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Rumors of homosexuality dogged Robert Taylor's career from
the outset, and he supposedly begged Louis B. Mayer to cast him in rugged,
he-man parts, and to engineer a macho image for him off-screen. The
publicity machine revved up to burnish Taylor's image by planting stories
in the tabloids of his love of manly pursuits like hunting and his
relationships with actresses, most notably about his set "romance" with
frequent co-star Barbara Stanwyck. Many deemed Stanwyck the most famous
closeted lesbian in Hollywood--besides Garbo--so their studio-engineered
relationship served both Taylor and Stanwyck well. The studio whisked the
two friends off for a civil wedding in 1939, and both got a career boost
from the legal union: Stanwyck enjoyed the cachet of marrying one of the
most devastatingly handsome matinee idols of Hollywood's Golden Era and
Taylor earned the social acceptance afforded by marriage. Taylor had
always battled his pretty-boy image and despaired over his lack of
critical acclaim--marriage to Stanwyck and the new assertively masculine
assignments it delivered proved him a passing good actor and a dedicated
professional. Some of his finer performances came in Quo Vadis
(1951), Ivanhoe (1952), Knights of the Round Table
(1953), The Hangman (1959), and Return of the Gunfighter
(1966). Taylor grew increasingly more conservative in the 1950s (he took
part in the McCarthy witch-hunts), and eventually took a second, much
younger wife, German actress Ursula Thiess.
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