The Gay Divorcée (RKO, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Turner Classic Movies did an extended program of films with at least allegedly Queer content hosted by Dave Karger and Alonso Duralde, an openly Gay author and film critic who’s just published a book called Hollywood Pride: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Representation and Perseverance in Film. Among the movies they showed last night was John Francis Dillon’s Call Her Savage (1932), which I saw in 2014 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/09/call-her-savage-fox-film-1932.html) and hailed as one of the so-called “pre-Code” era’s masterpieces; and Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight (1939), a romantic farce co-written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett and a movie Wilder told biographer Maurice Zolotow was “perfect because I fought [Leisen] every step of the way.” In between those two they showed the film I chose to watch, The Gay Divorcée (1934), second of the ten Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals and the first one that actually cast them as a romantically involved couple. (In their previous film together, Flying Down to Rio [1933], they were just two members of Gene Raymond’s touring band.)

Karger and Duralde were hailing this film for exactly the same reason Arlene Croce, in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (1972) damned it: the heavy presence of sissy-types in the supporting cast. “The male friendship theme was standard, too, and scriptwriters of the 1930’s had their kicks with it,” Croce wrote. “A male star was supported by a comic, and it’s surprising in how many musical comedies and operettas of the 1920’s effeminacy was a comic’s stock-in-trade. In The Gay Divorcée, which had a retrogressive book, all the male comics seem Queer. The title was changed (from Gay Divorce, the name of the 1932 stage musical it was based on) to take the edge off the hard word ‘divorce.’ Perhaps something should have been done about the adjective.” (This was Croce hinting at the cultural conservatism that would ultimately cost her the job of dance critic at The New York Times.) The Gay Divorcée had a rather twisted path from the page to the stage to the screen. It began as an unproduced play by British author J. Hartley Manners called An Adorable Adventure, which Manners’ stepson, Dwight Taylor, took and adapted into a 1932 musical called Gay Divorce. It was a vehicle for Fred Astaire and his first show without his sister Adele, who’d been his dancing partner in vaudeville and on Broadway until she retired in 1930 to marry into the British nobility.

Cole Porter wrote a full score for Gay Divorce but the only one of his songs that made it into the movie was “Night and Day,” which Astaire had danced to on stage with British actress Claire Luce and reprised on film with Ginger Rogers. (Astaire reportedly wanted “Night and Day” dropped from the film, too, because he thought it was overexposed, but he’d already recorded it twice, for Victor in the U.S. in 1932 and for Columbia in Britain in 1933 when he went to do the show in London. Both records backed the song with other tunes from the Gay Divorce score: “I’ve Got You on My Mind” in 1932 and the equally beautiful “After You, Who” in 1933.) Like “One for My Baby,” “Night and Day” is a song that later became identified with Frank Sinatra but was originally written for Astaire. According to Croce, before RKO bought the film rights to Gay Divorce, Mervyn LeRoy had taken Jack Warner to see the show, hoping Warner would buy the rights for him, but Warner said, “Who am I going to put in it – Cagney?” (Actually James Cagney would probably have loved it; in his autobiography he said that his one career regret was that he had made so few musicals.) The Gay Divorcée remains my favorite of the Astaire-Rogers musicals; yes, their dancing partnership got better later on, but in 1934 the formula still seemed fresh and hadn’t been run into the ground the way it was a couple of years later – though if I were to pick an Astaire-Rogers musical to illustrate the theme of Queer inclusion in film, it would probably be Shall We Dance (1937) for its bizarre scene in which Edward Everett Horton and the magnificent character actor Jerome Cowan (playing Astaire’s and Rogers’s managers, respectively) play a negotiation that seems like a mutual Gay seduction.

Karger and Duralde particularly pointed out the “Let’s K-nock K-neez” number in The Gay Divorcée in which the young Betty Grable (outfitted in a stunning pantsuit recycled from Dolores Del Rio’s wardrobe in Flying Down to Rio) practically throws herself at Horton, who couldn’t be less interested. It’s a precursor of Jane Russell’s marvelous number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?,” in which she dances with a crew of musclemen who basically ignore her, with the subtext that they’re more interested in each other. It also makes one wonder just why it took so long for Grable to grab the brass ring of stardom; she’d cycled through Fox, Goldwyn, RKO, Paramount, and Fox again until she finally got her break as a last-minute substitute for Alice Faye in Down Argentine Way (1940). And though there have been innumerable renditions of “Night and Day” ever since, the version in this film, with Astaire’s yearning voice, Rogers partnering him stunningly on the dance floor, and Max Steiner’s incredible orchestral arrangement, remains the definitive one for me.

The three “queens” in The Gay Divorcée are Edward Everett Horton (playing Ginger Rogers’ divorce lawyer), Erik Rhodes (playing Rodolfo Tonetti, the hired co-respondent, who at one point says, “Your wife is safe with Tonetti – he prefers spaghetti,” a line copped from a famous interview with Rudolph Valentino in which he said he’d rather eat a plate of spaghetti than make love to a woman) – the one cast member besides Astaire from the original Broadway production who got to repeat his role in the film – and Eric Blore as the inevitable waiter who’s the deus ex machina at the end. It turns out he previously knew Mimi Glossop’s (Ginger Rogers) husband Cyril (William Austin in a marvelous performance as a typical British upper-class twit) and Cyril’s wife, who looked nothing like Ginger Rogers. This proves that Mimi doesn’t need a divorce after all since her previous “marriage” was bigamous (something we had a clue about when Mimi complained that one of the reasons she wanted to dump her husband was she almost never saw him because he was always going out of town on so-called “business trips,” almost certainly to spend time with his legal wife), and therefore she and Guy Holden (Fred Astaire) can team up at the end. One thing I hadn’t noticed before about The Gay Divorcée is that when Astaire and Rogers confront each other on a British country road and she’s had to stop for a “Road Closed” sign that he put there deliberately, his car (a 1931 MG J2 Midget) has the steering wheel on the right side – correct for Britain – but her car (a 1929 Duesenberg Model J convertible that was apparently Rogers’s own vehicle) has the steering wheel on the left because it was both made and driven in the United States. (The car was ultimately sold at auction in 2012 for nearly $1.9 million.)