“A DAY AT THE BEACH” was a well-established national pastime by the turn of the 20th century. Beach colonies developed on land adjacent to waterfronts—Coney Island in New York, Atlantic City and the New Jersey shore, Mission Beach in California—all convenient to large cities. Many locations provided amenities for visitors, including bathhouse changing facilities, food stands, and souvenir shops. Family photo albums abound with images of fun in the sun by the sea. By the 1940s, a very few locales also became known to homosexual vacationers as places where they could find others like themselves. Provincetown (near Boston), Russian River (San Francisco), Key West (Miami), and Palm Springs (Los Angeles) were intimated to be safe havens—as was New York’s Fire Island, a barrier island five miles off the coast of Long Island. The initial draw of Fire Island for many was its distinction from most commercial beach resorts: relative isolation, an undeveloped beachfront, and few tourist amenities. Cherry Grove exemplified these characteristics, and it grew in popularity among the “Greenwich Village set” from New York City.
What began with family vacation cottages serviced weekly by a grocery boat had changed into a beach-bungalow, summer-rental community by the mid-20th century. Cherry Grove, in existence for over eighty years by then, had a dock accommodating yachts, regular ferry service, about sixty cottages, a hotel, a grocery store, and a post office, marking a complete recovery from a devastating hurricane that swept away most of its homes and infrastructure in 1938. Diversions in Cherry Grove included swimming in the Atlantic, sun bathing (nude in secluded dunes—if the hired constable wasn’t out patrolling the beach), dining at the hotel’s restaurant, and drinks at the bar. The hotel was the only building with a telephone and electricity (via a gasoline-fueled generator). Cottages were lit by candles or by kerosene lamps. Cooking was accomplished over bottled-gas camp stoves, and water was hand-pumped from wells drilled down to the island’s aquifer.
Many New York professionals rented cottages in Cherry Grove—actors, artists, photographers, writers. To be sure, not all were well heeled or well established in their fields. Many shared cottages with friends. Boldface names included John Mosher (of The New Yorker), W. H. Auden (with his lover, Chester Kallman), Cheryl Crawford (a cofounder of New York’s Actors Studio), Carson McCullers (author of The Member of the Wedding), and fashion photographer Richard Avedon with his first wife, Doe. Talented amateurs flourished among them.
Photography has always been a medium for memorializing people, places, and things. Cherry Grove provided a pristine beach, windswept dunes, and stunning sunsets as photographic subjects or backdrops. Other attractions included the frequent costume parties, beach baseball games, and theatrical productions by a group called the Arts Project. Fortunately, many photo artifacts remain that document Cherry Grove’s history—some dating as far back as 1910. Their recovery and preservation contributed evidence for the National Register’s 2013 decision to list the Cherry Grove Community House and Theater as a GLBT historic place.
Home moviemaking was also a big part of documenting life at Cherry Grove. Mary Ronin—a graphic artist at Young & Rubicon, a watercolorist, and a lesbian—created a documentary-style film of Cherry Grove social events that was screened at the Community House in 1949. Her gay brother Bill’s legacy is a large collection of high-quality still photographs from the late 1940s and ’50s.
The Cherry Grove Archive Committee curates these and other historic memorabilia. The Archives received several old canisters of film in 2015. One was labeled Camille, penned on a strip of dried cellophane tape. A 16mm moviola (a small viewer) was used to reveal color and black-and-white movie footage in pristine condition. The reels were sent off to a film editing studio to be digitized. Once returned and restored in high definition and full color, they revealed a drag parody of the movie Camille, George Cukor’s 1936 tearjerker classic starring Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor. Also revealed was a 28-minute, black-and-white film satire of the biblical story of John the Baptist and Salomé. Both are rare examples of very early “gay camp” performance art as captured on film.
Camille
Camille was conceived and filmed over several summers in the early 1950s by Jerett Robert “Bob/Rabitt” Austin (1911–1979). Austin had settled in New York City, where gays often found others like themselves in the lively arts professions. His day job was as a package designer for Seagram’s. He ultimately resided at a tony East 59th Street address, a neighborhood known as “Sutton Place,” famous for its upscale apartments and celebrity residents. Camille was filmed mostly in Cherry Grove and in New York, at the 58th Street studio of commercial fashion photographer Otto Fenn (1914–1993), noted friend of a young Andy Warhol. The cast is made up of Austin’s Cherry Grove and Manhattan friends. Fenn appears as Baron de Varville, and his studio assistant at the time, William Connors, appears as Camille’s star-crossed lover, Armand Duval. Where Salomé was filmed is uncertain. Both films were kept in storage by Jack Davidson, a Cherry Grove resident and Austin devotee.
