“I Won’t Be Directed by a Fairy!”: When Clark Gable Got George Cukor Fired From ‘Gone With the Wind’

In 1982, The Advocate published an interview with film director and living legend of Hollywood’s golden age, George Cukor. The Advocate had existed since 1967 and was, at 15 years old, the name-brand publication of the LBGTQ+ community. Cukor had been making movies in Hollywood since 1930, and, at age 82, he was the industry’s oldest working filmmaker. In late 1981, Cukor had capped off his 50-plus year career by releasing Rich and Famous, a dryly funny melodrama about two frenemies played by Candice Bergen and Jacqueline Bisset. Though in the mold of the kinds of “women’s pictures” on which Cukor built his career in the 1930s and ’40s—particularly, his 1939 masterpiece The Women—Rich and Famous was also notable for its sexually graphic depiction of a single, adult woman who is unlucky in love, but not for lack of trying with multiple lovers. The current season of my podcast, You Must Remember This, is called “The Old Man Is Still Alive,” a title which was inspired by a quote from Cukor. Like the other 13 directors profiled this season, Cukor started his career near the beginning of the sound era, and was still making movies in a much-changed Hollywood many decades later, long past the point where the genres, styles, stars, and censorship codes of the golden era were obsolete. Though Cukor didn’t have a major commercial hit after My Fair Lady in 1964, with Rich and Famous he proved that, creatively, he was capable of catching up with the times.

But not everyone was a fan. Reviewing it in The New Yorker, critic Pauline Kael wrote Rich and Famous off as “a homosexual fantasy,” complaining that the film’s depiction of Bisset’s active sex life was “creepy” and “didn’t seem like what a woman would get into.” In my extensive research this was the only time that I saw a film critic suggest during Cukor’s lifetime that he directed through a gay gaze. Though in Hollywood, everyone who knew Cukor—and many who didn’t—had been aware of his sexuality for 50 years or more, he had never “come out” publicly.

Six months later, the Advocate treated Cukor as though he were already “out,” even though, in talking to the magazine’s Douglas W. Edwards and David B. Goodstein, Cukor was more frank about his own sexual identity and queerness in Hollywood than he had ever been in any public forum previously. Though his own recent movie was a product of increased “candor” about sex in Hollywood films, when asked if there would ever be such candor about queerness in the movies, he stated, “I don’t think it’s in the air yet.” When asked if he would ever try, with the right script, stars, etc., to tell a gay story, Cukor admitted that he wasn’t sure: “I wonder whether I would have the courage to do it.” And what about gay stars—would it soon be safe for them to come out? “I don’t think the big audience would like it,” Cukor feared, “and I know it scares the studios to death…[they] are afraid that they might lose money with an actor if an audience doesn’t find him convincingly virile.” When asked what “gay people can do to accelerate the process,” he responded, “Behave themselves.”

Cukor himself had seen how homophobia, and the related, dog-whistle marginalizing of him as a “woman’s director,” had limited his own career in golden-era Hollywood. One thing that did not make it into The Advocate were the rumors, which had dogged Cukor for over 40 years, that his queerness had led to him being fired from directing what would become the biggest blockbuster at the time, Gone with the Wind.

Cukor had been given the reins to Wind in 1936 by his old friend and collaborator, producer David O. Selznick. He labored on pre-production for years; the shoot did not begin until January 26, 1939. There was always a worry shared by Selznick and Louis B. Mayer—who, in addition to running MGM, which would be distributing this film, was also Selznick’s father-in-law—that Cukor would lavish all his attention on Vivien Leigh, thereby neglecting the the film’s male protagonist and resulting in a film that would only appeal to the female audience. But once the shoot began, Cukor’s detractors felt they had proof of Cukor’s lack of interest, if not lack of ability, in directing action scenes when he let production designer William Cameron Menzies oversee the movie’s burning of Atlanta set piece. Then there was the fact that Cukor had already been paid an enormous amount of money, and his meticulous shooting methods were financially adding up. One potential replacement for Cukor, Victor Fleming, ticked a lot of boxes: He was a macho action director who already had a good rapport with Wind’s male star, Clark Gable, and he’d be cheaper. The only problem was that he was busy with another movie—The Wizard of Oz, a project which Cukor himself had worked on for a week.

According to Patrick McGilligan’s biography on Cukor, Victor Fleming was taken off Oz to replace Cukor after Gable had a meltdown on set. McGilligan claims that Gable had a secret: In the 1920s, he had once drunkenly spent the night with Billy Haines, the gay silent star who retired from acting rather than submit to a Mayer-ordered lavender marriage. Gable, who had an image as the most heteronormatively masculine man in movies, didn’t want anyone to know about this. But Cukor allegedly knew about it, because Haines was his friend. Since his retirement as an actor, Haines had become an interior decorator to the stars, including Cukor.

Cukor was both gay and Jewish, and though he wouldn’t deny either aspect of his identity, he did try to assimilate on both fronts out of fear of being forcibly retired.

Marcella Rabwin, Selznick’s right-hand-woman, recalled that Gable and Fleming “were very macho people and they had great intolerances…. They always referred to David Selznick as ‘that Jew boy up there’ and Cukor was ‘that fag.’” Cukor himself was both gay and Jewish, and though he wouldn’t deny either aspect of his identity, he did try to assimilate on both fronts out of fear of being forcibly retired. According to McGilligan, these fears came true on the Gone with the Wind set. Gable and his soon-to-be-wife, Carole Lombard, had both been agitating for Fleming to replace Cukor when, one day on set, Gable couldn’t seem to get his lines out. He then suddenly allegedly cried out, “I can’t go on with this picture! I won’t be directed by a fairy! I have to work with a real man!” The next day, Gable refused to show up to work, thereby sealing Cukor’s fate.

McGilligan claims this was a story Cukor himself was known to tell in private, which has been sanitized from the many official accounts of the making of this blockbuster film. In her book on the film, Molly Haskell acknowledged “gossip that Gable’s past as a gigolo and possibly a rent boy made him nervous in Cukor’s company,” but also suggested that Cukor’s firing was equally indebted to his slow shooting pace. All accounts agree that by the time Cukor was let go, his working relationship with Selznick, who liked to puppeteer his directors, had badly deteriorated.

Whether or not homophobia was the primary reason that Cukor was not allowed to finish the film, the firing fueled a perception that this master director was “too gay” to make certain types of movies. And in Hollywood, perception has always been reality. That was still true in 1982 when Cukor was interviewed for The Advocate, but by then—in what would turn out to be the last year of his life—he didn’t care. At the end of the piece, the interviewers pressed Cukor on how he navigated his sexuality when dealing with the much-feared mid-century gossip columnists, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, who were known to weaponize the sensitive personal information of their subjects. Did they ever threaten to out him?

“Never,” Cukor responded. “And I didn’t put on any big act. You know, a lot of people are so funny. They go out with the girls and all that, and that’s absolutely ridiculous. I didn’t pretend.” And if an ’80s tabloid were to do so? Cukor, always known equally for his erudition and his tendency toward profanity, responded: “I would tell them to go fuck themselves. Pardon me.”