The Damned Don't Cry - They Just Disappear: The Life and Works of Harry Hervey

By Harlan Greene

A biography of an unconventional Southern writer who illuminated gay life in the South

In The Damned Don't Cry—They Just Disappear, literary historian and Lamba Award-winning novelist Harlan Greene has created a portrait of a nearly forgotten southern writer, unearthing information from archives, rare books, film libraries,and small-town newspapers. Greene brings Harry Hervey (1900-1951) to life and explicates his works to reveal him as a hardworking writer and master of many genres, bravely unwilling to conform to conventional values.

As Greene illustrates, Hervey's novels, short stories, nonfiction books, and film scripts contain complex mixtures of history and thinly disguised homoerotic situations and themes. They blend local color, naturalism, melodrama, and psychological and sexual truths that provide a view to the circles in which he moved. Living openly with his male lover in Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, Hervey set novels in these cities that scandalized the locals and critics as well. He challenged the sexual mores of his day, sometimes subtly and at other times brazenly presenting texts that told one story to gay male readers, while still courting a mainstream audience. His novels and nonfiction may have been coded and thus escaped detection in their day, but twenty-first century readers can decipher them easily.

Greene also discusses Hervey's travel books and successful Hollywood scriptwriting, as well as his use of exotic elements from Asian cultures. The iconic film Shanghai Express, starring Marlene Dietrich, was based on one of his original stories. He also wrote some of the first travel books on Indochina, with descriptions of male and female prostitution and allusions to his own sexual adventures, which still make for sensational reading today.

Despite Hervey's output and his perseverance in presenting gay characters and themes as openly as he could, he has not been included in any survey of twentieth-century gay writers. Greene now rectifies this omission, providing the first book-length study of Hervey's life and work and the first scholarly attention to him in more than fifty years. It furthers our understanding of gay life in the South, as well as the impact of gay artists on popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781611178128

Harlan Greene

Harlan Greene is the author of the novels Why We Never Danced the Charleston, What the Dead Remember, and The German Officer’s Boy

Book preview

The Damned Don’t Cry—They Just Disappear

The Damned Don’t Cry—They Just Disappear

THE LIFE AND WORKS OF

HARRY HERVEY

Harlan Greene

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS

© 2018 Harlan Greene

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN 978-1-61117-811-1 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-61117-812-8 (ebook)

To Jonathan

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1 ◆ Of Mosques and Main Street

2 ◆ Condemn Me Not

3 ◆ The Blue Road of Romance

4 ◆ Born to Revel

5 ◆ The Gay Sarong

6 ◆ Not Entirely Platonic

7 ◆ Cobra, Congaï, and Charleston

8 ◆ Devil Dancer of the Middle Sex

9 ◆ Red Ending

10 ◆ The Mother of Inversion

11 ◆ The Hollywood Express

12 ◆ Passport to Hell

13 ◆ The Damned Don’t Cry

14 ◆ The Benison of Work … and a Little Beauty

15 ◆ Promised to Eternity

16 ◆ A Singular Elation

17 ◆ Aftermath

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Jane, or Jennie, Davis Hervey

Harry Clay Hervey Sr. and Jr.

Harry Hervey in fancy dress as a child

Cadet Harry Hervey, Georgia Military Academy

Harry Hervey, the young author, ca. 1921

Harry Hervey in costume

Harry Hervey in the gay sarong

Carleton Hildreth

Harry Hervey and Carleton Hildreth

Dust Jacket for The Damned Don’t Cry

Harry Hervey, ca. 1950

Cover for She-Devil

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been made possible—and better—through the contributions, competence, and generosity of many individuals, archivists, and curators around the country. In Savannah, Lynette Stoudt and other members of the archival staff of the Georgia Historical Society were prompt, professional, and accommodating. Others in the city, including John Duncan, Robert T. Henderson, Arthur Morrison, Patti Parker, and Roger Smith, graciously shared their information and knowledge of Harry Hervey and made helpful connections. In Charleston at the College of Charleston’s Addlestone Library’s Special Collections, digital archivist Sam Stewart was of great help in digitizing photographs. In Baltimore, Michael Johnson of the Special Collections Department of the Enoch Pratt Free Library extended permission to quote from Henry Mencken’s memorandum to Henry Allen Moe at the New York Public Library. (© Enoch Pratt Free Library, Maryland’s State Library Resource Center. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission. Unauthorized reproductions or use prohibited.)

