There’s nothing so gay as a stinking café
A club where the night lights rally
There’s nothing so vicious or costly pernicious
As the life we all lead in the alley
For birthdays and weddings and airing our beddings
The home is no longer a boon
A private pleasure or vex we now make public as sex
The salon of today’s the saloon
—Bruz Fletcher, “Hello Darling,” 1940
MOST PEOPLE today don’t know the name of Bruz Fletcher. In the 1930’s, however, all the right people knew his name. Humphrey Bogart, Louise Brooks, Howard Hughes, and Ronald Reagan are just some of the luminaries who laughed, drank, and blushed over the outrageous entertainment Fletcher delivered in his Sunset Strip nightclub. A modern saloon singer before Frank Sinatra or Bobby Short, Fletcher had as clear a voice as either of them, and a lyric wit that tossed off acrobatic rhymes and lavender-tinged triple entendres. This year marks the centenary of the birth of the gay wit known as “The Singing Satirist.”
But while he created phonograph records, published two books, wrote at least four plays, and was named constantly in the gossip columns, Bruz Fletcher seems to have disappeared. His youthful suicide in 1941 may have sealed his anonymity, and the mystery of why he exited life’s stage so prematurely remains unsolved. Aside from his appeal to straight sophisticates, Fletcher was a huge draw for the ordinary gay men of his day. The intimate patter and sly lyrics of a bar pianist are a staple of gay culture: long before we could dance, we could sing. Gay men’s bars of the mid-century were busted on the merest pretext. So much as a hand on the shoulder was considered “lewd conduct” in California, and dancing was completely forbidden. Men were so wary of exposure that they used false names with one another, even while picking each other up. Fletcher created a slender sense of community through singing, expressing a gay voice in all its humor and pathos. The touch of song that made him so popular amplified into the tradition of gay piano bars that remain a standard of gay life today. The long-lost Fletcher has recently been resurrected by Tyler Alpern, a fan of Fletcher’s music and tragi-comic life. Alpern’s website, “Bruz Fletcher Project: Remembering a Gay Voice” (www.tyleralpern.com/bruz.html) reconstructs Fletcher’s life and art in meticulous detail. Alpern’s previous obsession was to immortalize the legacy of Frances Faye, whose signature song, “Drunk with Love,” turns out to have been written by Fletcher. Alpern started thinking, “‘Who is this Bruz Fletcher?’ That’s how it started. There was nothing there.” Alpern has not stopped digging since. While Fletcher did not leave behind tunes that we hum today, his recordings give voice to the cautious outrageousness of gay life in the 1930’s. Madcap Tragedy Bruz Fletcher’s life script resembles one of the screwball comedies he hoped to score. Born in 1906 to one of Indiana’s richest families, he enjoyed private schools and exotic cars. His eternally boyish looks—he called himself a charter member of the Tired Baby Face Club—were emphasized by his nickname, a childish mispronunciation of “brother,” far more convivial than his given name, Stoughton Fletcher IV. While he was still a teenager his depressed mother poisoned herself. His mother’s mother, testing the fatal substance, inadvertently repeated the act, wiping out the family matriarchs in a single day. Around that time, the family fortune of seventeen million dollars evaporated in a pre-Crash financial fiasco. The racing cars his father had lavished on him were all repossessed. Armed with little more than good manners, some musical skills, and an aptitude for naughty, witty lyrics, he moved to Hollywood, where he barely eked out a livelihood as a songwriter in the film industry. Mostly, he penned vaudeville numbers for actresses, including Esther Ralston, Leatrice Joy, and Lita Grey. Thousands of men came to Hollywood with big dreams at that time, and Fletcher was among the many who found that evenings of glamour and a thriving underground gay world could never quite compensate for the hard reality of a cutthroat competitive industry. During the early 1930’s, he coupled with Casey Roberts, a darkly handsome art director who won three Oscar nominations. Fletcher performed on the nightclub circuit of Manhattan (at clubs like the mob-run Argonaut and Tex Guinan’s) and in Palm Beach clubs, with Roberts often visiting. In 1935 his fortunes improved when he landed a job at the Club Bali, owned by an L.A. socialite with the unforgettable name of Icky Outhwaite. The bar became so identified with the entertainer that it was popularly called Bruz