What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor
What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor
What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor
Early in the Morning
Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor
Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor
Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor
Early in the Morning
--"Drunken Sailor," Trad. Sea Shanty
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| Cornell on the left, Bill on the right |
The linchpin of Francis Nevins' claim that Cornell Woolrich was a "self-loathing homosexual" is the infamous sailor suit story. Woolrich had gone out from New York to Los Angeles, California, to write screenplays for Hollywood and there in 1930 at the age of 27 he met 20-year-old Violet Virginia Blackton, who preferred to go by the name Gloria and was nicknamed by her family "Bill." She was one of two daughters of film director J. Stuart Blackton, her elder sister, by nearly a decade, being Marian Constance Blackton.
Young Bill and Cornell eloped on Dec. 6, 1930 but the marriage, which was never consummated, merely lasted, it is variously stated, less than three weeks or perhaps three months, before Cornell flew the coop and moved back to New York, leaving Bill a continent behind him.
Nearly a half-century later, in 1977, when she was 76-years old, Marian Blackton, now Marian Trimble, was interviewed by Francis Nevins about her sister's marriage; and she produced, according to Nevins, quite a tale to tell. According to Nevins in his 1988 biography of Woolrich, Marian told him that Bill had told her that Woolrich had left a diary behind by mistake, in which he detailed having had in California a great many sexual encounters with other men, "in sordid and dreadful detail" (Nevins' words).
Marian claimed too, according to Nevins, that Woolrich had also had a locked suitcase under his bed, which curious Bill took a peek into one day when Woolrich left it unlocked--such a careless boy he was--and found had a sailor suit in it. Supposedly, according to Bill, according to Marian, according to Nevins, the timid Woolrich, all 122 pounds of him (this is what he weighed according to his 1942 draft registration card), had a habit at night of dressing up in this sailor suit and going cruising for gay sex at the LA docks. "Clearly," intones Nevins shudderingly, "[Woolrich's] homosexual life was of the most furtive and sordid variety, a side of himself that he despised and was ashamed of, that he could neither accept nor suppress, that he never acknowledged publicly and dropped down the memory hole...."
Wow! This puts a lot of weight on a sex diary and a sailor suit that no one had ever seen, allegedly, besides long-dead Bill. We have no actual evidence besides this story, ostensibly from Marian, that these things ever actually existed. (According to Barry Malzberg, Nevins played only a barely-audible recording of the Marian Trimble interview back to him.) And the fact that there is no other evidence, or any evidence really, becomes evidence that not only was Woolrich gay but that he was one of those furtive and sordid ones, closeted and self-loathing. (Yet he kept a diary about it all too!)
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| J. Stuart Blackton with his sailor suited son and big-bowed daughter Bill |
Marian, according to Nevins, went on to tell how Bill was brokenhearted by all this but didn't hold any grudges against Woolrich and behaved magnanimously. "She was still in love with him and she was heartbroken," Nevins quotes Marian as telling him of Bill. In 1933, Bill filed to have the marriage annulled, on the grounds that it had never been consummated. Nevins speculates that the imminent exposure of Woolrich's homosexuality--he just takes it for granted at this point--must have had the author "keyed up and quivering with terror;" but fortunately for him Bill, "a decent person," said nothing about the "true ground for the action."
I looked into all this part of the story when I wrote my own Woolrich article in 2022 and found that a lot of Nevins' telling of the affair was flat wrong. Bill actually went to New York in 1933 to launch a stage career and she brought her annulment suit against Woolrich there to a fanfare of national newspaper publicity. She didn't say Cornell was gay, she said he was a pallid sexless aesthete who could not perform his husbandly duties. Considering that Woolrich wrote racy Jazz Age novels and romance fiction at the time, this was very damaging to his reputation, besides being personally humiliating. It became crystal clear that, when it came to the he-man stuff, Cornell was just a pretender.