As for help from other scholars, I’d like to thank Gene Waddell and Barbara Bellows for alerting me to information I would have missed. Kent Davis of DatAsia Press opened my eyes to many things. He not only reprinted two of Hervey’s books, but in the process, while showing me the significance of Hervey’s Southeast Asia perceptions and works, became a good friend. In many ways, this book would not have been possible without Susan Dick Hoffius, who, in her previous affiliation with the Georgia Historical Society, made possible the acquisition of the Harry Hervey and Carleton Hildreth materials now housed there. She and other friends and colleagues have been patient with me and tolerated my obsessions and my absences over these past many years that I pursued Harry Hervey. And to Jonathan David Applegate Ray, I render my appreciation, awe, admiration and love. Thank you all.

Prologue

In the summer of 1951 in a townhouse in New York City, a man lay struggling for breath. As light filtered into the sickroom and muted traffic noise rose and fell like surf, people on the other side of the door listened to expiring gasps. Every now and then, the door opened and a hushed solemn visitor, coming to pay last respects, was allowed in.

Propped in bed, adventurer and author Harry Hervey, his owlish glasses on, could not speak but acknowledged his guest wanly. Sure the scene was melodramatic (he was a master of the genre after all), but he had been faced with death before. In China decades before, a young revolutionary had pointed a knife at him; and later, press reports had told of Hervey lying in the bottom of a fragile craft, delirious with jungle fever. Carleton Hildreth, his handsome young lover, had been with him then; and Hildreth, older but still handsome, was still at his side fretting.

I’m fine, it’s nothing, Hervey gestured dismissively between hard-won gasps. With another operation, he’d be up again. A contraption attached to his telephone had allowed him to listen to conversations with his new agent.¹ His nearly dead film career was on the upswing now; and soon he’d be, too.

Through sheer will, he had achieved the impossible before—acclaim for his books, a Broadway play, and Hollywood films. He had been hailed as an exotic adventurer and expert Orientalist; perhaps even more daringly, he had lived openly with Hildreth in hostile times and cities, staring down censors, social critics, and creditors who had tried to stop him. The glamorous life was to come to them again, for to everyone’s wonder but his own, Hervey rallied.

Within a few days, he was out of bed, nonchalantly shopping with Hildreth and going out to see movies like Sunset Boulevard. Its star Gloria Swanson had never graced any of his films—Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead had been his divas.² But he loved the story of Norma Desmond, the silent film actress who once had been big and was now poised for a comeback. He knew he was too. The world had certainly not seen the last of Harry Hervey.

1

Of Mosques and Main Street

The first he had seen of the world was some fifty years before on November 5, 1900, in the town of Beaumont, Texas, a locale just visited by one of the worst hurricanes in American history. The sense of having missed something momentous haunted Harry Hervey throughout his youth, and he tried desperately to find it.

His family centered around grandfather Frank, nicknamed the General, not for his rank in the Civil War but for what he achieved afterward in the United Confederate Veterans.¹ If General Frank Hervey told stories of the war on porches on long summer afternoons as Confederate jessamine bloomed, his grandson Harry was not there, or if so, he was not paying attention. Other boys growing up in the South in the early 1900s might have thrust imaginary swords against Yankee enemies and curdled the air with the famous Rebel Yell, but not him. He has written nine books, and never so much as said boo to the Confederacy, a critic would wail in 1939, the year that saw the release of the iconic Confederate film, Gone with the Wind.²

Instead, the dreamy boy was often found draped on davenports, behind cramped front desks, or hidden behind large potted palms in hotel lobbies, pouring over piles of books and yellowed geographic journal[s] containing pictures of far-off places and people.³

His favorite photograph was of queerly dressed men who were quite astonishing. As he stared at the men in long flowing garments with turbans on their heads, with others who were nearly naked something latent woke in the boy; a longing flickered to life like a flame given oxygen.⁴

In the photograph, the figures stood in front of a great causeway … flung across a marshy stretch, tapering to the foot of … tremendous stairways and monstrous cone-shaped towers, above the black jungle. The phallic tower was captivating; its hugeness, the utter newness, trapped and held him. And there were those dark, naked men moving among the galleries…. Beneath the picture was a line that he read slowly. ‘The Ancient Ruins of Angkor.’ … When he became a man he would go there. He knew he would. He’d be among jungles and strange, dark men.⁵ Indeed in the future, he’d write one of the earliest American books on Angkor Wat and claim credit for discovering Khymer ruins, which no white man had seen for centuries. And as for those strange dark men, well, he’d only be able to hint at the adventures he had with them.

