Both of them seemed to believe in their respective destinies. Corsaro was firmly convinced that he was slated to become one of the major theater and opera directors in America, and that Jimmy would achieve stardom on both the stage and screen.
“At least Jimmy would sometimes believe in his future,” Corsaro said. “At other times, he would plunge into deep despair, fearing he had only months to live.”
“I’ve got to cram as much living as I can into the time I have left,” Jimmy said.
According to Corsaro, “Jimmy had a lot of morbid thoughts which he expressed to me, even the possibility of committing suicide. I finally got him to go to a psychiatrist. He went for only three sessions. He told me, ‘You sent me to a jerk.’ He emerged from the sessions no saner than before. He was still taking out that switchblade and stabbing it into a wooden table or else my sofa.”
In the spring of 1953, producers Terese Hayden and Liska March hired Corsaro to direct The Scarecrow at the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. [It eventually opened on June 16.]
Sometimes called The Glass of Truth, the play was based on Feathertop, a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mercy MacKaye had adapted it as a play that was first performed at Harvard University in 1909.
Corsaro secured the services of three major stars: Patricia Neal, Eli Wallach, and his wife, Anne Jackson. Jimmy was hoping for one of the major roles and was very disappointed that he didn’t get it.
Corsaro told Jimmy that he lacked the experience for one of the bigger roles and thereby had been assigned a non-speaking part, that of the mirror image of the scarecrow.
Jimmy’s rival, Bradford Dillman, made his stage debut in it, cast as “Richard Talbot.”
Angered, Jimmy threatened to drop out of the production entirely. [“You wouldn’t give me a speaking role, yet you cast Dillman in my role. What experience has he had?”] Corsaro asked to be forgiven and even promised to offer him a major role on Broadway in one of the plays he planned to direct. He would keep that promise.
Barbara Glenn, Jimmy’s girlfriend at the time (one of many), was out of town. He wrote to her. “I accepted this thankless role because I think I can learn something from Frank. I’m getting a little stipend. With the money I’m going to buy me a new pair of shoes. I’ve worn out the leather on my old ones walking the streets of New York. I will also buy me a pair of pants. The one I’m wearing is so threadbare that my ass is almost showing. You know how dangerous it is for a good-looking guy like me to walk the streets of queer New York with his rosebud on display.”
When producer Hayden sat through the first rehearsal, she complimented Jimmy to Corsaro. “The boy’s physical grace will look beautiful as Lord Ravensbane’s mirror image.”
When Jimmy was introduced to Neal, she said she relished the challenge of playing an old woman—“and a witch at that.”
In her autobiography, the actress remembered Jimmy. “There was a pleasant looking young man who excelled in a small dancing role. I was sure that James Dean had a great future ahead of him.”
Her biographer, Stephen Michael Shearer, gave the best description of the play’s convoluted plot. “It is the story of a female blacksmith Goody Rickby (Neal), who seeks revenge for having been spurned by Justice Gilead Merton (Milton Selzer). She makes a pact with Dick Dickon (Wallach), known as ‘The Evil One,’ and casts a spell that brings to life a Scarecrow to win the hand of Merton’s daughter (Jackson).”
As a human, Lord Ravensbane (Douglas Watson), the scarecrow falls in love with the young girl and breaks his pact with Dickon. This dramatic acts brings about his death, but not before he has experienced, ever so briefly, the joy of life and love.”
During his short time at the Actors Studio, Jimmy had developed great respect for the talents of the husband-and-wife acting team of Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. He got to know them better during their work together on The Scarecrow. He had a dream that one day he, too, like Wallach, would marry a talented actress, and that together, they would perform on stage and screen. “If not Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, perhaps Me and My Gal could at least be Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn.”
Wallace urged him to concentrate on becoming a stage actor. “Of course, if you need a paycheck, you might make a movie now and then. But the stage is the only real venue for an actor.”
Years later, Wallace commented on the advice he had given Jimmy. “As a Method actor back then, I was almost evangelical in my promotion of it, as if reborn. I set out like a crusader trying to entice young actors into the fold, thinking they would bring fresh blood to the stage. I wanted to convert young Dean.”
