James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  “I was often asked if he were gay or bisexual,” Schatt said. “Well, maybe. His nuttiness and constant attempts at breaking the humdrum could have led him into anything.”

  Jimmy’s agent, Jane Deacy, arranged for Howard Thompson of The New York Times to interview him. Jimmy didn’t want the interview conducted within his private living quarters. “I don’t want some god damn reporter knowing where and how I live.”

  He told the newsman that he’d gotten kicked out of UCLA because he’d “busted the faces of two fuckers who deserved it. I wasn’t happy there. My father wanted me to study law. Can you imagine me as a lawyer?”

  “To me, New York is a vital, thriving, throbbing city marching to its own drumbeat,” he said. “The problem is that a cat like me can get lost in its maze. People are human beings in New York. In Hollywood, they are desensitized whores.”

  Thompson didn’t print part of the interview.

  ***

  The Schatt/Dean friendship eventually ended unhappily. When Jimmy finally attained the beginnings of some financial success, Schatt asked if he’d lend him the money for a new camera, which he badly need. Jimmy refused. “Who do you think I am, man? A god damn bank?”

  Equally infuriating, he granted access to a rival photographer, and denied it to Schatt, who had befriended him for so long and taken so many pictures of him for free.

  “I think he just used people,” Schatt said. “He sucked up to them, got what he wanted, and then went on his way.”

  Months later, Schatt encountered Jimmy in Hollywood. “He no longer looked like something Michelangelo would want to sculpt. He had bags under his eyes from his insomnia. He could have passed for a consumptive romantic poet, a dying male version of Camille. The constant smoking had dimmed the luster of his skin. Four packages of Camels a day will do that to anybody. More than that, his soul seemed to be creeping out of his body, and all this inner misery was reflected on his face.”

  In later years, an embittered Schatt, during interviews he granted, demonstrated his increased disillusion about Jimmy, and expressed a certain contempt for the cult based on his former friend. “Every actor I photographed wanted to look like Jimmy Dean. The reputation spread that I had ‘discovered’ the boy, which was not true. For a time, I couldn’t get rid of Steve McQueen who hung out at my studio. He had an obsession about Dean. He had me take a frontal nude of him. Frankly, I told him one day that he’d never make it as an actor. Was I wrong?”

  “After seeing Jimmy in The Immoralist, I also told him what a lousy actor he was. My exact words were, ‘You’ll never amount to anything in the theater or the movies.’ If truth be known, I still think Dean and McQueen were rotten actors.”

  Jimmy Kneels

  IN HOMAGE TO A BLACK MUSICIAN

  The most outrageous story ever told about James Dean topped any revelation made by Roy Schatt. Although it may be apocryphal, mention of it has been made in several books, and there are those who swore that it was true.

  One night, back in the days when lots of upscale white people went late at night to Harlem for entertainment, Jimmy joined a party that included composers Leonard Rosenblum and Alec Wilder, along with Stanley Haggart and his artist friend, Woodrow (“Woody”) Parrish-Martin.

  [Almost forgotten today, the very gossipy Parrish-Martin was known in media and arts circles at the time for his then-iconoclastic views on set design and decorating. He enjoyed a minor degree of celebrity for his promotion of, among others, the then-novel Haitian school of painting and an avant-garde use of colors such as chartreuse and purple in his decorating schemes.]

  An avant-garde arts arbiter of the 50s, with tales to tell: Woody Parrish-Martin.

  “I met Jimmy a few times when he used Stanley’s garden apartment,” Parrish-Martin said. “I was told he was outrageous, but that night in Harlem, I saw evidence of it firsthand. Before we rode uptown together, Jimmy got into the taxi with his bongo drums. We had a hell of a time that night and stayed till the club closed at around two or three o’clock.”

  “At the club in Harlem, Jimmy joined the black musicians who let him play those blasted drums. There was a piano player there—a mulatto—who was strikingly handsome, with a Robert Taylor mustache. Jimmy had been fascinated by him all evening. I thought he’d invite him home with him.”

  “We sat in front-row seats…all of us loved the jazz that the band was playing. As the night wore on, there were only about ten customers left in the club—everybody was drunk, including Jimmy. He approached this musician and bluntly asked, “Will you let me suck your cock?’”

