Lost Boys: Vintage Images of Jack Wrangler

Lost Boys: Vintage Images of Jack Wrangler

If one is going to rewrite and defy what it means to be a gay porn star, I don't think anyone could do a better job than Jack Wrangler. 

With his rugged good looks, blonde hair and steely blue eyes, Wrangler captivated the gay male community who were attracted by his refreshing take on what it meant to be gay. This, in turn, would help countless gay men to 'come out', thus serving as a means of cementing Wrangler's place in gay history as an icon of the movement.

He was a gay porn star, and an unapologetic one. Not content to hide in the shadows, Wrangler went where few such performers dared. “No matter what he did after his porn career ended, whether it was theater or cabaret or ballet,” Jeffrey Schwarz, director of the documentary Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon said, “whenever he would be interviewed they would refer to him as the former porn star Jack Wrangler. His attitude was, ‘I’m proud of it and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ ”

On July 11, 1946, a son, John Robert Stillman was born to Robert Thurston Stillman and Ruth Clark Stillman of Beverly Hills, California. Robert was a well-established Hollywood film and television producer whose films included Champion, Second Chorus, and Home of the Brave along with the television series Boots and Saddles, Rawhide, and Bonanza. John's mother, Ruth, was a former dancer in the lavish Busby Berkeley musicals of the 1930's. 

Stillman began his acting career at the age of nine in the NBC television series The Faith of Our Children (1953–1955), cast as a churchgoing boy who learned a moral lesson in every episode of the syndicated Sunday morning television show. The series starred Eleanor Powell and won five local Emmy Awards. 

It was during his time on the show that Stillman realized that there was something different about himself, becoming aware of his homosexuality when he was 10 years old.

After graduating in 1968 with a degree in theater from the College of Speech at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, Stillman was eager to break into show business. Bouncing between New York and Hollywood, despite his good looks and acting skills, he managed to find only limited work as a model, dancer and on the stage. Finally settling in West Hollywood in 1970, Stillman found steady work. “He ended up bartending and go-go dancing,” Schwarz said. “He was a very bad go-go dancer, self-admitted.”

Believing that Actors’ Equity, the actors’ union, wouldn't appreciate him go-go dancing under his given name, Stillman, after looking at the label on his Wrangler work shirt, chose a new last name, and thus, Jack Wrangler was born. 1970 also marked his first appearance in a male strip show, using his newly adopted name.

His work in West Hollywood led to a role in Douglas Dean's play Special Friends, one of the first gay-themed plays by a gay playwright to be performed in San Francisco. Wrangler played a former prostitute from Arkansas who becomes a bad go-go dancer in California. The role required extensive nudity. Soon after, he was on the cover of  a number of gay magazines, which, in turn, led to his debut in a series of short gay sex films.

In later interviews Wrangler stated he was drawn to the genre because it was "culturally subversive and politically liberating." Adding that he "wasn't comfortable in his own skin" and wanted some adventure in his life.

In his own words: 

"At the time we were all trying to find out who the hell we were as individuals, what we wanted specifically on our own terms, who we wanted to be, what our potentials were, what our differences were, what made us unique. And I think that's why the XXX-rated films were important, because it was like, 'Oh, my God, there are other people who like the same things as me'; like leather, or being blown on a pool table. (Laughs) It was a start: literally stripping ourselves naked and trying to begin from there."

Wrangler was then approached by Magnum Studios, the pioneering gay adult film studio and magazine publisher, after studio heads saw the poster for the play Special Friends which featured him semi-nude. His first gay porn film was 1970's Eyes of a Stranger (also known as Eyes of a Gay Stranger), one of the first hard-core gay adult films to be released commercially in the United States. The film was a huge success and thanks to his rugged good looks and masculine persona, he quickly became the dominate gay porn star of the era.

During his adult-film career, Wrangler appeared in over 80 films. Among his most notable gay films were Kansas City Trucking Co., Hot House, Sex Machine, and A Night at the Adonis.

And his influence transcended the world of porn. 

As mentioned, Wrangler became an important icon of the early gay rights movement, as his openness regarding his homosexuality helped make him, for many, a symbol of gay self-confidence, while his courageous and unabashed embracement of his sexuality inspired many others to come out of the closet and live openly as gay men. As Outcyclopedia, a gay-oriented online reference, wrote, “Many gay men in the 1970's and 1980's cited Jack as an integral part of their coming out process, as his against-the-stereotypes onscreen persona helped show them that a man can be gay and still be a man.”

