James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  “The patrons were then invited to perform fellatio, or whatever, on the men, moving from one hustler—each with an erection—to the next every time a bell went off. Sometimes, when someone was fellating an especially delectable man, he had to be urged to move on to the next recipient.”

  “That went on for a bit, but erections are only temporary,” Ducus said. “At the sound of a drumbeat, a patron was supposed to stay down on whichever hustler he had reached up until that point until he climaxed. When that came, so to speak, the show was over.”

  “It was all such fun,” Ducus said. “Jimmy seemed to enjoy it very much—in fact, Stevens urged that he configure himself as one of the performers some night, forming part of the wheel. He didn’t say no, but told us he’d have to give it serious thought. I didn’t go out with the guys every night, so I never learned whether he got involved or not.”

  The trio of nightcrawlers often patronized an illegal bar in an old warehouse in the West Twenties, right off Manhattan’s West Side Highway. Its cover charge was $40 a night. For that, the patrons would be allowed to drink all the beer they wanted.

  In the backroom were seven claw-footed bathtubs, in which naked men—some of them drunk, some of them drugged—had passively positioned themselves.

  Tanked up on beer, patrons of the bar were invited to urinate on the men in the tubs, in many instances aiming their streams of urine directly into the recipients’ faces. “Victims” within the tubs rotated frequently throughout the course of the night, some of them, soaked with piss, returned to unleash warm streams of urine on whomever had replaced them within the tubs. As the evening wore on, the stench of urine was perceived by many as desirable, and in some cases, erotic.

  “Jimmy was a real ‘golden shower queen’ and loved all the action,” Ducus said. “In one night, he must have gone to the backroom a half-dozen times to relieve himself of all that beer. Later, I heard that in Hollywood he got involved with some pissing scandals on the sets of Rebel Without a Cause and Giant.”

  Both Stevens and Jimmy, according to Ducas, were especially turned on by bondage, “real S&M stuff.” Sometimes accompanied by Ducas, but usually as a pair, Stevens and Jimmy visited a large, old-fashioned apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

  “I went with them only once, but I heard that the owner featured a variety of different exhibitions. The night I was there, he’d hired five Mandingo types. We were told that all of them had performed previously as ‘Superman’ in porn shows in Havana, venues for the most part attended by voyeuristic American tourists. Each of the performers had a monstrous dick.”

  “A lilywhite boy, no more that fourteen, was brought out. He’d been blindfolded. He was tied up and positioned on his stomach, his legs spread-eagled, and his rosebud was exposed to a full view of the audience, poor little thing. Then the Cubanos went to work on him. The kid screamed and pleaded with them to stop, but he was brutally sodomized by one after the other. His screams eventually died down to a long-suffering whimper. He was finally carried off from center stage, a bloody mess in need of stiches. I don’t know what eventually happed to the kid. He probably ended up dead in some seedy alley.”

  The most bizarre of the stories that circulated about the nocturnal trawls of Stevens and Jimmy through Manhattan’s sexual underground might have been apocryphal, but Ducas swore that the story was true. Later in life, Bill Gunn, Jimmy’s closest African-American friend, claimed that Jimmy had relayed a similar story to him as well.

  It is possible that it was Stevens who (formally) introduced Jimmy to the phenomenon of necrophilia—that is, an obsession, sometimes erotic, with corpses. As Jimmy told Gunn, “Back at Fairmount High, teachers didn’t go into the subject all that much.”

  [Of course, necrophilia has existed for centuries, with covert references to it in the underground gothic or vampire literature of England’s Victorians. More recently, its adherents have encountered like-minded cohorts in large cities like L.A., London, and New York.

  It has happened that a necrophiliac will make a deal with a seedy funeral parlor, whose staff might alert them when a young man or woman, perhaps dead in an accident at the peak of their beauty, is brought in for embalming or cremation. Covens of necrophiliacs have, in some cases, convened for some kind of communal encounter with the corpse. In less extreme cases, aficionados assemble for ghoulish sessions that are simulated without the actual presence of a corpse.

  Allegedly, Stevens informed Jimmy that he was a necrophiliac voyeur.]

