Carleton Carpenter as flamboyantly gay photographer Russell Paxton tells Ann Sothern (as Liza Elliot) and Luella Gear (as Maggie Grant) all about the gorgeous male model he has in his studio in the television adaptation of Kurt Weill's Lady in the Dark, originally broadcast by NBC on September 25th, 1954. This was a very early example of lgbtq+ representation in mainstream media and Carleton's over-the-top portrayal of the character was daring for the era, leaving viewers with no other option than to accept that his character was gay---not "ambivalent 1950s, is he or isn't he?" gay, but in your face "I lust over men, tra-la-la-la-la-la! I don't care if you like it or not" gay. Carleton, who was openly bisexual, clearly ran with the part, camping it up and having fun while imbuing the character with the freedom he gave himself in his personal life during the buttoned-down 1950s.
Born in Bennington, Vermont in 1926, Carleton caught the acting bug early after serving as a Seabee in the U.S. Navy during World War II (where he fell in love for the first time with a fellow Seabee named Costello, a relationship which was emotionally intense but never consummated). Arriving in New York City in January of 1944, Carleton soon after scored a part in the David Merrick Broadway play Bright Boy. Instantly grabbing attention in the opening scene when he walked out wearing nothing but boxer shorts with a towel around his neck and stepped across a bunch of beds to look out a window, his long legs carrying his lanky six-foot-three frame across the stage like an Olympic sprinter caught everyone's eyes. Garnering laughs from the audience, his good looks also earned him both male and female admirers, with one wealthy older bachelor offering to pay his way through college. "He kept calling backstage," Carleton later recalled with a laugh. "All the guys would group around and say, 'Your old guy that wants to send you to college is on the phone!' One of them said, 'Well, that's what you get for coming onstage with nothing on but your shorts and a towel around your neck when the curtain goes up!'" Unbothered by the attention, Carpenter (nick-named "Carp") was fully aware that he liked both women and men and already had experience with both under his belt. "I slept with as many women as I did men, I guess," he stated in a 2017 interview with Matthew Rettenmund for the Boy Culture website, adding with a laugh, "I really didn't keep count." Entirely comfortable with who he was, Carleton never attempted to hide his bisexuality. When asked if he ever worried that being open about it would hurt his career, he breezily replied: "Never crossed my mind."
Working in early TV shows, modeling for magazines, and cast in a number of Broadway plays in the late-1940s after the success of Bright Boy, Carp was surprised one night when a famous screen star made a visit to his backstage dressing room. "I was taking my wig off and somebody knocked and there stood Cary Grant! My feet wouldn't move. He's saying how much he enjoyed me in the show and going on and all I could say was 'thank you'. He climbed three flights of stairs and I'm waving my wig at him. He said he would like to take me out and buy me a drink. In the meantime, I'm looking over at my rotten jeans on my dressing table and I thought, 'My God.' And I did have a date. I wanted to tell him I had a date but maybe all three of us could go out, but as soon as he heard the word 'date,' the door slowly began to close and he was gone. I've thought about maybe he wanted a piece of ass — he might very well have. He was a gentleman's man as well as a ladies' man."
Carleton was brought to Los Angeles by producer Louis de Rochemont to play a supporting role in the movie Lost Boundaries in 1949. Signed by MGM shortly afterwards, he made a splash singing the novelty song Aba-Daba Honeymoon with Debbie Reynolds in the musical Two Weeks with Love in 1950, a song which Carlton sneakily introduced to the film's producer and which earned a gold record for the pair when it reached number three on the Billboard charts in 1951. Among his eight films for MGM, one of his leading roles was starring in the 1952 Stanley Donen comedy Fearless Fagan opposite Janet Leigh. Based on a true story, Carleton played a young man who raised a lion cub and tried to hide the full-grown lion on a military base after he was drafted into the army. He also starred with Jan Sterling in the 1952 MGM western Sky Full of Moon as a cowboy named "Tumbleweed" who arrives in Las Vegas and gets caught up in the world of gambling.
After leaving MGM in 1953, Carp continued working in stage, television, and radio productions. He also established himself as a successful songwriter, composing the numbers Christmas Eve, I Wouldn't Mind, Ev'ry Other Day, Cabin In the Woods, A Little Love, and Come Away in addition to writing special material for Marlene Dietrich, Kaye Ballard, Hermione Gingold, and his pal Debbie Reynolds. Remaining lifelong friends with Debbie, he attended events with Reynolds and her children Carrie and Todd after her divorce from singer Eddie Fisher in 1959, and Debbie presented Carleton with his lifetime achievement award from the Hollywood film organization Cinecon in 2012, joking with him onstage by saying: "You know, you and I are gonna be singin' Aba-Daba Honeymoon when we're both a hundred years old!" Devastated by her passing in 2016, he later said: "It was awful. I had over a hundred messages on my machine when I got home, and I was very sick."
During the 1960s and 1970s, Carleton continued to work on stage and in films, appearing in the groundbreaking lgbtq+ play The Boys in the Band in 1968, and starring as "Miss Untouchable" opposite Rue McClanahan, Fannie Flagg, and transgender actress Candy Darling in the gay-themed movie Some of My Best Friends Are... in 1971. He also became a successful author in the 1970s and 1980s, writing the popular mystery novels Deadhead, Games Murderers Play, Cat Got Your Tongue?, Only Her Hairdresser Knew, Sleight of Deadly Hand, The Peabody Experience, and Stumped. His last work as an actor was in a play in 2015, and he published his autobiography The Absolute Joy of Work: From Vermont to Broadway, Hollywood and Damn Near 'Round the World the following year. Remaining healthy and active into his 90s, Carleton passed away peacefully of natural causes at his home in Warwick, New York on January 31st, 2022 at the age of 95. "I just loved the work, honey," he stated about his long and varied career near the end of his life. "That was always the thing with me — I didn’t care anything about all of the glop that went with stardom."
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