Farley Granger was so gorgeous

I just got done watching "They Live by Night," where he was captured beautifully—every closeup of his face just melts me. Do you think he was a top or a bottom?

Bottom. He was a pretty nelly queen.

I adore Farley Granger and John Dall both in "Rope". And while I know times were very different, I wish closeted Cary Grant had taken the role of Rupert Cadell and embraced it. I'm not typically a fan of remakes, but I'd almost love to see a "Rope" remake to see what they could do with it in that regard.

I read his autobio Include Me Out.

Very entertaining

Robert Calhoun sucked his dick every day. Lucky!

He's lovely. Those are blowjob lips.

He was sexy and openly bisexual. Like Brando, he had pair of pouty dick-sucking lips.

He had the Mimi Rogers funny mouth thing going on.

He was just as pretty as Monty Clift.

Monty relied on good directors and editors to 'perform' well on screen.

An out gay/bi man. Have a lot of respect for him.

A collection of pics of Farley Granger here:

In Visconti's "Senso." Gorgeous.

R9, Monty Clift had a pretty good career on the New York stage.

Monty left the New York stage as soon as he could.

Farley was Visconti's fall-back choice for 'Senso'. (I've forgotten his first choice to star opposite The Divine Ingrid who was hanging around Italy at the time)

Farley had that gorgeous bump in his aristocratic nose just like Robert Taylor and Norma Shearer.

R17, Monty did not leave the New York stage as soon as he could. Hollywood beckoned, but he refused. It took 11 years since his stage debut in 1935 to make his first Hollywood picture in 1946, and even then he refused to sign a studio contract. He was already being branded difficult, but he didn't want to be tied down to a studio and wanted the freedom to return to the stage. He never did though, except for an off-Broadway staging of "The Seagull" in 1954 as a favor to his friend Mira Rostova.

Farley Granger was a contemporary of Clift and Brando, but Granger's film career seemed to have petered out by the mid-'50s. He did a lot of those televised theater anthology shows like Playhouse 90, Kraft Theater, and the US Steel Hour.

I'd love to see Monty and Farley bump noses together.

Didn't Visconti want Monty for 'Senso'?

Monty was in Rome appearing in that Selznick abortion—

R21, Visconti wanted Brando and Ingrid Bergman.

Absolutely gorgeous. One of the most beautiful men in Hollywood history.

[quote] Brando and Ingrid Bergman.

I'd love to see those two powerful performers IGNITE the screen !

Doesn't do a thing for me, but to each his own.

Farley Granger rolled around with two of the biggest sluts in entertainment world; Shelly Winters and Leonard Bernstein.

Never heard of film Senso, will have to check it out, seems interesting.

Monty and Farley were both so passive. They suffered a lot in tearjerkers on screen but they were always seemed to be victims.

R26 You must see 'Senso' on the big screen.

Farley is flaccid but there another man in the cast called Massimo who supplies a little more testosterone.

Shelley Winters had the smelliest snatch, ever! How could Farley lick that and then go suck Robert Calhoun’s dick????

Shelley started those rumours herself with those two fictional autobiographies. She was never the slut she wanted to be because no guy (unless drunk) would go near her so she made it up.

I wasn't just A slut, I was THE slut!

Shelley’s twat stunk to high heaven.

Farley's appeal was similar to the equally-limp Peter Lawford's.

But Farley faded into obscurity while Lawford hang out with the slimy rat pack.

He was gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous. Not the greatest actor, though, which is why his career never took off in a big way. I think r19 that in fact Monty and Farley *did* have a fling or hook-up at one point. I seem to recall this being hinted at in Arthur Laurents' memoir (he and Farley had a long relationship). Now Monty and Farley together - THAT is something to fantasize about - even if they were both passive bottoms. But so beautiful together, I bet. In Farley's memoir he also suggests having had a one-night-stand with Jean Marais. Another hot pairing!

Farley was a beautiful person inside and out. You bitches talking smack about him should be ashamed.

Farley used to cum in Bob Calhoun’s mouth.

Any pictures of him knitting?

I ran into him a few times on the UWS where he lived. Charming, lovely, classy man.

I still think Strangers on a Train is one of the best movies ever made; Granger was good in it but poor Robert Walker wiped the floor with everyone on screen.

Are you really a bisexual if the only woman you are known to have fucked is Shelley Winters, to promote a minor romantic comedy about a couple and their dog?

I saw Granger do a Q and A after a screening of Strangers on a Train at MOMA around 2008.

