I was lucky enough to interview the charming Farley Granger, who died Sunday in Manhattan, twice over the span of nearly three decades. I first spoke to him backstage when he was appearing on Broadway in “Deathtrap” in 1981. At one point when I asked the then semi-closeted actor about his long-ago “engagement” to Shelley Winters, he called her and put me on the phone with Winters and she gushed about her “sweet Farfel,” as she called him. Granger and I had an understandably franker talk in 1997, when he was promoting his autobiography “Include Me Out,” with an appearance at Film Forum. Below are excerpts from our first encounter, which appeared two weeks before my debut as a professional film critic. I’ve added some updates and clarifications in brackets. You can find the later interview here.
NEW ROLE FOR AN OLD HAND AT THRILLERS (April 5, 1981)
“These days, just because you have a scene in a shower, that’s supposed to be an homage to Hitchcock,” says Farley Granger. “But most films these days lack Hitchcock’s wry sense of humor. He would surround the main actors with strange characters. Hitchcock wasn’t trying to be stylish; that’s the way he actually saw the world.”
Granger, who recently assumed the lead in “Deathtrap,” Ira Levin’s long-running Broadway comedy-thriller [Michael Caine played the role in Sidney Lumet’s 1982 film adaptation], is no stranger to the goose-bump genre. He starred in two films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, “Rope” in 1948 and “Strangers on a Train” three years later.
Although he made “Strangers”…three decades ago, it remains his favorite film role and is probably Granger’s best-known performance. He played a tennis pro who unwittingly becomes involved in a murder plot with a deranged playboy, played by Robert Walker, in real life a close friend of Granger’s.
“Walker never got over his wife, Jennifer Jones, leaving him for [film producer] David Selznick,” Granger recalls of the troubled actor, who died in 1952 [while in production with Leo McCarey’s “My Son John,” completed using outtakes from “Strangers on a Train”]. “The film has a wonderful rhythm, pace to it that makes it very special. Although there are some very grim things in it, it’s not a very somber picture. It’s fun and suspenseful, not unlike ‘The Omen’ parts one, two and three.”
Although he has worked primarily on stage and in television for the past quarter century, Granger — looking trim and at least a decade younger than his 55 years — recalls his years in Hollywood with wry bemusement.
“I was always some sort of neurotic killer or the boy next door,” he says, spearing a blood-red steak with a plastic knife. “They never could make up their minds.”
In addition to the two Hitchcock roles, he killed a priest in “Edge of Doom,” murdered a gas station attendant in “They Live By Night,” and robbed a bank in “Side Street.” In his last starring role in a major [Hollywood] movie, “The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing” (1955) he was millionaire Harry Thaw, who murdered architect Stanford White over the affections of showgirl [Evelyn] Nesbitt.
At the same time, he played a series of rather bland romantic second leads for producer Samuel Goldwyn (“Enchantment,” “I Want You,” “Hans Christen Andersen”) whose talent agents had discovered 17-year-old Granger acting in Los Angeles-area stage productions.
“The real story wasn’t bizarre enough for them. They also wanted to change my name. They had a whole list of new names, but I refused because my family would have been outraged. But otherwise, I was like a good little boy and did everything they told me.”
“The North Star” [a pro-Soviet war film that cast Granger as a teenage villager who takes up arms against invading German troops during World War II] was directed by Lewis Milestone.
“I loved working with Milestone. He was terribly sophisticated and had wonderful eyes, kind of like an evil leprechaun. I was like a child. He would tell me to do something, and I would do it. He got me into his next film, ‘The Purple Heart.’ ”
Granger played a downed Navy flyer on trial in Japan…and shortly thereafter joined the navy and went to Japan. Returning to Hollywood afterr the war, he chafed at his contract with Goldwyn, an independent who made three or four films [a year].
