James Dean
Page 27
The trip began near their estate on the Hudson River. They sailed down the river, then continued on into the open sea to Martha’s Vineyard. From there, they embarked on a casual ten-day exploration of the coast of Cape Cod. During the first two days of their trip, the weather was so rough that Lemuel said, “Only a member of the Kennedy clan could sail through waters like this.”
When he returned to New York, Jimmy gave Bast a highly edited version of that sea adventure.
“You mean. Lemuel took his wife along when both of us knew that one of the purposes of the trip involved seducing you?”
“I made a few visits to Lem’s stateroom for a blow-job while Shirley was on deck. “She’s a very understanding wife and has a really masculine voice.”
“It was a wild trip on the seas,” Jimmy recalled. “At one point at this party where Lem’s friends came aboard in Provincetown, Lem stripped me completely naked and had me appear as Neptune on a throne he’d made. After all, he’s a scenic designer. I went over big with his gay pals that night, and I got a lot of sleepover offers. Fortunately, Shirley was away that night visiting these two dyke friends of hers.”
While aboard, Jimmy heard Lem discussing his play, See the Jaguar, scheduled for an opening that autumn. He had already signed Arthur Kennedy as the lead, with Michael Gordon directing it and Alec Wilder composing the music. To Jimmy’s great delight, it included an important role for a teenage boy.
By the fourth day of the cruise, Jimmy was actively campaigning for inclusion in the cast, but without directly asking for that key role.
“At least Lem is assured of access to your dick—at least until he’s signed someone else to the part,” Bast commented, sarcastically.
Before the end of the cruise, the only assurance Jimmy had received from Lem was his promise that he’d arrange for a reading in front of Gordon, See the Jaguar’s director. “If you’re good at the reading, the part is yours.”
Jimmy eagerly read the play, learning that the character of Wally Wilkins is seventeen-year-old boy who has been locked up since childhood by his paranoid mother, who wants to shield him “from the terror of the world.”
To lure potential “angels” who might invest in the production of the play, Lem staged a series of theatrical sales presentations. The first of them was a run-through that unfolded within the luxurious Fifth Avenue apartment of Shirley’s wealthy aunt. There, actor James O’Rear read the part of the teenage boy, even though he was in his thirties at the time and wrong for the role. Accompanied by Brackett, Jimmy attended, although he was severely disappointed that Lem had not asked him to deliver the reading.
Boris Karloff, best known to movie audiences as Frankenstein, attended the reading. Later, within earshot of Jimmy, the aging actor lavished praise on O’Rear’s talent to Lemuel. That made Jimmy jealous to the point of overt anger.
By the end of summer, Lem still had not raised enough money to mount the play, so he staged a more lavish presentation at the Warwick Hotel. Once again, O’Rear was summoned to portray the teenaged boy.
Later, Jimmy complained to Brackett that, “The guy is reading my part. After all, I paid my god damn dues on that fucking wind-tossed yachting trip.”
In September of 1952, Lem’s fundraiser at the Warwick drew the attention of writers at the New York Herald-Tribune, who noted: “Producer Lemuel Ayers doesn’t seem to be worried about being able to raise the rest of the cash needed for See the Jaguar. Mr. Ayers, the noted scenic designer, has gone ahead and arranged for tryouts in both Boston and Hartford.”
Jimmy called Lem at his Manhattan apartment, learning that Shirley was out. He asked if could come by.
Two hours later, as he sat on the Ayers’ sofa, Lem’s fingers moved toward his zipper, as they had so many times before.
“Before I let you suck it, what about my audition?”
“I’ll arrange it,” Lem vowed.
“You’d better mean that,” Jimmy said. “OK, go ahead, have your fun, but swallow every drop so I won’t have to shower.”
***
At long last, the day had come for Chris White and Jimmy to audition for admission to the prestigious Actors Studio, home turf of Brando, Monty Clift, Julie Harris, and so many others. A lot depended on his getting accepted. After all, his stated reason for coming to New York involved learning Method acting as promulgated by the Actors Studio.