His life took an unconventional turn in 1977, at a restaurant in Manhattan called Ted Hook's Onstage, when Wrangler met big band/standards singer Margaret Whiting. Whiting, who was famous for hits like That Old Black Magic and Moonlight in Vermont  was 22 years his senior, but the two bonded quickly. As Wrangler later recalled, "I was with my manager when I looked over at Margaret, who was surrounded by five guys in a booth. There she was with the hair, the furs and the big gestures. I thought, 'Boy, now that's New York! That's glamour!' I had to meet her." 

Wrangler told the Chicago Tribune in 1985 that the two saw “things the same way, comically, professionally and romantically.”

He invited her to his one-man show the next night. She attended and their romance began a few weeks later. 

Their relationship turned tabloid heads and was highly criticized. First, there was the age difference - something considered quite shocking at the time - and that she'd been married three times previously.  Plus there was talk of Wrangler being nothing but a gold digger, entering the relationship simply for money. And the tongue wagging was not unfounded, for Whiting did, indeed, come from money. Along with her own earnings, she benefited from royalties earned thanks to her father, Richard Whiting, who was the songwriter of a long list of songs including Till We Meet Again, Ain't We Got Fun?, Hooray for Hollywood, Beyond the Blue Horizon, and  On the Good Ship Lollipop, to name a few.

In turn, Wrangler was accused of  'turning straight' by the gay community, who felt betrayed. However, he continued to consider himself homosexual and stated such in interviews with publications such as The Advocate. "I'm not bisexual and I'm not straight", Wrangler later said. "I'm gay, but I could never live a gay lifestyle, because I'm much too competitive. When I was with a guy I would always want to be better than him: what we were accomplishing, what we were wearing - anything. With a woman you compete like crazy, but coming from different points of view, and as far as I'm concerned, that was doable." 

Before they became a couple, during an argument in a restaurant, Wrangler adamantly told Whiting that he was gay. To which she, nonplussed replied, "Only around the edges, dear."

"Their relationship had nothing to do with sexual orientation," Schwartz told the New York Times. "It was based on mutual affection and respect."

Nonetheless, the early years of their relationship were difficult, as Wrangler and Whiting struggled with Wrangler's homosexuality. Wrangler explained in an interview: "When I got with Margaret, I knew I had to change course. She would have my bags packed and sitting outside the door when I got home at night and things like that. Plus I would go through massive guilt whenever I did go out with a guy and I was with her. So I finally said that's it. I went to her one night and said I'm never going to cheat on you again with anybody. So my sex life became very masturbatory. And I'm good at that. Very good at that, in fact."  

In 1978, a year after meeting Whiting, Wrangler made his heterosexual adult film debut in China Sisters, which featured a plot involving two women who seduce a gay man and turn him straight. In a later interview with Terry Gross of NPR, Wrangler said that the film crew knew he was gay and cheered him on while he lost his heterosexual film virginity.

Wrangler quickly made a number of well-known and popular straight-adult films, including Jack and Jill, Roommates, and The Devil in Miss Jones 2 (in which he played Lucifer.). He was a favorite of director Chuck Vincent, the critically acclaimed, openly gay director of some of the top straight-adult films of the 1970's and 1980's. Vincent's films subverted straight porn's traditional focus on the female body by focusing on Wrangler's body, thus fixing the viewer's eye on the male (rather than the female) sexual experience.
 

Capitalizing on his popularity and notoriety,  Wrangler co-starred alongside playwright and actor Robert Patrick in Patrick's 1979 play T-Shirts at The Glines Theatre in New York City. 

That same year, he authored a column on health and fitness, Wrangler's Weights and Measures, for the short-lived, gay-lifestyle magazine Au Contraire. in 1979.

In 1980, Wrangler, his step-grandmother, and his manager were attacked, pistol-whipped, and tied up by six burglars at his step-grandmother's home in Bel Air, California. The robbers made off with more than $250,000 in furs and cash. 

In a move that would help shape his future in a big way, Wrangler became a board member of the Johnny Mercer Foundation after its founding in 1982. The foundation's goal was to promote Mercer's music. In addition to joining the past and the present, thus assuring an appreciation for America's unique musical heritage, the foundation sought to honor the risk-taking of new artists and new voices in large measure through their support of new composers writing for the American musical theater. There's little doubt that this came about due to Whiting's influence. Johnny Mercer had been her mentor early on in her career and a songwriting partner of her father's.