Fletcher’s, and his risqué style drew patrons from film and society circles. Assuredly a “stinking café,” it functioned as one of Hollywood’s earliest gay bars. In 1935, however, gay bars were not as we know them today. The late David Hanna, an eyewitness to those years when he worked as an editor at the Hollywood Reporter, described how such bars “ran the gamut from hole-in-the-wall dives to elegant nightclubs,” but “all were disguised in some way to hide their identity as gay bars.” Homophile organizer Harry Hay recalled that the 1930’s gay bar was modeled on the speakeasy, retaining side doors and an air of hyper-caution due to raids that didn’t end with Repeal, as was the case with straight bars, “because it was queer!” A hybrid sort of bar emerged (on the elegant nightclub end of the spectrum) in which the clientele appeared heterosexual, but gays were welcome to mingle discreetly. Among these were many hotel bars as well as glamorous supperclubs, including, in Hollywood, Ciro’s and the Trocadero. The Café Gala, based on Bruz Fletcher’s bar and popular through the 1940’s, was such a place, according to Hanna. Duncan Donovan, who worked for Hearst gossip maven Louella Parsons in the 1940’s, recalls of the Gala: “the bar was all men and the restaurant was full of movie stars.” Gay goings-on were carefully covert, as exemplified by the Gala’s star attraction, pianist Bobby Short, who never publicly disclosed his (widely assumed) homosexuality—though Donovan recalls an occasion in the 40’s when they flirted throughout the night. When asked if a certain actor was gay, Donovan responds, in the mid-century’s coy lingo, “You mean was he giddy? Honey, if you couldn’t tell that boy was giddy, you didn’t have an ear for music!” No one had a better ear for music than Bruz Fletcher. His Club Bali (today a mammoth granite building that devoured several addresses) offered coral couches, waiters in red sarongs and sandals, and, on the bamboo walls, murals of Balinese sirens painted by a Disney artist in “exoticolor”—and Bruz at the piano six nights a week. His daring lyrics, called “voluptuously brittle,” spoke to the straight sophisticates and gay boys who patronized his place. Fletcher has been compared to Noël Coward and Bea Lillie—both of whom played to gay audiences while appealing to the general public. While the word “gay” is sprinkled throughout some of Fletcher’s songs, it functions as a code word that homosexuals used among themselves during the 1930’s. More often his queer references flew at higher altitude, as in a stanza of “Simple Things,” a 1936 spoof on the “Home On the Range” genre of songs: I want a cozy little nest, somewhere in the West Buried in there are references to the words “invert” and “pervert,” both of which were understood by the urban intelligentsia. In a similarly modern vein, in “Hello Darling” (1940) the speaker reveals that he’s been diagnosed by his psychoanalyst as having a “primate urge … to sleep with monkeys, marmosets, anything with a big tail.” He immediately orders a passing waiter to “bring me an ape!” Another song, “Nympho-Dipso-Ego Maniac” (1935), whose title alone is a diagnostic back-flip, describes its libidinous subject as a “complex reflex multi-sex-ation” and “the Cinderella of sin.” Such naughty lyrics were not unlike those of Cole Porter or Noël Coward, but Fletcher’s were more carefree and daring—which may have contributed to his undoing. Decode Blue A key to Fletcher’s surge as a celebrity was his ability to appeal to multiple audiences by creating characters and exchanges between them that could be read officially as heterosexual “blue humor.” But the girls could easily be boys beneath, especially in an era when gay men often considered each other as “sisters” and when drag names abounded. “Get It Up Kitty” presents an attractive waif whose manipulative “faking and taking” resonate to gay men of any era. Fletcher’s narrator rejects Kitty’s offer to be his “sister,” lamenting, “I’ve relatives galore, what I’m looking for’s a—more or less undressed company,” and concluding with the order to “get it up and keep it up Kitty.” Fletcher also waxes lyrical about another type of sister—the gay male pal whose adventures, real or imagined, serve to enliven one’s own fun. The subject of “She’s My Most Intimate Friend” (1937) he describes thus: “I know she’s diseased; I know she’s insane. I know she can only be appeased with a lash and champagne.” The above-referenced Nympho-Dipso-Ego Maniac, too, is a creature as easily bad gay boy as bad straight girl. “Nobody’s sister, nobody’s mother,” Fletcher trills, “just a gal about town.” This casual cleverness resembles