James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  When Jimmy wasn’t with Wilder, he went to the movie theaters, alone, near Times Square. Once again, he sat through A Streetcar Named Desire, focusing on the performance of, among others, Marlon Brando. More than once, he entered one of the theaters at 1PM and left around nine hours later. For food and drink, he purchased three cokes and two bags of popcorn, which collectively comprised both his lunch and dinner.

  In addition to Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Jimmy became fascinated with another movie that would impact his acting style. It was the 1951 release of A Place in the Sun, directed by George Stevens and starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters. All three actors would eventually play a role in Jimmy’s life during the months to come.

  Movies and players that deeply influenced Manhattan newbie, James Dean: Montgomery Clift & Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun

  A Place in the Sun was a cinematic adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s novel, published in 1925, An American Tragedy.

  Jimmy was mesmerized by Clift’s brilliant performance alongside the luminous beauty of Taylor. He was also impressed with Winters’ portrayal of a plain, ordinary-looking girl who gets pregnant and is subsequently drowned so that Clift can clear his road to marriage with the rich, beautiful, and socially connected girl played by Taylor. Ultimately, however, his murder of the girl played by Winters leads to his execution in the electric chair.

  The day after watching the movie, Jimmy visited a library and checked out a copy of the original novel by Theodore Dreiser, reading it cover to cover in three days.

  His deep regret was that he had not been awarded the role of the doomed lover played by Clift. He poured out his frustrations to Wilder. “I think you could have done it,” Wilder said. “After all, the role calls for a man who is both masculine and sensitive, in need of a lot of mothering.”

  “The part would have fitted me like a second skin,” he responded. “I’m jealous of Clift. A Place in the Sun has made him a major star.”

  Months later, Jimmy watched in dismay as both Brando and Clift lost their bids for an Academy Award, the Oscar going instead to Humphrey Bogart for his role in The African Queen.

  At the time, Jimmy didn’t realize that eventually, he would become intimately involved with both Brando and Clift.

  Making “Snaketime” with Moondog the Viking

  PANHANDLING AND PERFORMING ON THE SIDEWALKS OF MANHATTAN

  Alec Wilder wasn‘t the only composer Jimmy met during his early days in New York City.

  One day, Jimmy—jobless, hungry, completely broke, and strolling along Bleeker Street—wanted to stop at one of the cafés for a sandwich.

  Suddenly, as if in a mirage, he heard the sound of a drumbeat coming from a strange-looking sidewalk musician. He wore a dirty, tattered cloak and a Viking helmet with horns. He had a long, scruffy beard and was obviously blind.

  Jimmy introduced himself to Louis Thomas Hardin, learning that his nicknames included “Moondog” and “The Viking of Sixth Avenue.” Moondog’s usual turf stretched along three blocks of Sixth Avenue between 52nd and 55th Streets, where he spent his time selling sheet music and panhandling. Often, he just stood still, silently accepting the dimes and quarters that passers-by dropped into his basket.

  Drawn to the outcasts of the world, the more bizarre the more intriguing. Jimmy, with Moondog, soon developed an “odd couple” friendship. Jimmy learned that he’d been born in Kansas and had started playing the drums at the age of five. He’d made his first drum from a cardboard box. When his family moved to Wyoming, he had a tom-tom made from buffalo skin. At the age of sixteen, he’d lost his eyesight in a farm accident that involved an exploding dynamite cap. He later learned some music theory from books printed in Braille.

  During World War II, he moved to New York, where, in time, he met jazz performers who included Benny Goodman and Charlie Parker. Even Arturo Toscanini and Leonard Bernstein befriended him.

  “Moondog,” depicted above, was a blind musician whose performance art was often accompanied by rhythms from Jimmy as a street musician playing his bongo drums.

  He made a living by selling copies of his poetry and (heavily edited) articles about musical philosophy and by performing in street concerts.

  In time, Jimmy got to know him better and would soon seek him out. At first, he thought he was homeless, but found out that he occupied an apartment on the Upper West Side. Once, Jimmy visited him there. Moondog told him that his music was usually inspired by the traditions of the Native Americans he’d met in Wyoming, with input from classical music and contemporary jazz. “I mix all that with sounds I hear on the street—the noise of traffic, the sound of a baby crying.”