I never realized how tall he was. Even at his age then, he was a strapping guy. Total silver daddy.

He was smoking hot in his day.

R40, Granger claimed to have bedded Ava Gardner. Miss Gardner herself may have dipped her toe in the lady pond once or twice. So she may have been open so such dalliances.

He only made 4 movies that I remember

He was terrified of displaying his navel

R6 I don't know how you can claim he was "openly bisexual".

R18 You mention Monty did an off-Broadway staging of "The Seagull" in 1954.

It's not listed below but did any of you NY Eldergays see it?

R18, It's in the Internet Off-Broadway database (iobdb). Though Clift got good reviews, his trusted acting coach, Mira Rostova's florid acting style and unintelligible accented English got panned by the critics. This embarrassed Clift, who had been her biggest supporter, and he dropped her soon afterwards.

That cast list includes Kevin McCarthy!

R39, I also saw Granger once on Columbus Avenue, walking with an aide, not too long before he died. Even as an elderly man, he had a striking presence, very handsome, and yes, he was quite tall. He and Arthur Laurents must have looked like Mutt and Jeff.

Allegedly tried to seduce Harry Belafonte...oh, what a pair that would have been, but Harry is hetero.

Please. He was 100% gay.

What was it about post-war Hollywood that it suddenly seemed to embrace prettier leading men like Farley, Monty, Guy Madison, Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter? I'm sure superagent Henry Willson had a lot to do with it but why were audiences suddenly so into prettyboy beefcake?

Read Arthur Laurents' two memoirs. (Laurents wrote the book for Gypsy and West Side Story).

Laurents had a long-time affair with FG. It is superb dish about Broadway and Hollywood in the '40s through the 90s. Laurents is a superb writer. More should know about him. And yes, FG was 100% gay.

R52 These 5 five men were all pretty much eye-candy for females.

Four of them had weak, almost hairless chests. No beefcake at all.

I recall seeing Farley Granger for the first time when I rented the Alfred Hitchcock film Rope from my video store. I was blown away by how beautiful he was. Then shortly after I happened to see him in the film noir, Strangers On A Train, when I went to see a double bill at a revival house. I've been a big fan ever since.

R52, Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, and Robert Taylor were pre-war and pretty. Although they aged quickly due to their penchant for booze and cigarettes. Prettyboys were always around.

r56, those 3 were pretty only for the first 2 or 3 years of their careers but you could say that about a lot of stars, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck just to name a few. The ones I mentioned had a decided softer side, posed for shirtless beefcake photos, and it was really part of their appeal.

And Granger and Madison had lovely hairy chests.

Jane might as well be invisible.

R25, are you serious!? Farley Granger was involved with Ma Gogan from Pete’s Dragon!? Ew!!

John Gavin was another gorgeous hunk from the 1950s.

R52 Women wanted prettier and passive men like Anthony Perkins, Farley and Monty.

Roy Scherer/Rock Hudson was handsome but Doris Day just used him as a toy and a nincompoop eunuch.

What is it about the film quality of ROPE that gives it such a shallow and flat look? Is it the camera work or the lighting or the actual film stock?

It almost looks like a 1960s TV soap. Was the harshness intentional on Hitchcock's part?

Hitchcock's Rope was a disastrous, silly experiment which failed.

Hitchcock gained fame when the talkies came in the 1920s by cutting dialogue to a minimum, quick takes and his use of a mobile camera. He reached the top of his profession in the 40s and tried some weird experiments. First, he did 'Lifeboat' which was contained in a tiny space. Then he did 'Rope' which was equally bizarre using something called 'The Ten-minute Take'.

Go to Google and look for The Ten-minute Take. It was a stupid decision and makes 'Rope' tedious to watch.

This article is from 1949 and I'm sceptical about the claims.

MGM had two Grangers on their backlot at the same time.

Wasn't Farley actually the property of Sam Goldwyn, not MGM?

I'm kind of surprised nobody made him change his first name.

I don't know, R66.

I wish we did know who owned who because then we'd understand why so many movie performers were so badly miscast.

I guess since Farley didn't die young, he's not seen as a gay icon like James Dean despite actually being openly gay and having an excellent filmography in his youth. Nicholas Ray used Farley for his first film, the noir road movie, [italic] They Live By Night [/italic].

^ What do you mean Farley was openly gay?

Interesting when you read some Farley Granger obits there is totally no mention of his life partner or even that he was gay. So much for being "out".

Others however set things right.

He exuded zero masculine energy and had no chemistry with the ladies. But he played immoral guys really well.

