Drake the Teddy Bear artist is moving to Guerneville, a gay resort town on the Russian River, and although it's only 75 miles north of Castro Street, it's not Castro Street, so his friends are behaving as if he's moving to Siberia. We've thrown him a going away party, with gifts of a pith helmet, binoculars, malaria pills, and a machete (for carving out trails in the jungle). And, since he's said repeatedly that he's not into twinks -- nobody under 40 need apply -- we got a twink to dance nude and swing his long 19-year old cock in Drake's face.
San Francisco parties usually don't include celebrity hookup stories, mainly because there aren't very many. Guys typically move directly from small towns in the Straight World to Castro Street, with no stop in Hollywood in between. But Drake grew up in a show business family in Old Hollywood -- there's a picture of him at age two or three, awkwardly balancing on Humphrey Bogart's knee -- and, feeling nostalgic, he tells us about how, after high school, he went to work for Desilu and invited every big and not-so-big star into his bed:
"How about naming some names?" Corbin asks.
"Sure. Tony Curtis, Marlon Brando, Gordon Scott, Cesar Romero...well, it's easier to name the stars I haven't been with."
"How about Tony Dow?"
Desi Arnaz? Yes.
Desi Arnaz, Jr.? No.
Farley Granger? Yes
John Wayne? No
Richard Long? Yes
Richard Benjamin? Yes.
Bill Bixby? Yes
The game goes on. Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Ed Asner, Don Rickles, Charles Bronson, Sonny Bono, Fabian, Paul Anka, Caroll O'Connor, Donald O'Connor, Frank Sinatra, Billy Dee Williams. Nat King Cole, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Richard Thomas, Richard Dawson, Don Adams, Don Rickles, Don Ameche, Elliot Gould, Ryan O'Neill....
Out of over 50 male actors and singers of the 1950s and 1960s, Drake has been with 20. 40%.
"Which is your favorite?" I ask.
Without hesitation, Drake names: "Dennis Day."
We look around, mystified.
"You know, Dennis Day? On the Jack Benny radio program?"
Dennis Day (1916-1988) played a sheltered, naive, squeaky-voiced, gay-vague teenager, still living with his working-class parents, who Benny hired as a singer (his speciality was incongruously sentimental Irish ballads). His dialogue with Benny ranges from starry-eyed hero worship to passive-aggressive sarcasm, with not a few obvious gay jokes.
When a female movie star makes a pass at him, he recoils in horror.
He is taken to a psychiatrist because he is so "unusual."
He wolf-whistles at Benny wearing bicycle shorts.
Drake, growing up in the macho 1940s with a bodybuilder father, had few if any models of boys who could be artistic and sentimental, who didn't like girls, who liked boys.
On the radio, you could play characters of all different ages. Drake was crushed when, at about age 10, he met the "squeaky voiced teenager": Dennis Day was actually in his 30s, with a wife and five kids, two older than Drake!
Hollywood, September 1958Drake was a recent high school graduate working as a production assistant for December Bride at Desilu. The Jack Benny Program was filmed on a nearby soundstage, and Dennis Day was a semi-regular.
Drake could easily have dropped in on some pretext, but he avoided it. He wanted to keep his memory of the radio Dennis Day, the cute gay teenager of his childhood fantasies.
Another show filmed at Desilu was Date with the Angels (1957-58) starring future Golden Girl Betty White as the scatterbrained, wild-scheme-concocting Vickie Angel, and Bill Williams (father of future Greatest American Hero William Katt) as her by-the-book insurance agent husband.
"Did you go down on him?" Zack asks.
"No, but ask me about Betty White's husband at the time, Lane Allen."
Betty was quite a gay ally, even then, and managed to get a full coterie of Friends of Dorothy into the cast: Richard Deacon, Nancy Kulp, Sheila James Kuehl, Chuck Connors, Mary Jane Croft. Drake often dropped by to chat with new and old friends.
