One of life’s great truths—one that we desperately seek to avoid with proverbs and catechisms and even magazine articles—is that beneath its surface lies complexity. Our beloved fictions of heroes and villains crumble with scrutiny, leaving only convolution, shifting meanings, and unstable realities. The same is true of things. Even the simplest object has its hidden history of longing, love, and despair. Take, for example, cake. Chiffon cake.

Ask someone who lived through the 1950s to name the icons of that era, and chances are that—along with the ’57 Chevy, Lucy and Ricky, and the cul-de-sac rambler—chiffon cake will make their list. The recipe was introduced by General Mills in 1948 with a major marketing blitz that featured Betty Crocker, another 1950s icon. Betty, of course, is the fictional marketing persona invented in the 1920s by Marjorie Child Husted, a General Mills executive who sometimes posed as her creation. With Betty’s help, chiffon became a nationwide sensation. Billed as “the first really new cake in a hundred years,” thanks to its “mystery ingredient,” chiffon was light and fluffy like angel food cake, yet also rich and moist like butter cake, and it rapidly became a favorite of housewives from Syracuse to Oceanside.

Even today, the towering tube cake conjures a Kodachrome image of Mother, in lipstick and swing skirt, offering up love via food: the idealized feminine of mid-century America. But just as the post-war feminine mystique had its dark, unspoken places, so, too, had the chiffon cake. The real mystery lurking beneath its lemony glaze is not a secret ingredient, but the secret life of its reclusive inventor: the appropriately named Harry Baker.

The shorthand version of his history, repeated in a thousand cookbooks, notes that the insurance-salesman-turned-baker invented the cake in Los Angeles in 1927. He baked his chiffon cakes in his apartment kitchen in the Windsor Square neighborhood and sold them to the glamorous Brown Derby restaurant, where they pleased the palates of Hollywood’s studio stars. In 1947, Baker sold his closely guarded recipe to General Mills for an undisclosed sum—“because,” as one General Mills publication quotes him, “I wanted Betty Crocker to give the secret to the women of America.”

The complete version of Harry Baker’s life is more complicated, and you won’t find it in any cookbook, or anywhere else for that matter. “Just to mention his name was forbidden,” said his granddaughter, Sarah Baker, who is an attorney in Portland, Oregon. “I remember, maybe about 1964, my grandmother had a tea party for one of her sisters,” she recalled. “I had gone down to the kitchen to help her. She had her back to me, getting dishes out of a china cabinet, when I asked her, ‘Whatever happened to Grandfather Baker?’ “She whirled around faster than I knew she could move, looked at me absolutely furiously, and said, ‘We don’t talk about him.’ ”

Although it was wildly popular in the 1950s, the chiffon cake had been figuratively gathering dust for decades by the time I discovered the recipe in the late 1990s. It was the tail end of the glorious dot-com boom years and I, a hopeless liberal-arts kid from way back, had landed a job, mainly out of curiosity, at a prestigious design firm in downtown Minneapolis. Visions of John Cheever and Darrin Stephens launched my wife and me into a sardonic but passionate craze for everything retro-1950s. Dressed for cocktails, she would greet me at the door after work, martinis in hand; during one such happy hour, while browsing in our 1956 edition of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, I stumbled upon the recipe for chiffon. The job, the dress, the quest for fifties kitsch: forgotten. But my Betty still falls open to the creased and batter-spattered pages with the step-by-step photo directions for chiffon cake because, symbolism aside, it makes a truly splendid dessert.
Before chiffon, there had been but two types of cake. Foam cakes, like angel food, contain no shortening and rely on eggs for leavening; while butter cakes rise with baking powder. Chiffon combines the two, relying on both eggs and baking powder, and, the clincher, adds Harry Baker’s secret ingredient: vegetable oil (or, as it was called in those days, “salad oil”—another General Mills product, as it happens). The recipe calls for seven eggs. Their yolks are mixed with flour, sugar, leavening, and the oil to make a batter, which is folded into their whipped-hard whites.

