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Making the Boys

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : An exploration of the drama, struggle and legacy of the first gay play and subsequent Hollywood movie to successfully reach a mainstream audience.

 

Interview with Playwright Mart Crowley and Director Crayton Robey

 

(Q) : How did you get to know Mart in the first place?

(Crayton Robey): I did a documentary called “When Ocean Meets Sky” that chronicles the Fire Island Pines community, and I interviewed Mart because Mart wrote a portion of “The Boys in the Band” at the beach. In 1967 he actually went there and wrote I think the last scene and named all the characters. His friend, Susan Fonda, had a beach house there, and Susan was Henry Fonda’s ex-wife. Jane Fonda’s mother.

(Mart Crowley): Well no, she was not the mother of Jane. She was another wife. I don’t know how many times Henry Fonda was married.

(Crayton Robey) : So before we started that interview I asked him about “The Boys in the Band” because it was such an important part of my own coming out and a great resource. So he shared about 10 minutes worth of the genesis of “The Boys in the Band” and I was truly captivated. And I wanted to actually hear more about “The Boys in the Band” than that Fire Island story so I kind of put that on hold until I finished that documentary. So when I finished I called him up and I said “Mart, I need to know more about ‘The Boys in the Band.’ I think it’s really such an important moment. Can I do a documentary about it?” And he said yes.
 
(Q) : You had an influence on Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'neill. Did you always want to be a writer right from the get go?
 
(Mart Crowley): Well yeah, I think so, but I wasn’t quite sure that I was going to be a playwright. I was just scribbling stuff, writing stuff in notebooks. In the time I was a kid I think I made some attempts at writing a bad novel. Then I went to college and went to the drama department and then that began to focus me on writing for the theater. And I wrote some sketches in college that were done at school, and then I wrote a bad play that never got done, it’s in the file somewhere. Then from that I wrote a screenplay, and I had some luck with that.
 
(Q) : You’re talking about your neurotic parents, even describing how you had an unhappy childhood. Did that shape your character?
 
(Mart Crowley): Totally. Don’t you think? Do they have neurotic parents in Japan?
 
(Q) : Obviously they do.
 
(Mart Crowley): People are the same all over the world.
 
(Q) : But it opens up an element to explore more things. It just seems to me that when you have a troubled childhood a lot of artists come from those backgrounds.
 
(Mart Crowley): Mishima must have had a lot of trouble with his parents, don’t you think?
 
(Q): Well they were aristocrats. They’re very disciplined and strict about many elements with his sexuality and with his mind, and he tried to explore that at a certain age and he experienced conflict on that.

(Mart Crowley): He certainly did.
 
(Q): But he’s one of the greatest actually. I’m surprised he speaks fluent English.
 
(Mart Crowley): He did speak good English?

(Q): Yeah, you should look it up in Youtube. I was surprised to see that.
 
(Mart Crowley): I’m surprised to hear that.
 
(Q): Let’s get into meeting Natalie Wood. That was quite a significant moment for you to meet so talk about that meeting and she was the one who actually introduced you to your agent.
 
(Mart Crowley): Are you familiar with an American film director and stage director called Elia Kazan? I worked for him here in New York City. He preferred to make movies in New York as opposed to Hollywood, although he made some in Hollywood in the beginning of his career. So I worked for him as his assistant, one of his assistants, but I think one of the ones he preferred, and he worked very closely with the playwrights Tennessee Williams and with William Inge.

And it was at the time that he was working with William Inge on a picture called “Splendor in the Grass,” which was an original screenplay by Inge. And Kazan was fond of that story and helped Inge develop it and eventually directed it. And it was when Warner Brothers bought the story and Natalie was under contract with Warner Brothers that she was considered for the part. And it was Warren Beatty’s first picture, and he had been in a William Inge play on Broadway which was not successful, but that’s how Inge suggested him to Kazan.

There were other people tested for both parts actually, but those two actors got the roles in the end and made the movie. And when Natalie came to New York to make that movie that was when I met her and her husband, Robert Wagner. So we became great friends on the film and afterwards, after the film was over, Kazan shut his company down and he went off to Turkey to do research on his own family for a movie that he made about his family, which was called “America, America.”

And that really didn’t happen until about three years later, maybe even four. Because “Splendor” was in 1960 it started, released in ’61, and “America, America” I don’t think was released until ’63 or ’64 when he finally made that. So in between that time I worked for her, and it was during the times that she made two films that you know about.
 
(Q): What kind of work did you do for Natalie?
 
(Mart Crowley): Well she was making two major films. One was “West Side Story,” and so I went to the studio with her every day as she worked on that, all through the dance rehearsals and the scene rehearsals and the shooting of the picture, and that took six months, so that ate up a lot of time. And then I had some time off and then I came back and she made “Gypsy,” which was another big musical which required singing and dancing and all of that.