  “The chatter of wives at an open market, the melody of ocean waves, the rumbling of trains on the subway, the eerie lament of a foghorn in the harbor. When I put it all together, I call it ‘Snaketime.’”

  He showed Jimmy instruments he’d created, one of which was the “Trimba,” a triangular percussion instrument.

  On a few occasions, Moondog allowed Jimmy to participate, for tips, in street concerts. Jimmy would play his bongo drums.

  “I remember one cold winter day, we’d been making music out on the street for hours—me on guitar, Jimmy on bongos,” Moondog said. “We’d made about two dollars each. I said, ‘Let’s split and get some food.’ I spent my money in a coffee shop, but he decided to go hungry and see a movie instead.”

  ***

  One afternoon, as Jimmy and Alec Wilder were returning from lunch, they were walking through the lobby of the Algonquin. Coming toward them was the formidable Tallulah Bankhead, one of Broadway’s great leading ladies, an actress known for her husky (and much-satirized) voice, her outrageous personality, and her devastating wit. She was also notorious for her private life, having nurtured a string of affairs with some of the leading men and ladies of the screen and stage. Her conquests had included Sir Winston Churchill, Marlon Brando, Johnny Weissmuller (“Me, Tarzan!), and Hattie McDaniel, who had played Mammy in Gone With the Wind.

  Unknown to Wilder, Jimmy already knew Bankhead, having met her at the home of Joan Davis when he was dating her daughter, Beverly Wills. Davis had become a regular on Bankhead’s talk radio show.

  There in the lobby, to Wilder’s surprise, Jimmy made a running leap toward Bankhead, jumping up into her arms and wrapping his own arms around her. Wilder was stunned by this, and surprised that his trajectory hadn’t knocked her down.

  Then he kissed her passionately. “When they became unglued, I didn’t ask how they knew each other,” Wilder said. “But we did accept her invitation to a small private party later that night in her suite.”

  At 9PM Jimmy, with Wilder, knocked on the door of Tallulah’s suite at the Algonquin. The sounds of a raucous party could be heard. To the surprise of both men, when she opened the door, Bankhead was completely nude. “Come in, Dah-lings,” she said. “The party is well underway, although so far, no one’s fucked me yet.”

  Then she looked Jimmy up and down. “Perhaps my luck has changed.”

  Jimmy was flabbergasted that she’d be the hostess of a party in the nude, but Wilder was well aware of her antics.

  When Bankhead darted off, Wilder engaged in a dialogue with Mabel Mercer, the cabaret singer. Jimmy wandered off among the thirty or so guests.

  At one point, he encountered Helen Hayes. Although he hadn’t seen any or her movies or stage performances, he recognized her face from the newspapers. She was the great doyenne of the Broadway stage, a distinguished actress short of stature and big on talent.

  In a soft voice, Hayes said to Jimmy, “I told Tallulah that nudity was all right within the privacy of her suite. But I warned her to stay in her room and not run up and down the corridors in an undressed state.”

  “Good advice,” Jimmy said, before moving on.

  AT one point, Tallulah sought Jimmy out. Taking him by his arm, she led him across the room, where an actor who looked like John Barrymore
stood by himself nursing a drink. “Mr. Dean, this is John Emery, my former husband. I divorced him in Reno in 1941.”

  After shaking Emery’s hand, Bankhead made an impressive move. She unzipped her former husband’s pants and pulled out a large, uncut penis. “Look at this whopper, darling.” She said. “A two-hander, even though it’s still soft. You don’t encounter one of these monsters that often.”

  Smiling politely, Emery replaced his penis and zipped up again. “Oh, Tallulah, you must control yourself.” He didn’t seem all that embarrassed.

  Jimmy suspected that that outrageous bit of schtick had been repeated many times during the course of their marriage.

  The party wound down at around midnight. Before he exited, Wilder asked Jimmy, “Are you coming?”

  “I’ll be back soon,” he said. “Tallulah has invited me to her bedroom. I’ll catch you later.”

