William Haines was one of the biggest movie stars in America in the early 1930s, a top-five box office attraction whose on-screen persona of the arrogant young man humbled by the final reel had made him a favorite with audiences. Born Charles William Haines on January 2, 1900, in Staunton, Virginia, he had been fascinated with stage performance and motion pictures from an early age, spending hours watching silent films in local theaters. His path to Hollywood had been anything but conventional. At fourteen, he ran away from home with a young man he referred to as his boyfriend, ending up in Hopewell, Virginia, where the pair found work at a DuPont factory producing nitrocellulose for fifty dollars a week.

They supplemented their income by opening a dancehall that may also have served as a brothel. His frantic parents tracked him down through the police, but Haines refused to return home, staying in Hopewell and sending money back to support the family until most of the town was destroyed by fire in 1915. After the bankruptcy of the family business and his father’s mental breakdown, Haines moved to New York City in 1919, settling into the burgeoning gay community of Greenwich Village. There he worked a variety of jobs, spent time as the kept man of an older woman, and eventually became a model.

In 1922, talent scout Bijou Fernandez discovered him as part of Goldwyn Pictures’ New Faces of 1922 contest, and the studio signed him to a contract at forty dollars a week. He traveled to Hollywood that March with fellow contest winner Eleanor Boardman. His career began slowly, with mostly uncredited bit parts. His first significant role came in Three Wise Fools in 1923, and while he attracted positive critical attention and the studio began building him up, he continued to be cast in unimportant parts at Goldwyn.

A loan to Fox for The Desert Outlaw in 1923 gave him more opportunity, and in 1924 MGM lent him to Columbia Pictures for a five-picture deal. The first of these, The Midnight Express, received excellent reviews, and Columbia offered to buy his contract. The offer was refused, and Haines returned to bit roles at Goldwyn. His first big personal success came with Brown of Harvard in 1926, opposite Jack Pickford and Mary Brian.

It was in that film that he crystallized his screen image: a young, arrogant man who is humbled by the last reel. It was a formula to which he repeatedly returned for the next several years. That same year, on a trip to New York, he met James “Jimmy” Shields. Haines convinced Shields to move to Los Angeles, promising to get him work as an extra.

The pair soon began living together and considered themselves a committed couple, though newspapers never mentioned their relationship. From 1928 to 1932, Haines was a top-five box office star. He made the transition into sound with the part-talkie Alias Jimmy Valentine in 1928, for which he was forced to take elocution lessons. He compared the coming of sound to the discovery of clap in a nunnery.

His first all-talking film, Navy Blues, was released the following year, and he starred in Way Out West in 1930. That year, the Quigley Poll, a survey of film exhibitors, listed Haines as the top box office attraction in the country. In 1933, Haines was arrested in a Young Men’s Christian Association with a sailor he had picked up in Los Angeles’ Pershing Square. Louis B.

Mayer, the head of MGM, delivered an ultimatum: Haines could choose between a sham lavender marriage, his relationship with Shields, or his relationship with the sailor. Haines chose Shields. Mayer subsequently fired him and terminated his contract. The decision ended his Hollywood career.

He made a few minor films at Poverty Row studios, including several for Mascot Pictures and The Marines Are Coming in 1934, then retired from acting entirely. He and Shields, who had remained together privately for what would become forty-seven years, began a successful dual career as interior designers and antique dealers. Among their early clients were friends from Hollywood such as Joan Crawford, Carol Lombard, Marian Davies, and George Cukor. The couple settled in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, and their business prospered until they retired in the early 1970s.

On December 26, 1973, William Haines died of lung cancer in Santa Monica, California, at the age of seventy-three. He was interred in Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery in Santa Monica. His films faded from memory, but his story remained one of the most striking in Hollywood history: a man at the very top of his profession, who lost everything he had built because he refused to give up the man he loved.