Wanderlust was a hallmark of the Herveys. The boy’s great grandfather (General Frank’s father) had run off to Mexico to fight in the 1840s only to die there and leave an orphaned family back in Columbus, Georgia. In the next generation, when Grandfather Frank took off for war, it was to New Orleans to enlist in the Confederate infantry, serving as a second sergeant in Company A, Tochman’s Polish Brigade. Frank was eventually promoted to chief of artillery on the staff of Colonel John Baylor and was captured by the enemy to languish in a Union prison.⁶

Frank Hervey settled down after the war, marrying Anna Bedell of Pensacola, Florida, in 1866. Anna’s father (despite the name George Washington) was English, and the Bedells (sometimes spelled Bidell) as well as the Herveys took pride in being of English stock.⁷ As an adult Harry Hervey would periodically claim descent from famous Englishmen. Coming from a line of sea-faring people including Lord Francis Hervey and Admiral Dewey, it was only natural he’d become an adventurous traveler, he’d brag. And later, when embarking on a story about Charles and John Wesley, founders of Methodism, Hervey would claim descent from their Holy Club associate and friend, James Hervey. Ancestor Hervey had written, of all things, a religious best seller, an irony not lost on the last of the gay mad Herveys, as he styled himself. His own best sellers (and those that went bust) were sex-filled, lurid, depraved, and shocking.⁸

Grandfather Frank joined his father-in-law’s hotel business and embarked on becoming a family man. Daughters came first—Minnie in 1871 and Ralphie the next year. Then came four sons: Charles Bedell born April 6, 1874, destined to play a great role in his nephew’s life; Frank Jr. born in 1875; Harry Clay Hervey Sr. (the father of Harry Clay Hervey Jr., the subject of this biography) born on July 12, 1877; and George, the last son, rounded out the quartet in 1879.⁹

The little information known about Hervey’s father, Harry Sr., comes from newspaper stories. In 1885, when General Frank and his children were living in the European Hotel in Macon, Georgia, a newspaper reported of Harry Sr.: While running for ‘home base,’ the little fellow dashed against a post and was knocked senseless. Aid was at once given him, and in a short time Harry was restored to consciousness with apparently no long-term effects.¹⁰

Frank was ambitious and soon running the Lenoir House hotel in Macon, too, before branching even further to the Warm Springs Hotel, later the Roosevelt Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. His oldest son Charles attended nearby Mercer University and graduated in 1894.¹¹

It was about this time that Frank moved his remaining children from Macon, Georgia, to Houston, Texas, where he assumed management of the Capitol Hotel. In December 1897 in one of its one hundred rooms, something happened to his son Harry Clay Hervey Sr. that again got his name in the papers. He was tending to a guest only to have the older man suffer a heart attack and die in his arms.¹²

It’s not known exactly when that dapper young man met Jane Louise Davis, a slight young girl with fair hair, born in Hockley, Texas, on May 6, 1879, a date she would alter in the coming years.¹³ Usually called Jennie, she had three older sisters: Alberta, Katie, and the adopted Nellie English, all born in Texas. Something had prompted the girls’ parents, Mahlon, a farmer, and Jane Lavinia, a home maker, to move from Vermont to Texas.¹⁴ (A Vermont background and an alcoholic father named Mahlon would figure in some of Hervey’s novels.)¹⁵

The only glimpse afforded us of the writer’s mother, Jennie Davis, before her marriage to Harry Hervey Sr. is from a scrap of a newspaper clipping describing a party for young women. Twelve beautiful young ladies in full evening dress engaged each other’s company for the dances and intermissions…. The cotillion was gracefully led by Misses Davis and Scuddamore and many new and novel figures were introduced, a newspaper reporter gushed. If boys don’t believe that girls can have fun without them they ought to have been concealed in a closet and witnessed that gay gathering, and indeed, they would have changed minds.¹⁶

