Golden Age Bravado: Lon McCallister and William Eythe

They were both under contract to 20th Century Fox and its boss Darryl F. Zanuck was generally tolerant of having gay men in his employ.  After all, Tyrone Power, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price and Roddy McDowall and a few others collected paychecks at the West Los Angeles studio.  Zanuck was especially fond of Power and Webb.  But those men marched to the tune of their times.  They generally did what they were told and created no fuss.  The one thing they didn't do was live with another man.  That got the boss very angry.

A few gays had lived together before... most famously Cary Grant and Randolph Scott... and around the time of William Eythe and Lon McCallister there was Farley Granger and writer Arthur Laurents.  The naive public didn't really catch on to Grant & Scott and Granger kept a low profile and Laurents, not an actor, was not generally known to the public.  Eythe and McCallister's mistake was flouting their relationship in a time when one didn't do that and being new to the movies.

Eythe and McCallister both came to Fox in the early 40s.  If actors didn't work together, they certainly met in the studio cafeteria.  Not only was everyone aware of who was new, there was always the it takes one to know one philosophy and in no time at all they fell into one another arms and started living together almost immediately.  Their partnership would last until death intervened.

Most people at the studio knew the score and gave them lots of space although McCallister became popular at his home base because he was compliant, friendly and kind of adorable.  Eythe had good looks and was a decent actor but was hot-headed, often imperious and had a chip on his shoulder.  It's been said Zanuck came to loathe him.  Regarding both actors, the Fox publicity machine went into overdrive.

Eythe was from Mars... Mars, PA, that is.  Born in 1918, he had an older brother, a jock who would go on to be an All-American halfback hero at Carnegie Tech, and it was difficult for a young gay boy to be in the shadow of such a brother.  It didn't help things when Bill went in for drama at the same school.  After graduation he toured with several stock companies and wound up on Broadway in The Moon Is Down (1942).   As you've read a great deal in these pages, he was discovered by a talent scout who turned him on to Fox.

The studio was initially high on him.  Many of their contract players were off to war and handsome leading men were in demand.  Eythe was 4F because he had a partial deafness.  He received good notices for his first film opposite Henry Fonda in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943).  That same year he played a young, noble French boy who forfeits his love for Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette.  Film exhibitors named him a Star of Tomorrow.

Arguably his best film was The Eve of St. Mark (1944), as a young soldier who leaves his love, Anne Baxter, behind as he enlists.  It was designed as a morale booster for the guys off fighting and was very popular.  He got hot under the collar when the publicity folks cooked up a romance with Baxter.  The studio was trying to mend his image problems.

Also in 1944 he appeared in Wing and a Prayer, another popular war film but he took a backseat to Don Ameche and Dana Andrews.  The same year he appeared in the Academy Award-winning Wilson.  In 1945 he was reunited with Baxter in A Royal Scandal where director Otto Preminger picked on him as did bisexual star Tallulah Bankhead.

After playing Linda Darnell's beau in the turn-of-the-century Preminger musical, Centennial Summer (1946), Eythe was in quite the funk.  He didn't like it when Fox intruded (he said) in his life and when it was apparent they then gave up on him, he didn't like that either.  McCallister went to Zanuck and tried to steady the ship but it was of little use.  Eythe would never again appear in a top film.  In 1947 and caving to public pressure, he moved out of the Malibu home he shared with McCallister and married socialite Buff Cobb.  His lover was sure he'd be back.

Herbert Alonzo McCallister Jr. was born in Los Angeles in 1923.  He enrolled in a children's professional acting school when he was quite young and by age 13 he had a bit in famed gay director George Cukor's 1936 Romeo and Juliet.  The two would become lifelong friends.  McCallister would go on to appear in 27 more films in very small and usually uncredited parts, including Stella Dallas, Souls at Sea, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Babes in Arms and Yankee Doodle Dandy.

By 1943 McCallister was in the service and he and a number of his fellow soldiers were chosen to appear in Stage Door Canteen.  It was a real-life place where actresses hobnobbed with soldiers. Although a thin plot it is a good chance to ogle stars playing themselves.  McCallister had a bit with acting legend Katherine Cornell in her only film.

He was still in thick with Cukor and his gaggle of handsome gay guys who congregated at the director's house every Sunday for a swim and assorted activities.  Most wanted to be in the movies.  Cukor also gave a lot of straight parties and McCallister was one of the very few ever who could score a crossover invitation.

