As Vulture points out, it’s a bad idea to read too much into these photos. For one thing, both friends dated and married women; there’s no evidence that either had relationships or encounters with men. But more importantly, the supposedly incriminating snapshots were staged — not as blackmail, but as publicity. Paramount Pictures hired photographer Jeremy Zerbe to take a series of faux-casual shots of the two stars for fan magazines, aimed primarily at young women. Zerbe himself was gay, and his work had a homoerotic tinge even when created for a female, heterosexual audience. Captions played with puns on “most eligible bachelors;” another, of Scott flexing his abs in the shower, says that he “displays a physique that should answer maidens’ prayers.”
Then why are the rumors about Grant so persistent? It’s hard to say, but part of it is likely people’s discomfort with Grant’s mysterious, uncanny appeal. There was always something vaguely uneasy about him: his overbrushed teeth (per The New York Review of Books), his outrageous tan, his accent that belonged to no country in particular, the sense he gave that he spent his life playing the part of Cary Grant. He wasn’t like other people; and a century obsessed with categorizing and speculating about sex had no other vocabulary to describe him.
