Jack & Jim.

Jack Larson played Jimmy Olsen on Superman in the '50s, Now his poetry to his late lover, director James Bridges, has been set to music by composer Ned Rorem

During his seven smash seasons as "golly-gee"-ing reporter Jimmy Olsen in the pioneering 1950s hit TV series The Adventures of Superman, clean-cut Jack Larson had a not-so-squeaky-clean behind-the-scenes romance with Montgomery Clift, who was shooting Hitchcock's I Confess on the lot across the way at Warner Bros. He even starred in fellow gay actor Rock Hudson's first film, Fighter Squadron ("Rock was so bad in one scene, they had to cut it!" says Larson). The toast of Tinseltown's secret gay glitterati and an aspiring poet-playwright, Larson soon met writer-director James Bridges--later famous for The Paper Chase and The China Syndrome. The two managed to maintain the impossible in closeted Hollywood: a long-term relationship--over 30 years, although Larson claims "it wasn't difficult, because we never thought about it"--ended only by Bridges's death in 1993. Some poems he wrote for Bridges have now turned up in a new Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra CD of Ned Rorem's music, More Than a Day.

Composer Rorem met the dynamic duo in 1962 and a year later set some of Larson's verse to music, Poems of Love and the Rain. To memorialize Bridge, Rorem has resurrected two songs from that set, placing them in an entirely new context by adding seven more of Larson's poems to form a scintillating cycle for countertenor Brian Asawa, who also sings the earlier From an Unknown Past (transcribed especially for him).

"I'm very proud of the CD," says Larson. Indeed, the recording contains some of Rorem's most exuberant songs--not surprising, given the 77-year-old's reputation as America's preeminent exponent of the art song. Rorem must feel some kind of satisfaction that his quiet yet persistent rant against dissonant, atonal modernist complexity has finally found vindication. Having felt more discriminated against as a composer than as a gay person, Rorem has long been an activist for musical simplicity. "I'd been forever missing the point of something that finally had no point," Rorem once wrote. "Music's not written to be understood but to be felt."

The heartfelt quality of More Than a Day is enhanced by the choice of vocal vehicle: the countertenor voice, which began gaining more acceptance in the '90s. As singer Asawa puts it, "I don't like to think of the countertenor voice as something sexually weird, but because we're singing in this higher, treble, `female' register, it becomes something unusual or something sexually ambiguous." Asawa's voice is supple and sensuous, a perfect match for Larson's passionate lines and Rorem's luscious arabesques.

The still-handsome Larson still lives in Los Angeles and prides himself on being "the first television teen idol"--although, fearful of being pigeonholed, he limited his pubescent publicity to only one column, by the notorious gossipmonger Hedda Hopper. When he still couldn't shake off the specter of Jimmy Olsen, he abandoned acting altogether, pursuing a career as a writer. In addition to his poetry, he penned a few pioneering plays (in verse!) with unapologetically gay characters and provided the librettos for Virgil Thomson's Lord Byron and Charles Fussell's The Astronaut's Tale.

But it's still his Hollywood days that people ask about. "We never made a fuss about being gay," Larson says, "but we never hid anything. Maybe I was naive, but I never felt oppression."

Hilferty's articles have appeared in New York magazine and Opera News. He is currently finishing a film, Babbitt: Portrait of a Serial Composer.