Vipers (1942) to J. Edgar Hoover writing in the Woman's Home Companion (January 1944), linked the suffocating mother to her son's homosexuality. Their relationship contained “the seeds of disaster” (American Home, May 1944) and merited psychological “and if necessary chemical” treatment (Science Digest, December 1943). After hearing Hoover on bad mothers, who caused “crime” and “perversion,” even casual readers may have decided that Clifton's bond with his “pal” (read: male) and “cutie” (read: female) was warped. Webb, on the other hand, may have found articles about the close relationship salutary. Namely, the couple-ness of Clifton and Mabelle exposed what Judith Butler calls “regulatory fictions” and allowed Webb to be even more open about who he was. “He didn't try to hide it [his queerness, the touchstone of his probable homosexuality] at all,” said Joan Fontaine, who socialized with him and echoed what others have said in interviews. “He was rather pleased with it.”Footnote ⁴⁶

In Hollywood, where the arrogant aesthete was becoming his screen persona, Webb appeared in The Dark Corner, then in The Razor's Edge (both Twentieth Century Fox, 1946), where – owing to less rigid enforcement of the Production Code during and immediately after the war – his effeminate character was patently queer. As Razor's Edge opened around the country, Webb was already starring in Coward's Present Laughter (1946) as the pomaded actor Garry Essendine. The dramatist had furnished Essendine with a token amount of heterosexual window dressing, including an estranged wife, an ingénue who adores him, and a comely married woman to whose charms he pays lip service. But though the script paints him as “irresponsible,” Essendine keeps these and other women at arm's length.Footnote ⁴⁷ Webb increased even more the heterosexual distance between Essendine and others, helped along, according to cast member Cris Alexander, by the actor's having directed himself.Footnote ⁴⁸

Theatergoers must again have been divided. Though Coward first played Essendine wearing “a flame-colored dressing gown and lemon-yellow pajamas,”Footnote ⁴⁹ no American actor (according to the New York Journal American, 30 October 1946) could “carry off a dressing gown with more Cowardian flair than Mr. Webb” – and on his entrance, as though Cukor had never coached him, the actor showed what the critic had meant. Gowned, he stood atop a hassock peering at his face in a mirror. “I look 98!” he said, and, as one published contemporary account reported, the audience “screamed with delight.” Almost at once he

More rollicking laughter.Footnote ⁵⁰

The decoding of the subcultural codes was child's play, for Coward had filled out three acts with “fancy characters” (New York Herald Tribune, 30 October 1946), some with same-sex affinities. Characters named Morris and Henry admire Essendine – and so do other men unnamed, from unmarried millionaires who back his plays to a student, an exotic he picked up in Marseille, and a Navy officer's son who looked “absolutely marvelous, if it's the one I think it is [which other ones were there?], vast strapping shoulders and tiny, tiny hips like a wasp.”Footnote ⁵¹ Fundamental to the plot and its queer aura was Roland Maule, the budding dramatist who has a lavender-bathed crush on Essendine. According to producer John Wilson, who attended a 1947 London revival of the comedy with Coward as director and star, the scenes of Essendine and Maule

But though Maule even in New York was the “swishy admirer” who “swoons all over the place” (Billboard, 2 November 1946), Webb – who “bounces around prettily” as the “foppish character” in the Coward dressing gown – was (borrowing a term from Harry Benshoff) the male diva, and the man who elicited the overtures.Footnote ⁵³ He was “as cynical as he [was] vain,” wrote PM (31 October 1946), “as flippant as he [was] flamboyant.” More important, as Essendine he presaged the Webb who, unfettered, would be on view from 1946 to 1966 in Hollywood, both in motion pictures and in the publicity that attended them. Audiences for movies and plays, in other words, had not lost interest in the queer – nor had they lacked opportunities to observe (and relish) it.Footnote ⁵⁴

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, mainstream culture recognized the persistence – and perils – of queerness. In 1942, for example, a well-established New York theater critic wrote that he was “wearied” and “annoyed” by “the attempted humor that is supposed to spring from homosexuality and kindred forms of degeneracy.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Though the comment was a form of surveillance over queerness, hegemony came with a price: the visibility of queerness meant that queers were less isolated. As such, from periods that raised the profile of queerness (from World War I through the pansy craze) to more circumspect later periods that tried to ignore or condemn it, queers could – and did – negotiate a social and cultural space in the margins of everyday life.

Beginning in the 1930s, for example, queers colonized Cherry Grove, Fire Island, and in populating the beach and its environs, they became more visible to one another as well as to others. They also found that they could draw strength from one another.Footnote ⁵⁶ Like Cherry Grove or the queer-friendly downtown Manhattan bar, the theater was a safe zone where queers could see themselves as themselves while theatergoers across the sexual continuum could vicariously act out their desires.Footnote ⁵⁷ What made Clifton Webb exceptional – perhaps even unique – was his prominence linked to the redundancy of queer notation that attached to him.

Onstage the star text of Webb was a bolt of queer lightning. He “was very very aware of being gay,” according to actor and (later) psychotherapist Glen Boles, “and loved doing it.”Footnote ⁵⁸ “It” was his performance of the anti-masculine and the anti-heteronormal. A study of his theatrical career thus recuperates an essential part of the queer past – the capacity of American culture to contain both a negative (forbidden) model of the masculine and the heteronormal and at the same time to revel in its transgressive pleasures.

In short, weaving a host of complementary traits into a seamless – and homosexualFootnote ⁵⁹ – whole, fashioning what later would became known as a gay identity, Webb was not only a queer force in American culture from the 1920s through the 1940s, but also the embodiment (according to Foucault) of the “secret that always gives itself away.”Footnote ⁶⁰