The result delivers on every one of Betty Crocker’s promises: Chiffon is simple, virtually foolproof. Light, moist, rich. And above all, “glamorous.” The lemon version (the only one I make) speckles starry citrus against a snowy sky of sweet, voluptuous crumb. Never dry, never cloying, never dull, it is, in short, the perfect cake. And the rave reviews earned by my first attempt brought me back to it time and again. Members of our extended family bring pies to Thanksgiving dinner. I make chiffon.

I had been an enthusiastic baker of the cake for some time when one day, drooling through back issues of Cook’s Illustrated magazine, I chanced upon an article on chiffon by food writer and Joy of Cooking contributor Stephen Schmidt. If you’ve read Cook’s Illustrated, you’ll already know that Schmidt tinkered exhaustively with the original Betty Crocker recipe to end up with something just a little better. (So he claims. I stick with the original.)

What caught my eye, however, was a sidebar article about Harry Baker. Schmidt repeated the standard biography: insurance salesman, 1927 discovery, service to the stars, etc. But he also uncovered some new details. For one thing, he noted that Baker, during his Hollywood heyday, shared his apartment “with his aging mother.” And the sale of the recipe to General Mills took on a new twist in Schmidt’s telling: “Having been evicted from his apartment, and fearing memory loss, the usually reclusive Baker trekked uninvited to Minneapolis to sell his recipe,” he wrote.

Every one of us is blessed with curiosity, and there are those among us who can keep it at bay. I’m not one of them. Taken together, these few scraps of information hinted at a story. One thing led to another, and eventually it turned out that I spent five years, on and off, chasing the elusive Hollywood inventor of my beloved chiffon cake.

In 1923, Paramount released Hollywood, a silent film that follows the misadventures of Angela Whitaker, a hapless girl from “Centerville” who can’t land a film part in the land of dreams come true. The film is laced with nearly eighty cameo appearances by virtually every star of the silent era: Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Pola Negri, Cecil B. DeMille, Will Rogers.

That same year, tycoons who owned the Hollywoodland Real Estate erected an enormous sign to advertise their corporation. Years later, Peg Entwistle, a real-life Angela Whitaker, would throw herself off the four-story “H.” Eventually, the Hollywood chamber of commerce toppled the last four letters of the sign and it’s been an icon of American dreams ever since.

1923 also saw the arrival of Harry Baker in Hollywood. He, too, came from Ohio. He was forty years old. Behind him he’d left his wife, Mary, and two children, Harry Jr. and Mary. His insurance business had gone sour. He was broke. Looking for a new source of cash, he turned to his lifelong hobby: fudge. A confectioner in the tony Wilshire neighborhood bought it from Baker for fifty cents a pound. It was enough to afford him a living.

Harry also began to tinker with cake recipes, and he would have put Cook’s Illustrated’s Stephen Schmidt to shame. He devised more than four hundred different recipes in his quest to bake a sweeter, moister angel food cake. He varied ingredients, measurements, and the baking time and temperature. Nothing satisfied. In later years, he described the eureka moment that led him to salad oil in almost mystical terms: It was, he told a reporter at the Minneapolis Tribune, a “sixth sense—something cosmic” that revealed his secret ingredient. And it worked.

During the time that Harry Baker was handing out experimental cakes to his neighbors, a handful of entrepreneurs pooled resources to launch a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard. The Brown Derby opened for business in 1926, in a building shaped to match its name. Two years later—call it another cosmic twist—Harry Baker walked in with a sample of his unbelievable cake. It became one of the Derby’s signature dishes.

From its start, the Brown Derby featured as many star cameos as the film Hollywood. In fact, many of its first regulars had starred in the film. When a second Brown Derby opened in 1929, closer to the studios, DeMille was an investor. The plot for the film A Star is Born was conceived there, and the original version features a Brown Derby waitress in the girl-from-the-provinces role. Star-struck tourists quickly made the Derby a station on the Hollywood pilgrimage, earning it the nickname “Rubberneck Restaurant.”

