James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  After that, he seemed too drunk to drive, so Jimmy took the wheel. When they’d reached one of the outer boroughs of New York, he stopped at a subway station, where they got out and caught a train into Manhattan. Bast and Jimmy moved the Texan to the back seat, left the keys with him, but locked his car doors so he could sleep off his drunk before heading to Harlem.

  Arriving exhausted with Bast and Dizzy in Midtown, Jimmy learned that his audition reading of See the Jaguar had been scheduled for ten o’clock the following morning. He desperately wanted the role and was filled with anxiety. Yet at other times, he was very optimistic because of his intimate connection with Lem Ayers.

  Jimmy told Dizzy, “I want to be a big Broadway star.”

  She later wrote, “I hope Jimmy has a big career as an actor, but I also wanted him to want nothing more in his life than me.”

  James Dean, Tom Tryon, and Jack Cassidy

  SOMETIMES, IN SHOW-BIZ, THREE’S NOT A CROWD

  Dizzy Sheridan’s wish to have Jimmy want her did not come true, although her hope for his big career was on the horizon. If she wanted to keep Jimmy in her life, she would have to learn to share him with others, both men and women.

  Less than a week after returning to New York, he was pursuing Chris White again. Not only that, but her new boyfriend as well.

  Hot, talented, artistically versatile, and movie-star handsome: Tom Tryon.

  Perhaps with a touch of malice, Rogers Brackett showed Jimmy an item in Walter Winchell’s gossip column. It claimed that the handsome young actor, Tom Tryon, had been seen dating starlet Chris White. “Rumors are that the nuptials are to be in Hartford, Tryon’s hometown.”

  Consumed with jealousy, Jimmy demanded, “Who is this Tyrone Power?” deliberately misstating his name.

  He later told Bast, “I feel a sense of betrayal. But I’m not going to confront her. I have another, much better, scheme.”

  Tryon, who was five years older than Jimmy, had served for three years in the U.S. Navy beginning in 1943. Upon his return from the war in the Pacific, he entered and later graduated from Yale.

  Back in New York, he had studied acting under the tutelage of the acting coach Sanford Meisner, who at the time was as well-known as Lee Strasberg.

  Currently, Tryon was one of the players in the long-running Broadway musical Wish You Were Here, starring alongside Jack Cassidy, Patricia Marand, and Sheila Bond. [Studded with musical numbers, many of which went on to successful lives as hit singles, it had opened in June of 1952 on Broadway at the Imperial Theatre, running for almost eighteen months and 600 performances.]

  Jimmy was aware that Brackett knew the director of the play, and he asked him if he would obtain seats to see a Saturday night show.

  Brackett was willing and seemed delighted that Jimmy wanted to go on a very public date with him again, since he’d been slipping around and seeing him privately instead of dining out or going to the theater with him, as he had done months before.

  After the show, Brackett and Jimmy went backstage to greet the director and to congratulate the stars. Jimmy left Brackett as he was talking to Cassidy and the director. He wandered over to introduce himself to Tryon.

  Years later, Tryon, at his home in Key West, told Darwin Porter, co-author of this biography, what then transpired between Jimmy and himself:

  “I didn’t know who Dean was at the time. He had yet to open on Broadway in See the Jaguar. He really turned on the male charm. I had never been so lavishly congratulated on my acting in my life. He also told me I was a goodlooking guy. He must have learned that I was gay, because he claimed that the moment I walked onstage, he got an immediate erection.”

  “I considered him very sexy and handsome, too, though a little bit short for me. Mostly, I go for guys who are tall in the saddle. He was doing more than talk to me. He was standing so close, we could have had sex.”

  “He told me that he wanted to let me in on a secret, but swore me to keep it to myself. He said that he was about to be cast as the second male lead in a play called See the Jaguar produced by Lemuel Ayers. I’d heard of him. Dean revealed that Ayers was in the process of deciding whether he wanted to cast Arthur Kennedy as the primary lead. Dean went on to say that Ayers was not satisfied with Kennedy, and that he was discreetly searching for another actor to play the male lead instead.”