Wrangler's interest in writing continued with the publication of an autobiography, The Jack Wrangler Story, or What's a Nice Boy Like You Doing?, in 1984.

It was around this same time that he returned to the stage, appearing in the play Soul Survivor, a comedy about a gay man whose lover has died of AIDS. He also became a promoter of the cabaret singer Carol Woods, writing and producing several shows for her between 1984 and 2001.

At Whiting’s urging, he turned his attention to theater and cabaret, crafting Whiting’s cabaret act along with several shows around the legacy of songwriter Johnny Mercer, who had fostered Whiting's career.

He wrote and produced a 1985 cabaret show which featured Mercer's music, starring Whiting and Karen Akers.

By this time Wrangler's adult-film career was tapering off, and Whiting demanded that he give up his porn career and live erotic shows. In 1986, at the age of 40, he appeared in his final adult picture, a straight porn film for Caballero Home Video entitled Rising Star.

In 1988, he wrote the book for the Off-Broadway musical I Love You, Jimmy Valentine, (also known as Alias, Jimmy Valentine), with music by Robert Haber and lyrics by Hal Hackady. Based on the O. Henry short story A Retrieved Reformation, it featured Faith Prince, Bill Buell, Kurt Peterson and Keith Savage. 

Wrangler would go on to write, direct, or produce a number of other plays, musicals and revues, including The Valentine Touch, The First Lady and Other Stories of Our Times, and Irina Abroad! 

From 1989 through 2001, Whiting was the Artistic Director of the annual Cabaret and Performance Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford Connecticut. With other performers such as Julie Wilson and Anne Francine, as well as musical directors like Tex Arnold, she and Wrangler spent 10 days instructing selected professionals and amateurs in the cabaret performance process.

By this point, Wrangler had completely reinvented himself, but to complete the picture... there was just one more thing he felt he had to do. After living together for about 20 years, Wrangler and Whiting decided to make it official and got married in 1994. 

  

Once again, Wrangler turned his attention to Whiting's career and cabaret. And a year later, he helped conceive the 1997 Broadway Revue Dream, a tribute to songwriter Johnny Mercer, who had been a mentor to Whiting. The show opened on April 3, 1997 at the Royale Theatre, starring Whiting, Lesley Anne Warren and John Pizzarelli.  The show was well-received and largely responsible for Whiting's resurgence in popularity on the cabaret circuit. Dream closed on July 6, 1997 after 109 performances, with choreographer Wayne Cilento receiving a Tony Award nomination for Best Choreography.

In 1998, Wrangler and Whiting filed a $3 million lawsuit against New York City when the then 74-year-old Whiting tripped on loose pavement and broke her hip. Their suit claimed $2 million in damages for her injuries and $1 million for loss of conjugal relations. 

Casting about, Wrangler, again, saw an opportunity to share the music of Johnny Mercer with the world. In 1999, he co-wrote and produced Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: The Jazz Concert which paired Mercer songs with excerpts from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt’s best-selling book about a murder in Mercer’s hometown, Savannah, Georgia. 

His work on behalf of the foundation continued. According to the New York Times, Wrangler was to be credited with the idea for a ballet based on Mercer's 1946 musical St. Louis Woman, which was performed by the Dance Theater of Harlem in 2003.

In 2008, a feature-length documentary film about Wrangler's career, impact on the gay community and decades long romance with with Whiting, Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon, premiered at Newfest and received a GayVN Award. It was produced and directed by Jeffrey Schwarz of Automat Pictures which is distributed by TLA Releasing.

Jack Wrangler died Tuesday, April 7, 2009, in Manhattan. The cause: emphysema, no doubt due to a lifetime of smoking. He was 62. 

Whiting, his widow, died on January 10, 2011 from natural causes at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey. She was 86.

Theirs... a love story for the ages.

Read the complete NPR interview.

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Isn't he handsome? 

That's the first thing that struck me when I saw him. I couldn't believe he was a gay porn star. He looked like he should have been competing with Bobby Sherman or David Cassidy for parts. That said, he does little for me, personally. But those eyes. That face. And his story!

I would love to see a film done about their romance. Or, better yet, a musical entitled, Only Around the Edges, Dear.

Well, that's all for now. Leave your thoughts and memories in the comments section. And, as always...

Thanks for reading.

It Had To Be You / You Made Me Love You

Margaret Whiting

I Wish I Were In Love Again

Margaret Whiting & Elaine Stritch 

This is the Life - Carol Woods

I Met a Man Today - Karen Akers