HAILED IN 1954 by Newsweek magazine as “probably the most influential columnist inside the [Hollywood] movie colony,” Mike Connolly today is all but forgotten. He is someone who deserves to be remembered, however, and on several counts. As gossip columnist for the Hollywood Reporter from October 1951 to his death from a kidney malfunction following open-heart surgery in November 1966, he was a witness to and participant in over a decade of sometimes tumultuous Hollywood history. He was privy to most of Hollywood’s secrets during those years, and as Tinseltown’s premier gossip columnist was often the first to divulge them in writing publicly through his “Rambling Reporter” column. Virulently anticommunist, he used his column to harass and hound those with known leftist connections or sympathies. He was also gay and, despite living in an era of tight censorship regarding anything gay in Hollywood’s movies and of legal and social sanctions against overt gay activity in real life, he delighted in subtly dishing the gay Hollywood scene for readers in the know and those able to read between the lines of his carefully crafted sentences.
In his anti-Communist zeal, Connolly was willing to take on even the biggest names in Hollywood. Here is a sample of his writing:
March 25, 1960: A “fink,” in the parlance of Frank Sinatra and of Albert Maltz’s pet propagandists, Pravda & The Daily Worker, is a “capitalistic parasite.” … In other words, a strikebreaker. … Sinatra, who has always professed to despise finks, has switched his affections by signing the biggest fink in town, Albert Maltz, to script The Execution of Private Slovik. … Communist Maltz, y’see, is no longer a member of the striking Screen Writers Guild; nevertheless, he IS a scripter. … And since Sinatra hasn’t signed a Writers Guild of America contract, it makes Maltz a sneaky, switchhitting, strikebreaking FINK. … And not Sinatra nor any commie apologist can wish this sick man Maltz out of his stinking kettle of fish.
Author Val Holley has brought Mike Connolly to life again in his recent biography, Mike Connolly and the Manly Art of Hollywood Gossip (McFarland, 2003). In the following interview, Holley comments on Connolly’s complex, problematical legacy as a gay gossip columnist in whose life sexual orientation, Hollywood glamour, and politics intersected in an often disturbing mix.
Lester Strong: What sparked your interest in writing a biography of Mike Connolly?
Val Holley: I discovered Connolly when I was researching my book on James Dean [James Dean: The Biography, St. Martin’s Press, 1995]. I wanted to know what the gossip columnists had said about Dean and his short time in Hollywood. I read the obvious ones first—Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons—then realized I should check out the trade papers. So I started reading Mike Connolly’s “Rambling Reporter” columns in the Hollywood Reporter. After reading two or three, I realized that as a writer he was a giant among pygmies. He could outwrite all the other columnists, and he was fun to read. He had the talent for what he did, and loved doing it. He was college-educated, well-read, and had a background in cinema, theater, and vaudeville history. All that informed what he wrote. Also, after reading a few of his columns, I was sure he was gay. That came across in the quality of his writing, its fabulousness, and the enthusiasm he had for things that straight men would likely not pick up on.
LS: You bring up several topics. Let’s start with Connolly as gossip columnist. What part did he play in the Hollywood publicity machine with “Rambling Reporter”?
VH: Ambitious Hollywood actors want every bit of publicity they can get. Gossip was, and still is, a very important part of that. You don’t have as many gossip columnists now as you did in Connolly’s day. But stars need to have their names in the news, whether in the print, broadcast, or these days the Internet media. And gossip columns are one of the best ways to achieve that.
Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons wrote syndicated columns, which meant their work ran in many newspapers across the country. Connolly had a syndicated column also, but his “Rambling Reporter” was a trade paper gossip column, which meant it ran only in the Hollywood Reporter. The trade paper gossip columnists usually got the items first, and were very important sources of news for the syndicated columnists. In fact, the syndicated columnists were almost encouraged to take their news items from the trade paper columnists. The attitude of trade papers like the Hollywood Reporter or Variety was: “We provide a service to the movie industry. We will not make any trouble over plagiarism or syndicated gossip columnists taking their information directly out of our columns.”
