WWW- For a gay actor in the 1960s, becoming Judy Garland’s lover could be a dream – with night sweats.
In John Carlyle’s posthumously published memoir, “Under the Rainbow,” the handsome raconteur recounts his time with the great singer, to whom he was engaged, and his friendships with Rock Hudson and Montgomery Clift and others in closeted Hollywood.
Carlyle was 10 years younger than Garland and “her phone had stopped ringing” when they hooked up. He writes that she once stood in her living room and yelled, “Where the hell is everybody?! This house used to be filled with people, even if we all hated each other.”
The two did amphetamines together, and Garland did Âother drugs as well, he says. He describes their lovemaking with Garland in a chiffon peignoir, but afterward, Carlyle says, “I slept lightly, making sure she did not float to the bathroom to rummage in her purse for more Seconal.” He would caution her not to spend too much time at the pool. “Bright sunlight, like running out of Ritalin, made her blown up and lobster-skinned.” Yikes.
Still, she would often sing at home for him, and entertain him with “her organic wit.”
“We grew limp from laughter; humor was the predominant, sustaining emotion in Judy’s life. It was her weapon against the doldrums, which could catapult her into cataclysmic rages.” One such rage at the gay bar Por Favor, shortly after she got fired from “Valley of the Dolls,” caused their breakup when she “socked my jaw with one connecting blow that pitched me out of my cane chair onto the floor,” Carlyle wrote.
Rock Hudson, he recalled, was usually “high camp,” but “a glowering bore” when he wasn’t. “Fame kept his closet door closed, which he said was hell. … Both moods were fueled by alcohol.” Yet Hudson was generous “if he liked you,” and just as Carlyle was “verging on [his] own gloom because there had thus far been no gifts,” he walked into his bedroom and it was filled with the most expensive easel money could buy, a dozen canvases, and innumerable paintbrushes and oils after Carlyle had expressed a desire to paint.
But Carlyle’s reminiscence of physical relationships with James Dean and Marlon Brando may never come out – unless trustees John Paul Davis and Professor Chris Freeman reveal them some other way. Though the book’s dust jacket copy reads, “He sleeps with Marlon Brando and James Dean,” those passages were cut from the book by lawyers, a Carroll & Graf spokeswoman told us.
