Drake Hooks Up with Radio "Teen" Dennis Day

San Francisco, September 1996

Drake the Teddy Bear artist is moving to Guerneville, a gay resort town on the Russian River, and although it's only 75 miles north of Castro Street, it's not Castro Street, so his friends are behaving as if he's moving to Siberia.   We've thrown him a going away party, with gifts of a pith helmet, binoculars, malaria pills, and a machete (for carving out trails in the jungle).  And, since he's said repeatedly that he's not into twinks -- nobody under 40 need apply -- we got a twink to dance nude.

San Francisco parties usually don't include celebrity hookup stories, mainly because there aren't very many.  Guys typically move directly from small towns in the Straight World to Castro Street, with no stop in Hollywood in between.  But Drake grew up in a show business family in Old Hollywood -- there's a picture of him at age two or three, awkwardly balancing on Humphrey Bogart's knee -- and, feeling nostalgic, he tells us about how, after high school, he went to work for Desilu and invited every big and not-so-big star into his bed:

"How about naming some names?"  Corbin asks.

"Sure.  Tony Curtis, Marlon Brando, Chad Everett, Cesar Romero...well, it's easier to name the stars I haven't been with."

"How about Tony Dow?"

"No, no twinks.  I'm not into them now, and I wasn't into them then.  And not Rock Hudson.  He wasn't into me.  But anyone else...name him, and I've probably been with him."

Desi Arnaz?  Yes.
Desi Arnaz, Jr.?  No.
Farley Granger?  Yes
John Wayne?  No
Richard Long?  Yes
Richard Benjamin? Yes.
Bill Bixby?  Yes

The game goes on. Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Ed Asner, Don Rickles, Charles Bronson, Sonny Bono, Fabian, Paul Anka, Caroll O'Connor, Donald O'Connor, Frank Sinatra, Billy Dee Williams. Nat King Cole, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Richard Thomas, Richard Dawson, Don Adams, Don Rickles, Don Ameche, Elliot Gould, Ryan O'Neill....

Out of over 50 male actors and singers of the 1950s and 1960s, Drake has been with 20.  40%.

"Which is your favorite?"  I ask.

Without hesitation, Drake names: "Dennis Day."

We look around, mystified.

"You know, Dennis Day?  On the Jack Benny radio program?"


In case you need a refresher on gay history, Jack Benny was a comedian who pretended to be gay for 30 years, on the radio (1932-1955) and on tv (1950-1965), playing "himself" as a prissy, vain, mincing, lisping queen, pretending to eye the muscular stage hands, pretending not to be interested in women, even pretending that real-life wife Mary Livingston was just a friend.

Dennis Day (1916-1988) played a sheltered, naive, squeaky-voiced, gay-vague teenager, still living with his working-class parents, who Benny hired as a singer (his speciality was incongruously sentimental Irish ballads).  His dialogue with Benny ranges from starry-eyed hero worship to passive-aggressive sarcasm, with not a few obvious gay jokes.

When a female movie star makes a pass at him, he recoils in horror.

He is taken to a psychiatrist because he is so "unusual."

He wolf-whistles at Benny wearing bicycle shorts.

Drake, growing up in the macho 1940s with a bodybuilder father, had few if any models of boys who could be artistic and sentimental, who didn't like girls, who liked boys.

He was crushed when he discovered, at age ten, the "squeaky voiced teenager" all grown up, in his 30s, with a wife and five kids, two older than Drake!

Hollywood, September 1958

Drake was a new high school graduate with a job as a production assistant for December Bride at Desilu, The Jack Benny Program was filmed on a nearby soundstage, and Dennis Day was a semi-regular.  He could easily have dropped in on some pretext, but he avoided it.  He wanted to keep his memory of the radio Dennis Day, the cute gay teenager of his childhood fantasies.

Another show filmed at Desilu was Date with the Angels (1957-58) starring future Golden Girl Betty White as the scatterbrained, wild-scheme-concocting Vickie Angel, and Bill Williams (father of William Katt) as her by-the-book insurance agent husband.

 Betty was quite a fan of the gay community, even then, and managed to get a full coterie of Friends of Dorothy into the cast: Richard Deacon, Nancy Kulp, Sheila James Kuehl, Chuck Connors, Mary Jane Croft.  Drake often dropped by to chat with new and old friends.

One day in the summer of 1957, he found Betty and Bill on a set built to look like Sardi's restaurant, in a plot about Vickie meeting various celebrities, but failing to convince her friends.   Liberace...Hugh O'Brien...and waiting in the wings, memorizing his script, Dennis Day!

He was over 40 years old, but still boyish, still an icon from Drake's memory.

 You'd think that someone who has sat on Humphrey Bogart's lap and played softball with David and Ricky Nelson would be blaise about meeting a tv star.  But Drake found himself unaccountably star struck.

Tongue-tied, he approached and said something like "Mr. Day, I don't know if you remember me, but we met when I was a kid...."

Day gave him an up-and-down glance. "Well, you've grown up quite nicely, haven't you?"

Liberace, who was wandering about, trying to pick up the production assistants, put his hand on Drake's shoulder and whispered. "You'll never get him.  Lord knows I've tried."  He patted Drake's butt and walked on.

"Did you do Liberace?" I ask.

"No.  He was way too fruity, and way too aggressive.  He would practically unzip you before you had a chance to say 'Hello."

"Get me to do what?" Day said, feigning innocence.

Drake knew that game!  Day was on the make.  Thinking fast, he said, "To...um...listen to a song I wrote.  Give me a professional opinion."

"Why, certainly.  I'm always glad to encourage new talent.  Let's go to my dressing room, and you can give me an earful.  Or do you need a piano?"

The rest of the story, with explicit sexual content, is on Tales of West Hollywood