“I told Dean that stage acting is the most alive thing an actor can do. The stage is a much higher level than film, a more satisfying medium. Movies, by comparison, are like calendar art next to a great painting.”
Wallace recognized that Jimmy was struggling to survive as an actor, and he shared with him memories of how “Anne and I started out. We found this dingy little basement apartment in Greenwich Village for $35 a month. The bathroom was outside. We cooked on a two-burner stove I got from a secondhand shop for ten bucks.”
Jackson joined Jimmy and her husband, recalling days of working with him in the theater. Jimmy envied them their various appearances in Tennessee Williams’ plays, including This Property Is Condemned. Rogers Brackett had taken Jimmy to see Wallach’s Tony-winning performance in Tennessee’s The Rose Tattoo, opposite Maureen Stapleton.
Sometimes, Jackson joined Wallach and Jimmy, sharing her own memories of the theater. She recalled the time she’d visited backstage when Wallach was appearing with Katherine Cornell in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.
“Charlton Heston was cast as Proculeius, a Roman general in Caesar’s army,” Wallach said. “He wore this gray uniform with a short skirt. He asked me if I didn’t think he had beautiful legs to show off, suggesting that horny women or gay men would buy tickets to the show to gape at his legs. He also told me that he’d started out as a nude model, claiming that when he dropped the robe to pose in the nude, there were sighs of desire heard from both the men and women in the class.”
“I told Chuck, ‘If you’re going to make it in the theater, there is no need to be modest about your physical assets,’” Wallach said.
Patricia Neal Introduces Jimmy to His Mentor
(One of the Few Members of Hollywood’s Old Guard Who Genuinely Liked Him)
GARY COOPER, THE MONTANA MULE
Ever since Marcus Dean, Jimmy’s uncle, had taken him to see Gary Cooper in Sergeant York (1941), the image of the ultimate all-American hero, nicknamed “Coop,” had been implanted on his brain. To Jimmy, the lanky, handsome star was lean, laconic, and masculine, an image of inspiration to a small boy growing up in the farmlands of Indiana.
To Jimmy, there was something real about the actor. “He had no bag of tricks,” Jimmy said, “and none of the florid gestures of some other actors of his era.”
As Jimmy rehearsed for his teleplays, he would remember Coop’s speech patterns and his uncanny use of hesitancy, and his naturalness.
Without his uncle, Jimmy returned to the movie theater the next day to see for a second time Cooper portraying Alvin York, a backwoods turkey shooter who became America’s most-decorated hero of World War I.
From that moment on, Jimmy never missed a Gary Cooper movie. He was especially enthralled with Cooper’s superb portrayal of baseball star Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees (1942), or as the Ernest Hemingway character in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), in which he created a beautifully believable relationship with Ingrid Bergman.
When Jimmy met Patricia Neal in New York, he didn’t tell her that he hadn’t really understood the architect Cooper had portrayed opposite her in The Fountainhead (1949). But Cooper redeemed himself in Jimmy eyes when he was cast as the subtle and sympathetic sheriff, Will Cain, who must confront a coven of killer gunmen in High Noon (1952). Of course, Grace Kelly would be waiting for him at the end of
the picture. “Grace Kelly—now that’s something Coop and I have in common,” Jimmy boasted to his friends.
Jimmy was aware, as were many a movie fan, that Cooper and Neal had begun a tormented affair when they’d co-starred together in The Fountainhead, even though he was married at the time to Veronica Balfe, whom he had nicknamed “Rocky.” Neal was twenty-six at the time, and he was forty-six.
When Jimmy had lived with Rogers Brackett, and the producer had learned of Jimmy’s fascination with Cooper, he brought Jimmy up on all the gossip. “What a cocksman that guy was, and bisexual at that,” Brackett said.
Patricia Neal with Gary Cooper. Although they were acting together in a scene from The Fountainhead, their love was real, albeit thwarted.