LS: So the trade columnists and the syndicated columnists wrote for different audiences who presumably read them with different expectations.
VH: Right. And that’s still true today. Trade columns are read by Hollywood insiders, who understand the workings of the Hollywood publicity machine and often know quite a bit about the stars and other people mentioned in the columns, or even know them personally. Much of the information the trade columns contain is aimed at studio executives, producers, directors, casting agents, and so on. Syndicated columns are read by the movie-going public, who are the real targets of Hollywood publicity in the effort to sell tickets. I found it interesting to compare the “Rambling Reporter” with what Connolly wrote for his syndicated column a day or two later. He removed most of the inside jokes. He dumbed down a lot of it. And he always took out anything that might have brought shame on Hollywood.
LS: In the biography you make it clear that Connolly loved Hollywood and in some ways considered himself a publicist or ambassador-at-large to the world for the movie industry.
VH: Yes. In his syndicated column he glorified Hollywood and defended it in any way he could.
LS: How did his being gay contribute to his work and his success?
VH: First off, it provided him with a large network of informants. You have to realize that Hollywood was—and of course still is—loaded not just with gay actors but with gay functionaries like hairdressers, agents, publicists, and the like. Connolly wasn’t particularly secretive about being gay, at least among the social circles he traveled in, and all these gay men and lesbians knew that the best gossip column in Hollywood was written by one of their own. As a result, they shoveled the information to him. From what I was told, it sounded like, outside the FBI, Connolly had the greatest spy network in the United States. He had moles everywhere—in psychiatric clinics, Alcoholics Anonymous, communist cells in southern California, by one account, perhaps even British Customs. He knew where all the bodies were buried in Hollywood, which gave him enormous power.
Second, there were informal and unofficial gay networks in Hollywood, and they were heavily used as a way to get ahead with a career, especially by aspiring gay actors. The people I interviewed made it clear to me that this networking was very important to the success of young male stars. Agents and publicists sent their young male clients to be interviewed by gay journalists like Connolly because they were likely to be written about more enthusiastically, and of course Connolly was the top of the heap in that regard. It wasn’t uncommon for those young men—gay or straight, it didn’t matter—to throw themselves at Connolly just so he would mention them in his column. I was told it was common at gay Hollywood parties to hear the young guys joke about and compare “Mike Connolly experiences.”
LS: In your biography, Connolly doesn’t come across as a particularly pleasant person. These comments don’t make him sound any more pleasant.
VH: Some people who’ve read the book, including my partner and a great aunt of mine, said they ended up not liking Mike very much. I’m not sure I like him very much. I’m not sure what to think. He tended to write one way in his column and behave another in his life. He was an alcoholic who could be quite vicious when writing about other people’s drinking problems. He was a big proponent of marriage and criticized in print Hollywood couples who were quarreling openly, separating, or getting divorced. Years earlier, while city editor on his college newspaper at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, he went on a crusade to close down the brothels in town. Yet, despite living with the same partner—a man named Joseph Zappia—his whole adult life, he himself was quite promiscuous and thought nothing of paying for sex with hustlers on Hollywood Boulevard. Quite a disconnect.
With regard to gay men and lesbians, he consistently attacked in print the work of Tennessee Williams, whose subject matter, he said, belonged in a medical textbook rather than on stage. Yet he was supportive of many gay people in Hollywood, giving them career boosts by mentioning them in his column without saying or even implying they were gay, which would have hurt their careers. In a letter to me, Gore Vidal said Connolly was your typical drunk Irish Catholic queen when he was in his cups, but good company otherwise. So, would I have liked him? I don’t know.
LS: There was also his politics.
VH: I would have deplored his conservative political views and their manifestations in his column. I think he could accurately be described as a precursor of today’s Log Cabin Republicans. Extremely conservative politically.
