GLR May-June 2023

Hatcher and himself as gay men, The En clave and TwoLives , got little attention and are not much remembered. But the time between Home of the Brave and The En clave was a time of great change. The film versionof The Boys in the Band opened in 1970, three years before The Way We Were , but it took twelve more years before an

loved “Chernobyl.” It’s hard to ascertain just what this re lationship—so much a creature of its times—was like. In Hofler’s view, “The two men were deeply in love and com mitted to each other.” According to Lau rents: “He was my reason for living. My reason for writing.” (“It was the bile that

THE WAY THEY WERE How Epic Battles and Bruised Egos Brought a Classic Holly wood Love Story to the Screen by Robert Hofler Citadel Press. 278 pages, $28.

kept Arthur going,” said a London friend of Laurents.) Fein stein believed that “Arthur was afraid Tom was going to leave him, because he did leave him a couple of times. Arthur was always doing more to keep the relationship going.” To Howard Rosenman, it was simpler: “They were both terrible drunks,” though Hatcher went to AA and got sober before he died of lung cancer in 2006. In the summer they lived in separate houses in the Hamptons. Their neighbor in New York was sure the two men had poisoned his cat because it kept wandering into their garden. Of such details are marriages made, and Hofler, as his previous books about Dominick Dunne and The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson demonstrate, has a great eye for detail. As for the history of which Arthur Laurents and Tom Hatcher were a part—concurrent with all the dish in Hofler’s book, and there’s tons of it, is the cultural change their lives re flected, which is the real takeaway of this book. Laurents’ first play, Home of the Brave , was about anti-Semitism in the U.S. military. The Way We Were was a gay love story disguised by gender-changing. The two plays he wrote late in his life about

other major movie about homosexuality, Making Love , with Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean, came out in 1982, and it was a critical and financial bomb. In 1985, William Hurt won an Oscar for Kiss of the Spider Woman , Tom Hanks for Philadelphia in 1993, and Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote in 2005. So, did The Way We Were have anything to do with the his tory of movies about gay people? You could make a list of tel evision shows and movies that did, but it would not include The WayWeWere . What Hofler’s book describes so entertainingly is a time when Jews changed their names, got nose jobs, and celebrated Christmas on TV, homosexual writers created het erosexual characters to survive, and a Jewish girl from Brook lyn became a surrogate for the longings of gay men: a picture of a shift in culture that came about in ways that now seem in evitable but weren’t back then. As Hofler notes, Black people are now thriving in the theater the way Jews of Arthur Laurents’ generation once did, to the point that Jews, the former outsiders, are now the Establishment. Such is the endlessly rocking wash ing machine of American assimilation.

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9781641608800 | Cloth | $30.00

May–June 2023

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