Over lunch in Manhattan, Neal told Jimmy that she had accepted a marriage proposal from Roald Dahl, the British writer. With tears in her eyes, she also tossed a “bombshell” at him, revealing that Cooper had scheduled a brief visit to New York for their final goodbye before they parted forever. “He’ll have very little time here, and he wants you to join us for dinner.”
“I’m dying to meet him, but it sounds like you guys need some space all your own.”
“We’ll have that after he meets you,” she said. “And you should know that there’s a motive to his madness. He’s heard that Elia Kazan might cast you as the lead in East of Eden, and Coop thinks that the role of your mean and bitter father would be a choice role for him.”
In anticipation of his dinner with Cooper and Neal, Jimmy got a haircut and wore his only suit. He wanted to look his best, but later confessed, “I was nervous as hell, but Coop put me at ease almost immediately. He’d made dozens of movies and won two Oscars—in fact, he was Hollywood royalty, a survivor of the Golden Age—yet he treated me like an equal worthy of respect.”
Neal made no mention of what happened that night in her memoirs. But she described to Anne Bancroft [a close friend of Darwin Porter and Stanley Haggart] and others what happened that night: “I think Cooper was testing his chemistry with Jimmy. Coop and Jimmy could not have been more different as actors, yet they bonded. For reasons known only to him, Jimmy told Coop that he was inspired more by him than he was by either Monty Clift or Marlon Brando.”
“You’ve always been my screen idol,” Jimmy said. “Not those other fuckers.”
As stated by Neal, “Right before my eyes, Jimmy and Coop seemed to develop a romance. Of course, you know I don’t mean that in any sexual sense. These two men were from different generations and had divergent lives. But each seemed to sense that one lost soul was meeting and finding a sympathetic comrade in the other.”
“Unlike Jimmy, Coop had actually read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and both of them became animated about methodologies for the creating of a dynamic father-son confrontation on the screen.”
“We’ve got to show love beyond the outward hostility,” Cooper said to Jimmy. “We can do that.”
“And I can show my love for you, too,” Jimmy said. “You’ve meant so much to me. So tall, so handsome, so forthright.”
“For a man of few words on the screen, Coop delivered quite a mouthful that night,” Jimmy told Eli Wallach.
After a few hours, Jimmy politely excused himself, with the understanding that Coop and Neal needed time alone during their final night together.
Standing up, and towering over Jimmy, Coop extended his hand. Impulsively, Jimmy wrapped his arms around him and held him tightly for one long moment. Cooper responded with manly affection, even running his fingers through Jimmy’s hair.
“For one brief moment, I saw a loving father holding his young son in his arms,” Neal said. “It was a beautiful sight I’ll never forget.”
***
[Despite the onscreen suitability of Gary Cooper playing father to the character played by James Dean in East of Eden, Elia Kazan had very different ideas.
The austere, inflexible role of Adam, Jimmy’s father, was awarded to Raymond Massey, a talented actor who was very different from Cooper.
“I’m so sorry Coop lost the role,” Neal said. “He and Jimmy were heartbroken. Jimmy called me and was sobbing on the phone. He really wanted those moments onscreen with his idol.”
Cooper called him at the end of the picture’s filming to arrange a get-together in Hollywood. As such, he was one of the few golden age stars to welcome the newcomer, unlike Clark Gable and Cary Grant, who had each expressed contempt for him.
Even Jimmy Stewart turned against James Dean, ostensibly because they each competed for two of the same roles, despite the quarter-century difference in their ages. (Stewart was forty-seven, and Dean was twenty-three. They vied for the role of Jett Rink in Giant, and for the part of aviator Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis. In the aftermath of Jimmy’s rejection of the latter of those two roles, it was awarded to Stewart, who thus became the pilot who flew across the treacherous Atlantic to Paris.]
When Jimmy and Cooper learned that they shared a passion for horseback riding, they sometimes went riding together on Saturdays.
