Odd this day
2 April 1974
Well, it’s 51 years today since perhaps the most interesting thing ever to happen at an Oscars ceremony.
David Niven, co-hosting that year’s proceedings, had been in the process of announcing the presenter of the Best Picture award, the final one of the night. The woman in question was a
very important contributor to world entertainment, and someone quite likely–
…but before he could finish and tell them he meant Elizabeth Taylor, someone else emerged.
Opel, moustachioed and — at that moment, although not for the last time in his life — stark bollock naked, pegged it across the stage, waving his hand in a peace sign, while certain other untrammelled parts of his body also moved about with some degree of freedom.
Niven, famously, stayed as cool as he was paid to, and as Opel left the stage adjusted his bow tie and said
Well, ladies and gentlemen, that was almost bound to happen.
That got a bit of a laugh, and bought him some thinking time, so he continued:
But isn’t it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?
Niven’s quip was good enough for people to think the incident had been staged, but it hadn’t. According to the best account of the incident, and of Opel’s life, that I’ve come across…
…he had sneaked backstage using a borrowed press pass, secreted himself amid the scenery and waited. At the crucial moment, off came a jumpsuit, and on came Opel — who later told LA gay paper the Advocate:
I thought it was very interesting that Elizabeth Taylor could be flustered by the sight of a nude man in any context.
Oddly, Opel had been born a middle-class Catholic, and had shown every sign of being destined for a conservative life. Sacked from the Peace Corps, however, and then, in 1966, from a role as Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter, for being gay, he chose a different path. He worked in LA schools, but also as a photojournalist for the gay press — and in July 1974 streaked a City Council meeting. They were debating a ban on public nudity, which — after Opel had got his kit off next to the police chief, in a chamber packed with 400 observers — passed by 12 votes to one.
Niven may have been partly right about him, in that Opel tried his hand at stand-up, and wasn’t very good (and had his set interrupted by “a man wearing only an earring”). But he did pack some laughs into a short life. He toyed for a while with the idea of launching a magazine called National Pornographic, got involved with a campaigning group called Fags for Unseating Civic Knuckleheads (an acronym I’m not sure the New Yorker needed to spell out), formed a Nude Lib Party
in the wake of Richard Nixon’s resignation … [with] the slogan “Not Just Another Crooked Dick.”
(Mind you, when you consider Nixon’s actual campaign…)
Opel also
appeared as Mr. Penis at the Christopher Street West parade
(now L.A. Pride), so we can be reasonably sure he wasn’t one of those
in the gay movement … [who] wanted to act respectably and assimilate into the straight world.
Perhaps this is why his story ends horribly. He was murdered in San Francisco in 1979, and it was almost certainly a hate crime, so he may have been singled out for being so unapologetic. The New Yorker, noting the date, and the decade which followed — during which many, many more gay men came to dreadful, untimely ends — suggests:
Opel’s death … foreshadowed the end of the party.
But this strikes me as unconvincing, suggesting almost a tragic destiny for him and his community. Both events were shaped by prejudice, without a doubt, but even an implicit link feels a little like a reach.
Perhaps the one connection is that — like Derek Jarman, Ian Charleson, Freddie Mercury, and all the millions of other, not famous, victims — Opel will always be preserved as a young man, and be remembered.
A friend of his once remarked that
Robert was dream fulfilment to Oscar viewers. Every year, his memory puts an edge of suspense on the Oscars, like a promise that something unscripted and exciting and sexy might happen.
Will Smith and Chris Rock — and, indeed, the cast and crew of Moonlight — can testify that the unscripted bit still occasionally comes true. The other two criteria are less often met.