  At around 5AM, Wilder was awakened. Switching on the light, he saw a battered Jimmy. He didn’t have much to say. But later that morning, over breakfast, he was more talkative about what had transpired.

  “Ever since I first met Tallulah, I had this fantasy about my sticking my dick into that luscious mouth of hers.” Jimmy confessed. “It has something to do with the way she moves her lips. Well, last night, my fantasy came true, plus a lot of other nightmare I didn’t contemplate. She complained that I almost choked her to death with an explosion of cream. She said it was at least as thick as the cream her old Alabama cow, Deliah, used to give when she was a girl growing up in the South.”

  Three nights later, Bankhead called, inviting Jimmy and Wilder to join her at Norma’s Room, a nightclub in Harlem, a cabaret that attracted black entertainers, including Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, and Nat King Cole.

  Before the night was over, Bankhead herself rose to perform on the small stage at Norma’s. She danced the Black Bottom and sang her theme song, “Bye Bye Blackbird,” followed by hilarious impersonations of Ethel Barrymore, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Bette Davis.

  As a spontaneous climax to her equally spontaneous act, she turned three cartwheels, demonstrating to the audience that she’d forgotten to wear panties.

  After that night in Harlem, Bankhead faded from Jimmy’s life as fast and as impulsively as she’d entered it.

  ***

  [In the early 1960s in Key West, Bankhead was escorted to a party at the home of a local designer, Danny Stirrup. Her escort was the novelist James Leo Herlihy, who had just directed her in the touring play, Crazy October.

  At one point during the drunken evening, Darwin Porter asked her, “Is it true that you actually knew James Dean? Or is it only a rumor?”

  “No, Dah-ling, it’s the deadly truth. I got to play with his bongos and other things. He returned the favor. But he had to go and ruin it by telling me, at the end of the evening, that my mouth reminded him of Edith Piaf’s.”

  Weeks after Jimmy’s death, Porter was with another novelist, James Kirkwood, during a visit to Bankhead’s apartment in Manhattan. During their visit, she claimed that she was heartbroken when news came over the TV that Jimmy had died in a car crash. “God has taken away one of his most talented and most beautiful children.”

  ***

  One night, Wilder invited Jimmy to go with him to hear his dear friend, Peggy Lee, perform at a nightclub. Jimmy was thrilled with the invitation, since Lee was one of his favorite singers.

  Seated at a front row table, Wilder was delighted when she chose to sing something he himself had written and composed, “That’s the Way It Goes,” followed by his big hit, “While We’re Young.” Jimmy, as he later described them to Wilder, found the lyrics “laden with longing.”

  For years, he’d read about Lee, who had been dubbed “The Queen” by Duke Ellington. She numbered Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra among her friends. Even Albert Einstein adored her. The press often documented her love affairs, including her on-again, off-again liaison with Sinatra.

  To Jimmy, she seemed to sing and speak at the same time. He found her oval face beautiful, with a glittering, seductive aspect. She’d once been described as “perky, pretty, and bouncy, but genuinely soulful, world-weary, and resigned.”

  Before she joined them at table after the show, Wilder told him, “Peggy lives on the dark, moody side of the boulevard of broken dreams.”

  Shortly before midnight, Wilder and Jimmy welcomed her to their table. She and Wilder embraced like old friends, and Jimmy impulsively kissed her on both cheeks. “You are my dream lady,” he said.

  He listened as both Wilder and Lee discussed Sinatra. “We have this mutual admiration society,” she said. “That is, when we’re not fighting. Frankie’s got a temper, as you well know.”

  “The Primal Male meets the Primal Female,” Wilder said. “Your personalities just had to mesh. That is, until you guys have one of those knock-out, drag-out fights.”

  Jazz singer Peggy Lee gave Jimmy “fever.”

  “No human being can live with either of us for long,” she said.

  When Wilder departed for the men’s room, she turned all her attention to Jimmy. “Could I come by your suite tomorrow night and be your escort to your show?” he asked.

  “If it wouldn’t make Alec jealous, I’d be honored,” she said. “Is he in love with you?”