“Goldwyn demanded so much money to loan me to other studios that very few of them wanted to negotiate with him. They had their own young stars under contract, who were being paid as little as I was getting from Goldwyn. They would think, ‘Why should I build Granger up for Goldwyn?’ I tried to get Goldwyn to share my contract with Twentieth Century-Fox, like he did with Dana Andrews. I finally had to buy my contract out.”
One of Granger’s few loan-out assignments was “They Live By Night,” which he made at RKO under fledgling director Nicholas Ray. In one of the first American neo-realist films, Granger and Cathy O’Donnell played two fugitive lovers [loosely modeled on Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow; the film was remade by Robert Altman in 1974 as “Thieves Like Us”]. After the film was completed, however the studio was bought by Howard Hughes, who disliked “They Live by Night” so much that he shelved it.
“It was way ahead of its time,” Granger says. “It was the first film to be shot with a helicopter. It was shown in private screenings around Hollywood and at museums, and everybody flipped over it. So much of the film was copied by other people that it wasn’t so fresh when Hughes finally released it, three years later.”
Next came Granger’s first Hitchcock film, “Rope,” in which he played a homicidal [gay man, in Granger’s then-boyfriend Arthur Laurent’s adaptation of a stage play loosely inspired by the notorious Leopold and Loeb murder case of the ’20s]. He says he’s happy about reports that “Rope,” which starred James Stewart, may be making the rounds again for the first time since its original release in 1948. Hitchcock, who owned the film, had refused to allow showings of the movie [it was ultimately re-released in 1984 along with several other unavailable Hitchcock titles].
“I would like to see ‘Rope’ again. I have no clue how my performance would stand up. I know Hitchcock felt the movie didn’t come off as well as it should. Hitchcock was really amazing. He never looked in the camera’s viewfinder.”
[Like so many American actors of that era, Granger found work in Europe, where he played an Austrian officer in Luchino Visconti’s “Senso,” a film that was almost impossible to see in 1981 but has recently been restored and is available from the Criterion Collection]. “There was the enormous screenplay that didn’t make any sense at all until we finally got a revised script by Tennessee Williams,” Granger recalls. “The film was supposed to take three months to film, and it went on for nine months. I thought I was never going to get out of Italy.”
As Granger’s film career lost steam, he increasingly turned to stage work and television. He appeared on virtually all of the live TV anthology series of the 1950s, including “Playhouse 90” and “Studio One” and later worked in television soap operas…He also played the King of Siam in the City Center revival of “The King and I” and appeared in the highly-lauded 1956 revival of “The Glass Menagerie”…
Granger’s role in “Deathtrap” is very demanding. He is on stage for almost the entire play and his character talks virtually nonstop.
“I really enjoy working with a live audience,” he says. “I have some sort of control over my performance, and the different audiences keep me going. Making films can be very boring. It has nothing to do with the talented people involved, it’s just mechanics. I remember that for “Roseanna McCoy” [a film he made in 1949], we literally sat in pouring rain on location in the Sierra Madre mountains. We’d get up at 6:30 in the morning every day for two solid weeks and no camera was ever turned.”
While Granger produces an endless stream of anecdotes about his career, he is less willing to discuss his private life. He laughs when asked abut Shelley Winters’ recent autobiography, which includes a lengthy account of her engagement [engineered by Howard Hughes as a publicity stunt for their movie “Behave Yourself! ”] to Granger, who has never married [but acknowleged he was bisexual and had long-term relationships with men in his 1997 autobiography, saying he never tried to hide it].
“We’re still engaged,” jokes Granger, who remains a close friend of the actress [she died in 2006] and lives in the same apartment building. I think [the book] was very much like her.”
Granger says he’s negotiating to write his autobiography, but it will not be of the true-confessions variety.
“I should hope it will be more interesting than that. I want it to be humorous, but to have some kind of meaning. I think back on all the people I’ve worked with who are gone, who are dead, who are drunks. I’ve seen an awful lot.” [Below, Granger, at right, in 2007 signing copies of the autobiography along with co-author and longtime partner Robert Calhoun, who died the following year].
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