The Brown Derby manager was a showman who got his start selling bottles of ocean water to tourists and is remembered primarily because of the salad named after him. Bob Cobb’s restaurant “was one of the greatest, most glamorous eating establishments in America,” said Mark Willems, who co-authored a history of the Brown Derby with Cobb’s widow, Sally. “And the chiffon cake was the cornerstone of their establishment. After Cobb salad, it was the most famous recipe they had.”

According to Willems, the most popular version of Baker’s creation was his grapefruit chiffon, which he made especially for Hollywood gossip columnist Luella Parsons. “Luella was overweight, and she held weekly staff meetings at the Derby,” he explained. “She threatened to move her meeting if they didn’t come up with a less fattening dessert. She told them ‘Put grapefruit on something, everyone knows that grapefruit is less fattening.’ ”

Though Harry Baker was only a baker, his fortunes rose with the Derby’s, and he began to move in charmed circles. Derby patrons like actresses Barbara Stanwyck and Dolores del Rio and singers Nelson Eddy and Lily Pons, to name just a few, began to request his cakes for their parties. The studio commissaries followed suit. His cakes even appeared in feature films. In 1933, while counseling her son Elliott on the subject of his divorce, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt tasted Baker’s creation at a Los Angeles party she attended with Will Rogers. Shortly after, Baker was invited to the White House to share his recipe with the staff. Baker sent a cake, but he declined the invitation, along with hundreds of other requests for his recipe from lesser mortals. Instead, he took elaborate precautions to guard it. He took care to mix the batter alone in the kitchen of his bungalow on Larchmont Boulevard; in fact, no one was allowed in his kitchen. He also hid his garbage, fearing that spies would see the high volume of used vegetable oil containers and guess his secret ingredient. And so he maintained a monopoly on his wildly popular creation.

Throughout the 1930s, the reputation for Baker’s cake spread far and wide and orders came in faster than he could fill them. He mixed batter for each cake individually and baked them separately, using twelve tin hot-plate ovens set up in a spare bedroom. Finished cakes were set to cool on the porch, where customers retrieved them, leaving two dollars’ payment in the mail slot. At the height of his business, Baker in this way produced forty-two cakes in an eighteen-hour day, from which he grossed an equivalent, in today’s dollars, of somewhere around nine hundred dollars.

Harry Baker had always been ambitious. Harry Jr., when he spoke of him at all, told his wife that it had been his father’s dream to earn a million dollars. Whether he hit that mark or not, the elder Baker had, in short order, come a long way from penury and fudge. Some of his first profits, he later told the Minneapolis Tribune, were paid to a portrait painter, who captured the likeness of his mother, Belle Baker, in oils. The result, Harry said, was “more beautiful than Whistler’s mother.”
This much of Harry Baker’s life story was easily established with a few trips to the Minneapolis library and the assistance of a helpful archivist at General Mills. But it left his first forty years unaccounted for. As is so often the case when conducting historical research, questions piled up faster than answers. Most pressing among them: Why had Harry Baker gone to Hollywood in the first place? Published accounts were pointedly vague on this point. “His business dwindled in the slump of 1921,” reported the Tribune. “He looked for a bright spot to settle, and picked Los Angeles.” But why did he leave his family?

In early 2003, I gathered what I had learned so far and wrote a short item for the Larchmont Chronicle, a newspaper that served the Hollywood neighborhood where Harry Baker had lived. I included contact information in case someone who knew about his life should read it. I received a few false leads and a few queries from curious fans of the cake in Japan (it is apparently quite popular there). Nothing happened for two years. I had more or less consigned Baker’s story to my unsolved-mystery file when I received an email from his granddaughter Sarah, the daughter of Harry Jr., who had chanced upon the article online. After a few email exchanges, it became clear that Harry Baker’s world was more complicated than I had imagined. His 1923 departure to Hollywood was precipitated by personal reasons, not economic ones.

