James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  Two views of Sarah Churchill. Lower photo, with her celebrated father, Sir Winston. She was the “black sheep” of the Churchill family.

  After every Saturday night show, she invited its cast and crew to her apartment for what she defined as a “post-broadcast soirée.” There, the liquor flowed, often into Sarah herself.

  From the beginning, Jimmy launched a flirtatious relationship with her, jokingly referring to her as “the daughter of a bulldog.” Although she’d been born in London in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, she looked much younger and was quite attractive, with her Titian red hair and her emerald green eyes.

  “I’m the lamb who strayed from the fold,” she confessed to Jimmy at one of her parties. “At seventeen, I broke free from the flock and set out to discover the world, finding it one cruel place. I had dreams of becoming a film star. Still do. But that isn’t easy, even with a famous name like mine.”

  She enthralled him with tales of her fabled life, including details about the time she accompanied her father to the 1943 Teheran Conference, where she was introduced to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin. “The bloody Stalin came on to me,” she claimed. “I think it would have been a feather in his cap to have seduced the daughter of Sir Winston.”

  She also told him that “After all the good men left Britain to fight in World War II, thank God the Yanks arrived in time to take care of the sexual desires of the deserted sweethearts, wives, and recently bereaved widows.”

  She was married to Anthony Beauchamp, but admitted, “I never know where he is. Despite my status as a married woman, I’m pretty much a free agent. My father does not approve of my marriage and is very cold, even hostile, to my husband.”

  One Saturday afternoon, when Sarah had not arrived on time for the filming of her hostess duties for the Hallmark series, Brackett placed some frantic calls, without success, to her penthouse. Finally, in desperation, he gave Jimmy the keys to her penthouse and instructed him to go immediately to see what was wrong and, if possible, to fetch her. “She drinks, as you well know, a lot.”

  At the door to her penthouse, Jimmy rang her bell at least ten times before using her key to let himself in. He found Sarah sprawled nude and drunk on her bed. He later told his friends at Jerry’s, “I was such a devil. Such an opportunist.”

  In a call to Brackett, he claimed that he found Sarah “drunk and threatening suicide. I’d better stay with her. Who knows what might happen. Tonight, you can get someone else to write the damn credits on that blackboard.”

  Brackett agreed, promising he’d be right over as soon as the show went off the air.

  If Jimmy is to be believed, he seduced Sarah after that phone conversation with Brackett. Bragging about it later to his friends at Jerry’s, and later to William Bast, he was said to have stripped down before piling on top of the drunken aristocrat. “In midfuck, she woke up and and we checked each other out, eyeball to eyeball. She seemed pleased, and told me, ‘Go to it, kid.’”

  Three hours later, Brackett rushed into Sarah’s penthouse. He found Sarah fully clothed and sitting on her sofa with Jimmy, having yet another drink.

  When she left the room for a moment, Jimmy falsely claimed, “I talked her out of her suicide threat. She’s okay now.”

  ***

  [In November of 1955, Jimmy was scheduled to return to the set of the Hallmark Hall of Fame TV series. This time for an appearance not as a disembodied hand writing anonymously on a blackboard, but as the star of a TV adaptation of The Corn is Green, that play by the gay Welsh playwright, Emlyn Williams.

  As a teenager, Jimmy had seen the film adaptation (1945), starring Bette Davis, of the play, which had first been produced in 1940. In this autobiographical tale, a 50-year-old spinster, Miss Moffat, inspires her young male student to greatness.

  Two months before filming was scheduled to begin, Jimmy was dead.]

  ***

  Rogers Brackett’s other best friend in New York was the designer and art director, Stanley Mills Haggart. For many of Brackett’s TV advertisements or shows, Haggart provided the art direction. Arguably, he had more Hollywood connections than Brackett, having arrived in 1917 in what was then a fledgling “frontier town” with his (formidable) mother.