  “The piano player didn’t look shocked at all,” Parrish-Martin said. “I think a lot of white men, including Cole Porter and Monty Woolley, had gone down on him many times before. He simply unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis, masturbated it hard, and offered it to Jimmy. Then the kid got down on his knees and serviced him. It took him about ten minutes to reach climax, and we all sat there taking in the show. Management should have charged for the exhibition. It was well worth it.”

  “That night, I saw firsthand how good Jimmy was a deep throat artist. He’d been practicing on somebody, maybe Rock Hudson.”

  “After I moved out of Stanley’s apartment, I never saw Dean again.”

  John Gilmore

  “AT LAST, I’VE FOUND A BOY PRETTIER THAN I AM”

  —JAMES D EAN

  Beating the pavements of Manhattan, looking for a gig, Jimmy encountered Ray Curry, another actor he’d met when he was an extra in Hollywood. Jimmy knew of a drugstore on West 47th Street that served fresh orange juice and “big muffins with all the butter patties you wanted.” He invited Curry to go with him there.

  At the counter, Jimmy noticed this young man sitting a few feet away. “Hot damn!” he said to Curry. “At last, I’ve seen a boy prettier than I am.”

  “Hey, I know this guy,” Curry said. “He’s Jonathan Gilmore [an actor/author later billed as John Gilmore]. “I’ll introduce you.”

  Gilmore later recalled his memory of first seeing Jimmy in March of 1953, comparing him to a small scarecrow: “Dean lurched into the place and tripped over the doorsill, struggling to keep his balance. A shock of hair stood out like straw. His hands were jammed into the pockets of baggy gabardine trousers. A checked jacket hung on his frame like a sack with leather patches on the cuffs. He had the aura of a burlesque performer in vaudeville. He was hunched down into himself—almost shrinking and squinting through tortoise-framed glasses.”

  Later, Curry said, “It was a case of two soulmates coming together. These guys shared two passions: Bullfighting and motorcycle racing. Jonathan was actually reading a book on bullfighting when I introduced him to Jimmy.”

  A relationship with Gilmore was developed that afternoon that Gilmore would later write about in a trio of memoirs, including Laid Bare, The Real James Dean (1971); The Hollywood Death Trap (1997); and Live Fast—Die Young: Remembering the Short Life of James Dean (also 1997).

  Many Dean biographers overlooked Gilmore’s role in Jimmy’s life, but he was a key figure. Even some of Jimmy’s best friends were unaware of the bond between the two young actors.

  Born in the charity ward of the Los Angeles General Hospital, Gilmore was four years younger than Jimmy. He became a child actor, even appearing in a movie with cowboy star Gene Autry and interpreting other bit parts at Republic Studios. John Hodiak and Ida Lupino, in time, became his mentors. Hodiak introduced him to Marilyn Monroe, about whom Gilmore would write a book, Inside Marilyn Monroe (2007).

  At first, Gilmore and Jimmy were friends, not lovers. Sometimes, if Gilmore had ten dollars, he might lend Jimmy two. Both of them shared tips about the latest casting calls for Broadway plays. They would often meet at their favorite street corner, eating together at a drugstore counter where the food was cheap, greasy, and filling. In the beginning, they saw each other two or three times a week, often viewing films at rundown movie houses on Times Square.

  It wasn’t long before the
subject of sex arose.

  “Jimmy seemed obsessed with Marlon Brando and had this picture of him with a penis in his mouth.” Gilmore said. [That photo, replicated underground, was widely circulated at the time among the gay colonies of New York and Los Angeles.] “In reference to Brando, Jimmy said, ‘I learned that he often rolls over for guys and takes it up the ass.’”

  At one point, Jimmy told Gilmore that he’d been seduced by some of the biggest stars in Hollywood. “As another pretty boy, you must have had your share of stars, too,” he said.

  John Gilmore...kinky nights with James Dean

  Gilmore revealed that once, at a party in Hollywood at the Garden of Allah, he was only fifteen years old. “A drunken Tyrone Power came up to me and told me that I was one of the most beautiful boys he’d ever seen. He kissed me and wanted to kiss me again, trying to stick his tongue down in my mouth.”

  One night early in their relationship, Gilmore and Jimmy got smashed at Jerry’s Tavern and later ended up in his apartment. Jimmy asked him if he’d ever gone to bed with a producer or director when he’d worked in pictures in Hollywood.