  According to Ducus, Stevens once arranged for Jimmy to pose as a recently deceased fetish object for an assemblage of necrophiliacs. In preparation for his role, after submitting to a heavy application of body make-up, applied with the intent of producing a deathly pallor, he climbed into a coffin in a darkened room and closed his eyes, pretending to be dead.

  One by one, the necrophiliacs fellated the “corpse.”

  “Dean was a crazy loon, and he would do anything,” Ducas said. “He accepted the role on a dare from Stevens. Everything happened in silence. Dean never opened his eyes during the ceremony. I found the whole thing disgusting. Later, Jimmy told me it was one of the most exciting sexual thrills of his life. Sometimes, I suspected his elevator didn’t go to the top floor.:”

  “Later, Stevens and I got into a fight over this cute but very fucked-up Puerto Rican kid, and we never spoke again,” Ducas said. “I’m sure that he and Dean drifted away from each other after Jimmy returned to Hollywood for other dreams and other adventures. I heard he took up car racing.”]

  [Before the end of his life, Stevens had retired to Westport, Connecticut. The police rushed him to the hospital after they discovered him—robbed, bludgeoned, and bloodied by some unknown assailant—within his home. He died shortly thereafter, on August 7, 1989, at the age of 68, of cardiac arrest.

  Stevens was known to solicit strange men, some of them hitchhikers from beside the highways, and bring them back to his residence. There was speculation that he had encountered a psychotic hustler. No arrest was ever made.]

  A Fascination for Coffins

  IN INDIANA, JAMES DEAN REHEARSES HIMSELF FOR HIS EARLY DEATH

  Jimmy would once again retreat to the interior of a coffin, but under completely different circumstances. This time, his ghoulish act would be photographed and displayed around the world.

  The story began in Hollywood with his chance encounter with photographer Dennis Stock during the weeks preceding the release of his first major film, East of Eden.

  Every Sunday afternoon, Nicholas Ray held a soirée within his suite at the Château Marmont on the Sunset Strip. Ray was considering casting Jimmy, whom he’d invited as one of his guests, in his upcoming movie, Rebel Without a Cause.

  To the party, he had also invited Stock, whom he knew on a casual basis.

  Ray had met Stock when he was on assignment to photograph Humphrey Bogart. Stock had joined Magnum, the famous photographer’s cooperative. At the age of twenty-seven, he was the organization’s youngest member.

  At the party, at around three o’clock that afternoon, Ray led Stock over to introduce him to Jimmy.

  “Nick guided me to a corner of the room where a young man reclined,” Stock recalled. “His moody mood was similar to mine that day, as I wasn’t comfortable at parties. After Nick introduced us, he left Jimmy Dean and I alone together to talk.”

  “There was nothing terribly imposing about this bespectacled young man at first,” Stock said. “His responses were monosyllabic. But as we chatted, and drank wine, his tongue loosened a bit. He told me that he’d made a feature film, East of Eden, based on a John Steinbeck novel. I had not heard of him or the novelist. He insisted that I see the movie, which was going to be shown as a sneak preview in Santa Monica. I agreed. And so it all began.”

  “I saw the film, and I was stunned,” Stock said. “So was the audience, who applauded the vitality of Dean’s performance. It was mesmerizing. From that night on, I decided that a star was born, a
nd I wanted to get in on witnessing the birth. Within days, I had an assignment for Life magazine to do a photo essay on just who this much-talked-about young actor really was. A possible cover shot was suggested.”

  “My assignment from Life involved photographing Dean’s environment, the setting that reflected both his background and his personality, the setting that had produced this unique character. Of course, I knew at some point that meant going to Indiana farm country. But first, New York.”

  Photographer Dennis Stock in the mid-1980s

  The following morning at Googie’s, Stock and Jimmy reconvened for breakfast, and the photo shoot—one that would lead them together first to New York City and then to Indiana, was plotted.

  Outside Googie’s, Jimmy asked Stock if he wanted to get on his back.

  “Do you mean, ‘as a means of fucking me?’”

  “That would be okay, too, but my invitation was to ride behind my back on my motorcycle as we explore the Hollywood Hills,” Jimmy said.