In a 2015 interview, Davidson recalled, reflecting on Austin: “It was a hobby, and he loved creating films. He started it with, ‘Wouldn’t it be a lark to do a takeoff on Camille? And not running an hour and a half. It’s going to run 45 minutes, maybe 40.’” Austin was “just a renter” who returned regularly to Cherry Grove “because he wanted to do his films here.” He avoided “shutter bugs” at the beach, because he didn’t like seeing himself in pictures, according to Davidson.
On the other hand, Austin shamelessly corralled and cajoled his friends to be in his movies. Most agreed enthusiastically. Some had second thoughts, however, when faced with a camera and the reality of being memorialized on film in drag, which was outlawed on New York City stages and in cabarets beginning in 1929. Overt depictions of homosexuality or dialog was banned from Hollywood movies in 1930 under the Motion Picture Production Code, often called the Hays Code after its author, Will H. Hays. The censorship continued until the mid-1960s.
Austin chose a silent-movie format for retelling Alexandre Dumas’ 19th-century tragic story of a tubercular French courtesan who’s kept by a rich baron and pursued by a besotted younger man. The actors in Austin’s Camille broadly mimic “silent movie” mannerisms. The dialogue is mimed by the actors and explicated through the use of onscreen inter-titles. Austin created, filmed, and inserted the amusingly polyglot title cards with lines like “I intend to meet the Baron aussi!” The movie’s title is superimposed over a box of Smith Brothers cough drops. The principal locales are established by intercut footage from Hollywood movies: a Parisian street scene, an opera house auditorium during intermission, and staged operatic performances. He also tape-recorded opera excerpts (including from La Traviata) for a post-production soundtrack.
Remarkably, this 63-year old movie retains its vivid, original 16mm print Kodachrome color, even in low-lighted interior scenes. Costumes and sets are surprisingly elaborate, considering that gowns and props were purportedly scavenged from Grove householders or limited to what could fit into a suitcase. Colorful, voluminous silk hoopskirts and flowing capes suggest French Empire couture during a ballroom fashion show—of sorts. Drag makeup exaggerates the players’ features, which verge on the grotesque. Perhaps the clown-like makeup was used to disguise cast members’ identities in this McCarthy witch-hunt era.
The film’s date was authenticated by the renowned gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen (1913–1965). She reported in September 1953 that “the lads at Fire Island have just finished shooting their all-male movie version of Camille.” Kilgallen’s column, “The Voice of Broadway,” was syndicated in 176 national and international newspapers from 1940 to 1960. She regularly titillated readers with “scoops” about Fire Island’s notorious homosexual contingent, especially those residing in Cherry Grove. As a panelist on the TV game show What’s My Line?, Kilgallen may have learned of Camille from her co-panelist, the irrepressible radio and screen actress Arlene Francis (1907–2001). Francis was the “Mystery Guest” in the Cherry Grove Arts Project’s Second Little Show (July, 1953), a parody of the 1950s game show. One drag celebrity panelist in the parody was tagged “Dorothy Killrotten.”
Austin’s Camille was screened at Otto Fenn’s studio at his annual New Year’s Eve Sapphire Ball in the 1950s and at Fire Island house parties in the 1960s. “He enjoyed that so much, to show the film to anyone who wanted to see it,” recalled Davidson. Somehow, word of the drag film’s existence traveled from Fire Island to Hollywood, and to the ears of gay George Cukor (1899–1983). Cukor invited Austin to California to screen it. Austin told Davidson that “Cukor had quite a few people there to watch it.” He was famous for his parties—daytime fêtes for movie colony cognoscenti, nighttime pool parties for “the boys” and their “boyfriends.”
Salomé
The completion of Austin’s Salomé can be dated to no earlier than September 1951. Its post-production dubbed music soundtrack is a 1950s noir theme that would have been instantly recognizable when first heard over the film’s introductory title cards. It was borrowed from Alex North’s film score for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), from which the play’s homosexual subtext had been erased. Austin again employed the silent screen format, with dialog and plot propelled by title cards. One Keith Martin is credited as the director; he kept the actors focused and the action moving smoothly.
