Secrets and bios: if you think you're frustrated by celebrity biographies that gloss over gay lives, listen to how the books' authors feel, blocked at every turn. Henry Willson biographer Robert Hofler shares his fellow snoops' secrets.

Nazis and gays. In the biography sweepstakes, one can be a cakewalk. The other almost always requires a delicate dance through a minefield of potential libel, antediluvian prejudice, and post-publication recriminations.

"Oh, there's no question," says Steven Bach, author of both the Moss Hart biography Dazzler and an upcoming Leni Riefenstahl bio due in fall 2006. "It is so much more difficult to delve into a gay past. The Nazi past always has a paper trail, and a gay past does not. Confirmation is terribly difficult."

In one respect, time is on the side of the biographer, whichever outre subject he chooses to write about. "Fortunately, Riefenstahl is no longer with us," Bach adds, "so it is easier now, not having to worry about litigious-type issues."

I can sympathize. Having written the recently published biography The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson, I know firsthand how truly liberating someone else's death can be. After a long bout with lawyers, in which the most frequently asked question was "Is this person dead or alive?" I found that my own book had been lee relatively intact. "I lost only one queer," I told friends. Calling someone a homosexual, I discovered, was every bit as libelous as calling Riefenstahl a Nazi. If she or he is alive.

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, straight people are different from you and me. Vanity Fair, in its 2003 Hollywood issue, had no problem profiling the late superagent Charles K. Feldman and detailing his affairs with sisters Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, who are very much still with us. But try revealing agent Henry Willson's sexual liaisons with his many male starlets, and it's as if Stonewall were merely a twinkle in some drag queen's eye.

After writing The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo was asked the question all writers most ponder post-publication: "What's your next book?" Since he had just delivered the seminal critical study of homosexual characters and themes in the movies, most admirers assumed that his next tome would be the real thing: a historical study of the homosexual movers and shakers in the entertainment world. But it was not to be.

"That," said Russo, "is the book that can never be written."

For much of Russo's life (1946-1990), it was true. But since then, scads of gay bios have been published to help salvage several nearly lost life histories. It is a race against time in which death is both the storytellers friend and chief adversary. The dead can't be libeled; on the other hand, the longer people have been dead, the less likely that any of their contemporaries are still around to be interviewed. And all too often, the older they are, the more unwilling people are to talk about homosexuality or, for that matter, fellow homosexuals.

Shortly before his death in 2002, Jacque Mapes insisted that his lover, Ross Hunter, had no relationship, business or other wise, with Henry Willson. It was an absurd defense, because the agent repped Rock Hudson on six films produced by Hunter, including Pillow Talk and Magnificent Obsession, the 1954 film that took the actor from Universal contract player to major star. Since Willson had enjoyed the reputation of maintaining the longest-running gay casting couch in Hollywood, Mapes, at age 88, preferred to keep his distance. Too much distance, it turned out, to be credible. "Ross had nothing whatsoever to do with Willson," insisted Mapes. "Rock was under contract to Universal, so Ross didn't have to deal with Henry Willson."

Katharine Hepburn proved much more helpful to Emanuel Levy in researching his biography George Cukor: Master of Elegance. When it came to that most delicate of questions, however, he hit a brick wall with her. "Don't forget," Hepburn told Levy. "I'm from New England. We have a lot of sex and good sex, but we don't talk about it."

Hepburn's own sexuality comes under scrutiny in two upcoming biographies, James R. Parish's Katharine Hepburn: The Untold Story, out this fall, and William J. Mann's currently untitled biography of the actress, which is expected to be published next year. Many of Hepburn's contemporaries resisted Parish's questions about the actress's sexuality. "They would look into the distance and say nothing. Or they said, 'I don't want to besmirch her memory.' As if saying someone is gay is besmirching her memory."

"Unfortunately, some people still see talking about a person's homosexuality as an invasion of privacy," says Mann, whose biographies of gay subjects also include Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines and Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger. "There's still an impulse for people to think that what we're doing, writing about gay lives, is somehow not important or we're exaggerating. It's frustrating."

Every biographer has his own favorite technique for broaching the subject that still means scandal to a certain generation. When interviewees failed to bring it up themselves, I often asked, "Did you know that Henry Willson claimed to be engaged to President Truman's daughter, Margaret?" The question usually produced a long pause. And then: "Wasn't Willson gay?" Actor Keith Andes, who played Marilyn Monroe's memorably buff love interest in Clash by Night, had the best response: "Henry Willson engaged? That's an oxymoron!"

If asked too abruptly about same-sex doings, some interviewees turn belligerent. Elaine Stritch, for one, went off when I asked if she ever saw Rock Hudson with Henry Willson on the set of A Farewell to Arms, in which she costarred. "Where are you going with this book?" she demanded to know. "He was a very, very dangerous man. He controlled all those guys: Rock, Rip, Rap, Tab, Troy." Which was the end of my interview with Ms. Stritch.

Fortunately, Willson never followed through on his engagement (real or imagined) to first daughter Margaret Truman, who failed to mention him in her 1956 autobiography, Souvenir. For many biographers, the specter of the protective widow can put up an iron curtain so impenetrable that it renders their task next to impossible.

"There were people who simply refused to talk to me because Kitty Carlisle Hart had told them not to," says Bach. "She somehow got the idea the book was going to be nothing but an expose of Moss Hart's sex life, which was never the intention. I'm told that you don't mention my name in her presence."