As the girls Jennie Davis and Charlotte Scuddamore lead the procession to sandwiches and punch, they may have not known it, but they were soon to marry brothers. In the next generation, Davis’s son would write of overlapping lives of brothers and their loves, with a younger brother always in the shadow of a more successful older one.¹⁷

Elder brother Charles Bedell Hervey married Charlotte Mary (or Mae) Scudamore (sometimes Skidamore) in her hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, in 1898. At some later date in an unknown place, never recalled or memorialized in the family, the younger brother Harry Clay Hervey Sr. married Jane Louise Davis. In fact, not much of the union would ever be noted, and with Jennie’s habit of moving dates around, it’s possible she might not have been married the socially correct number of months before the birth of her boy, who’d grow up to write of girls getting pregnant and becoming desperate to marry. Harry Sr. would have been about twenty-two, Jennie about twenty. They named their son Harry Clay Hervey Jr., as if staking a claim of utter legitimacy, but the boy’s childless uncle, Charles Bedell Hervey, always would be more of a father to him than the man whose name he bore. Intriguingly, Hervey would come to write of an uncle later revealed as a father instead.¹⁸ Jennie did not have an easy time with birth, and her son bore a scar on his brow over his left eye suffered in the process. It’s where the fairies kissed you when you were born, she would tell him.¹⁹

Jane, or Jennie Davis, Hervey about the time of her wedding. Photograph courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society.

A photograph shows father and son in matching long black bathing suits, with the golden-headed boy looking up adoringly at the man he would come to resemble. Jennie labeled it a proud father. In another photograph, she hoists up her infant, and her hair is piled up on her head; nearby, ramrod straight, sits Miss Birdy wearing a hat with wings as if in fact a bird has just landed on it.²⁰

A Proud Father. Harry Hervey Jr. and his father, Harry Hervey Sr. Photograph courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society.

By the time baby Harry was three, he and his parents had moved back and forth from Texas to Florida to Mobile, Alabama, where Uncle Charles Bedell Hervey managed the Bienville Hotel.²¹ Charles soon opened the Cawthorn in Mobile in 1906 and the Battle House, with accommodations for six hundred, two years later.

To help his younger son get a foot up in life, General Frank, head of the chain of hotels styled the Hervey Hotel Company, signed a lease on the New State House Hotel in Waco, Texas, and handed it over to the personal management of Harry Sr.²²

About 1907 the General retired, and Charles, the eldest son, took the reins of the Company. I would like to have Montgomery in my chain of hotels, he pontificated in an article titled Hervey Wants It—as if it was well known that he usually got his way. By 1908 he had become president of the Mobile and Gulf Coast Hotel Men’s Association, and his younger brother Harry attended trade conventions with him.²³

Although the hotel in Waco proved profitable and remained in the Hervey Hotel Company chain, Harry Sr., for an unknown reason, was demoted from manager and brought back to Mobile, to clerk at the Cawthorn, a great reduction in status. He must have redeemed himself, for in September 1908 Charles named his younger brother Harry Sr. manager of the New Battle House. To all, he appeared an ideal young host.²⁴

Accustomed to moving around and rarely playing with children his age, Harry Jr. was solitary. Furthermore, it was galling for a young boy who craved adventure to never have any of his own, as guests came and went bearing trunks plastered with labels of faraway lands. When not pouring over images of nearly naked men, he could be found in the hotel lobbies eavesdropping on guests and memorizing books about India, the Malay Peninsula, Tibet, and beyond. Perhaps it was only natural that once he began publishing he would center his tales in exotic lands or in hotels and train stations, crossroads where strangers could meet and mingle their destinies.

