Harvard’s presence in Hollywood is nearly as old as Tinseltown itself, yet the uneasy alliance between the country’s most prestigious academic institution and the nexus of mass entertainment is fraught with a singular tension: Can a highbrow university and a pop culture world just get along?
For decades after the “Harvard Film Academy” negotiation collapsed, Adolph Zukor’s prediction failed to come true: Most Harvard men still followed the traditional tracks of law, politics, business, finance, and medicine. Those who did go to Hollywood—mostly as artists and performers, not brash businessmen such as Hearst and Kennedy—were often so eager to escape stifling upbringings and social mores that they simply dropped out of the university. Like the Jews in Hollywood, they were cultural outsiders. Songwriter Cole Porter and actor Monty Woolley were society boys pressured by their families to attend Harvard Law; both were gay half a century before the Stonewall riots, and cruised waterfront bars together in Manhattan. The two, who knew each other at Yale, remained friends in Hollywood, and Woolley was a frequent guest at Porter’s all-boy pool parties—until he fell in love with a black man. Porter, who liked men but not blacks, disapproved, and their friendship ended.
By the 1940s, celebrity culture had become inescapable. As many as 90 million Americans went to the movies every week. As far as 02138 was from 90210, it was impossible for Harvard to fend off the growing influence of pop culture.
The Hasty Pudding’s century-old tradition of cross-dressing was already the sort of subversive, channeled rebelliousness—from a club independent of the university—that tweaked Harvard’s stuffy, paternalistic culture and fostered such actors as Jack Lemmon, who would later win accolades in a cross-dressing role. Then in 1951 and 1967, respectively, the Hasty Pudding Club found a way to lure movie stars to campus with its Woman and Man of the Year awards.
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