He got canned from One Life To Live because he couldn’t remember his lines.

His "love scenes" with beefy, butch Ruth Roman in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN are pretty laughable.

Bruno (Robert Walker) knew a homo when he saw one.

After Farely Granger threw him over bit later Arthur Laurents took up with Tom Hatcher, the two became life partners for next fifty or so years.

Gore Vidal suggested AL look up TH at a Beverly Hills clothing store where the young actor was working at the time. What was lust at first sight soon developed into something far more. The couple's NYC home was a beautiful townhouse located on Saint Luke's Place in West Village.

Tom Hatcher would go onto a successful real estate career largely in Quogue , Long Island. Arthur Laurents had small home out there that became the couple's place in the country so to speak. This was back when much of Southhampton like rest of Long Island was still farmland (mostly potato fields), and land was cheap. Far cry from what things have been for past few decades.

Tom Hatcher's obit in NYT.

Farley (No-Navel) Granger

I just recently watched ROPE on TCM and had NO inkling that the James Stewart character was gay. What's there in the film that would make one think that?

[quote] had NO inkling that the James Stewart character was gay

No, his two students were homosexual (and killers)

Well, r81, according to Hitchcock experts and screenwriter Arthur Laurents, the James Stewart character is also gay and, I believe, sort of a mentor to the young men. I wonder about the play ROPE and how latent the homosexuality is there (if at all).

I think the only connection ROPE has to the Leopold/Loeb case is that of the two murdering young men, Leopold and Loeb, one was the top and one was the bottom. In the Hitchcock film, Farley is clearly the bottom. It's amazing his agents and his studio allowed him to make the film.

I bet that 99.9% of the audience in 1948 were utterly oblivious to any sodomy in this story.

Even for gay audiences, r83? Did gaydar not exist in mid-century America?

As a child watching Farley Granger, Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson in movies on TV, something just piqued my interest and told me they were homosexuals (this was in the late1950s) before I really grasped what that even meant.

Gaydar, most of us were born with it. An entire DL thread could be composed on this.

Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson don't ping for me in their movies.....but Farley does.

That Gore Vidal put Arthur Laurents onto Tom Hatcher begs the question if the former got there first.

On another note don't know if Farley Granger lived his life as totally out, but Arthur Laurents certainly did, and didn't give a fuck.

But then again AL was "theater people", and even in 1950's, 1950's or even 1970's America people tended to make allowances if I understand correctly.

Eileen Fulton didn’t want to work with ‘a gay’ but then she found out he was the EP’s lover. Oops!

What is the deal with the navel thing, any theories?

In Rope i think it is made clear they share a bedroom. There is a whole theory about their sex life based on the opening of a champagne bottle by John Dall.

A friend of mine interviewed Farley when he was in Milwaukee on his book tour.

Calhoun was there, as well, answering most of my friend's questions when Farley often went blank.

I remember witnessing a sad audition for a play in NY the mid 1980s in which a befuddled Farley came a cropper, blowing the lines and looking generally ineffectual. He was not in bad shape physically but there was nothing hot about him. He did not get the role. Maybe this was during the time he was appearing soap operas?

Who is Calhoun, r89?

R90

Robert Calhoun was Farley Granger's life partner, see R71.

Please keep up!

[quote] …befuddled Farley came a cropper, blowing the lines and looking generally ineffectual…

That's the difference between a genuine actor and someone who stands in front of a movie camera.

Hitchcock said he used his performers as 'cattle'. He used Farley twice.

I know we mostly see Farley Granger in black and white.

But he reminds me little of this guy we only see in color.

R94 he looks nothing like Farley. At all...

Farley had a similar prominent nose.

Eileen Fulton was plugging up toilets and lusting after Bob Calhoun’s cum dump!

Well, since he was an intelligent artist, he was probably versatile like most intelligent artistic types who refuse to subscribe to lazy and boring homosexual archetypes.

R63, R64 Hitchcock also used the annoying The Ten-minute Take in his next movie after Rope.

Hitchcock may have thought the moving camera was artistic (like Max Ophuls' artfully moving camera) but it make this interesting movie 30 minutes longer than it needs to be.

UGH to Under Capricorn...one of his worst...up until Torn Curtain.

I just re-watched it.

Joseph Cotten looks comatose in a role which was meant for Burt Lancaster.

Poor Ingrid can't do anything with her one-dimensional role. I just wished she could do what she did to Lana Turner 8 years previously. If she swapped roles with Margaret Leighton the film would have generated a stronger class dynamic with 2 interesting women instead of two pallid ones.