  Over the years, he developed friendships with some of the luminaries of the silent screen, including a very young Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Joan Crawford, William Haines, Ginger Rogers, and Lucille Ball. He became emotionally and sexually involved with the emerging star, Randolph Scott, and later, lived with Scott and Cary Grant, running their household while they were away at work at the studios. Through Grant, he met Katharine Hepburn and Tallulah Bankhead. He was also a close friend of several American playwrights, including Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and William Inge. He was also the former lover of Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society. Years later, the diarist, Anaïs Nin, introduced Haggart to Gore Vidal, with whom he enjoyed a long friendship.

  Stanley Haggart (seated) in the 1930s, with his celebrated companion, British director Peter Glenville, relaxing in the garden of the house they shared in Saffron Walden, U.K.

  Haggart became friendly with the Who’s Who of Hollywood when he hooked up with William Hopper, son of the popular Hollywood columnist, Hedda Hopper. For many months, he became her “leg man,” prowling through the nightspots of Hollywood with her gay son, William, gathering information that Hedda might either use or bury, depending on studio politics and censorship standards of the time.

  Although Hedda adopted many anti-homosexual platforms, and endorsed or reinforced them in her columns, Haggart maintained that in private, she was relatively tolerant. She was obviously aware of her son’s sexual proclivities, but never confronted him with it.

  Stanley Haggart, privy to most of the secrets of le tout Hollywood and Broadway, including many associated with Rogers Brackett and James Dean.

  She was always warm and welcoming to Haggart, although telling him, “I’m glad to know a lot of the secrets you guys pick up at night but, as you well know, I can’t print much of the crap. But I still want to know. Hedda always wants to know. I think I can use some of this information to my advantage when I face a recalcitrant star who won’t cooperate with me. I can always threaten them. If they don’t give me the personal data I want, I can destroy them by publishing their secrets.”

  As his Manhattan residence, Haggart had rented all four of the apartments (the entire allotment on that floor) on the top floor of a midtown apartment building. Although he was legally obligated to retain the floor’s communal hallway and the original entryways to each of the individual apartments, he interconnected their interiors by knocking down some of the interior walls, eventually reconfiguring the top floor’s layout into a huge, mostly interconnected spaces. Its inner doors could be opened or close, and its individual interior spaces flexibly configured for the housing of friends who frequently flew in from Hollywood. The result was an articulate, warm, artistically stimulating, and comfortable environment interspersed with both private and communal spaces. Its appeal became widely appreciated within Haggart’s vast circle of friends and business acquaintances.

  A raconteur, Haggart often invited between ten and twelve guests for dinner. They enjoyed the cuisine produced by a huge black cook from Harlem who set a lavish table. Her cuisine nourished luminaries from Hollywood as well as the theatrical elite of New York, including figures from the dance world such as Martha Graham.

  Based on Brackett’s bringing him to his home for dinner, Haggart later recalled his first impressions of Jimmy.

  “At first, he was shy and awkward around me,” Haggart said. “I think he didn’t want me to assume that he was just another of Rogers’ toy boys. Peering at the world through his horn-rimmed glasses, he seemed to find the place baffling, especially New York. He didn’t care much for small talk, but I saw him closely observing me. I feared at first that he was thinking, ‘How can I use this man?’”

  “In those day
s, I fancied myself a handwriting analyst, and Rogers insisted I give a reading on Jimmy’s. I asked him to write out some lines (he selected something from Hamlet), and I interpreted his handwriting. But I didn’t give him an honest verdict. I thought he was suicidal, but it wasn’t a conscious thing with him. Of course, I could be wrong, as I so often was.”

  “It became obvious from his handwriting that he must have suffered a lot in childhood. As an adult, that affected his judgment of people, if indeed he could be called an adult. He’d turned his insecurities inward, and it had taken hold of his personality.”

  “Actually, I thought he didn’t like me, but at the door, he hugged and kissed me goodbye, like Rogers always did. He whispered to me, ‘I want to see you.’ I thought it was a sexual come-on, but I was wrong.”

  Late the next afternoon, when Haggart returned to his home from a day’s work, it was raining heavily. “To my surprise, Jimmy was standing in the doorway, waiting for me. He was soaking wet. I, of course, invited him upstairs. Once I got him there, I offered him a bathrobe and suggested that he remove his clothes so that I could dry them. He rejected the robe, but stripped off his clothes, all except for his underwear, and handed them to me.