Gloria also claimed to the newspapers that she was the one who walked out on him. She was fawningly portrayed all around as beautiful and physical and dynamic, everything Woolrich was not. One might be forgiven for thinking that Bill had cynically exploited her marriage with Woolrich to publicize her own stage career (which never went anywhere anyway). Woolrich himself pathetically told the newspapers: "We had a terrific fuss and Gloria left me. I guess she couldn't understand why I was so quiet. When she left the world fell upon me just as if there had been an earthquake."
This doesn't sound anything at all like Nevins' account, or Marian's, or Bill's, or whoever it was that originally narrated it. It's amazing to me that for over four decades, until I published my article at Crimereads, no one had ever unearthed this material. Instead people just salaciously repeated the same flimsy tittle-tattle as hard fact. Here's Thomas C. Renzi, who died at age 71 in 2019, in his 2015 book Cornell Woolrich from Pulp Noir to Film Noir. He writes that information about Woolrich's supposed homosexuality
comes from an objective source, Nevins' biographical opus of the author....Woolrich turned out to be a backstreet homosexual....he would dress in a sailor suit and comb the derelict dives and dens of the seedy waterfront for the kind of entertainment he could never find at home.
Then there's Eddie Muller, 67, in his introduction to Open Road's 2020 reprint of one of Woolrich's finest crime novels, The Bride Wore Black:
Woolrich was a compulsive liar, always rewriting facts to tell a better story. We do know, thanks to Nevins' research, that Woolrich was a self-loathing gay man whose lifelong residency in a locked closet no doubt contributed to the secrecy and paranoia which drips from the stories.
At least Muller varies the take slightly by calling Woolrich a "self-loathing gay man" rather than a "self-loathing homosexual" but Nevins, 83, and Renzi, who would be 78 were he alive today, evidently could never bring themselves to utter the word gay in their writing. Instead it's always the very clinical homosexual, punctuated with very disapproving phrases like "backstreet homosexual," which sound like they come out of one of those scarifying antigay Fifties high school "educational" films.
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| Marian Blackton, Stuart Blackton's eldest daughter, in 1922, when she was about 21 |
The notion that Nevins is an objective source for all this is questionable. As early as 1971, six years before he interviewed Marian Trimble and extracted the diary and suitcase stories, evidently, Nevins had already proclaimed that Woolrich was "obsessed with the fear that he was homosexual." Where did Nevins get the facts for that claim in 1971, three years after Woolrich's death? I have no idea. All I know is that Nevins has been hugely attached to this theory for at least 55 years, practically the whole of my own lifetime. He also has applied it as the explanation for other gay crime writers' problems. Maybe this is as much or more about Nevins as it is Woolrich.
Whatever his motivation Nevins certainly has established none of these contentions as "fact." Contrary to what Muller wrote, we don't "know" that the author was a self-loathing gay man who lived his life in a locked closet. We don't know what his sexuality was. He could have been gay, straight, bisexual or asexual. We do know that he had a mother fixation and trouble relating with other people. And he does seem to have had considerable self-esteem issues and possibly a masochistic streak. But the homosexuality stuff has always been speculative, nailed down by absolute hearsay which never should have been trotted out as factual. It's as substantial as the vaporous claim that J. Edgar Hoover was a cross dresser. I could see it as quite possible that Woolrich never had sex with anyone.
But here's another interesting new "fact"--and it is a fact. Eight years after her interview with Nevins, Marian Trimble published a biography of her father in 1985, when she was 84 years old. And in it there's a page about her sister Bill and Cornell's marriage! I have known about the existence of this book for four years but only recently was able to get my hands on a copy of it. I'm going to quote the entirely of the Bill-Cornell passage:
Bill (Gloria) was the first to break away from our gay [family] quintette. To our utter astonishment, and quite without need to do so, she eloped with Cornell Woolrich, a sandy-haired, impecunious young writer from New York. Some bright agent had sold him across the Continent as New York's brightest gift to Hollywood. Cornell didn't think this was so, and presently demonstrated his conviction. He flopped quietly and completely. Lean, hungrier looking than Cassius, Mr. Woolrich enslaved Bill's mother-complexed emotions within the first hour of their meeting. And one day came the wire, "Bill and I have taken the plunge hand in hand," signed Cornell.