I also wish Hitchcock hired a film editor instead of the four men paid to push that damned camera back and forth.

[italic]The Edge of Doom[/italic] (1950) is included with Amazon Prime. It stars Dana Andrews as a priest who remembers Martin Lynn (Granger) and his troubles.

WTF kind of a name is Farley? Were his parents playing a joke on him?

"Hey! Chuck U. Farley!"

Farley tried seducing Jameson Parker during their OLTL days.

[quote] Farley tried seducing Jameson Parker during their OLTL days.

I don't blame him and Parker was a fool for not taking advantage of the hit.

R103, he was named after his father, Farley Earle Granger, Sr.

R102 I watched that recently in my film noir binge. I was kind of impressed by the fact that movie called out the problematic aspects of organized religions. Farley's character being a son of a struggling devout mother who dies and his character pleading with the priest of the local parrish to give his mom an extravagant funeral. Arguing to the priest it would be a reward for her devotion to the Church and weekly tithing. I don't know if it was intentional but it was very hard to side with the Catholic priests who were moralizing and condescending to Farley's tortured character who was rightfully angry and pointed out their hypocrisy.

[quote] Farley's tortured character

Most of Farley's characters were tortured. He was passive.

What exactly happened on the set of OLTL that resulted in his firing? It had something to do with a man...

Today is John Dall's birthday (5/26)! I can't believe he was only fifty when he died.

And I think his hair in "Rope" is fucking flawless, and almost a character on its own. And Dall's own character of Brandon Shaw was ABSOLUTELY a datalounger.

Happy Birthday to the late, great John Dall!

It seems John Dall was also homosexual.

He was the gay murderer in 'Rope' and he played in that adolescent kid's movie called 'Spartacus'.

He played the sneering Marcus Glabrus who, I guess, we're supposed to assume is a bum-chum to the evil Crassus (played by Larry).

Cannot believe this thread is still active.

R72 It’s funny you say that because when I watched They Live by Night for the first time, I remember being surprised to learn about Granger’s sexuality. He had such amazing chemistry with Cathy O’Donnell. I also liked them together in the Anthony Mann film noir Side Street. It’s too bad neither of them had great film careers.

Because of the nature of story of Rope Hitchcock deliberately cast two gay actors (Dall & Granger) in those roles. Nobody could have pulled those roles off as well as those two did back then.

[quote] Nobody could have pulled those roles off as well as those two did back then.

I thought John Dall was insufficiently pretty (despite R111's opinion of his 'fornicatingly flawless hair').

Montgomery Clift, of course, would have been a prettier and more effective guilt-ridden homosexual.

R4

Yes. but Arthur Laurents got there first.

[quote]Do you think he was a top or a bottom?

Does it matter? With those lips, he was definitely a cocksucker.

Is there really any indication in the film of ROPE that the James Stewart character is gay? Is there anything in the screenplay that enforces his sexuality? Apparently, Hitchcock first offered the role to Cary Grant and then Montgomery Clift, and perhaps with either of those actors, the role might have had a much different effect. But I don't really get why the character was conceived as gay when there doesn't even appear to be any subtext of homosexuality.

Jimmy Stewart sucked the air out of every scene that he was in. And not just in ROPE.

^^ James Stewart plays a good-looking, well-groomed, well-spoken, middle-aged single man in Rope. Even then that was more than enough to signal his homosexuality. Stewart was miscast in the role, which would've been better served with someone with a more sophisticated image. Joseph Cotten would've been perfect and probably would've taken the role if offered, but it was too close to home for Grant, and Monty wasn't mature-looking enough to play a mentor.

^^r122 Lawrence Olivier would have been perfect. If Hitchcock could have toned down his overacting.

R122 Joseph Cotten was homophobic - it would have been a very unpleasant set.

R124 where’d you hear that? Anecdotes please!

From the documentary Chris & Don: A Love Story (2007) about the love term relationship of Christoper Isherwood & Don Bachardy. Don Bachardy mentions Cotten's attitudes in the film. I have no reason to doubt him.

For my money George Nader was much more attractive than Farley Granger. But to each his own...

Bringing this all home actor Michael Nader (of Dynasty fame) who recently passed away was the nephew of George Nader.

R126

There was a thread mentioning Joseph Cotten being homophonic.

But there is also plenty more on record elsewhere...

"The three-and-a-half-decade relationship of the British writer Christopher Isherwood and the American portrait artist Don Bachardy is one of the ultimate true stories of a proto-gay-marriage succeeding in a forbidding climate.