  “A couple of times,” Gilmore said, “but I didn’t like it.”

  According to Gilmore, Jimmy then asked him if he’d ever tasted “jizz.”

  Gilmore answered that he had, but that he had spit it out.

  In a memoir, Gilmore wrote, “Jimmy put his hand behind my neck and pulled my face toward his, putting his lips on mine. I was the first time I’ve ever been really kissed by another guy.”

  “Can you be fucked?” Jimmy asked.

  “Jesus, I don’t think so.”

  Nibbling on his neck, Jimmy then tried to sodomize Gilmore. “At first, I tried to go down on him, but his cock was too big, and I choked. We tried to fuck, but it didn’t work out exactly, as he wanted it to.”

  At some point, Jimmy had to withdraw without reaching climax. The session ended with Gilmore “Jacking Jimmy off with skin lotion.”

  In 1980, the gossip tabloid, The Hollywood Star, ran an article by Gilmore entitled “I Had Sex With James Dean.” In it, Gilmore reported details he omitted from his books.

  “Jimmy liked to be cuddled in bed. He liked to be held and he liked to be kissed.”

  On some occasions, Jimmy asked Gilmore if he’d dress up as a girl and let himself be escorted to parties as Jimmy’s date.

  Gilmore later wrote, “In time, I eventually felt as if I were Jimmy’s mother, brother, and lover. We were bad guys playing bad boys while opening up the bisexual sides of our personalities…One sex scene between the two of us played out in black leather to the music of Edith Piaf. The sex was a game. Jimmy was obsessed with riding the black ship in hell, and for a time I was on board with him.”

  Jimmy seemed to view Gilmore as an unthreatening wastepaper basket. According to Gilmore, “Into it, he dumped his chaotic, erotic, and crazy ideas. We enjoyed poetry and bullfighting, bongo drums, girls (often the same ones). We had the same crummy friends, and we shared the same sleepless nights.”

  It wasn’t just bullfighting they shared in common. Both of them had a mutual friend in singer Eartha Kitt. Jimmy told Gilmore that the singer was his “café au lait girlfriend.”

  They also knew a notorious Hollywood homosexual, Alfred de la Vega. “He sucked my cock,” Jimmy said. “Did he do yours, too?”

  “He wanted to,” Gilmore answered.

  In a memoir, Gilmore even described Jimmy and himself going to bed as a trio with an actress, Sharon Kingsley. “I pushed my cock into her, and she groaned and laughed a little, making a muffled sound because Jimmy’s cock was in her mouth.”

  On another night, Jimmy wanted sex with Gilmore while wearing a black leather jacket. He gave Gilmore a pair of black lace panties “that I got off some chick,” and begged his friend to put them on.

  “Jimmy told me just to lie there and show him my stomach.”

  “I want to see if I get a hard-on by pretending you’re this French whore.”

  “I was barelegged. But he wanted me to wear both a leather jacket and black panties. He kissed my legs and jacked off.”

  “We were sporadic friends,” Gilmore claimed. “Our relationship was jumpy and spotty, but we’d connect like electric wires and it made sparks. He was drawn as if by magnet to what struck him as perverse. He saw me as a kind of teenage Rimbaud who didn’t like anybody. He liked that about me.”

  [After Jimmy’s death, Gilmore moved to Paris, where he stayed at the Beat Hotel, a 42-room flophouse at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur, in Paris’s bohemian 6th arrondissement, notable as a residence for members of the Beat Poetry movement. There, he became friends with author and junkie William S. Burroughs, actress Brigitte Bardot, and the novelist Françoise Sagan.

  Today, Gilmore is an author and a journalist, known for his iconoclastic Hollywood memoirs, true crime literature, and hard-boiled fiction. He wrote a shattering memoir of Elizabeth Short (aka the Black Dahlia) and her famous dismemberment, which ushered in a cult following for him. He also wrote The Garbage People (1971) about Charles Manson and his psychotic family. Gilmore had known the butchered Sharon Tate. But of all his Hollywood stories, James Dean remained his favorite subject of memoir.]

  Jimmy Had a Question for Ronald Reagan About the Casting Couch—

  “BACK IN 1947, DID YOU HAVE TO PUT OUT FOR JOHN VAN DRUTEN BEFORE HE GOT YOU THE PART IN THAT STUPID MOVIE YOU MADE WITH ELEANOR PARKER?”