  “Dean suggested that secretly, he could arrange an invitation for me to the Ayers estate up on the Hudson, and that after Ayers met me, he’d be sure to favor me as See the Jaguar’s leading actor. He also claimed that even though Ayers was married, he was as gay as a feather boa.”

  “My dream,” Tryon continued, “involved appearing as a star in a Broadway play. Stupid schemer that I was, I fell for Dean’s line. Later, of course, I realized what a bullshitter he was, and the real reason he came on to me.”

  “No doubt he was turned on. I was at the peak of my male beauty back then. But, as I was to learn later, he had vengeance on his mind. Specifically, he wanted to punish his girlfriend, Chris White.”

  “The main reason that had motivated my decision to go out with Chris involved press and public perceptions. I was an actor on the rise, with hopes of becoming a movie star, and I wanted to dispel rumors that I was gay. There was nothing very serious between Chris and me.”

  “Arriving at the Ayers estate on Sunday, I found Lemuel and Shirley marvelous hosts. I think he had the hots for me, but I belonged to Dean that weekend. Frankly the sex was great. Jimmy and I performed every known act, and a few he invented. I discovered a streak of masochism in him. At times, he wanted me to hurt him, and I obliged, but I’m not much into that. Otherwise, he did everything I wanted him to do—and then some.”

  “By Monday night, when we returned to New York, I was fairly certain that Lem would consider me as the lead actor in his upcoming play. As for Dean, he was talking seriously about the two of us living together. I mean as a sort of unofficial husband and husband, with me as the top.”

  ***

  A few days after their return to Manhattan, Jimmy received a call from Tryon. “You want some more of this hot young actor?” Jimmy asked him.

  “I can’t get enough,” Tryon said. “But I’m calling with a slightly different invitation. Jack Cassidy wants to have us up to his suite for a late night supper tonight after the show.”

  “He’s gay, right?” Jimmy asked.

  “Let’s call him bisexual. After all, he’s married to the actress Evelyn Ward.”

  “I’m game for anything,” Jimmy said. “I’ll meet you at the theater’s rear entrance after the performance. I’ll be your Stage Door Johnny.”

  After sitting through another performance of Let’s Do It Again, Jimmy was waiting outside when Cassidy and Tryon emerged that night from the theater. As a trio, they headed out into the street, looking for a taxi. Along the way, Cassidy encountered a bevy of young women or late teenaged girls clamoring for his autograph.

  [Jack Cassidy, five years older than Jimmy, was the handsome star of the musical, Wish You Were Here, in which Tryon had a secondary role. Jimmy knew very little about him, other than that he was a singer and actor.

  A lot of his success derived from his talent as a musical performer on Broadway. His persona was often that of a vain, shallow, urbane, super-confident egotist with a dramatic flair.

  His son, David Cassidy, born in 1950, later became a teen idol and pop star, best known for his key role in the 1970s musical TV sitcom The Partridge Family.

  After divorcing Ward in 1956, Jack married actress and singer Shirley Jones, with whom he had three more sons, including Shaun Cassidy. In his 1994 autobiography, C’Mon, Get Happy, David claimed that his father was bisexual, as did Jones. He suffered from bipolar disorder, and could be seen watering his lawn in the nude.

  Partial Portrait of a Dysfunctional Family: Jack Cassidy (left); his second wife, Shirley Jones (center); and Jack’s son by his first wife, pop singer and teen idol, David Cassidy.

  Jack Cassidy di
ed in 1976, alone in his apartment when he fell asleep drunk and ignited his Naugahyde couch. His body was identified by his dental records and a signet ring.]

  Midway through his career as a porn star, Cal Culver (aka. Casey Donovan) wanted to break into screen acting. In pursuit of that goal, he made overtures for a role in a possible film production of Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner; and Darwin Porter’s Butterfies in Heat, later filmed in Key West as The Last Resort.

  Despite Culver’s considerable talent as an actor, film producers refused to hire him, based on his notoriety in porn. He billed himself as “The New James Dean,” and for a while, he thought he’d be awarded the lead role in a film, The James Dean Story, but the deal fell through.

  Over dinner in his suite that night in 1952, Cassidy amused Jimmy and Tryon with stories of his life.

