Actor Van Johnson, who died in 2007, was one of Hollywood’s ideal films idols.
In the 1940s, the charming screen icon was box office gold
and remained a popular presence on TV in shows like Murder, She Wrote (which starred his good friend Angela Lansbury).
However, Johnson’s stardom was nearly curtailed due to a serious car accident. It happend when he and close friends actor Keenan Wynne and his wife Evie (Abbott) were en route to a movie screening.
Johnson suffered a fractured skull, had bone fragments that pierced his brain, and was left with a scar on his forehead and a long metal plate on the left side of his head.
While his scar was strategically hidden in his movies by the make-up department, it is visibble in the 1954 court-martial drama The Caine Mutiny.
Other Hidden Aspects of His Life
Beyond the careful camoflauge of his physical scars, Van Johnson, who was gay, and the Hollywood publicity machine worked overtime to conceal his true sexuality.
Photo bycommons.wikimedia.org
For example, a portion of the New York Times obituary of the actor read as follows:
“Mr. Johnson shocked MGM and dismayed his fans in 1947 when he stole the wife of his best friend, the MGM character actor Keenan Wynn. But by the time he married Evie Wynn, he was too big a star for the studio to punish. They had a daughter, Schuyler, in 1948, separated in 1962 and were divorced in 1968. Mr. Johnson did not remarry.”
Simultaneously, a section of his obitiary in the Los Angeles Times reported:
“In January 1947, Johnson married Eve Wynn, the former wife of his close friend, actor Keenan Wynn. Johnson married Wynn, the mother of two young sons, in Juarez, Mexico, only four hours after she had obtained a Mexican divorce. (The marriage, which produced a daughter, Schuyler, ended in divorce in 1968.) Johnson’s marriage had a profound effect on his youthful female fan base. A widely circulated joke at the time said that when Johnson’s young female fans found out that he had gotten married, they wore their bobby socks at half-mast.”
Then, Much Later…
In 2004, after Evie Wynn there were references in the press to Van Johnson’s double life. Several of his fans felt betrayed when he wed Evie the day after her divorce from Keenan] Wynn, while others who knew about Johnson’s sexual ambuguity questioned the reality of the marriage.
Evie eventually sued Johnson for divorce, citing cruelty and mental abuse, and a few weeks later she sued Wynn for “fraud and breach of contract” in their property settlement and for failing to pay child support.
Evie reconciled with Johnson for a short time and, in 1961, journeyed with him to London, where he performed on stage in The Music Man,.
However, the couple ultimately separated when Johnson commenced an affair with a member of the show’s cast. Ned Wynn, Evie’s son, said she told him that Johnson had left her “for a man – a boy, really. He’s the lead boy dancer.'”
Meanwhile, Johnson had referred to his departure from Evie as “the ugliest divorce in Hollywood history.”
In the end
In the end, entertainment journalist Michael Musto set the record, straight (so to speak) about Van Johnson in The Village Voice in 2008:
“He was gay! He would have even told you that! His daughter, in her scathing memoir about him, certainly would have brought it up! But all the mainstream-press obits carefully omit that fact, only deigning to bring up Van’s Hollywood marriage to a woman. Please! The man toured in La Cage aux Folles! And as a reader points out, “He even died in Nyack, a stone’s throw from Rosie O’Donnell‘s house!”