Partner Mary McCarty
Queer Places:
Holy Cross Cemetery
Culver City, Los Angeles County, California, USA
Margaret Lindsay (born Margaret Kies; September 19, 1910 – May 9, 1981) was an American film actress. Early in her career, Lindsay lived with her sister Helen in Hollywood. Later in life, she lived with her youngest sister, Mickie. She never married. According to biographer and historian
William J. Mann, Lindsay was the life partner of musical theatre, film, and television actress
Mary McCarty.[4]
Margaret Lindsay, who traveled around the country with lover Janet Gaynor and had comedienne Mary McCarty as a long-time lover, could not get parts in big-time movies despite her exceptional beauty because she refused “to play the game,” though she was romantically linked by studio publicity department to Dick Powell and dated Liberace and Cesar Romero with every assurance that they would not even ask for a goodnight kiss.
The Dubuque, Iowa, native made a splash in Cavalcade (1933), bluffing her way into the all-British cast by pretending to be London-born. She was friendly with some of the shady underworld that surrounded screen actress Thelma Todd; after Todd was found dead in 1935, Lindsay was called to testify before a grand jury about Todd's ex-husband (and reputed gangster) Pat DiCicco. Some columnists implied that Lindsay and DeCicco were involved romantically; more sophisticated wags, however, hinted her real lover was Janet Gaynor, with whom Lindsay took refuge after her grand-jury testimony. Many newspapers carried items about Maggie and Janet crisscrossing the country, ducking into hotels to escape reporters. In July 1936 they headed for a getaway in Hawaii.
Lindsay moved with the high-spireted crowd of Jean Howard and Ann Warner, and became something of a prototype feminist at the studio, refusing to "grin and bear it", the costumary response, she said, when a director got "fresh." She told Ben Maddox: "I don't care to be called by my first name and to be "darling" to everyone on the lot." Early on she vetoed marriage outright, saying having both husband and career just didn't mix. In 1937, in the midst of the grapevine chatter linking her to Gaynor, she blasted rumormongers, saying she intended to on living her own life "and letting others live theirs." That she did, eventually buying a house in the Hollywood Hills with her longtime partner, comedienne Mary McCarthy. If she was seen with a man, it was often Liberace.
Margaret Lindsay, pictured on the left, “remained stoically true to herself throughout her whole career in movies, never marrying to appease the studio or the public, and maintaining a lively and popular hangout for the closeted lesbians of Hollywood in her and her partner Mary McCarty’s bungalow. Rumoured to have been a long-time lover of Janet Gaynor, pictured on the right. The two appeared together in the film Paddy the Next Best Thing (1933).”
She appeared in the occasional film through the 1960s, but Hollywood didn't quite know what to do with a glamorous lesbian who refused to play the game. The post-Code imposition of gender conventionality also dictated changes in the press of Margaret Lindsay. No longer adamantly opposed to marriage, she was romantically linked to the clean-cut Dick Powell and quoted as saying she often dreamed of falling in love and becoming a wife. But her favorite Hollywood date? Cesar Romero, she said, still winking at those who knew the score, because when Cesar brought her home, he never asked for a good-night kiss.
Lindsay's time as a Warner Bros. contract player during the 1930s was particularly productive. She was noted for her supporting work in successful films of the 1930s and 1940s such as Jezebel (1938) and Scarlet Street (1945) and her leading roles in lower-budgeted B movie films such as the Ellery Queen series at Columbia in the early 1940s. Critics regard her portrayal of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hepzibah Pyncheon in the 1940 film adaptation of The House of the Seven Gables as Lindsay's standout career role.
Lindsay died at the age of 70 of emphysema in 1981 at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. She was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, California.[5]
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