  Jimmy found Cassidy dashing and debonair, admiring his devil-may-care attitude. He was refined, suave, and charming, but Jimmy sensed a dark streak in him.

  Privately that night, surrounded by likeminded companions, he indulged in gay chatter.

  Jimmy learned that he and Cassidy had shared something in common: Both of them had been seduced as part of casting auditions by Cole Porter.

  Cassidy had continued his sexually charged visits to Porter’s bedroom. “I made him work for it,” he said. “I’d strip naked and sit in a corner with my big cock dangling over the side of the chair. Cole, that old sod, had to get out of his wheelchair and crawl across the carpet for access to what I have.”

  Jimmy found the story insensitive and sadistic, but strangely erotic. “I’ll have to try that someday. All I need is a cripple.”

  “When I was a teenager,” Cassidy continued, “I cultivated my voice and my speech patterns by seeing about ten movies a week, preferring double features,” Cassidy said. “John Barrymore was my idol. I modeled a lot of my style after him.”

  [By 1976, Cassidy had perfected his Barrymore persona to such an extent that he was hired to portray “The Great Profile”, Barrymore himself, in the feature film W.C. Fields and Me.]

  Two nights later, Jimmy dropped in for a visit with Stanley Haggart, this time without a companion. Running low on cash, he wanted to see if Haggart could get him cast in one of his television commercials. He didn’t want to go back to Brackett and ask him.

  Haggart knew Cassidy. After learning that Jimmy had spent the night in his hotel suite, along with Tom Tryon—who would later become a friend of Haggart’s in Key West—he asked about him.

  “We had a three-way,” Jimmy admitted. “I don’t want to go into a blow-by-blow account of what happened. But Tom screwed me as Cassidy and I blew one another.”

  “Then, after the sex was over, Cassidy got drunk with us and broke down and cried. He told us that his mother had borne him late in her life, and that she had never loved him. ‘She rejected me,’ Cassidy said, ‘and hired a woman two doors away who had just had a child to nurse me. I can never remember my mother ever having kissed me.’ In response to that, I said ‘The same could be said for my father.’”

  ***

  Tryon’s dream of appearing as the male lead in See the Jaguar never materialized. The actor learned later that Ayers had never deviated from his desire that Arthur Kennedy be designated as the play’s male lead, even though Jimmy had dangled it in front of Tryon as a trophy that was up for grabs.

  Years later, according to Tryon, “Basically, the role had been assigned to Kennedy even before I got involved with jimmy. It was never really available at all. After that night with Jimmy and Cassidy, I never saw the boy again. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a liar.”

  [Although bigtime stardom eluded him, Tryon went on to greater things. His greatest role came in 1963, when Otto Preminger cast him as an ambitious Catholic priest in The Cardinal, for which he received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama. “Preminger practically killed me. Never before and never again would I suffer such abuse.”

  “I almost got to work with Marilyn Monroe on her last unfinished picture, Something’s Got to Give, directed by George Cukor. But when Marilyn was fired, I was, too.”

  By the late 1960s, Tryon was disillusioned with acting, and he went on to become a famous writer, specializing in horror and mystery books. His best known work was The Other (1971), about a boy whose evil twin brother may or may not be responsible for a series of deaths in a small rural community in the 1930s.

  When Darwin Porter became Tryon’s friend in Key West, Tryon had taken as his live-in lover Cal Culver (also billed as Casey Donovan), the leading gay male porn star in America.]

  ***

  Awakening early for his first audition for the role of Wally Wilkins in See the Jaguar, Jimmy borrowed William Bast’s only clean white shirt and his charcoal-gray slacks that had just come back from the cleaners. After endless preening, he asked Bast and Dizzy, “How do I look?”

  After winning their approval, he headed toward the Royalton Hotel, where his sometimes lover, Roddy McDowall lived. N. Richard Nash, the author of Meet the Jaguar, was conducting the reading in McDowall’s room, for reasons known only to him.

  Jimmy knew very little about Nash. Born in Philadelphia, he’d been a ten-dollar per match boxer before going on to study English literature and philosophy in college. He had written for Broadway before, having authored works that included the Shakespearian-themed comedy, The Second Best Bed, produced in 1946, and the highly acclaimed drama, The Young and the Fair (1948). His greatest success would come later, when he wrote the original Broadway version of The Rainmaker (1954), which was adapted into a movie two years later starring Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn.