  Emerging from the kitchen, I offered him freshly brewed coffee and a pastrami sandwich. He drank the coffee and devoured the sandwich and asked for some ice cream. He still hadn’t put on his clothes, and I thought he was trying to entice me. I had assumed he was a hustler.”

  “But it wasn’t that,” Haggart continued. “He told me that he’d particularly loved my rear apartment. It enjoyed direct access to a rooftop terrace I’d ‘decorated’ with potted plants and shrubs. He called it ‘a retreat from the world.’ He said he sometimes needed a place for privacy with someone else, perhaps a stranger. At times, he found that being with Rogers was overwhelming, and he wanted to ask me a huge favor. He wondered if he could use that back apartment any time he wanted as a means to escape from the world.”

  “I told him he could. I didn’t think I was being disrespectful of my friendship with Rogers. As Jimmy and I were talking, I knew that Rogers was entertaining an extraordinarily handsome young actor he’d cast in a commercial. So he was cheating on Jimmy, anyway.”

  “At any rate, I never assumed that those two had promised fidelity to each other. I not only agreed to let him use the apartment, but I told him that it could become his secret love nest if he so desired.”

  “He jumped up and kissed me, and told me he wanted to repay me for my generosity. He took my hand and placed it on his crotch. ‘It’s yours if you want it,’ he said. But I withdrew my hand. ‘That’s not necessary,’ I told him. ‘Believe it or not, there are people in the world who can be generous without you having to put out to show your gratitude.’”

  “My aunt, Ortense Winslow, in Fairmount, Indiana, told me there would be people like you in the world, but I never believed her.”

  “At the door, he hugged and kissed me passionately, promising we’d meet again real soon.”

  “That might just have been something to say,” Haggart said, ‘but in his case he meant ‘real soon.’”

  “Let’s be friends for always,” he said. “I like you.”

  “Until death do us part,” Haggart responded.

  He later recalled, “That was a strange thing for me to say. I meant it in a sort of flippant, irreverent way. The rest of Jimmy’s life passed so quickly, both in New York and when he visited my home in Hollywood. I felt I was just getting to know and understand him, and then he was gone in a flash. It was like someone riding on an airplane, sitting back and having a drink, and the next minute that plane is plunging to earth in flames.”

  ***

  During the days to come, Jimmy sometimes made use of Haggart’s rear apartment at least once, and sometimes three times a week. Often he didn’t introduce his guests to his host.

  One night, Jimmy dropped by and, after a meal, asked Haggart to accompany him to the Astor Bar for a drink. This was the first time Haggart saw Jimmy actively cruising in a public setting.

  Gay bars (and gay activity in general) were illegal in those days, but the Astor Bar on Times Square was the discreet pickup joint for homosexuals, often middle-aged, often married, out to snare a young man who was usually broke and often an unemployed actor. Within inner circles, habitués of the Astor Bar were sometimes defined as “The “Closet Brigade.” It was also a dangerous hunting ground, because the person a gay man picked up might be a vice cop, which led to arrest, imprisonment and/or heavy fines, public exposure, and its subsequent humiliation and/or job loss.

  As Haggart closely observed, Jimmy seemed to be viewed as fresh meat by the largely middle-aged clientele, and he received several propositions. One man was quite attractive, perhaps thirty-five in age, and well dressed in what was known as the Brooks Brothers style. Haggart noticed that he wore a gold wedding band.

  When Jimmy went to the Astor’s oval-shaped bar for another round of drinks, it became obvious to Haggart that he was being propositioned by the man.

  When he returned to Haggart’s table, Jimmy asked if he could bring the man back to his apartment, and Haggart agreed. Jimmy told him that the man was an advertising executive connected to The Kate Smith Show, which aired on NBC.

  Jimmy’s pickup of the man occurred in the late spring of 1952.

