illiam “Billy” Haines was born in 1900 in Staunton, Virginia, the child of a working-class family in a town too small to hold him. At just 14, he ran away with another boy choosing freedom over the small-town suffocation of staying. He eventually landed in New York, where his good looks carried him into modeling, and in a twist of fate, straight into MGM’s orbit. At 22, he boarded a train west to Hollywood.
Billy never trained as an actor, but his charm, sharp timing, and quick smile made him a natural for the screen. MGM put him in the role of the campus kid, the cheeky flirt, the one audiences rooted for. His big break came with Brown of Harvard (1926), and he cemented his stardom opposite Lon Chaney in Tell It to the Marines (1926). Chaney was “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” famous for playing grotesque outcasts hidden behind masks. Billy, by contrast, made his mark by refusing to wear one.
When sound arrived, many silent stars stumbled, but Billy thrived. His quick wit and snappy delivery made him perfect for the new talkie comedies. He churned out hit after hit, but MGM quickly typecast him as the wisecracking, cocky sidekick. By the time Way Out West (1930) landed, audiences were tiring of the recycled persona, and critics began to say Billy was stale.
Behind the screen, whispers about his private life had been circulating for years. Unlike many of his peers, Billy wasn’t hiding. He was living with Jimmie Shields, the man he’d fallen in love with in 1926. For Louis B. Mayer, MGM’s iron-fisted boss, this was intolerable. The solution? A “lavender marriage.” Mayer ordered Billy to marry a woman for the cameras and keep Jimmie in the shadows.
Billy refused. Flat out. He wasn’t going to deny Jimmie, and he wasn’t going to pretend. Mayer promised he’d never work in Hollywood again,and Mayer kept that promise. Just like that, MGM dropped one of its brightest stars.
But Billy had already made his choice: love over fame. And Jimmie stayed by his side for nearly 50 years.
Their life together wasn’t without hardship. In 1936, they were attacked at their beach house by a mob of men throwing rocks and hurling slurs. Billy and Jimmie pressed charges, an act of open defiance unheard of at the time. Though the case was dismissed, the message was clear they wouldn’t be intimidated back into the shadows.
Enter Joan Crawford. She was more than a friend; she was family. When Billy’s film career ended, Joan urged him to channel his impeccable taste into decorating. He did—and created a second career that eclipsed the first. With Jimmie at his side, Billy founded William Haines Designs. Soon, Hollywood royalty;Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, Gloria Swanson, even Ronald and Nancy Reagan, wanted a Haines-designed home.
Ironically, the same Hollywood power players who had shut him out as “too queer” now paid him handsomely to furnish their homes. His style—modern, glamorous, airy—became synonymous with Hollywood chic and helped define “California living.” His firm, William Haines, Inc., thrived well into the 1960s, making him more money and arguably more lasting influence than he might have achieved as an aging movie star. It was, in every sense, a perfect flipping of the bird to Louis B. Mayer.
Billy lived defiantly, fully, and joyfully with Jimmie. Their home was a gathering place of laughter, parties, and queer resilience. Joan Crawford once called them the happiest couple in Hollywood. But even a defiant life can’t hold off everything. In the early 1970s, Billy was diagnosed with lung cancer, the result of decades of heavy smoking. He died on December 26, 1973, at age 73.
Jimmie was devastated. Friends said he drifted through their home like a ghost, unable to imagine life without Billy. Within two months, he took his own life, leaving a note that he simply couldn’t go on without the man he loved.
It was a tragic ending, but also a testament: theirs was a love so deep it defied Hollywood, social convention, and even death itself.
Billy Haines should be remembered not as a faded star, but as Hollywood’s first openly gay leading man. He refused to lie, refused to abandon his partner, and when the system shut him out, he built a new empire on his own terms. His story is one of courage, reinvention, and love, a reminder that queer people have always been here, living fully, even when the world told them not to.
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