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Ivor Novello and co-star Gladys Cooper in an advertisement for The Bohemian Girl (1922) from The Film Daily 10th June 1923 (Media History Digital Library)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Novello\u2019s final stage musical was \u2018Gay\u2019s the Word\u2019, an\narguably knowing title that inspired the name of the UK\u2019s oldest LGBTQ+\nbookshop in central London. It is no secret now that Novello was gay (actor Bobbie\nAndrews was his partner of 35 years), and most of those in theatrical and film\ncircles would have known. So too would many of his fans if they were able, or inclined,\nto recognise the signs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is not surprising that the gay identity of a star such as\nNovello was not explicitly discussed in public during his lifetime. Even today,\ncoming out as LGBTQ+ is viewed by leading agents and producers, especially in\nHollywood, as a career-restricting liability particularly for A-list players, although\nthis is gradually changing. Back in the 1920s, although we can presume the\npopulation to include a similar proportion of queer people as now, there was no\nchance that Novello, like his Hollywood contemporary, Ramon Novarro, would be\npublicly \u2018out\u2019. However, in some ways, and particularly in the playful pages of\nthe booming industry of fan-magazines, the secret could be hidden in plain\nsight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As star studies scholars have observed, fan-magazines helped\nsatisfy the desire of audiences to engage with their stars away from the screen,\nextending the mythic realm of cinema itself. There\u2019s perhaps something about\nthe heyday of silent cinema that fostered such myths, with those huge glowing\nclose-ups in music filled auditoria inspiring the imagination. Cinemagoers\nmight wonder what their favourite stars sounded like, about the life they lead\naway from the screen, and just who Ivor Novello might actually want to kiss\nwhen his mouth moves in to nearly consume the screen in that famous close-up from\nAlfred Hitchcock\u2019s 1926 classic, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The setting of Hitchcock\u2019s film brings us back to\nBloomsbury, not far from the aforementioned bookshop, where we find other queer\nhaunts, including those expressionistic fog-enshrouded streets in which the\nfilm is set. His character can be called \u2018queer\u2019 in many different ways,\nincluding his eccentrically nervous \/ camp behaviour, his sometimes-strange\nappearance which veers from a gaunt vampire-like figure to an immaculately\ndressed sophisticate. Then there\u2019s his suspiciously unseen nocturnal life, the\nLodger sneaking out into the streets at night. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The film\u2019s intertitles are peppered with references to the\nLodger not being \u2018keen on the girls\u2019 and one defence of the Lodger\u2019s curious aversion\nto his landlady\u2019s risqu\u00e9 paintings of Victorian belles: \u2018even if he is a bit\nqueer, he\u2019s a gentleman\u2019. The Lodger is hounded by the police and is attacked\nby a mob while handcuffed; a provocative motif Hitchcock later associated with\na sexual fetish in his famous Hitchcock\/Truffaut<\/em> interview. Novello is\nmade to suffer, and suffer beautifully, a trait of many of his roles where he is\nburdened with some strange secret that ensures that a conventional heterosexual\nd\u00e9nouement falls persistently out of reach. But if Novello is queerly mannered\nin The Lodger<\/em>, in whatever sense, it serves the noirish plot \u2013 Novello the\nhomme fatal<\/em> \u2013 and adds possibilities<\/em> to this character and others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The year The Lodger <\/em>was first shown, Novello had established\nhis own queer space in London, the Fifty-Fifty club in Soho. This was a\nsanctuary where theatrical folk could meet and dine, but one subjected to\npolice raids on spurious charges. Press reports alluded to \u2018a certain type\u2019 who\nfavoured the club, alerting us to the real reasons for those raids. That type,\nno doubt, included Novello\u2019s contemporary, Noel Coward. Variety<\/em> seems to\nthink along those lines when helpfully explaining to its readers on 5th<\/sup>\nSeptember 1928 that the two men were \u2018close friends; and were members of what\nit termed \u2018the same temperamental set in London\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More direct is a line in the New York Times<\/em> review of\nThe Lodger<\/em> on 11 June 1928 which really leapt from the page at me when I\nfirst started researching Novello. \u2018There now enters Mr. Novello\u2019, it opined,\n\u2018looking pale and drawn and with a manner plainly saying that he very likely\ndoesn\u2019t like blondes at all\u2019. What else can this \u2018manner plainly saying\u2019 be\nreferring to but homosexuality? Notably here, the reviewer is referring to \u2018Mr\nNovello\u2019 rather than \u2018The Lodger\u2019, as if it\u2019s something that Novello brings\npersonally to the role. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Elsewhere in fan-magazines, as for other gay stars, one\nfinds more coded comments on Novello\u2019s excellent manners, his romantic and\nsensitive nature, and ubiquitous references to his devotion to his mother, as\nwell as an admiration for strong and often fabulous women. When the \u2018talkie\u2019\nremake of The Lodger <\/em>(Maurice Elvey, 1932), also starring Novello was\nreleased in the US as The Phantom Fiend<\/em>, Variety <\/em>(24th<\/sup>\nApril 1935) sneered at \u2018the lip pursing of Ivor Novello\u2019, who \u2018directs\nsuspicion towards himself by his queer antics\u2019. The OED<\/em> tells us that\nthe word \u2018queer\u2019 as a reference to homosexuality had been in sub-cultural use\nat least since the 1890s, then becoming a mainstream slur before being\nreappropriated by the LGBTQ+ community a century later. Variety<\/em> thus\nmay, or may not, have had Novello\u2019s sexuality in mind with this description,\nbut in context it\u2019s difficult to miss the innuendo, especially if you were a\nmember of that aforementioned \u2018temperamental set\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such oblique references, coding and stereotyping, does not\nalways read as homophobic, even though the hushed circumstances is redolent of\nthat context. Intentionally or not, such language made something visible,\nhowever opaquely, to audiences then, and to us now, like eddies in the\nheteronormative fog that continually conspires to obscure it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Carefully articulating the sexual identity of stars could\neven be commercially expedient. Ronald Gregg, in his research on gay Hollywood\nheartthrob, William Haines, argues that there was a short period from the late\n1920s where representing queerness was even seen to be of commercial advantage\nin Hollywood before the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934 shut things\ndown once more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In terms of those intertitles and apparently throwaway remarks\nwe find in fan-magazines and newspapers, it\u2019s too easy to permit\nheteronormative pressure to dismiss such references as reading \u2018too much\u2019\nretrospectively, as if there were never any LGBTQ+ people in the past. There\u2019s\noften a reason why such identities and desires were not openly declared and so\nhad to be expressed a little more obliquely \u2013 queerly<\/em> \u2013 so we should\ncelebrate those traces and give them their proper place in history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So when I sit down this LGBT+ History Month and watch the\nLodger slipping out into the London fog, I\u2019ll be thinking about the queer\nantics of all kinds that both he, and Ivor Novello, brought to silent cinema.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Michael Williams is author of Ivor Novello: Screen Idol<\/em>\n(BFI Publishing, 2003), and has most recently written on Novello in Tamar\nJeffers McDonald and Lies Lanckman eds., Star Attractions: Twentieth-Century\nMovie Magazines and Global Fandom<\/em> (University of Iowa Press, 2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n https:\/\/www.uipress.uiowa.edu\/books\/9781609386733\/star-attractions<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n http:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/film\/michael_williams<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Screengrabs: The Lodger<\/em>, Network Releasing, Blu-ray, 2012<\/p>\n\n\n\n For more information from the BFI on Ivor Novello see: http:\/\/www.screenonline.org.uk\/people\/id\/448907\/index.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ivor Novello was the biggest male star of British cinema in the 1920s and early 1930s, starring in 22 films in a career that spanned 1919 to 1934. The handsome Cardiff-born star \u2013 with his celebrated \u2018classic profile\u2019 \u2013 first rose to fame in 1914 as the composer of hit WWI anthem, \u2018Keep the Home … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/cifr\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/232\/2021\/02\/The-Lodger.jpg\")
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