  [Fast forward to January of 1953. Jimmy came by and asked Haggart to make a big bowl of popcorn. He then turned on the television. As they sat eating popcorn and watching The Hound of Heaven, an episode of The Kate Smith Show, it became clear that Jimmy had been cast as an angel.]

  He didn’t always use Haggart’s apartment just for sexual liaisons. Often, he would arrive unannounced for access to the lavish meals cooked every night by Haggart’s cook from Harlem. He’d tell Haggart that he was tired of hanging out with Brackett’s coterie of “queer friends.”

  “I get tired of them ogling me or following me to the toilet at a restaurant,” Jimmy said.

  On most of the nights he appeared, Jimmy rarely got caught up in the conversations whirling around among Haggart and his guests. Often, after eating, he would sit in a remote corner of the living room, not saying a word, but looking sullen, even hostile. Sometimes, he’d just stand up, leave the table, and exit from the apartment, not even thanking his host for dinner.

  Haggart indulged Jimmy’s rude behavior, although many guests expressed dismay at why Haggart tolerated him.

  One night was different from the others. Haggart had invited a friend over for dinner, Lemuel Ayers, who was also of friend of Brackett’s. Both Haggart and Ayers were members of the same labor union, United Scenic Artists.

  “He was a scenic designer but a much bigger deal than me,” Haggart admitted. “He’d had a brilliant career on Broadway, having designed or contributed to the ‘look’ of productions that included Oklahoma!; High Button Shoes; Kiss Me, Kate; and Cyrano de Bergerac.”

  Jimmy didn’t seem much interested in Ayers until it was revealed that he’d invested in an option on a play entitled See the Jaguar, which contained a key role for a young male actor. Ayers said he was considering offering the part to Anthony Perkins, the son of the famous actor, Osgood Perkins.

  “Tony’s name was already familiar to Jimmy, and not in a good way. He still suffered from memories associated with how, back in Hollywood, George Cukor had dangled in front of him a role in the Spencer Tracy movie, The Actress, before eventually awarding it to Perkins.

  Although Jimmy at that point did not reveal to Ayers that he, too, was an actor, Haggart watched as he began to “turn his charm and powers of articulation onto Lem,” as Haggart nicknamed his friend.

  Although he was married with children to Shirley Ayers, a wealthy woman, Lem was a well-known homosexual. He lived with Shirley in a lavish apartment in Manhattan, but they were better known for their estate at Stony Point in Rockland County, north of the city. Here, they regally entertained the theatrical elite within a mansard-roofed mansio
n, that had been built in 1849 on a dozen heavily wooded acres a mile or so from the Hudson River.

  Alec Wilder, Brackett, and Haggart were frequent visitors there, along with an artistic elite of artists, producers, and show-biz personalities.

  [One member of their entourage was novelist John Steinbeck, who, coincidentally, would create the story of Jimmy’s first feature film, East of Eden. Other guests on occasion included theatrical producers David Merrick and Lucille Lortel, actor Mel Ferrer, and an array of actresses who included Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, and Agnes Moorehead. Orson Welles visited on two separate occasions.]

  “Jimmy was never hostile around Lem,” Haggart said. “Shirley wasn’t there that night, and it was just as well, although she was aware of her husband’s adventures. Before the night was over, Jimmy was practically crawling over Lem. It was on one of those occasions that an embarrassed host should tell his guests, ‘get a room,’ but I didn’t have to do that, because before midnight, Jimmy made an offer inviting Lem onto the garden terrace for a view of the city.”

  “I didn’t see Lem until two days later, when he had nothing but praise for Jimmy, practically wanting to adopt him.”

  “However, I did encounter Jimmy the next morning in my kitchen. He was wandering about naked with a semi-erection, which he called a ‘piss hard-on,’ trying to make a pot of coffee. I agreed to cook breakfast for him. He wanted bacon and eggs. My cook wasn’t scheduled to arrive until noon, which was just as well, considering how Jimmy was dressed. ‘Dressed,’ of course, is not the right word.”

  During the weeks to come, Jimmy and Ayers made frequent use of Haggart’s love nest. Once, when Haggart peered out onto his garden terrace, he found both of them enjoying the summer sun in the nude.