Sarah Baker wrote: “When my father was seven years old, my grandmother answered the door and found a policeman who informed her that her husband had been arrested for performing an indecent act with a young man in a public restroom. That led to the divorce.”

“To my mother, it was a family tragedy,” said Florence Lorenz, a niece of Harry Baker. “Homosexuality was a taboo subject in those days. Not only did they not talk about it, they didn’t even know about it.” Harry’s wife Mary, one of six girls, was close with her sisters, including Florence’s mother Winifred, who witnessed the aftermath of his arrest. “The policeman came to the door, and Mother didn’t even know what they were talking about,” Florence reported.

When they finally deciphered the nature of the charges that Harry Baker faced, Mary and her sisters were scandalized. “It came as terrible shock,” said Mary Dalton, another niece. “They had grown up with Harry, and so they had known each other for a long time. He was supposed to be a fine young man with Christian ideals and seemed like a suitable spouse for someone who grew up with a minister for a father.”

These assumptions rapidly unraveled after the truth about Harry Baker’s sexual orientation came to light. Harry, bound for Hollywood, left behind a wife in her mid-thirties and two small children. Mary sold the furniture, hoping to raise enough money to rent a furnished apartment, but without support or employment, she finally moved into her mother’s home in Lima, Ohio, where three of her sisters lived already.

“It was a big two-story house with a backyard and fruit trees and a grape arbor,” remembered Susan Baumgarten, another granddaughter of Harry Baker, who lived in the home in later years. “They had a basement where they did laundry with an old-fashioned laundry machine where you had to wring out the clothes.” This work would have been Mary’s. “She had to depend on her sisters for support, so she kept house for them,” Baumgarten said. In later years, Mary’s mother and one of her sisters developed Parkinson’s disease, and she cared for them after they lost their mobility. According to various family members, Harry Baker never sent any support to his ex-wife.

Divorce, to say nothing of homosexuality, was never discussed in the family. Many of Harry Baker’s relatives said they knew little more than rumors about his life; and, except for Sarah Baker, none dared to ask his ex-wife, Mary, about his fate. “I found her to be a stern and somewhat austere disciplinarian,” Sarah remembered. Susan Baumgarten saw her a bit differently: “I wouldn’t say that she was bitter—it was more like a Christian martyr situation. She was going to be a survivor.”

Regardless, the heavy silence that hung over the matter of Harry’s desertion affected the children. “My husband never mentioned him,” recalled Jane Baker, who married Harry Jr. in 1944. “He never talked about him at all, except to say that he ‘left the family.’ That was the way he put it. I learned later from one of his cousins that he was a homosexual. Grandmother Baker, she was very nice, but she was stern. She stuck to business. But I gather, from what I have picked up from the family, that she was very kind to my husband as a small child. I think she knew he missed his father, but she never said that. They just never talked about him.”

This taboo was passed down. “I don’t think I ever heard about him at all until I was probably thirteen or fourteen,” Sarah Baker recalled. “Later, my mother would sometimes confide in me. ‘You know, your Grandfather was a homosexual,’ she would say—but never with my father or brothers present.” When Sarah finally heard the story of his arrest, from one of her great-aunts, she took the information to her mother. It was news to her. With her father, Harry Jr., Sarah never discussed the subject.

In the early 1990s, a relative compiled a family history and genealogy and mailed a copy to Harry, Jr. “My father kind of pooh-poohed it,” Sarah said. “Eventually he read it, but he must have had to muster up the courage.” Turns out there was nothing in the family history about the elder Harry Baker’s secret past.

While his wife was working the laundry machine for her mother and sisters back in Ohio, Harry was making his new life in Hollywood. By 1930, as his cake business flourished, he was living with another man, “Mac,” who served as his assistant baker.

Sally Cobb, who ran the Brown Derby with her husband Bob, remarked on the pair to Mark Willems. “Sally was very gay savvy,” Willems said. “She had many gay friends, and she talked about those two guys, Harry Baker and his friend, that they lived together and ran the business together.” In those days, even in Hollywood, such arrangements were rare, Willems added. Rather than risk the scandal of living together, “a gay couple would buy houses next door to each other.”