  “It didn’t work out,” he said. “I’m staying with him at the Algonquin. Our relationship is totally one-sided.”

  “You mean he gives you a blow-job and then calls it a night?” she asked. “I know Alec very well. I even know about his tragedy. Why he’ll never be a lover.”

  “You mean…?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “He admits he has the world’s smallest penis. He gets his satisfaction getting oral with some young stud like you.”

  “A terrible affliction,” he said. “But he has to live with that. Fortunately, I don’t have that problem.”

  “You’d better not,” she answered. “Life is too short for me to waste my time on trivia. Tomorrow night is fine. Come by at seven.”

  The following night, Wilder was scheduled to attend a private dinner with the distinguished cabaret artist Mabel Mercer, whose loyal following included everyone from Sinatra to a coven of gay devotees. Wilder had written her signature song, “Did You Ever Cross Over to Sneden’s”

  Jimmy told him he’d go to the movies, but at seven, he arrived at Lee’s suite at the Sherry Netherland and was shown in by a maid. When Lee appeared, he kissed her on both cheeks. For the first time, he saw her without makeup. To him, she looked like a homespun girl from the plains of North Dakota, where she’d been abused by a wicked stepmother, or so he’d heard.

  In anticipation of her act, within her hotel suite, Jimmy watched her as she transformed herself into a glamorous figure, carefully coiffed and made up. She said that earlier, without makeup, on an elevator, a woman had asked her, “Are you Peggy Lee?”

  “’Not yet,’ I told her,” Lee said. “’Catch me later, darling.’”

  Miss Peggy Lee. “Until we meet again,” she told Jimmy.

  Satisfied with her makeup, she told Jimmy to “Pour me a cognac, and don’t be stingy, baby. That’s a line I learned from a Greta Garbo movie.”

  She informed him that before going onstage, she belted down a few cognacs to lubricate her throat.

  He hailed a taxi to take her to the theater. Backstage, he accompanied her to her dressing room where she went through another elaborate check of her makeup and costume. He then accompanied her to the edge of the sightlines of the stage. Along the way, she hugged each of her musicians.

  Standing in the wings, ready to go on, she breathed heavily in and out, and that seemed to give her a burst of energy. Then she muttered a soft, intimate prayer.

  He heard the announcer: “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to welcome the lady and the legend, Miss Peggy Lee!”

  There was an enthusiastic reception as she walked onto the stage, illuminated by spotlights. She let out what sounded like a small screa
m and stamped her high heels on the floor as she burst into song.

  She opened her act with her big hit from 1942, “Somebody Else is Taking My Place,” followed by her 1943 hit, “Why Don’t You Do Right?” That song had sold more than a million copies and had made her famous.

  Later that night, he accompanied her back to her suite.

  When William Bast came to live with him in New York, in reference to his sexual interlude with Lee, Jimmy told him, “I was nervous at first. After all, I was told that Frank Sinatra was a tough act to follow.”

  “In front of me, she defined her post-performance sexual workout as ‘a coolout.’ She was winding down. Actually, she was quite funny, doing an impression of what chickens do in North Dakota when it rains. ‘They stand in the downpour and drown,’ she told me.”

  “Our evening was great, some moments sublime,” Jimmy claimed.

  At one point, she admitted that her taste in men hadn’t been very good except for her first husband, Dave Barbour, the guitarist and composer whom she claimed she still loved. “Finally, by one o’clock that morning, we did the dirty deed, and she made me feel like a real man. She’s not devouring like Tallulah Bankhead. Yet she is demanding in a soft way. She aims to get her satisfaction, and with me, she did. In fact, before I left her suite, I proposed marriage to her,” he told Bast.

  “She didn’t outright reject me, but was very kind. She said, “Jimmy…oh, Jimmy. You sweet, vulnerable, dear boy. I adore you. But marriage would ruin everything for us. Let’s be really close friends who get together every now and then for a good fuck.”

  “Okay!” he said, before passionately kissing her goodbye.

  Before he left, she said, “I have this very strong feeling about you. That you’re going to make it big in the movies. I sense a great deal of hidden talent in you. You’re going to become Mr. James Dean, not Mr. Peggy Lee.”