LS: Conservative is one thing. In the biography you describe a kind of virulent anticommunism and extreme red-baiting that went considerably beyond conservative political views.
VH: Yes. Joe McCarthy was one of his heroes, and he supported the Congressional House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC] and its hunt for communists in the early 1950’s. He wasn’t above calling those he attacked in print “jerk,” “scummie,” “rat,” and “vermin.” In a March 1952 “Rambling Reporter” column, he disclosed publicly director Elia Kazan’s secret testimony before HUAC and Kazan’s refusal to identify other former communists. That cost Kazan an Oscar for his work on A Streetcar Named Desire as well as a deal with Warner Brothers to produce and distribute Baby Doll [both movie versions of Tennessee Williams plays], which led to Kazan’s decision later to name names before HUAC.
As I was writing the book I kept asking myself, “Why couldn’t Connolly live and let live? Why was it so important to him to do everything he could in print to drive communists out of Hollywood?” Other columnists like Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper were also anticommunist, but they were nowhere near as vitriolic and scurrilous as he was. The publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, William R. Wilkerson, was very anticommunist. As a columnist on Wilkerson’s paper, Connolly would have been expected to be anticommunist also, but he wasn’t just a mouthpiece for Wilkerson. Some people I talked to suggested his conservative politics and hatred of communists came from being Irish Catholic. But not all Irish Catholics were conservative by any means.
I assumed early on in my research for the book that Connolly was a closeted gay man, and that his pursuit of communists was one way of masking his homosexuality. But the evidence didn’t bear that out. There were some important ways in which he made no effort to mask his homosexuality. He never married. He lived openly with his partner, Joseph Zappia. It’s true that he put Zappia on the Hollywood Reporter payroll as an assistant, as his legman. Zappia did a lot of legwork for Connolly over the years, so there was that professional relationship. But everyone in Hollywood knew what their personal relationship was.
In the end, I think his views and actions were fueled by rage. He always felt he was the outsider looking in: the son of poor Irish immigrants, a sickly child often kept home from school because of a heart condition and later rejected for military service during World War II because of that same condition, a gay man in a world where homosexuality was considered abnormal. But he didn’t want to defy or bring down the social order that caused the problems he ran into. He wanted to be part of it, to feel like an important part of it. “Rambling Reporter” gave him that, since it allowed him to feel he was a power in Hollywood who could make or break careers. It also gave him a means of releasing the anger and aggression he’d built up through years of feeling snubbed and excluded because of his background, poor health, and homosexuality. And since he identified with the rich and the powerful, and supported the conventional social order, it’s no wonder he aimed his anger at those he felt endangered everything, like communists.
LS: What is his legacy, for good or bad, as a gay journalist?
VH: On the plus side, he left behind an all but forgotten legacy of excellent writing. I’m hoping the book will call attention to that. Also, because of his cleverness, he was able to convey a great deal of gay information in his column between the lines. For historians interested in the gay history of Hollywood, his writing is a valuable and relatively untapped source. On the negative side, there were his political views and his willingness to attack in print anyone he thought a danger to the values he espoused publicly. There was also his duplicity in not always living up to those values in his own private life.
When it came to concluding the book, I may have sidestepped more than I should have the kind of person he was. Still, there’s Gore Vidal’s comment about Connolly being good company when he was sober. In researching the book, I met a number of people who remembered him with fondness. There was also another comment by Gore Vidal that influenced how I ended the book. He once disputed the idea that America is a unified country, and claimed that the only thing holding it together was Johnny Carson’s monologues. The social role of newspaper and magazine columnists is to create and hold together a community of readers. Mike Connolly did that for America’s movie industry. During his years writing “Rambling Reporter,” much of Hollywood woke up each morning wanting to read him before anything else. He did his job superbly, and that’s where I left my account of his life.
Lester Strong is an editor for A&U magazine and a regular contributor to Out magazine.
Val Holley, in addition to his book on Mike Connolly, is the author of a biography of James Dean.
