Orson and Lena and Vincente

When Vincente Minelli was asked to come to Hollywood–he had been a very successful scenic designer in New York–the studio brass asked him what he’d like to do. He said: I want to to do a black musical. Like Welles, Minnelli used to hang in largely mixed show biz circles, and why not do a black musical that wouldn’t be degrading to the director and the cast? When shooting started on the 1943 film, “Cabin in the Sky,” Minnelli, who was primarily gay, but who loved a number of women, fell in with Lena Horne, who was also sleeping with Orson Welles. In fact, Welles would often walk over to the set and wait for Lena, to take her out to lunch. I envy how interesting and free these people were and how, without demanding inclusion in the status quo via marriage or whatever, they made their own lives and loves. And it occurs to me, too, that queerness and being spiritually or actually orphaned shaped each and everyone of this story’s participants: Minnelli was the gay boy of Italian socialists and a political-minded part Native American mother who ended up wanting to articulate something of his experience of difference by making a movie about an aspect of American blackness; Lena, who was basically dumped or pimped out by her mother at an early age, has said that, other than her son and her father, the gay composer, Billy Strayhorn, was the great love of her life; and when asked about Gary Cooper once Orson Welles, who was orphaned in fact and for real before he was an adolescent, rolled his eyes seductively and said: He makes me feel like a woman