Both White and Jimmy faced stiff opposition. Some 150 other young men and women were also auditioning for admission, and fewer than a dozen, maybe less, would be accepted.
The father of the Method was the Russian director and co-founder of the Moscow Art Theater, Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938). As taught by Lee Strasberg, aping the master, the actor “learns to use his senses, his mind, and especially his feelings as effectively as he employs his voice and body to project his character.”
The day was cold and windy as Jimmy and White headed out. He was not adequately dressed for the bitter weather. They took the elevator to the tenth floor of 1697 Broadway, near 54th Street. Getting off, he was freezing, and he went and sat on the hall radiator. “My balls are frozen. I’m defrosting them.”
When he was warmer, he shocked White by telling her, “I can’t go through with it. I’m too nervous.”
“Listen to me, you little prick,” she said, confronting him. “This was my audition all along. You horned in. Now you’re trying to fuck it up for me.” She reached into her handbag and took out two cans of Budweiser that had been intended as props for their upcoming presentation. “Here, drink this,” she said. “Maybe you won’t be so nervous.”
He gulped it down.
Within a few minutes, the secretary came out and called for Dean, a name near the top of the list of candidates whose auditions had been scheduled for that day.
White was stunned when he bolted from the room, heading for the stairwell, not the elevator. She quickly recovered and asked the secretary to put their names under “W” for White, which meant that they’d be called near the end.
Within half an hour, Jimmy reappeared with two cans of unopened Budweiser. “I just couldn’t do the audition pretending to drink beer from an empty can,” he explained to her. “Also, running up and down ten flights of stairs has made me less nervous.”
When their names were recalled, Jimmy removed his glasses and raced out onto the stage. Since he was so nearsighted, he missed his mark by almost ten feet, hitting the hard floor with a bang. It was supposed to represent sand on a beach before the debut of a hurricane.
Nervously, White followed his dramatic entrance. He could hardly make her out, so he squinted at her. He flipped open the can of beer and said, “Hi,” which was not in the script.
Their scene about loneliness and alienation began. They’d rehearsed it many times, but he threw her off by inserting impromptu phrases. Although she masked her feelings, she was furious.
The scene’s ending called for him to invite her into his ramshackle beach shack, but she runs away. The skit was suddenly over.
From the front row, there was a long silence. Elia Kazan asked, “Who wrote this skit?”
Nervously, White stepped forward. “I’m the culprit.”
“It was okay,” Kazan responded.
“Rather sensitive,” Cheryl Crawford chimed in. [Producer Cheryl Crawford was one of the founding members of the Actors Studio. She had produced such plays as Porgy and Bess in 1941, as well as Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo (1951). Later, she expressed a dim view of Jimmy. “As a human being, he was just too sick.”]
Finally, Lee Strasberg spoke. “I found the scene quite natural. That’s why I let you guys run three minutes’ overtime.”
Days would go by before they were notified that they had both been accepted into the Actors Studio. Of the dozens who had applied, fewer than ten had been accepted.
To celebrate, Jimmy asked White out to a dinner at Jerry’s Tavern. “Maybe he’ll let us dine for free, since he’s been rooting for us.”
Dizzy seemed satisfied with that explanation and set up a time to meet him the following evening after she’d settled back into her Manhattan routine.
The two female rivals for Jimmy’s love would never meet again.
***
As the autumn winds blew into New York, and the multi-colored leaves began to fall in Central Park, it was time for Jimmy to find a place to hole in for the winter. Dizzy and Jimmy decided once again to set up residence together, this time in a large but bleak apartment at 13 West 89th Street, just off Central Park West. There was a big difference from their previous arrangement. This time, they would have two roommates, William Bast and a woman identified only as “Tina.” Both Jimmy and Bast had attended UCLA with Tina.
The only decoration on the walls was Jimmy’s battered and ragged matador cape. The furnishings consisted mainly of bare mattresses with no linens.