Baker somehow kept his relationship with Mac a secret from his mother Belle, who made periodic extended visits from Lima and died in his home in 1934. “I remember my grandmother talking about Mac,” said Betty Heisser, one of Harry’s nieces, “but not their relationship. To her, that would have been unthinkable.”

Harry Baker wasn’t the only illustrious culinary figure on the Hollywood scene in the 1930s. In the same year that Eleanor Roosevelt and Will Rogers were sampling Baker’s chiffon, Marjorie Child Husted, the brains behind Betty Crocker, cooked up a spectacular marketing illusion. She herself began posing as the fictional Betty Crocker.

Traipsing around Hollywood, cameras in tow, “Husted/Crocker enjoyed cocktail parties, sightseeing trips, luncheons, yachting excursions, and movie debuts,” wrote Susan Marks in Finding Betty Crocker, her history of the brand. “Soon she had free access to closed movie sets and permission to interview anyone she cared to.” Husted brought star power to Betty Crocker’s popular weekly radio show, revealing on air the secrets of Robert Taylor’s lemon meringue pie, Clark Gable’s cake frosting, and Joan Crawford’s potatoes on the half shell.

Inevitably, she found her way to the Brown Derby restaurant, where it’s likely she encountered Harry Baker’s cake. (A decade later, Husted collaborated with Cobb on a cookbook of Brown Derby favorites.)

This coincidental collision between Baker and Crocker on the eve of the Second World War is what propels Harry Baker’s personal history into the realm of cultural studies. Or, if you prefer, Fellini: The gay baker, exiled from his staid Midwestern family, enters the gossamer world of Hollywood fantasy. There, he meets up with the fictional persona of a culinary corporation. Like a relay runner, he hands off his life’s achievement, his signature cake recipe, to Betty; she in turn sells it back to America as the hallmark of the very domestic life that Baker had spurned.

This cycle is completed with a story from Sarah Baker, about the time when her father, Harry Baker Jr., who grew up to be a minister, was posted to a church in Gibsonburg, Ohio. “The women’s group at the church made up a cookbook,” she recalled, “and one of them contributed a recipe for chiffon cake. My mother said when she saw that, she felt like she had to keep her mouth shut. She just didn’t want to open up the subject.”

Betty Crocker’s image had as much to do with femininity as cooking. In her first radio broadcast in 1924, according to Finding Betty Crocker, Betty asked listeners, “If you load a man’s stomach with soggy boiled cabbage, greasy fried potatoes, can you wonder that he wants to start a fight or go out and commit a crime? We should be grateful that he does nothing worse than display a lot of temper.”

By the end of World War II, when Fortune Magazine named her the second-most-popular woman in America, surpassed only by Eleanor Roosevelt, Crocker’s image had become “supercharged with ideas about how a woman ought to be and behave,” Marks said. “She was about being the anchor of the family: A savvy consumer, a good wife and mother. The connection between love and food was a rich undercurrent.”

That connection was just a small aspect of a complicated set of cultural expectations that took hold during the 1950s. “During the war, women had worked and were educated and had aspirations,” said Elaine Tyler May, a professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota and the author of Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. “But after the war, doors closed, and the one big door that opened was the home. Women said, ‘I may not be able to be a doctor or an artist, but I’ll be a career homemaker.’ Take care of the children, be a good partner, and be sexy and glamorous.”

General Mills, through Betty Crocker, played no small part in creating this mystique. My 1956 edition of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book includes, in addition to recipes and instructions for table settings, an illustrated list of “special helps” that hint at the frustrations of the career housewife: “Notice humorous and interesting incidents to relate at dinnertime when the family is together,” reads one. Another advises readers to “harbor pleasant thoughts while working. It will make every task lighter and pleasanter.” Still another suggests that they lie down on the kitchen floor to avoid fatigue: “Let your arms, hands, and head fall limp.”