an updated riddle of the Sphinx: A sexually ravenous woman who is sister and mother to no one is no woman at all, but a man in drag. The Maniac seduces a well-meaning preacher who, as a result, delivers “a sermon on Gomorrah, very gay.” Though such references may seem thuddingly obvious today, in the 1930’s such language raised a few eyebrows but flew over most people’s heads. For anyone who watches 1930’s movies and wonders about the true leanings of the witty fellows in tuxedos, Bruz Fletcher testifies to an undeniable queer streak in Hollywood’s imagination. In “Wide Open Spaces” (1937), seemingly a satire on Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In,” he pays homage to sodomy on the rough frontier (“where the deer and the antelope can take it”), then renounces it in favor of refined urban sodomy, extolling “the great divide all on my side”: Give me men not quite so vagrant and most certainly more fragrant… With his sweet singing voice, Fletcher could pull his intonations like taffy, camping, vamping, and, in the argot of his day, dropping hairpins everywhere. Fletcher sighs, shudders, and cackles when performing “My Doctor” (1934), a phallic rhapsody about a personal physician who has “the biggest prrractice in town.” To drive the point home, he adds, “the size of his prescription quite belies human description.” A similar song, “Keep an Eye on his Business,” offers pointers on how to hold a man—literally. Fletcher makes it clear that he is talking about more than stocks rising; and every time he says “ladies,” one knows that, depending on the audience and the hour, he means “gentlemen.” When Prohibition was lifted in 1933, the ensuing culture of excess brought a tide of creativity for Fletcher followed by a crash of alcoholic burnout. On one of his albums, he peers around a giant martini glass, and a guidebook described his Sunset Strip club as an ideal place for the “partially potted.” Aside from entertaining for the inebriated, he lived out the madcap lifestyle that seems feasible only to those who drink a lot, and on a daily basis. Peter and Patsy, monkeys Fletcher kept as pets, made the papers when they escaped, scattering hammers, pennies, and broken jars of jam throughout his neighborhood. He tried to make light of the 1938 blaze that destroyed his hard-earned home, with a “Fire Shower” thrown by Jean Acker, the lesbian ex-wife of Rudolph Valentino. He had shared the burned home with Casey Roberts, though Fletcher’s last residence was with Jack Sowden, a fixture in Hollywood’s gay world, and coincidentally also an art director. It was Sowden who discovered Fletcher in his garage with a running car that he’d rigged to asphyxiate himself. At age 34, the voluptuously brittle wit was stilled. No one is certain why he took his life, but the abrupt end of his job at the Bali in 1940 may offer a clue. Many suspected that the anti-gay crackdowns he had successfully dodged throughout the decade had finally caught up with him. That breathless leer when he sang about men’s endowments may have offended the wrong Hollywood bigwig on the wrong night. Or the gay crowd, fickle even in the 1930’s, may have decided that the Tired Baby Face had simply grown too old. Tyler Alpern, who found Fletcher via his fascination with Frances Faye (about whom he has also created a website), initially noticed that Faye’s signature number was a Bruz Fletcher song called “Drunk with Love.” The least arch and most honest lyric he ever wrote, “Drunk” reflects the moody acceptance of passions that may not be expressed during ordinary sobriety, but instead in mean times, under lantern light, on coral couches, or while one is partially potted. Don’t need champagne to make me spin. Now every day I stop and say I’ll find someone new. Some day he’ll walk out my door. Stuart Timmons is the co-author, with Lillian Faderman, of the new book Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (Basic Books). He may be reached at stimmo@aol.com.
Where the best of all the worst will always be.
I want an expensive extensive excursion
To the realms of in, per, and di version.
It’s the simple things in life for me.
Give me a penthouse instead of a tent-house and give me a bathroom.
Give me Chanel and to hell with the fellow who smells of the range.
Give me beautiful faces and practical graces
And show me the man who likes wide-open spaces…
Love him so, is it a sin?
My hands touch his, my senses fizz.
He makes me drunk with love.
Then I feel his lips, my heart soars and dips.
And I don’t care what I do. …
Well, I guess that’s what doors are for.
And when I slam it,
He’ll say “God, damn it!
He’s just drunk with love.”