It was Cukor who got the main thrust of McCallister's career started.  Cukor was temporarily at Fox to make a military movie, Winged Victory (1944), out of Moss Hart's popular play.  All the male stars were on leave from the service and in the cast were listed by their ranks.  McCallister had the lead.  It's generally conceded to be Cukor's worst film.

Fox was impressed with his work and his boyish good looks and offered him a contract.  When I first caught up with his work later on, I always associated him with animals since he made five films featuring them... three horses, a dog and a cougar.  

His next movie set the tone for the rest of his career... the earnest kid who only wanted to do good things.  Even when he wanted to grow up and do weightier things, his 5'6" frame, engaging smile and that youthful handsomeness seemed to prevent it.  The film in question, arguably his most well-known, is Home in Indiana (1944).  He's a wayward kid who happens onto a horse farm and trains a blind filly into winning a trotting race.  He was romanced by Jeanne Crain (his leading lady in Winged Victory as well) and June Haver.  The public, Fox and McCallister were all very excited.

Jeanne Crain, June Haver and Lon

By 1947 he was out of the service.  He was not out of the closet as far as the public was concerned and sadly never would be.  Like his partner he couldn't stand the game-playing and kicked himself every time he went on one of those studio-arranged dates.  But both McCallister and Eythe knew that Zanuck treated one of them with respect and the other with contempt.  

He was in a film noir I was fond of, The Red House (1947) with Edward G. Robinson, Judith Anderson, Rory Calhoun and Julie London.  The first two are siblings who have a terrible secret that concerns a hidden location in the woods.  McCallister was second-billed as a family friend.  The same year he was top-billed in Thunder in the Valley, family fare about a collie in Scotland.

By 1949 Cobb had divorced Eythe (she went on to marry newsman Mike Wallace) and he was back where he belonged.  McCallister was happy but noticed that Eythe had gotten out of shape and was drinking far too much.  Still, they thought they had something special and were happy to give Part 2 a solid chance.  

The boys with Dana Andrews (l)

McCallister starred in The Big Cat, another animal story for the whole family.  And two more horse stories arrived... the highly-fictionalized The Story of Seabiscuit (1949) with Shirley Temple and The Boy from Indiana (1950) helped draw a close to the Fox contract and his movie career.  He would manage a couple more B flicks that nobody saw and of course did some early television.

By 1953 both men were done making movies.  It was a decision that  was made for them.  And why?  For Eythe his career never really took hold... certainly not enough to ignore how difficult he was.  Studio execs hated it when big moneymaking stars were a pain in the ass but they put up with it.  It was about commerce.  But William Eythe?

It was said that McCallister being vertically challenged and boyish  did him in.  Maybe so but did anyone tell that to Alan Ladd?  Each of those things may have contributed somewhat but the issue was not so much that they were gay but that they lived together and didn't care who knew it although they didn't otherwise flaunt being gay.  Some called them brave... more called them foolish.  Two famous men simply did not live together in the 40s and 50s and think it wasn't going to have consequences.

Occasionally they would together attend one of Cukor's soirees but the host was not particularly fond of Eythe.  It's likely he and others thought at this point that Eythe was using McCallister.  It was the latter who was rich and getting richer all the time.  He had dabbled in his father's profession, real estate and property investment, for years and now he embraced it fulltime.  He had his sprawling Malibu estate and a number of properties around Los Angeles and would be acquiring more in the Lake Tahoe area.

 

By the mid-50s Eythe was drinking more than ever and usually depressed.  He accumulated a few drunk driving arrests.  McCallister did all he could to help pull his partner out of it but to no avail.  William Eythe died of acute hepatitis in 1957.  He was 38 years old.  His early death was described as a result of the downside of Hollywood stardom.

McCallister would live a lot longer but I never heard about him again until I read his obituary.  From the early 60s until the early 80s, he and his old pal Cukor became inseparable.  They didn't live together but that's about the only thing that kept them from being called a couple.

After Cukor's death McCallister became more reclusive than ever.  He had a few friends and family but kept a low, if not non-existent, public profile.  In a 1992 interview he said that being a movie star was great but I never considered doing it for a life time.  I wanted to be myself, be free to go where I pleased without causing a traffic jam.  I've succeeded in this and I am happy.

He decided he liked Lake Tahoe enough to move there and that's where he passed away in 2005 at age 82 from congestive heart failure.  He'd been ill for some time.  His L.A. Times obituary did not mention that he had been in a long relationship with William Eythe or that he was gay.

Next posting:

A breakthrough gay film