James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  Instead, as he approached its open window, Jimmy pulled out a flick knife and seemed to threaten the driver, who stepped on the gas and sped away.

  After that, Jimmy returned to their penthouse. Bast quickly retreated to the bedroom and pretended to be asleep. He didn’t want him to know that he’d witnessed the scene below.

  Back at Barney’s Beanery, Jimmy looked around the room at the many out-of-work actors who had managed to scrape together enough money for a bowl of Barney’s dubious chili.

  Suddenly, Jimmy’s face lit up. “I’ve got this great idea. I’ll go to New York and find us a place to live. Why don’t you follow me? We’ll be two struggling actors trying to make it in the cultural capital of the world, where our talents are sure to be appreciated.”

  “That might not be a bad idea,” Bast said. “Let’s keep in touch after you get there. When you have an address, send it to me. I’ll respond at once.”

  After more talk and more plans, the two men retreated to the sidewalk, where they warmly embraced for a farewell. “I hope that faggot-hating Barney isn’t watching,” Jimmy said. Then he kissed Bast on both cheeks and headed out into the fading afternoon, toward his new life.

  Later that evening, after Bast had returned to his modest studio, he could hear the shouts of the spectators across the street, roaring from the American Legion Stadium, where a violent wrestling match was being staged between a white giant and a black giant.

  Missing Jimmy, he fell asleep listening to the roar of the crowd. “Break his neck! Tear the fucker apart!”

  Unhappy, and In Chicago

  JIMMY ENJOYS A BRIEF FLING WITH A MARRIED STARLET WHO CHALLENGED THE HOLLYWOOD PRODUCTION CODE

  It was in Chicago that Brackett made his debut into the field of television. His decision was partially based on references in The Hollywood Reporter about the challenges confronting radio from the emerging media of “the little black box.”

  One of his first duties involved supervision of a show for kiddies entitled Meadow Gold Ranch. He told Jimmy, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Television is the medium of the future, and you should seek work in TV dramas being filmed in Manhattan.”

  “But I want to become a movie star,” Jimmy protested.

  “Why not a TV star?”

  After his arrival in the Windy City, Jimmy entered the lobby of The Ambassador East, one of the most expensive hotels in Chicago. Dressed in jeans, he had draped Sidney Franklin’s blood-soaked matador’s cape over one of his shoulders. After registering himself into Brackett’s room, his battered suitcase was carried onto the elevator by a smartly uniformed bellhop, who Jimmy claimed “looked like a dead ringer for John Derek.”

  Whereas with Bast, he had maintained the pretense that his relationship with Brackett was no longer sexual, Brackett told a different story. “I don’t think Jimmy was in the door for more than ten minutes before I had his clothes off. The pickings for me in Chicago had been lean, and I was hungry. Sex in the morning, sex when I came in from the office, and sex after retiring to bed. The kid told me I exhausted him.”

  Jimmy seemed lost in the vast sprawl of Chicago and stayed mostly within the hotel room, not wanting to wander alone on his own.

  During his fourth evening in town, a guest arrived at their hotel room. It was David Swift, a respected director, screenwriter, animator, and producer. He would later recall his introduction to Jimmy: “I knocked several times before this young man slowly opened the door and peered out. I think Rogers was in the shower. The kid had on this tattered old matador’s cape and seemed to be rehearsing an imaginary bullfight. Instead of telling me who he was, he shouted ‘TORO! TORO!’ I thought he might be insane.”

  Suddenly, having wrapped a robe around himself, Brackett was in the room, pushing Jimmy aside. “It was then that I learned that this crazy guy was James Dean, and that he was this actor wannabe,” Swift said.

  He had arrived to accompany his friend, Brackett, and Dean to the Chicago production of the controversial play, The Moon Is Blue. It starred Swift’s young and attractive new wife, actress Maggie McNamara. In a previous production that starred Barbara Bel Geddes, it had been a hit on Broadway, where it had been attacked for its “light and gay treatment of seduction, illicit sex, chastity, and virginity.”

  Jimmy found the play candid and exciting and enjoyed its frank discussions about sex. He was charmed by McNamara’s performance and told her so backstage after the performance.