“I got Kazan to arrange a screening of East of Eden for Coop and me,” Jimmy said. “Later, over drinks, I asked Coop what he thought of my performance, and he told me I had all the elements of a really big star. As for Massey playing my father, he thought he was a shit.”
“Massey played the role in the first dimension,” Cooper said. “He should have shown more than contempt for his son. He should have conveyed a deep love, at least in a far and distant chamber of his heart. I would have reached down to show I really cared for Cal in spite of my neurotic behavior.”
Jimmy later told Kazan, “That’s not a bad appraisal coming from an actor who’s supposed to be inarticulate.”
He later related that one Saturday after a very long and tiring horseback ride, Cooper invited him for a steambath at his country club.
“We were bare-assed—now I know why Coop is called ‘the Montana Mule.’” Jimmy told William Bast. “It was long, thick, floppy—and still soft. Those were some lucky guys and gals who got to make love with him.”
“Unfortunately,” Jimmy continued, “I cannot include my name on Coop’s list of conquests. I would have been more than willing. If he’d played my father on the screen, it would have been a case of incest.”
Jimmy’s continuing fascination with Cooper was demonstrated during the filming of Giant in Texas. He admired the Stetson worn by actress Mercedes McCambridge. She told him that Cooper had given it to her after he’d worn it in three of his pictures.
“I thought it might be something like that,” Jimmy said. “Your hat is the most authentic in the movie.”
She later claimed that Jimmy made at least three unsuccessful attempts to steal it from her. “I was onto the little devil. I guarded that hat like it was the crown jewels.”
When he heard the news of Jimmy’s death, shortly after the filming of Giant, Cooper said, “I’m depressed, a bit morbid. What a loss. The roles he could have played.”
Jimmy, of course, was not alive to see the last stand of America’s hero. Cooper was at home battling cancer when James Stewart accepted an honorary Oscar on his behalf at the Academy Awards in April of 1961. Stewart chocked up, signaling to the world that one of its greatest stars was dying.
For Cooper, it was no longer High Noon. Midnight was fast approaching.
Gary Cooper died on May 13, 1961, about a month after being designated as recipient of that Oscar.
The first telegrams of condolence to his family came from President John F. Kennedy and Queen Elizabeth II of England.
Jimmy Misses a Bus Stop
WITH MARILYN MONROE
Albert Salmi, with his rugged good looks, brawny physique, and very masculine aura was a member of the cast of The Scarecrow who intrigued and physically attracted Jimmy. Like Jimmy, he was a Method actor and a member of Actors Studio.
The son of Finnish immigrants, he had been reared in Brooklyn. Four years older than Jimmy, he had jo
ined the U.S. Army to fight during World War II.
During a rehearsal for The Scarecrow, Salmi’s relationship with Jimmy deepened when he extended an invitation to join him in the East Village. He wanted Jimmy to experience both an old-fashioned Turkish bathhouse and its Finnish counterpart, with the intention of demonstrating that the dry heat of a Finnish sauna was superior and more invigorating.
After testing each of them, the two young actors went to Stanley Haggart’s apartment, to which Jimmy still had his private key. The next morning Haggart met both men, each attired in his underwear, and served them a Kansas-style farmhouse breakfast. Since it was a Sunday, they wanted to spend the rest of the day sunbathing on his rooftop terrace.
That evening over drinks in Haggart’s living room, Jimmy asked Haggart—since he was considered an interpretive expert—to examine a sample of Salmi’s handwriting.
Haggart later admitted to Alec Wilder and others that, “I didn’t give an honest reading. Salmi appeared tame enough on the surface, but there was a dark streak, a touch of madness I intuited through the reading of his handwriting. He was capable of great violence, and the lines on his hand implied a horrible upcoming death. Jimmy seemed attracted to this reckless streak in Salmi, but I didn’t tell either of them any of that.”
“During the summer of 1953, the two of them made frequent use of my apartment, often sunbathing in the nude on my terrace. I jokingly told Jimmy that Salmi’s real name should be ‘salami.’”
“Jimmy sometimes complained to me that Salmi was a selfish brute in bed,” Haggart said.
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