Dizzy and Jimmy shared the sole bedroom with twin beds, and Tina and Bast agreed to sleep on day beds in the living room. The kitchen had virtually no utensils. Jimmy suggested they could eat with their hands—that is, if there were something to eat in the bare cupboards. Bast remembered their first night in the apartment. They each shared a bowl of boiled vermicelli, the only food left. “We picked off the bugs floating on top.”
Two weeks later, Jimmy arrived at the apartment with a large box, which his three roommates assumed contained foodstuff. When he opened it in front of them, it turned out to be an expensive set of luxurious pillows and bedsheets from Bloomingdales.
The objects were a gift from Rogers Brackett, with whom Jimmy still maintained an uneasy truce, not having submitted to the producer’s never-ending requests to move back into his apartment with the luxuries associated with it.
In an act of showy ostentation, Jimmy spread the chocolate-colored sheets over his bare mattress, arranged the pillows, stripped down to his briefs, and crawled inside after wishing his roommates a good night.
Angered and envious, all three of them moved toward his bed, overturning his mattress and sending him sprawling onto the cold floor.
“There was little privacy,” Bast said. “I got a preview of the breasts and vaginas of Tina and Dizzy, and each girl learned how we were hung. Of course, Dizzy and I had seen Jimmy in the nude many times before. Tina hadn’t. She grew accustomed to his parading around the apartment with his balls dangling.”
Bast also remembered the maze of bras, panties, and stockings hanging out to dry in the bathroom; the complaints about toilet seats being left up; the bathtub rings; and the snoring from both Jimmy and himself. There were also conflicts about dishes. “We had a few dishes by then being left unwashed in the sink. There were fights over which radio programs to listen. We were not a compatible quartet.”
As each day went by, Jimmy grew more irritable and difficult to live with, as he faced increasing anxiety about why he had not been called for an audition of See the Jaguar.
A surprise invitation came in for Jimmy to visit his aunt and uncle, Ortense and Marcus Winslow, in Fairmount, Indiana. He was told that his father, Winton, would return to Indiana for a short visit. If Jimmy could make the trip, the dentist technician would arrive with two new front teeth for his son.
Jimmy invited Dizzy and Bast to join him on the trip. They immediately complained that they did not have the plane fare. “That’s no problem,” Jimmy said. “We’ll hitchhike. It’s only 800 miles.” He told them that he’d seen that 1934 movie, It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Colbert had shown Gable how to hitchhike by lifting her skirt and revealing one leg. “What I’ll do is unbutton my shirt and reveal my chest. If not that, I’ll pull up my pants’ leg and show off one of my shapely gams.”
“Then you’ll be queer bait,” Dizzy said. “But we’ll go with you since you’ve promised comfortable beds and all the food we can eat. I also want to go horseback riding.”
It was an unseasonably cold morning on October 9, 1952, as this trio rode a bus from midtown Manhattan to the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel. Rejecting Jimmy’s suggested technique, they each stuck out their thumbs and, within an hour, they’d procured a ride to the (far western) end of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
They still had to cross the width of Ohio. Bast said they were picked up by a “weasel-like man, real creepy, and an obvious sexual pervert. Everything he said to us was sexually suggestive. Finally, it all came out when Jimmy and I went to take a leak with him in a gas station. He said he liked to lick the balls of young men and eat pussy. He wanted the four of us to check into a sleazy motel for the night. We didn’t get back into his car, heading instead for the open highway with our thumbs out.”
Luck was on their side. A Nash Rambler slowed down and offered them a ride, the motorist claiming that he’d be driving throughout the night en route to Dubuque, Iowa, for an exhibition baseball game. It turned out that he was Clyde McCullough, at the time a famous player for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
When they stopped for dinner, he invited them to join him, but they told him they were on a limited budget. “Forget it,” he said. “I’m loaded. Order anything you want.”
COLLECTIBLES: Clyde McCullough, depicted on a baseball card as he appeared in 1951, around the time he picked up Jimmy and his entourage as they were hitchhiking to Indiana.