  Maggie McNamara, as she appeared on the cover of Life magazine in April, 1950.

  Over thick Chicago steaks, as Swift renewed his friendship with Brackett, McNamara and Jimmy got to know each other. Swift informed everyone that he was developing a TV sitcom, Mister Peppers, scheduled for transmission on NBC during the summer of 1952. Its star was Wally Cox.

  [As a gossipy footnote, Swift claimed that Cox was the lover of Marlon Brando. That information fascinated Jimmy. It was perhaps the first time he’d heard that Brando was bisexual.]

  ...and years later, as she starred in an episode of The Twilight Zone (“RingaDing Girl”).

  McNamara, a New Yorker, had been a teen fashion model and had appeared on the April, 1950 cover of Life magazine. She said that producer David O. Selznick had seen the magazine cover and had offered her a movie contract. “I turned it down. I’m not ready for movies yet.”

  Whereas Swift had not been particularly impressed with Jimmy, he later admitted, “For Maggie and Jimmy, it was instant love. My wife just adored him and practically wanted to adopt him and make him part of our household.”

  During the days ahead, while Brackett and Swift were otherwise occupied, McNamara and Jimmy set out to explore Chicago together during the daylight hours. According to Swift, “I know I should have been jealous, but Rogers assured me that Jimmy was one hundred percent homosexual. I later learned that was not true.”

  Jimmy told Bast that on three different afternoons, he returned with McNamara to the suite she otherwise occupied with Swift. “We made love, and I was really into her.”

  Bast speculated that “Jimmy was eager to establish his heterosexual credentials after all the gay sex he’d had. He also told me that they didn’t spend as much time exploring the glories of Chicago. Instead, they talked for hours, plotting their future careers. The two lovebirds really seemed into each other. I don’t think Swift and Brackett had a clue.”

  “Whether it was true or not,” Bast continued, “Jimmy also told me that when the time came for him to say goodbye to McNamara, her final words to him were, ‘I should have married you instead of David. You and I are kindred souls.”

  [Eventually director Otto Preminger would cast McNamara as the female lead, alongside William Holden and David Niven, in the 1953 film version of The Moon Is Blue. The movie challenged the censorship provisions of the Production Code of its day and was consequently banned in several states, including Maryland, Ohio, and Kansas. Preminger appealed the ban all the way to the Supreme Court and won his case. The ban was overturned, and The Moon Is Blue became credited as instrumental in weakening the influence of censorship in the film industry.

  For her role in it, McNamara was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress of the Year. She later appeared in the romantic drama, Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), and also played the lead opposite Richard Burton in a biopic Prince of Players (1955) about the mid-19th-century Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth.

  Her career, however, was in serious decline by the mid-1950s, offers for acting jobs only sporadic. Preminger claimed that “Maggie suffered greatly after becoming a star. Something went wrong with her marriage to David Swift. She had a nervous breakdown.”

  Her last appearance was with the silent screen great, Lillian Gish, on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1964. After that, she faded from public view and worked as a typist until her death on February 18, 1978.

  She was found dead on the sofa of her New York apartment, having overdosed on sleeping pills.]

  Childhood Memories Co
me Flooding Back

  JIMMY RETURNS TO FAIRMOUNT

  Before establishing a life for himself in New York, Jimmy told Brackett that he wanted to return to Fairmount, Indiana, to visit his family, especially his aunt and uncle, Ortense and Marcus Winslow, who had reared him as a little boy after his mother died.

  Brackett, who remained behind, bought him a round-trip ticket from Central Chicago to the train depot at Marion (Indiana), where it was understood that the Winslows would meet his incoming train.

  As he rode the rails, many memories of his boyhood in the 1940s came racing back.

  At this point in his life, Jimmy had not yet made any of his legendary films, nor had he yet taken Hollywood by storm. But in a short time, he would become the most famous alumnus of Fairmount. Unlike Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, he had not been born into poverty. As a teenager on a Midwestern farm, he had led a comfortable middle-class life.

  His Aunt Ortense remembered him as “a pretty boy, fair-skinned, rosy-cheeked, with ruby red lips. His mother always dressed him real cute until he finally adopted his own style: Blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and boots.”