Defying social conventions of the 1950s and ’60s, the two men navigated Hollywood society as an openly gay couple, withstanding the slings and arrows of homophobes like the actor Joseph Cotten, who during a dinner party at David O. Selznick’s house made loud, derisive remarks about “half-men.”

[quote] What is the deal with the navel thing, any theories?

The Hays Code said navels equal penises and vaginas.

John Gavin puts every other actor mentioned in the shade.......

r132 It was the same modesty rule that kept Barbara Eden from showing her navel on I Dream of Jeannie. (Although Eden got away with it on occasion.)

I saw Granger onstage in Lanford Wilson’s “Talley & Son” at Circle Rep in 1985. He was quite good and even won an Obie.

R136 Another Datalounger at R90 I remembers Granger auditioning for a play in NY in the mid 1980s.

Too bad he never showed dick or ass. He was delicious in his 20s and 30s. I wonder if he ever fucked Brando or others.

I swear I remember reading that Fraley Granger had a fling with Rue McClanahan. Did I imagine this? Someone on DL will know.

Appears to have been a dick-loving bisexual like James Dean and Sal Mineo. Fucked women when he was young and horny and less discriminatory. But preferred men romantically and sexually and identified more and more with gayness as he aged.

According to tittle-tattle on DL Jameson Parker got "one of the fathers" on OLTL fired for being a bit too friendly.

Farley Granger on Gay Subtext in ‘Rope’: ‘It Was Never Discussed’

I thought that he was canned for bringing barely legal hustlers to the set of OLTL.

Wouldn't you just love on be an an orgy with Farley Grainger, John Gavin, Tyrone Power, Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Anthony Perkins, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean (minus the cigarette breath) Cary Grant, etc at the peak of their individual beauty that went on forever.

r144, they all had cigarette breath,darling!

But those were the days of Sen-sen…no one had cigarette breath for long….

Farley much preferred dick over pussy.

Read something about how Farley Granger was invited to dine at some Hollywood mogul or producer's home. Once there wife of said person sat Mr. Granger down and basically said his dalliances with men weren't really a huge issue, what he did in his private life wasn't anyone's business. But carrying on in public with Shelly Winters was another matter....

Said wife went on that Ms. Winters was basically a slut and that being seen in public or worse perceived as being romantically involved with the woman could harm Farley Granger's career.

Speaking of the slut, Debbie Reynolds said in her last book that she was at a Hollywood party where Shelley was openly serviced by men under her flowing gown.

Deb never forgave Shelley for being a bitch on wheels during the filming of What's the Matter with Helen? It cost her a load of money since she was the main producer (but not credited).

"Shelley Winters figures strongly in Granger’s own memoir, but not the fact that Granger and Calhoun had helped her get an apartment downstairs in this very building.

“She was really startlingly smart, and original, and articulate. She was terrific, you know, when in a good mood, but when not in a good mood was totally impossible. She’d been freezing in her big old apartment on Riverside Drive, so when she got into this building she not only kept the curtains closed tight but put mattresses against all the windows and turned the place into a sauna.”

Granger and she had been in one movie together, “Behave Yourself,” a 1951 comedy. “She walked off the set one day. She said: ‘Jimmy Wong Howe [the cinematographer] is favoring Farley.’ And she once said to her housekeeper: ‘Don’t serve the wine in the good glasses. I think Farley is stealing the good glasses.’ ”

Can you imagine eating Shelley Winters’ pussy??? Yuck!!!!!!

He was a bit wooden as an actor but he was beautiful to look at.

Shelley Winters called him Farfel.

R44, R132 The British were also squeamish about their men displaying their navel

Farley took over the role of the gay playwright in "Deathtrap" on Broadway and played it from March 17, 1981, to June 13, 1982.

He was so hot in Hans Christian Anderson....

^ He has no meat on his buttocks!

Granger was the weak link in "Strangers On A Train". Not enough to derail this great movie, but he just pales in comparison to the rest of the cast (kind of like Robert Cummings in "Dial M For Murder")

Weirdly, he was wonderful in his soap role on "As The World Turns" and had great chemistry with Eileen Fulton and Margaret Reed.

I think Hitchcock wrote his characters in Strangers on a Train and Rope as closeted gays so the uptight, subdued persona worked in that favor. Moreso in Rope as being tortured by a secret that's killing him inside was an allegory for the closet.

A bit rodenty. Nick Jonas with bigger eyes.

R160 Farley's white passing?

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