THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 63 JULY 31, 2019
Hamilton, who dated the likes of Marilyn
Monroe, Danielle Steel and Britt Ekland,
isn’t currently romantically attached, he’s
quick to qualify: “I have dates.” Indeed, it
was on the way to a dinner rendezvous a few
months ago at industry hangout Craig’s — a
regular spot where he can often be found
with pals Robert Wagner, Tom Jones, Sugar
Ray Leonard and Sylvie Vartan — that he
and a companion ended up in a Bentley-on-
Bentley wreck. Luckily, they were unscathed.
He replaced his totaled Continental GT
with an identical model: “That car was
elegant in a fistfight, and I liked that.”0
n the Texas set of Hamilton’s
1960 breakout, Vincente
Minnelli’s Home From the Hill,
a boy asked co-star George
Peppard if Peppard was a movie
star. The Method-trained thespian replied
that, actually, he was an actor. Then the kid
turned to Hamilton and wondered if he, too,
was an actor. Hamilton responded that, in
fact, he was a movie star.
While Hamilton had said it to razz
Peppard, he realized he meant it. He was a
fervid soldier at MGM’s backlot boot camp,
where he’d honed the all-purpose practical
arts: fencing, riding, shooting and what-
ever else might be needed in everything
from comedies to Westerns. (“To this day,
I can take a bullwhip,” he boasts, “and cut a
cigarette in half.”) More crucially, Hamilton
— armed with good looks, easy charm and
a given name so WASPy it almost seemed a
put-on — couldn’t have been more game to
participate in what would prove to be the old
studio publicity machine.
“I just played into it,” Hamilton says, grin-
ning. “They did all the lying.” In conjuring
his playboy image, MGM manufactured an
old-money background. In reality, he spent
his teen years on the edge of real wealth in
Palm Beach and attending the tony New
York prep school Hackley for a short spell
alongside true blue-blooded best buddy Herb
Allen, the financier scion now famed for his
Sun Valley mogul conference. (“He knew he
was going to inherit the earth; I only knew I
was going to pretend I was going to do it.”)
Friend of six decades Joan Collins doesn’t
think it’s all a put-on. Or, at any rate, he
became who he was feigning to be. “George
was urbane and charming by the time I met
him when he was 20 years old,” she says.
“Very elegantly dressed and able to make you
laugh: You can’t say that of many people.”
Hamilton’s no crank about the good old1 Hamilton struck a beach pose in this 1960s photo.
2 In Home From the Hill (1960) with Luana Patten.
3 As Hank Williams in Your Cheatin’ Heart (1964).
4 In Evel Knievel (1971), with Sue Lyon.
5 As the title character in Zorro: The Gay Blade (1981).
6 In The Godfather: Part III (1990), as consigliere
B.J. Harrison.
7 On Dancing With the Stars (2006) with
Edyta Sliwinska.days. But he does relish how, once upon
a time in Hollywood, contrivance was an
inalienable right. He deplores the cult of
authenticity that has overtaken the town
since his heyday. “Everybody has to be
‘real,’ ” he says, spitting the word. “That’s not
the purpose of being here. It’s invention.”H
amilton credits his larger-
than-life Southern belle
socialite mother, Anne, known
as Teeny, and nine-years-
older gay half brother Bill as
defining influences. They’d brought him
and younger sibling David from small-town
Arkansas to Beverly Hills when George was- Teeny was escaping Hamilton’s father, a
philandering bandleader. Both mother and
brother harbored dreams of stardom.
The family settled into a house along
the upper residential stretch of Rodeo
Drive, where by Hamilton’s account they
entertained the likes of Clark Gable, whose
supposedly false teeth were “all I could
look at,” and Gloria Swanson (“Very strong-
minded. She’d say things like, ‘I’ll poison
myself if I wish!’ ”). He soaked it up. His
takeaway was Teeny’s and Bill’s devout com-
mitment to glamour as a way of life: “It took
the mundane out of the world.”
Younger brother David, whom Hamilton
frequently visits in Palm Beach, describes
the perspective that Teeny and Bill shared
as “a philosophy of optimism, a looking for
the best out of life, to make it adventurous
rather than dull.” While never poor, mother
and brothers were at times broke — which
they saw as temporary, “a bad hand in a
poker game” — as Teeny teetered from one
supportive suitor to the next. (Merv Griffin
labored for years to turn Hamilton’s early
life into a film, finally released in 2009 as
My One and Only, with Renée Zellweger as
Teeny and Logan Lerman playing 15-year-
old Hamilton.)
The serene relationship Hamilton pos-
sesses with artifice was, however, not passed
on to his own children. When shooting a
Kardashians-knockoff reality show for E! in
2015 called Stewarts & Hamiltons (it lasted a
single season), he found that his grown sons
— Ashley, an actor, musician and comedian,
and George Jr., a college student — didn’t
share his equanimity about self-caricature.
“The joke being on me,” says George, smil-
ing. “I’ve long been OK with that.”
Hamilton contends it was for Teeny and
Bill as much as himself that, at the age of 28,
he bought the 36-room Grayhall in Beverly
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