Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood's First Openly Gay Star.

In 1930 the top box-office star in America was a gay man. But can you name him? The story of William Haines, a fun-loving Southern boy who parlayed a sly, devil-may-care persona into a decade of movie stardom, is full of surprising turnabouts, but the most spectacular may be his current obscurity. In an era when even the most marginal of Hollywood's golden-era players merit a biography or two and the lives of gay pioneers are being scrutinized in colleges across the land, Haines, who was both a bona fide movie star and a man who lived an openly gay life before the concept had been invented, has remained a figure known only to aficionados, a footnote in the celebrated lives of Joan Crawford or George Cukor.

With the publication of Wisecracker, author William J. Mann restores a remarkable life to its proper place in the curricula of both film history and gay social studies. An authoritative and exhaustively researched examination of a singular life, Wisecracker also succeeds at illuminating an entire era in Hollywood history, a time when homosexuality was an open secret, before the tide of public prejudice and studio pressure created a closet so roomy that actors are still filing into it.

"This is an untold chapter of gay history," Mann tells The Advocate, referring to the freewheeling 1920s Hollywood that formed the backdrop to Haines's life. "We live in a time of arrogance: We tend to think that everything we've done over the past 25 years in the gay movement is new and that people of our generation and the one before are the trendsetters. But there were people who were leading lives of authenticity and integrity long before a gay political sensibility came into being. Billy exemplifies that."

Indeed, Haines's almost-50-year relationship with Jimmie Shields, with whom he shared a home even at the height of his movie fame, looks in retrospect like a profoundly courageous act. (Crawford called it "Hollywood's only successful marriage.") Haines's sexuality certainly figured in the unraveling of his MGM contract. Says Mann: "It was his choice not to play the game, and that ultimately ended his career."

The game, as Mann's book reveals, was invented in the early `30s. With a more sober, Depression-era America and the introduction of the infamous Production Code, the demands of the media changed. Suddenly, giving a convincing performance as a heterosexual was the price of a Hollywood career. Cary Grant, Claudette Colbert, and other gay actors buckled. Haines resisted.

If his spoiled career can't be entirely blamed on his decision to stand by the truth about his sexuality--Mann points to other factors, including waning box-office appeal and a receding hairline--Haines's story nevertheless has more than a grain of heroism in it.

Unlike other stars of his era, whose lives ended in quiet disgrace when their movie careers went under, Haines faced the waning of his with equanimity and smoothly segued into a still more distinguished career as an interior designer. "The stereotype of silent stars is Norma Desmond, locked up in a house somewhere," says Mann. "But Billy Haines went on to a very successful second career without compromising who he was."

The occasional patch of breathless writing notwithstanding, Mann has told all of Haines's tales with sympathetic interest and scrupulous detail. Full of irresistible Hollywood gossip but careful to keep a measure of distance, Wisecracker uses a gay perspective to enlarge the story's significance and scope without distorting it.

Haines was neither a great actor nor a gay rights pioneer, but Mann reveals him to be a man of indisputable personal stature.

Isherwood is a senior editor for Variety.