Jimmy ordered “the biggest steak you’ve got.” After devouring it, he asked the waitress, “Can I have seconds?”
“As long as you’re paying, or your friend here, you can have the whole cow,” the brassy waitress snapped.
The sports figure drove them to a point where Marcus could motor up from Fairmount and haul them back to his farm. All three of them thanked McCullough profusely for his hospitality.
[It was twenty years later, while watching Giant, that McCullough turned to friends and said, “God Almighty! I once picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be a big-time cow eater in this little dive. My passenger was James Dean, and I’m not making this up.”]
At the Winslow Farm, Jimmy introduced his aunt and uncle, whom he referred to as “Mom” and “Dad” to his best friends, Bast and Dizzy. Bast recalled, “They were wonderful to us. We’ve never eaten so much—fried chicken, thick steaks, cream gravy and mashed potatoes, cornbread with rich butter, and endless ears of corn on the cob and green beans cooked in bacon fat.”
In the barn, Jimmy rescued his motorcycle, a CZ, from mothballs and went roaring through the countryside with Dizzy hanging onto his back for dear life.
After a reunion with his former drama coach, Adeline Nall, the teacher asked Jimmy to address her drama class about insights into the New York theater and how to break into it. Bast was asked to talk about writing for films, and Dizzy performed some of her best modern dance movements. “All three of us were very green in our so-called professions, but the students were impressed,” Bast said. “Of course, Jimmy gave a very limited impression of how to break into show business. He left out that he had been on many a casting couch.”
In front of Nall’s class, he demonstrated an actor’s changing faces by saying, “My name is James Dean” in several different ways, beginning with a melancholy sadness and ending tearfully. Along the way he said the line with aggression, with reluctance, with manic energy, and also hysterically, as if he were shouting, “FIRE!”
On the third day, Winton Dean arrived with Jimmy’s new front teeth. Painfully, both Bast and Dizzy observed Jimmy’s attempt to embrace his cold, distant father.
“At least we got to see what Jimmy would look like in twenty-five years,” Bast said. “Winton was very reserved and self-conscious around his son. He didn’t laugh or smile once during his short visit. Watch
ing father and son left me with nothing but a deep sadness. At least Jimmy made off with two new front teeth. He knew that Jimmy didn’t have money and would have to hitchhike back to New York. He could have lent him at least a hundred dollars, but he chose not to.”
Fortunately for Jimmy during that return visit to Fairmount, his child-molesting pastor, James DeWeerd, was in Chicago, so some potential embarrassments were avoided.
Shortly after Winton’s return to California, a call came in for Jimmy from his agent, Jane Deacy, in New York. Lemuel Ayres wanted him right away to audition for See the Jaguar. He had raised enough money to bring the play to Broadway for an opening on December 2 at the Cort Theatre.
Before leaving Indiana, Jimmy paid a visit to his mother’s grave. In front of Bast, he broke down and cried. “The pain of desertion is still there,” he said.
Marcus drove the trio from his farm to the main highway for the beginning of their long hitchhike east.
Their most memorable ride en route to the outskirts of New York was with a drunken Texan driving a big cream-colored Cadillac. He came to a screeching halt and called out to them, “Y’all jump in!” As he drove along, he kept a bottle of whiskey between his legs, every now and then taking a gulp.
He seemed rather rich and invited all of them to dine with him at a steak house. Everyone ordered a T-bone, but the Texan claimed, “These tough pieces of leather must have come from Kansas. You guys will have to come down to my ranch in Texas to get the steak of a lifetime.”
At a gas station, when Dizzy was in the toilet, the Texan told Jimmy and Bast, “I drive up once or twice a year to New York. You see, I’m into black poontang, and there’s this place in Harlem I should give you guys the address to. In my home state, it’s frowned upon for a white man to like black pussy.”
En route to New York, he stopped the car, opened the door, and “vomited the Rio Grande” (Bast’s words). He explained to his passengers that he had an ulcer but liked to drink and eat a lot. “I enjoy the taste, but then I have to throw it all up. My ulcers can’t handle it.”