Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Collecting material for Tuesday’s gay-interest posting on Farley Granger led me to Arthur Laurents (who I wrote a bit about on the occasion of his death in 2011). Yesterday’s posting in this run-up to Pride Month switched to rainbow clothing. Today I’m back to accomplished LGBT people, with a brief posting on Laurents.

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Laurents in 1984

From Wikipedia:

Arthur Laurents [né Levine] (July 14, 1917 – May 5, 2011) was an American playwright, stage director and screenwriter.

After writing scripts for radio shows after college and then training films for the U.S. Army during World War II, Laurents turned to writing for Broadway, producing a body of work that includes West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), and Hallelujah, Baby! (1967), and directing some of his own shows and other Broadway productions.

His early film scripts include Rope (1948) for Alfred Hitchcock, followed by Anastasia (1956), Bonjour Tristesse (1958), The Way We Were (1973), and The Turning Point (1977).

… Laurents wrote Original Story By Arthur Laurents: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood, published in 2000. In it, he discusses his lengthy career and his many gay affairs and long-term relationships, including those with Farley Granger and Tom Hatcher. Hatcher was an aspiring actor whom Gore Vidal suggested Laurents seek out at the Beverly Hills men’s clothing store Hatcher was managing at the time. The couple remained together for 52 years until Hatcher’s death on October 26, 2006.

The book:

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Hatcher and Laurents as gorgeous young men

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Laurents (at age 90) with Patti LuPone in 2007, for the revival of Gypsy:

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This entry was posted on May 25, 2017 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Movies and tv, Shirtlessness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.