One cool November evening, he eavesdropped on a man speaking of China and Dr. Sun Yat-sen. I was seven or eight at the time, and my knowledge of China was vague, colored chiefly by dragons and a jade ring that my mother wore. But the country had a subtle fascination for me, and dimly, I sensed that it was woven into my youth and manhood. This was the only mention he’d give in any of his writings of his growing up; and he’d only recall that and the fire-lit rooms of my boyhood, with the blue dusk sifting down years later when he was in China, claiming a friendship with the same Dr. Sun Yat-sen.²⁵

Living with Harry Jr. in the hotel in Mobile were his Grandfather Frank and Grandmother Anna, his parents, Uncle Charles and Aunt Charlotte, as well as Uncle George and Aunt Etelka. Uncle Frank Jr. and his wife Lucy were in Houston. He was the sole child among them.²⁶

Beside reading, there were handsome men and beautifully dressed women in lobbies to watch, mysterious all-male steam rooms to wander through, and because of where he lived, there was also the opportunity to escape the ordinary and have the fantastic usurp the real, at least once a year, at Carnival, the Mardi Gras–like celebrations held in many Gulf Coast cities.²⁷ During these celebrations encouraging outrageousness and excess, a dreamy feminine boy like Harry could indulge his penchant for fancy dress without fear of being punished for donning women’s clothing or other costumes. Photographed as Little Lord Fauntleroy, an English dandy, or later as an adult as an Eastern dancer of ambiguous gender, Harry Hervey could try on a new persona as he would a costume, going on to wear drag as an adult.

At age eight or nine, at a child’s birthday party in New Orleans, Hervey appeared as a prince wearing a royal suit of white satin … with silver garniture while leading a grand march. He soon wrote his own play, a tragedy called Y’Vonne and acted it out in the backyard with other children.²⁸ It is possible he assumed the title female role himself, in love as he was with costume, acting out imaginary scenes and seeing life through the eyes of strong dramatic women. Women, what they wore, their rich emotional lives, their wiles and their power as seducers and love objects of men, both attracted and repelled Harry Hervey. Though he would focus on women in his art, veering from imitation to misogyny, he was sexually attracted to men.

Harry Hervey showing his love of costume and fancy dress—even as a child. Photograph courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society.

Despite the contempt aimed at gay men and women in this era, and indeed throughout all the decades of his life, there is no suggestion that Harry Hervey, as a child or later, ever manifested any real guilt about his same-sex attractions. Even though he needed to support himself through his pen, his writing at times would be so homoerotic that producers would not stage it.

Grandfather Frank died at his farm at Neshota, Alabama, in 1910, leaving his oldest son Charles as president and manager of the Hervey Hotel Company, with all the other brothers employed at various family properties. In 1912, Hervey’s father was in Tallahassee, Florida. But by 1913, the only board members at a meeting of the hotel company listed present were Charles, Frank Jr., and George. Missing without remark was Harry C. Hervey Sr.—apparently not only vanished from the firm but the family.²⁹

If Hervey Jr. knew what happened to his father or where he went, he never mentioned it. Perhaps he dramatized what he felt in his third novel Ethan Quest, where the eponymous hero, based on Hervey himself, growing up in a house of boarders, is haunted by a missing father. When he asks where his father is, there is only a vague reply that he had gone way off and wouldn’t ever return. Ethan’s father had joined the ranks of things to be regarded with mingled fear and curiosity, such as the attic, drunken men and the doctor’s office—suggesting that Harry Hervey Sr. may have left due to illicit sex (carried out in the attic in the novel), drunkenness, or disease.³⁰

In the coming years, the novelist would tell reporters that it was in this era when his father disappeared that his own glamorous life of world-wide travel began. Not only was that not true, but Hervey compounded his falsehoods by saying he was often accompanied by his father who was not there or with both of his parents who were separated, a rather poignant and obvious attempt to assume a dream life for a bitter reality.³¹ Hervey’s doppelganger Ethan Quest also fabricates stories, telling other boys about an absent father and an exotic life of world-wide adventures.

Afterwards, his success as a liar thrilled and alarmed him. The memory of the boys’ faces, eager with interest, challenged his vanity. But the fact that he had deliberately falsified troubled him—slightly. He found it disturbing that he did not regret it more. It showed him that he had a capacity for violating the fringe of ethics without leaving more than a transient sediment in his conscience.³² Hervey, like his fictional alter ego, would lie glibly about all manner of things in the coming years with little apparent guilt—or consistency, saying what he wanted to whatever end suited him.

Telling stories about a