Louise Tanner, widow of Auntie Mame author Patrick Dennis, cooperated fully with Eric Myers on Uncle Mame, his biography of her husband. As usual in such cases, Myers saved the question of homosexuality for late in the interview process. When it came, finally, Mrs. Tanner's response was as circumspect as it was belated. "Whatever Patrick may have been, we had a successful marriage, and we produced two children," she replied.

A year later, Myers ran into Dennis's widow at a party. "We were chatting amicably, and suddenly she grabbed my arm to say, 'I just want you to know that if you hurt me or my family, I will sue you,'" Myers recalls. "It came as a bit of a shock." He remembers Louise Tanner as a "wonderful friend," but admits, "She died shortly before the book came out, and I did feel an odd sense of relief."

Berry Berenson, widow of Anthony Perkins, refused Charles Winecoffs requests for an interview for his biography Split Image. Fortunately, unlike Kitty Carlisle Hart, she put up few roadblocks in his research on Perkins's life. The fallout there, however, proved retroactive and arrived right after the book's publication. Winecoff had supplied TV producers with a long interview and extensive research for a Perkins documentary, but when the show finally aired, Winecoff found himself unceremoniously dumped from the project. "They had to cut me out to get other people's cooperation, even though I was going to be the spine for the whole show," Winecoff remembers. "If you write about a gay person who is married with kids, all of a sudden his whole life before that marriage is nullified. It never happened; you're not supposed to talk about it. That's what shocked me: You're only supposed to write about his life since his marriage."

Often the people most offended are the book reviewers, who hurl accusations of "gossip and hearsay" at a gay subject's biographer, who is not writing on an even playing field: Unlike the heterosexual variety, same-sex relationships from the golden age of Broadway and Hollywood do not leave behind the paper trail of marriage certificates, family photos, gossip-column mentions, obits. Even the 21st century is not immune from such obfuscation. For an example, one has to go back no further than the December 28, 2004, death of Susan Sontag: In her New York Times obit, the newspaper of record failed to mention the name of Sontag's longtime partner, photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Meanwhile, the press is all too willing to use the evidence of nuptials as evidence of a person's heterosexuality. Mann mentions Vanity Fair profiles of Claudette Colbert (a.k.a. Mrs. Joel Pressman) and MGM costume designer Adrian, who married actress Janet Gaynor. "So much celebrity profiling takes the position that they were heterosexual with, maybe, some same-sex dalliance on the side," says Mann.

Another example: Despite a rebel pose, James Dean assiduously promoted his affair with Pier Angeli. Showing a flair for publicity matched only by Tom Cruise, he even went so far as to show up on his motorcycle to scowl outside the church when the actress abruptly married singer Vic Damone. "There are many who deduce that the only reason Dean had sex with men was to advance his career," says Val Holley, author of James Dean. "Whatever evidence they may cite, I can make the opposite case, trick for trick, that Dean had sex with women only to advance his career."

Without the easy backup of kids or alimony payments, "sometimes you have to write in code, says Pan . He quotes Lauren Bacall's line from Young Man With a Horn--"It must be wonderful to wake up in the morning and know just which door you're going to walk through"--that established her character's bisexuality. That was 1950. "We still have to do that today when writing about real gay people," says Parish. "You can't always write in full detail. You have to let people put two and two together."

Even when there is corroboration, it tends to be diluted by blind items and anonymous sources. Bach got a lot of the latter when researching his Moss Hart bio. "People told me, 'Don't mention my name,' and "You may not use my name in your book,'" he recalls. "It's the obstacle you have to overcome in writing about a gay person even today."

Letters and diaries are usually a biographer's best friend. They are often something less with a gay subject. "At first I thought, I'm going to get these letters of Moss Hart's and they'll be revealing," Bach recalls. "Then I realized that people then didn't sit down and write salacious details in letters. People were interested in being discreet. These were back in the days when going to a gay bar could land you in jail."

Before writing Alec Guinness, author Piers Patti Road secured access to all the actor's written material, which was voluminous. "Guinness wrote two sets of very self-conscious journals, beautifully written, but they didn't say much," says Read. "You have to piece it together." The author was mildly amused by the biography's reception in the United Kingdom: One reviewer said Road had gone too far in speculating about Guinness's homosexuality; another claimed he had played it down. "I tried to steer a middle course," says Road. Some men whom Guinness had propositioned sexually refused to be interviewed, either on or off the record. Only after publication did they have the courage to come forward. "They told me I got it right in the book," Road says with deep satisfaction.

And so eventually the truth comes out. Even if it takes a book to be published--or a few more people to die--for it to happen.

In 1978, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich published Patricia Bosworth's Montgomery Cliff, one of the granddaddies of the gay biographies. Since it came out only 12 years after the actors death, a number of his lovers were still living and did not want to be identified. "And I respected that," says Bosworth. But now most of them have also passed away, and the author can finally fill in their names, including Jerome Robbins and Roddy McDowall, "who attempted suicide after his breakup with Monty," Bosworth reveals.

Because Montgomery Clift has never gone out of print, I suggested to Bosworth that she revise the biography by replacing all the blind items with the persons' real names.

"It's a good idea," says the author. "I just might do it."

Hofler is the author of The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson and is on staff at Variety in Los Angeles.