  His first train ride to Fairmount had transpired in 1940, as part of his 2,000-mile “funeral cortège” from Los Angeles aboard “The Challenger.” His grandmother, Emma Dean, had accompanied him, along with the embalmed corpse of his dead mother, Mildred. It had traveled within a sealed coffin, within a car otherwise devoted to luggage.

  Years had passed since his post-graduation departure from the Winslow homestead. Whereas the family’s ownership of its 14-room farmhouse had survived the Great Depression, many of their neighbors had lost their homes through foreclosures by greedy banks.

  The Winslows had always been warm-hearted guardians.

  In this small Hoosier town of 2,700, Jimmy as a boy raced along maple-shaded Main Street, a thoroughfare lined with staid, matronly, white-painted Victorian homes with moss-green shutters. He remembered the scene as reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell cover for The Saturday Evening Post.

  Route 9 connected Fairmount with Marion, ten miles to the north, where Jimmy had lived, temporarily, with his parents.

  Now, with Brackett far away in Chicago, Jimmy settled once again for a reunion with the Winslows and the circumstances of his childhood.

  Within a reasonable time after his arrival, Jimmy left the house and headed for the Rexall Drugstore, where he ordered a chocolate malt. Ironically, something akin to that had been choreographed opposite Charles Coburn during his one big scene in the movie, Has Anybody Seen My Gal?

  As a farm boy during his childhood, Jimmy had been taught to perform daily chores—feeding the chickens their grain, sweeping out the barn, collecting freshly laid eggs, milking cows, and helping with the spring planting. Marcus had even purchased a pony for him to ride through the fields. In summer, he fished for carp in a nearby creek.

  At the local public schools, he was bright and intelligent, but often didn’t listen in class and rebelled against doing homework. He earned mostly Cs and Ds on his report card.

  When he had turned fifteen, his uncle got him a summer job in a nearby factory that canned tomatoes. “I earned ten cents an hour and felt like a character in a John Steinbeck novel,” Jimmy later said.

  Jimmy Dean: High school basketball team member, despite his myopia.

  Later, his uncle bought him a motorcycle, a model from Czechoslovakia. Once he was safely away from the sightlines of anyone watching from his uncle’s farm, he stepped on the gas, navigating around “Suicide Curve” at full throttle. Many accidents, including two deaths, had been suffered within recent memory by motorists who did not maneuver their way around the curve.

  Jimmy’s fascination with motorcycles would continue throughout the rest of his life. One of his female classmates complained, “We learned to get out of Dean’s way when we heard him roaring in on that damned motorcycle. Sometimes, he seemed to be trying to run over us. He was very reckless. His accidental death was often predicted.”

  Before he graduated from high school, Jimmy reached his full height of 5’8”, weighing 140 pounds.

  In spite of his small stature, he excelled at sports, particularly basketball. His coach claimed that “The boy often had to jump three feet in the air, but he got the ball in the hoop. His playmates nicknamed him, ‘Jumping Jim.’ In fact, he became our champion player, in spite of the fact that he also had to wear glasses because he was nearsighted.”

  “He broke his glasses faster than I could buy him a new pair,” said Marcus.

  Jimmy also took up pole vaulting and excelled at that sport, too, although he quickly tired of it.

  His mother, Mildred, had been the first to notice his artistic flair. In Fairmount, he had often wandered down by the creek or in the meadows, sketching landscapes and still lifes. When not preoccupied with that, he hurled himself into track and field pursuits.

  ***

  No one would have more influence on Jimmy than the local Methodist pastor, Dr. James DeWeerd, who was viewed locally as a hero. Evoking Billy Graham, he combined dramatic rhetoric delivered with the flair of an actor.

  Shortly before his fifteenth birthday, Jimmy developed a strong crush on the reverend, who seemed responsive to the needs of this cute adolescent. In his early thirties, the Wesleyan minister was known for his charisma and histrionics in the pulpit.

  Jimmy’s child-molesting priest, James DeWeerd

  DeWeerd had traveled widely in Europe and had once studied in England at Cambridge University. During World War II, he’d served as an army chaplain. After a serious injury, he was awarded a Purple Heart for rescuing some fellow soldiers from a fire set by the Nazi Luftwaffe.

