It’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans History Month.
If you grew up in Britain in the 1960’s or 1970’s then you probably remember the 13-part series Robinson Crusoe on BBC Television. Made in black and white, this French production was shown many times between 1965 and the early 1980’s, often during school holidays.
Featuring handsome Robert Hoffman, most people remember the programme for the music, which was composed by Robert Mellin and Gian-Pero Reverberi, and for the distinctive dubbed English language narration. However most would be hard-pressed to name the actor who spoke those words and even fewer know of the fascinating gay love story behind the screen credit.
By the beginning of the 1980’s, ‘political correctness’ was taking hold at the BBC and some people were unhappy about the portrayal of ‘Man Friday’ in the series. Particularly in ‘humorous’ scenes such as the one in which the ‘cannibal’ Friday encounters a talking parrot for the first time. Years later, this scene would be satirised in an advertisement in which Friday gains the upper hand and cooks the bird.
Although some of this criticism was justified, the BBC’s reaction was extreme. It decided that Robinson Crusoe wouldn’t be shown again and, with a complete disregard for what this series meant to a whole generation of people, some idiot at the Corporation ordered that the cans of 35mm film should quite literally be thrown into a skip and destroyed.
Soon after, it emerged that the French company that had made the series had long since gone out of business and, for a while, it looked as if the BBC had destroyed the only surviving English-language copy. But fortunately, 16mm prints were later discovered in a French film archive and these inferior quality copies are what we are left with to view today.
In an ironic twist, the BBC had come close to destroying some of the best work by a man who represented the complete opposite of the racism and intolerance that the Corporation thought it was acting against.
THE NARRATOR OF ROBINSON CRUSOE
Robinson Crusoe was made in 1964 and the english language narration was recorded by a white American called Lee Payant.
In the early 1940’s Payant was a struggling actor in New York. There he met a fellow actor – an African American man called Gordon Heath.
Heath was not a man to hide his attraction to other men. In fact he was ‘overtly homosexual’ according to those who knew him.
In his autobiography ‘Deep Are the Roots: Memoirs of a Black Expatriate’, large parts of which you can read at Google Books, he describes how he wooed the target of his affections with poetry and coffee.
Eventually Payant stopped playing hard to get and they ended up being a couple for 30 years. Heath always called him by his full christian name: Leroy.
By all accounts, Gordon Heath was by far the more successful of the two. He was the first black radio announcer in the United States and played many roles on radio, often white characters, with audiences none the wiser.
In 1945 and 1946 he appeared in one of the top ten Broadway plays of the season: ‘Deep Are the Roots’, directed by Elia Kazan, and also starring Barbara Bel Geddes (who later played Miss Ellie in ‘Dallas’).
Audiences were shocked to see a black man on stage with a white woman. At this time, in some US states, it was illegal for a married heterosexual couple to share a bed if they were of different races. Even in New York theatre land the oppression must have felt absolutely stifling for Payant and Heath who were of different races and in a gay relationship.
PARIS
After a fourteen-month run on Broadway, the production moved to London’s West End, where it again received critical acclaim. After this, Heath and Payant decided they wouldn’t return to the extreme homophobia and racism of the United States and settled in Paris instead.
There, the two of them became co-owners of a club called L’Abbaye and, for nearly three decades, they entertained audiences by playing guitar and singing duets of folk songs. They released a series of records.
BRITISH TV & FILM
In the 1950’s, Gordon Heath performed in the theatre in Britain and appeared in plays on television. In one, he reprised his stage role as ‘Othello’ in a BBC production that was directed by Tony Richardson.
One of his most memorable film appearances was as a ‘dandy’ in ‘Sapphire’ — a 1959 crime drama that is set among London’s West Indian community in Notting Hill. He also narrated the British animated film ‘Animal Farm’ (1954). Lee Payant provided character voices in Asterix et Cleopatre (1968) and the two of them dubbed many films together.
However, leading roles in films didn’t materialise for Heath and it’s easy to guess two of the reasons why.
RANT
In fact it’s hard to view any of Gordon Heath’s work. Recordings of some of the TV plays may not exist — either because they were broadcast live or the tapes were later wiped or junked by the TV companies. But many of these 1950’s productions remain locked away in the archives. The people who control our media say they have storylines and characters that are out of date and offensive. We grown ups can’t be trusted to see them, except occasionally as short clips in a documentary with an ‘expert’ telling us how flawed they were.
Isn’t it ironic that we are denied the chance to see the work of black actors who took the only roles that were open to them 50 years ago: often exploring themes such as racial hated and mixed marriages, in productions that were filled with uncomfortable attitudes, the kind of words that ‘right-on’ television executives don’t want to screen now and yes sometimes an approach that is flawed from a modern perspective.
But right across the board there are few opportunities to see any archive television in full except the most populist and inoffensive stuff and mainly from the post black and white era. If you live in London, you can go to the British Film Institute where you may get to view on the premises. Clips are available on the website to those who are in education. Lucky them! For the rest of us: tough luck.
Discriminated against during their careers and now denied a screening. Consequently we are unable to watch most of Gordon Heath’s performances.
But here he is in a tiny role as a postman in the 1969 film ‘Staircase’. Frankly it’s pathetic that this bit-part is the only glimpse you are likely to get of this fine actor online.
Even this gay-themed film is never seen on British television these days. Probably because having straight actors playing campy characters in an argumentative gay relationship doesn’t fit the modern ‘happy-gays’ agenda. The last broadcast on terrestrial TV seems to have been on Channel 4 in 1992. Nor is the film available on DVD.
It’s tempting to think that Gordon Heath might have taken this role because of the groundbreaking (for the time) gay storyline of the film. But it turns out that it was shot in Paris, because Richard Burton and Rex Harrison didn’t want to fall foul of Britain’s punitive tax regime at the time.
Heath was a local in Paris and could do a Caribbean accent only too well, as his father was from Barbados. So that must have been a consideration too.
ALONE
In December 1976 Lee Payant died from cancer. He was only 52 years old. Anguished, Gordon Heath couldn’t face being in Paris alone and moved to the United States, where he spent five years acting and directing. But eventually he returned to France and met a new partner there.
Sadly, as with so many gay histories of the late twentieth century, you can guess the ending to this story. In 1991 Gordon Heath died in Paris due to an AIDS-related illness. He was aged 72. Some newspaper obituaries, such as the one published by the Chicago Tribune, mentioned Lee Payant but not that they were gay and partners.
But once you know this story and listen again to Lee Payant’s moving narration as Robinson Crusoe, you can’t help but smile and occasionally hear homoerotic undertones. Above all you wonder what might have been going through his mind as he recorded it.
LINKS
About the Robinson Crusoe TV series