One day in the summer of 1957, he found Betty and Bill on a set built to look like Sardi's restaurant, in a plot about Vickie meeting various celebrities, but failing to convince her friends. Liberace...Hugh O'Brien...and waiting in the wings, reading his script, Dennis Day!
He was over 40 years old, but still boyish, still an icon from Drake's memory.You'd think that someone who has sat on Humphrey Bogart's lap and played softball with David and Ricky Nelson would be blasé about meeting a tv star. But Drake found himself unaccountably star struck.
Tongue-tied, he approached and said something like "Mr. Day, I don't know if you remember me, but we met when I was a kid...."
Day gave him an up-and-down glance. "Well, you've grown up quite nicely, haven't you?"
Liberace, who was wandering about, trying to pick up the production assistants, put his hand on Drake's shoulder and whispered. "You'll never get him. Lord knows I've tried." He patted Drake's butt and walked on.
"Did you do Liberace?" I ask.
"No. Liberace was way too fruity, and way too aggressive. He would practically unzip you before you had a chance to say 'Hello."
"Get me to do what?" Day said, feigning innocence.
Drake knew that game! Day was on the make. Thinking fast, he said, "To...um...listen to a song I wrote. Give me a professional opinion."
"Why, certainly. I'm always glad to encourage new talent. Let's go to my dressing room, and you can give me an earful. Or do you need a piano?"
As they walked to the dressing room, Drake was in a panic. He wasn't a good singer, and he couldn't make up a song on the spot!
It was a very small room, barely big enough for two. Day sat in the only chair, folded his hands, and looked up expectantly.
The only thing Drake could think of was a song he had heard on the radio that morning:
Bye-bye, love. Bye-bye, happiness.
Hello, loneliness. I think I'm going to cry.
Bye-bye, sweet caress. Hello, emptiness.
"Ok, Ok!" Day said, laughing. "That's great, but which of the Everly Brothers are you?"
Drake hung his head.
"Oh, don't be glum. I know what you really came here for." Before he realized what was happening, Day had unbuttoned Drake's pants and was fondling his cock.
Then Drake fell to his knees, pulled Day's pants down, and began bobbing up and down on Day's cock -- average sized, thick head, ruddy --
"No, no -- up here. I want to look at you," Day murmured, bracing himself against the make-up table.
Drake rose to his feet again and let Day masturbate them both. He reached beneath Day's shirt to feel his warm hard chest, pinch his nipples. Then they kissed ...and spurted almost simultaneously.
"Whoa, what a gas!" Day murmured. They wiped off with some tissue and got dressed. "Tell Betty thanks for the hospitality."
Drake saw Dennis Day a couple of times after that, but always in a group, so they never hooked up again.
"Why is that your favorite story?" Mickey asks. "It was just a hookup, not a romance, and it doesn't sound that great. Dennis Day wasn't muscular or hung. He wasn't even that famous."
"But he was gay," Drake said. "Or bi. He didn't just accept a blow job from some queer, he wanted men. Even though he was married for 40 years and had 10 kids, he wanted men. Can you see how powerful that was to a kid in 1958, who thought there were only a few gay people in the world? We really are everywhere."
"Even in Guerneville."
Drake definitely included "Chuck Connors" in his list of gay actors, but he didn't elaborate. I figured he was joking.
ReplyDeleteCould be true. I mean, there is possibly a nude photo, but another photo (of him having sex) is clearly fake. A lot of athletes posed nude and said photos were sold on the black market. (No multimillion-dollar endorsement deals back then.) But sex photos were a bridge too far.
DeleteThe top photo is a random guy supposed to look like Dennis Day. The second shirtless photo is Farley Granger, and the third is Bill Williams
ReplyDelete"Drake, growing up in the macho 1940s with a bodybuilder father, had few if any models of boys...who liked boys."
ReplyDeleteHoney...
I get it. Mostly older, more masculine androphilic models and not Hirschfeld's Urning model. But don't discount the idea that one or more men in a weight room has been with other men; the whole history of bodybuilding would suggest otherwise.