  Jimmy was fascinated by DeWeerd’s war wounds. Shortly after they met, the pastor removed his shirt and let Jimmy inspect his scars.

  He could almost put his fist into the scarred hole in DeWeerd’s stomach. As he later confessed to Bracket. “I got sexually excited trying to put my fist into that hole.”

  Not everyone in Fairmount succumbed to DeWeerd’s spell. Some of the older boys called him “Dr. Weird” or “Miss Priss.” At the time, homosexuality was almost never mentioned. Instead, the pastor was defined as “eccentric” rather than queer, a widely adopted synonym for homosexual back then.

  DeWeerd was known to round up a carful of the high school’s top athletes and drive them to the neighboring hamlet of Anderson. There, he would watch them strip down and swim naked in the YMCA’s swimming pool. He often invited the better-endowed and/or more receptive ones to his elegantly furnished home, where he lived with his mother, Leila DeWeerd, an aging schoolteacher.

  At the time, homosexuality was interpreted as “worse than communism.” One basketball player was alert to DeWeerd’s sexual preference. Years later, he told a reporter that “the good pastor was always in the locker room checking out our stuff as we wandered down the corridor, bare-ass, to the shower room. Some of the guys knew of his interest and soaped themselves up a bit in the shower, so that they could produce a partial hard-on for this preacher man.”

  “He gave many of us blow-jobs back then,” the athlete claimed. “That was a good thing for some of us because gals didn’t put out much until marriage.”

  Jimmy would later describe the Reverend DeWeerd to William Bast, remembering him as a handsome man and rather stocky. “He had a jovial and was very kind, very loving, and his blue eyes forgave me, regardless of what I had done.” He also recalled the pastor’s rather full and sensuous lips.

  “He put those lips to work on me, exploring every inch of my body,” he confessed to Bast. “Every crevice. I lost my virginity to him.”

  The doctor did more than just seduce young Jimmy. He imbued him with a philosophy of life, telling him, “The more things you know how to do, and the more you experience, the better off you’ll be—and that pertains to sexuality as well.”

  DeWeerd was the most cultured man in Fairmount. He introduced Jimmy to yoga, the bongo drums, Shakespeare,
and Tchaikovsky. He also introduced him to car racing and bullfighting.

  An aficionado, DeWeerd showed Jimmy movies of the bullfights he’d filmed in Mexico City, Seville, and Toledo, Spain. He also had a private collection of nude pictures of well-endowed bullfighters, something that probably affected Jimmy’s life-long fascination with bullfighting.

  DeWeerd also taught Jimmy how to drive. One of their shared highlights involved an excursion to the “Indy 500” races in Indianapolis. There, DeWeerd introduced him to the ace driver “Cannon Ball” Baker. According to Marcus, “When he got back home, the boy discussed nothing but car racing for days at a time.”

  Jimmy was at the DeWeerd house for dinner three or four nights a week, the Winslows putting up no objection to the frequency of those visits. After the pastor’s mother retired for the evening, Jimmy and DeWeerd would read to each other or listen to classical music.

  In September of 1956, DeWeerd granted an interview to The Chicago Tribune. “Jimmy was usually happiest stretched out on my library floor, reading Shakespeare and other books. He loved good music playing softly in the background., Tchaikovsky was his favorite.”

  What DeWeerd didn’t tell the newspaper was that after his mother was safely asleep, he invited Jimmy to his downstairs bedroom and watched as he stripped down. He always said, “I want you naked for this workout.”

  As Jimmy later confessed, “He paid lip service to me. There wasn’t a protrusion or hole that he missed.”

  Sometimes, after they’d made love, Jimmy would lie in DeWeerd’s bed and indulge in what he called “spiritual talks.”

  The pastor said, “All of us are lonely and searching. But, because Jimmy was so sensitive, he was lonelier and he searched harder. He wanted the final answers, and I think I taught him to believe in a person’s immortality. He had no fear of death because he believed, as I do, that death is merely a control of mind over matter.”