When the apprehensive couple returned from the honeymoon trip, to stand, hand in hand, awaiting the family reproof, they were greeted with a few, quiet, amiable words from my father and an absent-minded "Oh hello" from T. [her brother] and me. Then everybody went on as if nothing had happened. This was in September. Just before Christmas Cornell eloped again, this time all by himself, leaving Bill to clutch at the furniture and make hideous sobbing sounds whenever the radio gave "Body and Soul" or "I Surrender, Dear," which, in 1931, was practically all the time.
My father and I made inept, inarticulate attempts to ease Bill's agony. She was not to be consoled. For fully six weeks Bill never got over it. When, at last, Mr. Woolrich explained to her by phone that it had all been a terrible mistake, Bill made him a dignified farewell. She then went out and bought a new shade of eyeshadow, a gesture we all applauded as a sign that the the worst had passed and we could now safely hear the two current hit songs through to the end.
That's it, just under 300 words devoted to the matter which so preoccupied Nevins and his followers. Some of the facts are discernably wrong, like Marian's statement that Bill and Cornell eloped in September. The documentary record clearly states it was December 6, 1930. If the couple really parted before Christmas, the two lived together as a couple for less than three weeks. This would seem to comport with the idea that Cornell realized he would not be able actually to have sex with Bill. (Three months, conversely, seems a long time for that realization to dawn.)
"I Surrender, Dear," a big Bing Crosby hit, was not released until February 5, 1931, so it doesn't seem like Bill would have been sobbing to that tune in the weeks following their breakup.
By the way the lyrics to this song run
"I may seem proud/And I may act gay/That's just a pose/I'm not that way." Words for the wise.
Woolrich came out to Hollywood in 1927 because his second youthful novel, Children of the Ritz, published when he was just 24 years old, won a $10,000 prize and was optioned by a film studio, but Marian does not credit him with that. The tone she adopts toward him is sardonic and more than a bit contemptuous. What she does NOT talk about is Cornell Woolrich being gay, the sailor suit or the sex diary. So what we are left with is what Nevins stated she said to him back in 1977.
By phone I talked to writer Anthony Slide, who prepared Marian's book for publication 41 years ago, and he says he didn't cut anything from her Woolrich account, certainly not anything about sex diaries and sailor suits. Why didn't she talk about it in her book like she apparently did with Nevins? Is it possible she was simply fancifying to Nevins? Or that Gloria was fancifying to her?
We just can't know at this point. But Gloria, even according to her own sister, was not the most stable of people herself. Certainly she had a flair for the dramatic. After breaking up with Cornell, she took up enthusiastically with a carnival hypnotist who for a show wanted to put her under a trance and bury her six feet underground. Anthony Slide described the Blackton family to me as "pretty weird." Only the brother was a "solid citizen," according to Marian, who herself was bisexual and had a later-in-life intimate relationship with Margerie Bonner, widow of novelist Malcolm Lowry.
Cornell was pretty weird too, to be sure. But was he a "self-loathing homosexual"? There is no way anyone can responsibly state this as a fact, or even a likelihood, though people have been insisting on it for forty years. Cornell was frequently self-loathing and a sad mess in many ways, yes. In my opinion his problems went far beyond any sexuality he may have had.
His encounter with the flaky Bill was, for him, epochal, because it exposed him, an exceedingly emotionally fragile person, to national humiliation as a pathetic sexless eunuch; and he never recovered from this degradation. Afterward he lived an apartment-bound, isolated existence, for nearly three decades with his doting mother, then, after her death, for another decade alone in ever-increasing squalor. He was agoraphobic and anemic and paranoid and mother fixated, for sure, probably masochistic too. (That certainly shows up in his writing.) Whether he was actually gay is a mystery. Don't let that phantom sailor suit of the last four decades bemuse you.
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