  “Because we were so young and pretty, John Gilmore and I sometimes competed for the same roles,” Jimmy told his friend, Stanley Haggart.

  Such was the case when the British playwright, John Van Druten, was involved in the casting for a Broadway play he had written, I Am a Camera.

  [Van Druten’s play had been inspired by Christopher Isherwood’s Good- bye to Berlin, which was part of his The Berlin Stories collection. Isherwood had based his tales on his decadent and brutalizing experiences in the German capital during the early 1930s, when the Nazis were fighting to seize power.]

  The lead role of a young writer was based on Isherwood himself, who was gay. The play produced the character of Sally Bowles, the iconic “Come to the Cabaret” entertainer.

  “I never told Jimmy about the part,” Gilmore said. “I knew he might make inroads to Van Druten and go to be with him in order to get the role. I was up for it without yet having to go to bed with Van Druten, and was going to keep it that way.”

  Isherwood was in New York to meet with Van Druten and his lover, Walter Starcke, who was co-producer of the play based on his novel. Around the same time, Jimmy had dined with Tennessee Williams, a friend of both Jimmy and Isherwood. He told the playwright how he’d met Isherwood in Hollywood at Cecil Beaton’s house. “Roddy McDowall and I did a sexual exhibition for some British expats,” Jimmy confessed.

  “I should have been invited,” Tennessee said. “I could have worn my royal purple robes and impersonated the Queen of England.”

  Tennessee called Isherwood and set up a meeting with Jimmy the following night. In their cozy get-together, Isherwood remembered having been introduced to Jimmy before and complimented him on his performance in the sexual exhibition back at that private party in Hollywood.

  “Don’t embarrass me,” Jimmy said. “It was a stupid thing to do. I’m older and wiser now. I’ve gone legit.”

  “My dear boy, I have done far more ridiculous things than that,” Isherwood said.

  It was arranged that Jimmy, the following evening, would pay a call at the apartment occupied by Starcke and Van Druten. Starcke had been the longtime lover of Van Druten ever since 1945, when he’d sent him a nude picture of himself.

  Before going there, Jimmy was briefed on aspects of Van Druten’s illustrious theatrical background. He was celebrated for plays filled with witty and urbane observations about contemporary life and society. [After Van Druten moved to America from the U.K. and became a U.S. citizen, many of his plays were adapted into famous films such as Old Acquaintance (1943), with Be
tte Davis and Miriam Hopkins, and The Voice of the Turtle (1947), with Ronald Reagan and Eleanor Parker. Jimmy would later ask, “Before getting his part, did Reagan have to lie on Van Druten’s casting couch like I did?”]

  That evening, confronting Jimmy, Starcke said, “Tennessee tells me it’s not your first time at the rodeo. You know the rules by now, I’m sure.”

  “I know the rules, and I also know how to break them,” Jimmy said.

  “I hope you’re obeying them tonight,” Starcke said. “The male lead in I Am a Camera could make you the biggest star on Broadway. Let’s adjourn to the bedroom. John gets lots of solicitations from young actors, and he insists I sample the merchandise before passing a guy on to him. Think of this as an audition. You’re not the first stud to find himself in this position. Catherine the Great of Russia ordered her ladies-in-waiting to evaluate a stallion firsthand before recommending him to Her Majesty. John likes to follow Catherine’s example.”

  “I see,” was all that Jimmy said.

  Later, after “interviews” with both Starcke and later, with Van Druten, Jimmy called Tennessee. “I have a sore ass,” he complained. “That Starcke has a big dick. Van Druten came back to the apartment later, and gave me quite a workout, too. But with him, I got to be the top, which was easier for me.”

  Tennessee cautioned that Jimmy—despite the Starcke/Van Druten promises—still might not get the role. “Starcke and Van Druten, especially Starcke, are known for their broken promises. They’ve used and abused many an actor before throwing him out onto the street.”

  Tennessee was right about Van Druten and Starcke. Jimmy did not get the role. Neither did Gilmore. Another actor, William Prince, was cast. He had starred on stage with Katharine Hepburn in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. In 1947, he’d been one of the founding members of Actors Studio.

  Jimmy once met Prince, reporting later, “I was underwhelmed.”