A new book claims Hollywood legend Cesar Romero led a private queer life

American pop culture will forever remember actor Cesar Romero as the first Joker in the Batman TV series from the 1960s. The menacing Romero stood 6 foot 3, one inch taller than Adam West, who portrayed Batman.

Romero, as the Joker, had a legendary and patented maniacal laugh, coupled with his trademark mustache famously painted over by white makeup. His failure to shave it off wasn't due to vanity, but because he was a spokesman for a clothing company and had committed to going on a U.S. tour for it, so he needed to have his recognizable mustache in tow.

That says a lot about who Romero was — decent, a man of his word, and kind. But behind the laugh, the mustache, and the iconic character was a debonair, tuxedo-clad man who allegedly lived his life as a gay man.

So says a new book, Cesar Romero: The Joker Is Wild, by author and screenwriter Samuel Garza Bernstein, who sifted through pages and pages of news clippings and interviews from Romero’s six-decade career in Tinseltown.

“Cesar Romero is completely ahead of his time,” Bernstein said in an interview with The Advocate.. “Long before the term intersectionality exists, Romero embodies the concept. He’s an American-born Latino, the child of wealthy Cuban immigrants, who is also a gay man secure enough that even though he assiduously keeps his private life out of the public eye, he still refuses to marry a woman to provide cover, unlike many of his peers in Hollywood at the time.”

Unlike other leading men of his era, Romero never staged a fake marriage with a secretary or paraded miserably in front of paparazzi and cameras as part of a studio-arranged “date.” And he never played the part of a tortured recluse.

Instead, his bachelor image flowed out of his utter and authentic joy of being in the company of glamorous women. “He absolutely loved going out on the town with Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, all of them,” Bernstein explained. “He adored dancing with them. That translated into headlines and photographs that painted him as Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor. But the thing is, it wasn’t fake. He really was having the time of his life. And it created this heterosexual cover story he didn’t have to work at. It took care of itself.”

Still, his deepest connections appear to have been with men, especially a legendary Hollywood heartthrob, actor Tyrone Power, a close companion for years. “I do think the love of his life was Tyrone Power,” Bernstein surmised. “I’m not certain about the physical nature of their relationship. I wasn’t there for that, although I would have liked to have been!”

There was clearly a very strong bond between the two, Bernstein said. “Cesar himself, when asked if they were more than friends, would say things like, ‘Who’s to say what we are with those we love?’ That’s not a man hiding. That’s a man acknowledging.”

Power and Romero shared a 10-week South American press tour for the film they costarred in, Captain From Castile, in the late 1940s, crisscrossing the continent in Power’s private plane, which he piloted. They were greeted by adoring crowds, even dining with Juan and Eva Perón. “But what mattered was the time they spent alone together,” Bernstein noted. “Cesar said those were some of the happiest times of his life.”

And yet Romero avoided the scandal and whispers that ensnared so many men in Hollywood who were rumored to be gay. “It’s very telling,” Bernstein pointed out. “He never shows up in Confidential magazine. He isn’t in Scotty Bowers’s memoir. He wasn’t at the notorious Hollywood gay parties. He lived in between worlds, socializing with straight couples, being the extra man, dedicating himself to his family. He didn’t live a hidden life, but I don’t think he lived a fully romantically fulfilled one either.”

Romero’s closeness to his family may have both grounded him and prevented him from being forthcoming. After the collapse of his father’s sugar business, Romero became the family caretaker, a role he maintained for the rest of his life.

“His parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews all lived with him in a sprawling Brentwood home that had something like seven bedrooms, and his sister stayed until his death in 1994,” explained Bernstein. “But they were staunchly Catholic, They didn’t talk about feelings. I don’t think he would’ve confided in them about his sexuality. That just wasn’t the way things were done.”

For Bernstein, Romero’s story is a confluence of resilience and self-invention. “He was code-switching his whole life,” he reflected. “He was Latino in white high society. He was gay in straight Hollywood. He was a bachelor in a town where people expected you to marry for show. And he managed all of it with grace, charm, and a kind of stoicism that came from his generation. He didn’t call it intersectionality, but he lived it.”

Bernstein doesn’t see Romero as closeted so much as pragmatic.

“He wasn’t hiding in shame. He was living as authentically as he could in the time he lived in. And he did it with such ease that I think people forget how radical it was. He didn’t fake a wife. He didn’t make himself miserable pretending,” Bernstein continued. “He simply lived as Cesar Romero, the gentleman joker, the man who loved women’s company and who may have loved Tyrone Power most of all. And he got away with it because everyone loved him back.”

In today’s Hollywood, where actors can bring their same-sex husbands or wives to premieres, Romero might have lived differently. But his life still resonates.

“I’m grateful I live in a world where I can be openly gay, have a husband, where it’s not scandalous,” Bernstein said. “Cesar didn’t live in that world. But he managed to live freely and joyfully in his own way. And that, to me, makes him not just ahead of his time, but a pioneer.”