William Haines: The First Openly Gay Hollywood Star Who Chose Love Over Fame

The story goes that in 1933, Louis B Mayer, the head of MGM, called top star William Haines into his office and delivered an ultimatum: either break up with his partner, Jimmie Shields, or face career destruction. Without missing a beat, Haines responded, “I’m already married,” and walked away from movie stardom to live happily ever after with Shields. The most remarkable thing about this legendary exchange, as Haines’s biographer William J Mann attests, is how much truth there is to it.

While there were several extenuating factors and the precise dialogue is lost to time, Haines did indeed walk away from an illustrious movie career to be with Shields. The two lived happily together until Haines’ death nearly five decades later. Joan Crawford, one of his closest friends, referred to them as “the happiest married couple in Hollywood”.

Following his acting career, Haines built a prosperous interior design business, shaping the homes of such luminaries as Warner Bros head Jack Warner, director George Cukor, and stars including Joan Bennett, Crawford, and Lionel Barrymore.

Haines was born in Virginia on the night before the first day of 1900. He was tall and athletically built, which was probably why MGM later claimed he had been educated at a local military academy. In truth, he was more inclined to stay home with his mother making doll clothes than kick a football around with other boys. He did, however, have a wild streak - at 14, he ran away from home with his first boyfriend to a nearby boomtown built for a gunpowder factory during World War I.

While still a teenager, Haines moved to New York, where he found work as an office boy at an investment firm and integrated into the vibrant scene of Greenwich Village. World War I had left a generation of jaded young people determined to live every moment as if it were their last, so free love, gender fluidity, and homosexuality were all welcome there at the time.

After winning a ‘New Faces’ contest run by MGM, Haines went to Tinseltown. In 1926, he was cast in Brown at Harvard, which became a hit and the template for his professional formula: an arrogant good-time guy who is laid low, only to rise as a better man who gets the girl. On the personal front, he met young Navy officer Jimmie Shields, and before returning to Los Angeles, he convinced Shields to come with him. They bought a house together and lived as spouses.

At the time, Hollywood had a permissive attitude towards sex and homosexuality. Unmarried stars like Greta Garbo and John Gilbert lived together openly. Stars like Clara Bow lived large with multiple affairs. Even homosexuality was tolerated in cases like Gary Cooper’s widely known relationship with actor Andy Lawler. Director Edmund Goulding was famous for throwing bisexual orgies. The Hollywood ‘sewing circle’ connected lesbian and bisexual actors, including Crawford, Alla Nazimova, Barbara Stanwyck, and Garbo.

The press relied on the studios for stories, so actors were allowed to live relatively freely. Haines was well-liked, gregarious and witty. There were rumors he and Shields were arrested for picking up other men, but those reports either didn’t exist or were destroyed.

Still, Louis B Mayer was virulently homophobic and pressured stars to enter heterosexual marriages. Some queer actors like Rudolf Valentino, Nils Asther, and Dolores Del Rio chose that route. With his growing fame, Haines’s private life became a top concern for newspapers outside Los Angeles. By 1930, he was the highest-grossing actor in Hollywood, commanding a salary of $3,000 a week.

Soon his popularity dwindled as he reached his 30s and the Hays Code intensified, expunging sex and ‘perversion’. Ultimately, Mayer threatened to rip up Haines’s contract if he didn’t start masquerading as straight, and the actor turned him down.

What followed was four decades of success as Hollywood’s leading interior designer. Haines never lost his core group of friends, including Crawford, and he and Shields remained together until the former’s death from lung cancer in 1973. Bereft, Shields passed away less than three months later from an overdose of sleeping pills. The note he left read, “Goodbye to all of you who have tried so hard to comfort me in my loss of William Haines, whom I have been with since 1926. I now find it impossible to go it alone, I am much too lonely.”

As much as Billy Haines’s story sheds light on an oft-forgotten point in American history when members of the queer community could live relatively openly, it also illustrates how brutal the backlash can be. History is a series of broadening social horizons followed by panicked retractions, and like in the early 1930s, we are currently going through a retraction. But better times are always ahead.