Salomé is one of the most riveting femme fatales in recorded history. Her story has been told from the 1st century CE into the 21st century. She’s the unnamed dancer, the “daughter of Herodias,” in the Gospel of Matthew. Salomé is memorialized in nearly every mode of artistic expression. The daughter of Herod II and Herodias, she is part of the biblical story of John the Baptist (Matthew 14:6-11), which provides the plotline for Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1892) as well as for Austin’s filmed satire. It is a revenge story: that of Salomé for the Baptist’s rejection of her advances. She seduces her stepfather with a lascivious dance. Herod offers Salomé half of his kingdom as a reward, but she demands John the Baptist’s head instead—to fulfill her desire to kiss the holy man’s lips, alive or dead. A silent film version in 1923 starring the bisexual Alla Nazimova was based on Wilde’s interpretive play. That film is remarkable for its Aubrey Beardsley-inspired set design and the presence of men in drag.
Austin’s Salomé is a mash-up of styles: part Roaring Twenties costumes and music, part 1930s black-and-white horror movie à la James Whale (with grainy film and shadowy lighting). Austin spoofs these classic styles further by adding “1939”—Hollywood’s golden year—under his film’s title. Stock film footage at the opening establishes the story’s Judean locale. The costumes are makeshift: party hats serve as crowns, men appear in tights and shifts, women in flapper garb and modern dress, all suggesting a house party substituting for Herod’s court. Close-cropped interior photography—a contemporary living room being the principal setting—contributes to a claustrophobic, orgiastic atmosphere. A steam radiator visible in one scene rules out Cherry Grove as the locale. The scene of John rising from his underground prison is eerily effective. Comic relief is provided by Salomé’s overly animated “dance of the seven veils.” Several cast members also appear in Camille.
Acts of Defiance in a Reactionary Era
The importance of Austin’s amateur filmmaking to GLBT history cannot be overstated, given the era of its creation and screening. Few gay men or lesbians would have called themselves “subversives” at the time. The word applied mostly to Communists or their supporters. Sen. Joseph McCarthy took the step of applying this term to homosexuals, whose presence in the entertainment industry (as well as government) was automatically suspect. Whether or not Austin knew it, his drag films were, by their very existence, subversive.
Mary Kapsalis, writing in the newspaper Fire Island Tide, recalled an early demonstration of a kind of gay militancy in Cherry Grove. “We had flaming queens in the ’50s and ’60s, ultra-effeminate men who cross-dressed as a gesture of rebellion, as a way of saying, ‘Yes, I’m queer, so what are you going to do about it?’” Nighttime police raids in Cherry Grove targeted gay men for disorderly conduct. Nude sunbathing was fined as “indecent exposure.” Mainland thugs routinely came to the Grove to physically assault gay men and lesbians. A man or woman could be arrested in private or public venues for wearing clothing not seen as gender-appropriate under New York State Law.
While the Army-McCarthy hearings ended in 1954, anti-homosexual fervor was in full fury, so the practice of “cloaking” people’s names was used in the cast list for Camille. “Rubye” in the title role and “Chrystal Humm” are untraceable thus far. Recalled Davidson: “The one who played Camille moved to Greece. Dick [Debrown] was the last one who I knew. He was the last to go.” Dick Clair Debrown (1918–2010) appears as “the Doctor” in Austin’s Camille. Debrown was a writer, researcher, and consultant, and he wrote for The Muppet Show. He also worked at Time Inc., and he was gay. The rest of the cast members are listed as first name only.
In Salomé, the following cast names are probably authentic, but there is no way to positively confirm this: “Jo” may be Josephine “Josie” R. Dale, née Correll (1912–?), the only woman playing a woman in Camille (the maid, Nanine), and as Euthenia in Salomé. Her husband (until 1951), appearing as John the Baptist, was Ted Dale (1910-1975) the NBC Radio musical director. The name Charles Gilbert (Taarkas in Salomé) appears in a cast notice for Armor of Light at New York’s Blackfriar’s Theater in February 1950.
Kilgallen’s scoop documents a new beginning date for “modern drag performance art.” Austin’s Cherry Grove Camille and Salomé appear before Christopher Isherwood’s novel The World in the Evening (1954). Isherwood coined the terms “low” and “high” camp to describe two styles of gay camp presentation in his novel, which influenced literary and performative arts criticism thereafter. A decade would elapse before Doric Wilson premiered his justly celebrated play The Madness of Lady Bright (May, 1964), with its central drag queen character. Plays with gay themes were gradually added to the bill of fare at Caffe Cino, the undisputed birthplace of Off-Off Broadway. But quite a few years earlier, the spirit of gay camp was alive and well in the relatively new medium of moviemaking, and now we have the evidence.
Carl Luss is a legal assistant at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, counsel to the Cherry Grove Community Association, Inc.