And I was just like any secretary or assistant, I had to take care of all the day to day stuff in her life that she couldn’t manage herself because she was busy filming and rehearsing and carrying on. So I managed all of the daily life. But then I got tired of doing that and she knew that because I wanted to be a writer. So she was very helpful in as much as I wrote a script for her. We found a book that she was interested in and I wrote the screenplay, “Cassandra at the Wedding.” It’s about twin sisters; one that was straight and one that was lesbian.
 
(Q): Back then there was still an issue with an actress playing a gay character, wasn’t there?
 
(Mart Crowley): Well at that time it was quite early, it was 1962, and major studios were not really too interested in making such a movie. And as a matter of fact, it eventually got cancelled and never made, because her agent was against her making it, and her boyfriend at the time, he wasn’t keen on her doing it. So it didn’t get done. But anyway, we remained friends and I started writing “The Boys in the Band.” And she knew all about it, and by the time that I finished the first draft of the play I really didn’t have an agent anymore, or know anybody in New York. And she just happened to be dating a man who was an agent, and he was a theater agent too.

So she arranged through him and with him to get me into some people to see in New York, and I came back from California with the play, which was almost finished but not quite. I wrote most of it on the West Coast in Hollywood, and then I came back and as Crayton knows, and it’s in the film, I finished the play out on Fire Island, where he was doing the documentary. So I finished the play out there and took it to the agent that Natalie had her fiancé set up the meeting for. It was with the company he owned here in New York called London International. And it was through them that the play got sent to Edward Albee and his associates. And it was done as a workshop and that was successful, and then it was done off-Broadway, and that was a big success.
 
(Q) : Let’s move on to the making of “The Boys in the Band.” Obviously, you had to face certain obstacles.
 
(Mart Crowley): Are you talking about the film or the play?
 
(Q) : The play initially. Obviously, people don’t want to associate with that project. Because they want to have a long career. Talk about the obstacles you had to face making that play.
 
(Mart Crowley): Well it was quite difficult. The director was a friend of mine, we had been to college together, and between the two of us, there are nine characters in the play, and I think we only read for maybe two of them that we couldn’t find on our own, because between the two of us we knew all the actors and we went to them and asked them to be in it. And I don’t think anybody turned us down.

I remember that I got Laurence Luckinbill myself, because we had also been schoolmates, and one or two others, and Robert Moore, who was the director knew several actors, including Kenneth Nelson, who played the lead, and he knew Leonard Frey, who played Harold. So he brought those and then we read people for Alan in particular, and found Peter White, who was in the movie, and we found Reuben Greene, who plays Bernard, the black character. He read for us. He was a model, a print model. So eventually we got our cast.
 
(Q): Back in the ‘60s the “New York Times” was a little bit critical about the gay issue and also Mike Wallace doing the CBS documentary that didn’t portrayed natural behavior. Take us a little bit through what was the idea of the homosexual in the ‘60s, because certain people would get shock treatment if they were discovered.
 
(Mart Crowley) : Gay people were fairly invisible. It was a fairly clandestine life; it was a very closeted life. Naturally people always got the vibe, if you will, from others as to whether they were gay or not, particularly if you went to Fire Island you met people on the weekend there and your circle of friends grew larger. And living in the city like New York, it was certainly easier to make contacts, even if they were private.
 
(Q) : Like in Greenwich Village.
 
(Mart Crowley): Yeah, Greenwich Village; exactly. There were many gay bars and you went to those and you met people, and so one circle of friends grew. But they weren’t necessarily carried out in the workplace or anything. You completely acted straight for your career.
 
(Q) : But at least you would be able to have experience at certain places. It’s not totally closeted and you can’t do anything.
 
(Mart Crowley): Well among a gay circle, yeah. But if there were heterosexuals involved and family life it depended on how open you were to your parents and your community and your church and so forth. But mostly it was very closed. It might have been known but it was never acknowledged. It was just as if it didn’t exist.
 
(Q): How do define your play after 40 years have passed. Right now with gay people kissing on the street or having a free relationship, how do you define your play?
 
(Mart Crowley): I suppose it helped open the way for all that kind of behavior today. That certainly didn’t exist in the time of the play at all. It’s just been a long evolution process. People wrote other plays and made other films that expanded tolerance and intolerance. There were both. And laws got changed, even such things as the American Medical Association took it off the books in 1973 as a disease, as a mental disease. Finally we came to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and that as abolished in December of 2010. So it’s been a long, long journey. Who knows what lies ahead?

End.