"Among the great contract film directors of the studio age, George Cukor was unique. Literate, witty, sophisticated, he was one of the few theater denizens to make the transition from Broadway to Hollywood--and to stay on top of his profession, for some fifty years and fifty films. The highest-paid director of his time, hailed as "the classicist of MGM," Cukor was five times nominated for an Academy Award as Best Director, winning for My Fair Lady. In publicity and mystique he was dubbed the "women's director" for guiding the most sensitive and temperamental leading ladies to immortal performances: Garbo in Camille, Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight, Norma Shearer in Romeo and Juliet, Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, Judy Garland in A Star Is Born, and--in ten films, including The Philadelphia Story--his lifelong friend and collaborator, Katharine Hepburn. But behind the "women's director" label lurked a stigma, the open secret that set Cukor apart from the generally macho, swaggering fraternity of directors. He was the only homosexual among his colleagues. Throughout his professional life Cukor walked the tightrope between public image and private life in an era when homosexuality was regarded as shameful or criminal. In some ways Cukor's sexual orientation was the least important aspect of his life, but in other ways it influenced his psychology and his career. It was the basis of his firing from the most popular movie ever made, Gone With the Wind--a shocking and ignominious tale that is revealed for the first time in this book. Cukor prided himself on being tough, but this book reveals a poignantly dichotomous creature--a man whose ideal of beauty was in contrast to his own feelings of ugliness; an essentially lonely man who surrounded himself with friends, and threw a lifetime of Hollywood's most glittering parties; a man whose appreciation of female characters derived from his own sensibilities; a consummate director of screen romance who in his own life paid for sex--and scoffed at love."--Dust jacket.
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