JAMES WHALE, British stage and film director, born (d: 1957) Most famously, the director of four classics of the macabre, Frankenstein (1931), and perhaps the best of all, the witty Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Among his many other films is the best of the three Hollywood depictions of Showboat, the 1936 black-and-white version with Irene Dunne. Whale lived openly as a Gay man in a then-as-now closeted Hollywood. His long-time lover was the producer David Lewis. But by 1940, no studio would hire him, and he never worked again.
His later life was famously portrayed in the film Gods and Monsters (1998), starring gay actor Ian McKellan and the estimable Brendan Fraser. One of the most critically acclaimed films of 1998 and winner of several awards including the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, Gods and Monsters is a compassionate speculation about the final days of Whale Adapted and directed by Bill Condon from Christopher Bram’s novel “Father of Frankenstein,” the film stars McKellen in a sublime performance as the white-haired Whale, who is portrayed as a dapper gentleman and amateur artist prompted by failing health into melancholy remembrance of things past.
Flashbacks of lost love, World War I battle trauma, and glory days in Hollywood combine with Whale’s present-day attraction to a newly hired yard worker (Fraser) whose hunky, Frankenstein-like physique makes him an ideal model for Whale’s fixated sketching.
The friendship between the handsome gardener and his gay, elderly admirer, is by turns tenuous, humorous, mutually beneficial, and ultimately rather sad – but to Condon’s credit Whale is never seen as pathetic, lecherous, or senile. Equally rich is the rapport between Whale and his long-time housekeeper (played with wry sarcasm by Lynn Redgrave), who serves as protector, mother, and even surrogate spouse while Whale’s mental state deteriorates. Flashbacks to Whale’s filmmaking days are painstakingly authentic (particularly in the casting of look-alike actors playing Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester), and all of these ingredients combine to make Gods and Monsters (executive produced by horror novelist-filmmaker Clive Barker) a touchingly affectionate film that succeeds on many levels.
It is at once a keen glimpse of Hollywood’s past, a loving tribute to James Whale, and a richly moving, delicately balanced drama about loneliness, memory, and the passions that keep us alive.
James Whale lived as an openly gay man throughout his career in the British theatre and in Hollywood, something that was virtually unheard of in that era. He and producer David Lewis lived together as a couple from around 1930 to 1952. While he did not go out of his way to publicize his homosexuality, he did not do anything to conceal it either.
As filmmaker Curtis Harrington, a friend and confidant of Whale’s, put it, “Not in the sense of screaming it from the rooftops or coming out. But yes, he was openly homosexual. Any sophisticated person who knew him knew he was gay.” While there have been suggestions that Whale’s career was terminated because of homophobia, and Whale was supposedly dubbed “The Queen of Hollywood,” Harrington states that “nobody made a thing out of it as far as I could perceive”.
With knowledge of his sexuality becoming more common beginning in the 1970s, some film historians and gay studies scholars have detected homosexual themes in Whale’s work, particularly in Bride of Frankenstein in which a number of the creative people associated with the cast, including Ernest Thesiger and Colin Clive, were alleged to be gay or bisexual. Scholars have identified a gay sensibility suffused through the film, especially a camp sensibility, particularly embodied in the character of Pretorius (Thesiger) and his relationship with Henry Frankenstein (Clive). Minnie introduces Pretorius to Frankenstein with the line, “He’s a very queer-looking old gentleman,sir….” in the film.
Gay film historian Vito Russo, in considering Pretorius, stops short of identifying the character as gay, instead referring to him as “sissified” (“sissy” itself being Hollywood code for “homosexual”). Pretorius serves as a “gay Mephistopheles”, a figure of seduction and temptation, going so far as to pull Frankenstein away from his bride on their wedding night to engage in the unnatural act of non-procreative life. A novelisation of the film published in England made the implication clear, having Pretorius say to Frankenstein “‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ Let us obey the Biblical injunction: you of course, have the choice of natural means; but as for me, I am afraid that there is no course open to me but the scientific way.” Russo goes so far as to suggest that Whale’s homosexuality is expressed in both Frankenstein and Bride as “a vision both films had of the monster as an antisocial figure in the same way that gay people were ‘things’ that should not have happened”.
Whale’s partner David Lewis stated flatly that Whale’s sexual orientation was “not germane” to his filmmaking. “Jimmy was first and foremost an artist, and his films represent the work of an artist—not a gay artist, but an artist.” Whale’s biographer Curtis rejects the notion that Whale would have identified with the Monster from a homosexual perspective, stating that if the highly class-conscious Whale felt himself to be an antisocial figure, it would have been based not in his sexuality but in his origin in the lower classes.
Whale died by suicide by drowning himself in his Pacific Palisades swimming pool on May 29, 1957 at the age of 67. He left a suicide note, which Lewis withheld until shortly before his own death decades later. Because the note was suppressed, the death was initially ruled accidental.