The 1950s also saw an unprecedented wave of anti-gay sentiment. As Senator Joseph McCarthy executed his notorious crusade against communists, his colleagues, including Senators Styles Bridges and Kenneth Wherry, were taking steps to bar gays and lesbians from public service in the less-remembered “Lavender Scare.” The rationale for the politics was that homosexuals in government service would be susceptible to blackmail. Some went so far as to accuse communists of spreading homosexuality in order to undermine American values. As with today’s debates over gay marriage, vote-hungry senators divided and conquered the electorate by appeals to prejudice. Thousands of civil servants lost their jobs after laws (which stood on the books until the mid-1970s) were passed to eject gays and lesbians from the government.

These two gender codes of the 1950s—the homemaker and the homosexual, the domestic and the deviant—defined America’s protectorate and our enemy. More delicious than the flavor of chiffon cake, then, is its historical irony. “This cake was developed in the closet by a gay man—the farthest from the Betty Crocker mystique that you could imagine,” May said, “and then it was adopted as a postwar modern recipe for the new homemaker.”

Fantasy has an essential, positive quality. Illusion distracts us from painful truths. And so just as Hollywood idols distracted the country from the Depression, war, and nuclear annihilation, Betty Crocker reassured the dejected housewives of America—their hands limp, prone on their kitchen floors—that tending their husbands, homes, and children was their biological destiny.

There is always at least a slight gap, however, between fantasy and reality—a crack into which we pour that uncomfortable notion that we are fooling ourselves. No one is more conscious of that gap than the manufacturers of the fantasy. “Nobody ever completely bought into that saccharine image of America. There was an element of camp to it all along,” said Daniel Harris, a cultural critic and the author of The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. “There was always a delight in ridiculing it on the part of the people who were its instruments. Judy Garland embodied the wholesome American idol, and it is rumored that while she was performing she would say to Mickey Rooney, ‘I have gonorrhea, can I suck you off tonight.’ She continually expressed her fatigue and contempt for what she symbolized.”

And what of Harry Baker? What is the fantasy in his history? The truth? His aspiration was to earn a million dollars. He made it a point in every city he lived, his niece Florence Lorenz reported, to obtain the address of Post Office Box Number One. Picture him approaching forty, at the cusp of the 1920s. He is respectable. He sells insurance. He is married to the second of six daughters of a Methodist minister. He has a son and a daughter, named for himself and his wife. He is a portrait of Ohio, of middle America. He is the embodiment of an entire nation’s yearning—maybe an entire world’s, maybe an entire species’—to reproduce in a world of unending abundance.

And then, the encounter in that restroom: the great failure, the human flaw that cracked the façade. Or was it his grand gesture? Breakdown or triumph—either way, it became the means to his liberation.
And for his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren? He simply disappeared. “He was a deep, dark secret,” said Susan Baumgarten. “We always thought he was dead.”

After he sold his recipe—some say for twenty-five thousand dollars, some fifty thousand dollars, though the exact number was kept secret—Harry Baker slipped from view. Mac, his companion, eventually married and had children. During the 1950s, Baker’s daughter briefly hired a private investigator to hunt him down, without luck. A rumor placed him in South America. There is a death record, though: At 6:30 a.m., on September 27, 1974, at the age of ninety-one, Harry Baker suffered heart failure at the California Convalescent Center in Los Angeles.

Though Mary Baker never spoke of her husband’s abandonment, it weighed heavily on her mind. In the baby book that she kept for Harry Jr., a late entry is written in the unsteady hand of an old woman. It reads in its entirety:

“I should explain: In the fall of 1923 when Harry was 7 years old his father decided he could probably make a better living in California. Business was very low—and the depression causing difficulties. We sold all of the furniture and since the future was uncertain, his father left for California. That was the last time we saw him.

We tried to find a furnished apartment we could afford. Finally grandmother very kindly invited us to make our home with her. Aunt Margaret, Aunt Helen, and Aunt Winifred also lived there.
We had a wonderful home life.”