  As Stock later recalled, “For me, it was the ‘white knuckle’ ride of a lifetime through Laurel Canyon and beyond, zooming along winding roads. Piloting his motorcycle, Dean was a crazed motorcyclist.” Having survived that ride, Stock snapped took some portraits of Jimmy within some of his usual Hollywood hangouts before they flew to Manhattan together in January of 1955.

  “Dean seemed to come alive in New York,” Stock said. “He told me he was a Manhattan baby, and that it was his kind of town, without the phoniness of Tinseltown.”

  During the first morning they spent together in New York City, Jimmy invited him to his favorite barber shop in the Times Square neighborhood. He needed a trim and a shave of his three-day beard with a freshly stropped razor.

  Stock followed Jimmy as he made his rounds of the city. He invited Stock into his pied à terre, which had two porthole windows evocative of a cabin on an oceangoing yacht. Sidney Franklin’s matador cape hung nearby. In reference to the pairs of bulls’ horns affixed to the walls, Jimmy told Stock that they belonged to bulls that he had killed in a Mexican bullfighting ring.

  “The sink was full of dirty dishes and an overflowing garbage bin. There was an impressive collection of literature on his shelf, with works by everyone from Shakespeare to Kafka. Scattered around the room was an array of empty beer cans. The man lived like a stray animal—in fact, he was a stray animal.”

  “Perhaps I wasn’t reading his signals right, but Jimmy seemed to be flirting with me. I felt sex was on his agenda if I didn’t make my exit from this fifth floor walkup on West 68th Street.”

  For lunch, Jimmy escorted Stock to one of his regular watering holes, Cromwell’s Drugstore, where everyone seemed to know him. That afternoon, Stock followed him to one of Katherine Dunham’s dance classes, where Jimmy introduced him to one of his closest friends, Eartha Kitt.

  Dinner that night was at Jerry’s Tavern, another hangout where half the patrons seemed to know Jimmy and wished him “Happy box office!” for his upcoming movie.

  That night, Jimmy took him to Geraldine Page’s dressing room, within the Broadway theater where she was getting ready to go on in The Rainmaker, a hit play that was later made into a movie with Katharine Hepburn. That play was written by N. Richard Nash, author of See the Jaguar, in which Jimmy would later perform in a crucial role.

  The following day, Stock photographed Jimmy sitting among his peers at the Actors Studio listening to a lecture from Lee Strasberg. Later that day, he visited Jimmy at a rental studio on Times Square, where Cyril Jackson gave him lessons on the bongo.

  During their stay in New York, Jimmy frequently failed to show up at appointments he’d made with Stock. “He was a little bastard, but I could relate to him. We were developing a friendship. In some ways, I felt he expressed different parts of my own character.”

  Even before they flew out of New York, Jimmy told Stock, “You are becoming my Boswell,” a reference, of course, to Samuel Johnson’s faithful personal historian, archivist, and companion.

  The most iconic photograph that Stock ever snapped of Jimmy was taken one cold, rainy February day near Times Square. In fact, it became one of the most famous post-war photos in America, widely reproduced on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and postcards. In it, Jimmy is attired in an overcoat he’d bought at an Army surplus store. A soggy cigarette dangles from his mouth. His shoulders are hunched, his hands buried in the pockets of his coat.

  After their time in New York, Stock and Jimmy flew together to Indiana, where his uncle, Marcus Winslow, met them at the airport and drove them to his farmstead. There, Jimmy was greeted by his aunt, Ortense Winslow, who treated him like a loving mother.

  “Jimmy was a cute little boy,” Ortense told Stock. “He wasn’t afraid of anybody or anything. He was a pretty boy. I’ve heard people say he was too pretty to be a boy. He was fair skinned, with rosy cheeks and lips, and his mother dressed him real cute.”

  “His aunt and uncle were warm, generous people, and they seemed to shower love upon Jimmy,” His nephew, Marcus Winslow, Jr., clearly adored Jimmy, treating him like an older brother.”

  As Jimmy navigated his way with Stock through Fairmount, he was treated like a local celebrity, even though East of Eden hadn’t yet been released. He was often stopped and asked for his autograph.

