A new biography of Hollywood legend Cesar Romero delves into how the famously single actor — perhaps best known for playing the Joker in the 1960s Batman TV series — may have felt about his alleged homosexuality.

While speculation about Romero’s sexuality goes back decades, in Cesar Romero: The Joker is Wild, author Samuel Garza Bernstein admits that speculation and secondhand accounts are pretty much all that’s left for film historians to go by. Romero, Berstein writes, was incredibly tight-lipped when it came to his private life and personal feelings, even among friends and colleagues.

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“There are no existing, verifiable accounts of any relationships. Even the generally accepted notion of his love affair with [fellow actor and close friend] Tyrone Power is speculative,” Bernstein writes in an excerpt from the book published last month by LGBTQ Nation sibling site Queerty.

According to Bernstein, even Romero’s close friend Ruta Lee isn’t sure whether his relationship with Power “ever became physical.”

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His discretion, Bernstein writes, prevented Romero from ever being outted by scandal rags like the infamous Confidential magazine during his lifetime, or in Full Service, Scotty Bowers’ 2012 memoir about his time as a procurer for closeted stars.

“He wasn’t at the notorious Hollywood gay parties,” Berstein recently told The Advocate of Romero. “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.”

Bernstein writes that Romero would have had “no conceptual frame of reference for LGBTQIA+ equality in the modern sense” and was “not a fan of public spectacles,” like the 1969 Stonewall riots, that might have confirmed “the ‘deviance’ of his own orientation.” However, the author is skeptical of how much we can glean about how Romero felt about his sexuality from Everybody Loves Raymond star Doris Roberts’ account of the actor bursting into tears while they were filming Simple Justice in 1989 and crying, “I don’t know why I am the way I am.”

“He may have gotten a little tipsy that night and indulged in a self-pitying crying jag,” Bernstein writes.

As he told The Advocate, Bernstein believes that Romero, who died in 1994 at the age of 86, “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.”

Bernstein noted that Romero never entered into a sham marriage or allowed himself to be set up on a date with a Hollywood starlet for publicity’s sake. “He didn’t make himself miserable pretending,” Bernstein told The Advocate. “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.”

“He was code-switching his whole life,” Bernstein added. “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.”

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