http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/dowd-dirty-harry-meets-dirtier-edgar.html?pagewanted=allOp-Ed Columnist
Dirty Harry Meets
Dirtier Edgar
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 12, 2011 Istvan BanyaiWASHINGTON I ASK Clint Eastwood, the star who defined macho in 20th-century movies, what it was like to direct a scene with two men kissing.
Especially when it’s
Leonardo DiCaprio and
Armie Hammer playing a rule-bending and gender-bending version of
J. Edgar Hoover and
Clyde Tolson.
Stretching out his Giacometti legs in the Four Seasons bar, the rangy 81-year-old said he juiced up the action to make it a fistfight that suddenly turns erotic. Or as Eastwood circumspectly puts it, “It becomes an expression, at least from one of the parties — maybe both — of borderline something else.”
A director who prides himself on his economy (one or two takes often suffice) and frugality, Eastwood said: “It moved so fast, nobody had a chance to feel awkward. Afterward there were some jokes.”
I quote the
Times film critic
Manohla Dargis writing that “the tenderness of the love story in
‘J. Edgar’ comes as a shock.”
He cocks his head and says with a gravelly murmur, “Don’t I seem like the tender type?” before reassuring me, “All this .44 Magnum stuff, it’s just an act.”
Some F.B.I. agents who worked with Hoover have been grousing that portraying the feared first director of the F.B.I. as homosexual would “turn Dirty Harry into Dirty Harriet,” as
William Branon, chairman of the
J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, put it.
It’s sorta meta: the star who played a fictional law enforcement officer breaking rules for what he sees as the good of society makes a movie about a real law enforcement officer breaking rules for what he sees as the good of society.
Dirty Harry came out looking cool, though. The dirt-collecting Hoover comes out looking creepy.
Eastwood signed on to direct the screenplay written by
Dustin Lance Black, the 37-year-old star who scored an Oscar in 2009 for his screenplay for
“Milk” and wrote the play
“8,” gleaned from transcripts of California’s
Prop 8 trial and staged in New York in September with a starry cast.
“He’s a nice kid,” Eastwood says. “I call him a kid because he’s younger than me by about eight centuries.”
Black, who was shy and sometimes suicidal growing up gay on military bases and in Mormon culture, told me he wrote about
Harvey Milk to “inspire the younger generation to start becoming activists.” In his Oscar acceptance speech, he exhorted young gays and lesbians “who have been told that they are less than, by their churches or by the government or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value.”
The collaboration between the dishy icon of gay swagger and the dashing icon of straight swagger is intriguing. Riffing on gay marriage with
GQ, Eastwood said, “Why not?”
He calls the tightly braided relationship between the No. 1 and No. 2 at the F.B.I. “a deep friendship between men.” Even if there was gay affection, he does not think it was consummated.
Black regards the relationship as a tragic love story. Even though he doesn’t depict it in the film, he thinks the relationship was consummated.
“It’s so funny because it’s the generational divide,” he says about himself and Eastwood, who remembers Hoover from newsreels in the 1930s and ’40s. “For a much older generation, gay is the act of having sex with someone of the same gender. But the post-sexual-revolution, post-Stonewall generation defines gay or lesbian as someone’s nature. Who they are attracted to, who they connect with. It’s something much deeper than just a sexual act. And when you define it like that, Hoover is a gay man.”
The biopic features several scenes of Hoover bumbling in hetero moments: taking
Helen Gandy, who would become his lifelong secretary, to the Library of Congress on a first date to show off the card catalog system he helped organize; flustered as he refuses to dance with
Ginger Rogers’s mother at a New York cabaret; sparking a lovers’ quarrel with Tolson when he talks about his dates with
Dorothy Lamour and how “it may be time for a Mrs. Hoover,” a slot Tolson felt he was already filling splendidly, with tart gossip and shopping trips where he dandified Hoover.
“He would propose to these women on the first or second date, and it would always be a ‘no,’ ” Black said. “A lot of the research I did was to go to gay men living in Washington, D.C., who are in their 80s and 90s now, and have them describe to me what the code was at that time. What you couldn’t say, what you did to replace the hole in your heart where dating and love would have gone. If anything was consummated, it was not discussed because it was just too dangerous.”
He said he wanted every scene, including the “love story” ones, to be based on facts. Eastwood said he, too, read the screenwriter’s research books to check accuracy and “make sure there wasn’t just one opinion.”
Black did extrapolate, though, about the pair who dressed alike, had all their meals together and enjoyed balmy trips to the Del Mar track in California (where they switched to matching white tropical suits and white fedoras).
The writer knew that Clyde and “Speed” — the nickname Hoover got because he talked fast to correct a stutter and/or delivered groceries quickly as a boy — had a glass-shattering fight in a Del Mar hotel room. Black conjures a tortured, bloody kiss at the end and Tolson’s parting threat: “If you ever mention a lady friend again, that will be the last day you share my company.”
There is no doubt that the monstrous mama’s boy who ruled the bureau for 48 years was self-loathing: He intimidated those who insinuated he was gay; banned gays from the F.B.I.; used files about
Eleanor Roosevelt’s lady friends to manipulate
F.D.R.; and spread false rumors that
Adlai Stevenson was gay.
Even though Black found no evidence to corroborate a claim by a Mafia wife that Hoover was a cross-dresser, he did put in a Bates Motel scene: DiCaprio’s Hoover puts on cascading beads and a lace-trim dress belonging to his late mother, the manipulative aspiring socialite who egged on his ambition and cruelly told him, “I’d rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son.”
Hoover grew up within sight of the Capitol and lived with his mother until she died when he was 40. He had an emergency F.B.I. phone installed in his childhood bedroom; he got the call about the
Lindbergh kidnapping there.
He left everything to Tolson in his will; now the two are buried nearly within hand-holding distance of each other in the Congressional Cemetery.
Black believes that the Commie-hating, credit-hogging, image-inflating Hoover was a harbinger of our modern society — sickeningly revolving around fame. “If there’s anyone who lives his life feeling like public adoration was the No. 1 goal,” the writer says, “it was J. Edgar Hoover.”
Eastwood says Hoover did some good. But when I asked if he was loco, the director replied, “He definitely marched to a different drummer.”
Spending time here filming and showing a screening Tuesday at the
Newseum did not awaken political yearnings in Eastwood, a libertarian/Republican who was once mayor of Carmel, Calif. Neither did news that in 1988,
Poppy Bush’s team kicked around the idea of having him as a running mate.
He said he’d never settle for No. 2 and he doesn’t think he could have survived a national campaign.
Referring to the grumpy, prejudiced dinosaur he played in his last role, he grinned: “In this p.c. era, I’d be the ‘Gran Torino’ president.”