  “I roamed the town and the surrounding farmland with Jimmy, and I came to know him. We formed a friendship, but it would be a fleeting one. At times, I think Jimmy had seduction on his mind, but it never came to that. The closest it came was when he invited me into the bathroom we shared. He was in the tub, bathing, and he asked me to soap his genitals because he said that if he did so, it would turn him on too much. I politely refused.”

  At one point, Jimmy was photographed next to the tombstone of Cal Dean, his great-grandfather. He pointed out that the name Cal was also the name of the character he played in East of Eden.

  Jimmy’s nephew, “Little Markie,” was only seven years old at the time, and Stock took pictures of him with his uncle as they fixed Markie’s bicycle and as Jimmy pushed him around the snow-covered yard in his soapbox derby racer.

  In the Winslow’s barnyard, Jimmy posed with a 700-pound sow.

  At one point, he entertained the barnyard animals with a performance on his bongos. “They need entertainment, too,” he told Stock.

  On another day, Jimmy appeared to be acting out lines from the title role of Hamlet, “exposing the Herefords and Poland China hogs to some of Shakespeare’s most elegant soliloquies,” Stock said.

  That night at a school dance, an attractive young girl came up to Stock and told him that Jimmy used to date her. He failed to get her name.

  “You know when you see a bird in a cage, how you want to open the cage door and say, ‘fly, bird!’ Well, that is the way I always felt when I was with Jimmy.”

  That night, back in Stock’s bedroom, Jimmy got philosophical. “There really isn’t an opportunity for greatness in this world. We are impaled in a crock of conditioning. A fish that in water has no choice. Genius would have it that we swim instead. We are fish, and we drown.”

  Stock didn’t want to admit it, but he really didn’t know what Jimmy was talking about.

  The afternoon before they flew back to New York, Jimmy took Stock for a stroll along Main Street, leading him into Hunt’s General Store, where he knew the owners. He then directed him to a room in the back where the Hunts displayed and sold coffins.

  Jimmy headed toward one of them and climbed inside, asking Stock to snap pictures of him.

  At first, Stock refused, considering it tasteless, but he acquiesced after Jimmy told him that the great tragedienne of the early 20th Century stage, Sarah Bernhardt, had posed for a picture from inside a coffin. “If Sarah can pull that stunt, so can I.” After that, Stock shot him in various poses inside the coffin.

  At one point, Jimmy closed its lid. He emerged, giggling, and said, “The trouble with the lid being closed it that it squashes my nose.”

&nbs
p; “He sat up for one picture and looked so very gloomy,” Stock said. “It was the saddest picture I ever shot, and it made me even sadder seven months later when Jimmy, in a coffin, was shipped back to Fairmount for burial.”

  “When I developed the picture later, I realized that Jimmy was not pulling a prank of indulging in black humor. He was expressing the loneliness of a little boy lost. All his showmanship had gone out of the picture. Exposed was a young man who really didn’t understand what he was doing and why he was doing it.”

  ***

  During their transit back to the Winslow farm, as an explanation for what had happened in the coffin, Jimmy told Stock, “I was mocking Death, telling the bitch I wasn’t afraid of her. I wanted to get into that coffin to tell the world that James Dean is not afraid to die. I’m laughing in the bloody face of Death. I’m taunting the cunt.”

  The next day, aboard a plane heading to New York, Jimmy turned to Stock. “I have a funny feeling I’ll never go home again. I’m saying goodbye to my past.”

  Stock’s photo essay on James Dean was published in the March 7, 1955 issue of Life magazine. Later, his photos were released again within a book entitled James Dean Revisited.

  Although the friendship between Stock and Jimmy was fleeting, producers deemed it significant enough to make a 2015 movie of the relationship. Entitled Life, it was directed by Anton Cordijin, starring Dane DeHaan as Jimmy, Robert Pattison (otherwise known for his Vampire roles) played Stock, giving a murmurous impersonation.

  The New York Times described Pattison’s performance as “perversely listed. He has been compared to Dean but in Life, he dials down his glow to nearly nothing to become a wan.”

  DeHaan delivered an unconvincing impersonation, which would make first-time viewers wondering what merited all the fuss about James Dean. The most convincing portrayal came from Ben Kingsley, cast as Jack Warner.