  Nash recalled Jimmy’s reading. “He wasn’t really trying to sell himself to me, and I respected that quality in him. As he began to read for the role of Wally, I sensed he had something that other actors didn’t. We’d auditioned at least a hundred of them before Jimmy read for me. At the end of his reading, I told him, ‘If it were up to me, I’d give you the role this morning. But you’ll have to read tomorrow afternoon before our director, Michael Gordon. You have that special quality the role of Wally calls for.”

  “You mean, I can play retarded?” Jimmy asked, jokingly.

  Before it opened, Nash had billed See the Jaguar as “an allegorical Western without the horses.” Set in the “backwash of civilization,” the rural South, it was loaded with symbolism, much of it difficult to understand. One early reader of the play had dismissed it, accusing Nash of having “earthy characters break from their role to spout philosophical pronouncements.”

  [In the play, Wally Wilkins is a seventeen-year-old boy, who has been locked up since he was a child in an ice house by his neurotic mother, ostensibly to protect him from the cruelty of the world. Shortly before her death, she releases him. As an innocent naïf, he discovers the cruelty and horror of the world, encountering both brutality and beauty.

  A kindly schoolteacher, Arthur Kennedy, aided by his pregnant partner, takes him in and shelters him to the degree he can. Kennedy’s partner was portrayed by Constance Ford, who had been awarded the role after Maureen Stapleton turned it down.

  After his release from his prison, Wally had set out with a rifle, and at one point, he kills a mountain jaguar about to attack him. That angers the local sheriff (played by Cameron Prud’Homme), who, previously, had built a cage with the intention of exhibiting the animal as a sideshow at his gas station. He’d even painted a sign—SEE THE JAGUAR—with the intention of displaying it, along with a menagerie of other abused and caged wild animals, as a tourist attraction.

  When the sheriff’s hopes about capturing the jaguar alive are thwarted, he captures Wally and displays him in the cage in lieu of the jaguar. The teacher (as played by Kennedy) later frees him, an act of defiance that so enrages the sheriff that he shoots him as “retribution” for his kindness.]

  During his second audition, this time in front of the director, Michael Gordon, a very different-looking
Jimmy showed up for his reading.

  Born a Jew in Baltimore, and later a member of the left-wing Group Theatre, Gordon was, at the time of Jimmy’s audition for See the Jaguar, under scrutiny from Congressional witch-hunting committees, as spearheaded by the dreaded Joseph McCarthy. Gordon was a friend of director Elia Kazan and John Garfield, one of the few Hollywood actors that Jimmy admired.

  Shortly before he met Jimmy, Gordon had directed the 1950 production of Cyrano de Bergerac, which had won a Best Actor Oscar for José Ferrer.

  [Amazingly, after Gordon survived the blacklist, film producer Ross Hunter hired him to direct a comedy for a 1959 release. It was Pillow Talk, starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day. It became one of the biggest-grossing box offices successes of that year.]

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Nash said. “The day before, Jimmy had been so neat and well-dressed. But when he showed up to meet Gordon, he looked like he was recovering from a two-night drunk. He was disheveled, his hair uncombed, and one of the lenses in his spectacles had been cracked. His reading was very bad. Gordon met with me and rejected Jimmy, even those he was close to Ayers, the producer.”

  “Finally, I persuaded Gordon to give Jimmy a final chance the following day. I went to Jimmy and angrily asked him, ‘What in hell happened to you?’”

  Jimmy told the playwright that he’d had a sleepless night owing to a personal problem. He hadn’t repaired his glasses, since he had no money.

  Nash agreed to lend him ten dollars. But when he showed up the following afternoon, although he was neatly dressed, he wore no glasses. “You don’t need glasses anymore?” Nash asked.

  “I went to buy a new pair with your ten dollars, but I saw this vicious-looking knife in a store window. So I went inside and bought it. I’m carrying it now.”

  Then he claimed that two friends had rehearsed with him throughout most of the night, and that he knew all the lines by heart, so he wouldn’t have to read from the script.