James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  Had Jimmy gotten the role of Christopher Isherwood, he would have appeared on stage with Julie Harris before being cast opposite her in East of Eden. Harris was later assigned the film role in I Am a Camera, but the male role went to Laurence Harvey, who co-starred alongside Shelley Winters, playing a German woman who backs out of marrying a Jew.

  In 1966, I Am a Camera was adapted into a Broadway musical, directed by Hal Prince, with music by John Kander, starring Jill Haworth, Bert Convy, and Lotte Lenya, Jack Gilford, and Joel Grey.

  But the actress who made the character of Sally Bowles a household name was Liza Minnelli in the brilliant 1972 film musical retitled Cabaret. Directed by Bob Fosse, it starred Joel Grey and Michael York. Had he lived, Jimmy might have sought the York role and portrayed young Isherwood.

  ***

  In 1959, Walter Starcke was living in Key West. His long-time companion, Van Druten had died two years before. In Key West, Starcke became friends with Darwin Porter, who at the time was the bureau chief in Key West for The Miami Herald.

  One of Broadway’s most influential playwrights, notorious for pressuring young actors into sexually compromising positions, John Van Druten, depicted above, and his long-time companion and pimp...

  At one point, Starcke asked Porter to help him write his memoirs. In pursuit of that goal, he articulated and dictated a long repertoire of “Broadway Babylon” anecdotes.

  In anticipation of their compilation, Porter, as co-author, claimed, “Starcke’s lurid exposés will reveal decadent, manipulative, and very lavender aspects of the Great White Way. Broadway’s image as ‘The Great White Way’ wasn’t a navigable highway. It was more akin to a fetid swamp.’”

  One of Starcke’s claims involved his “discovery” of Paul Newman. “He walked into my office in New York selling encyclopedias. I have this instinct about who’s going to be a star and who isn’t going to make it. I thought Newman was a living doll. I called the biggest agent in town and told him, ‘You’ve got to meet this guy right now. What blue eyes! I haven’t checked out his other body parts yet, but before sending him over, I will.’”

  Broadway impresario and new age guru, Walter Starcke.

  Starcke eventually decided that his memoirs (previously dictated to Darwin Porter) were too seamy to ever publish.

  “Of course, Newman knew that my help came with a price,” Starcke said. “No one ever accused him of being naïve. I didn’t invent the casting couch, but I made good use of it.”

  “Steve McQueen was another actor who ended up on my casting couch,” Starcke claimed. “Although I had predicted stardom for Newman, I didn’t think McQueen was star material at all. Most of the actors I seduced eventually faded into oblivion. A few made it—Ralph Meeker, Marlon Brando, Monty Clift, and Tony Perkins. But the huge majority ending up selling vacuum cleaners or waiting tables.”

  “As for Dean, he was a little shit,” Starcke claimed. “Just a hustler. But who am I to cast stones? That’s how I got my start, too.”

  Starcke later decided that the publication of his memoirs would be unwise and perhaps even dangerous. By that time, he had evolved into a spiritual leader, a guru [“You are what you create and you create who you are.”] who had authored a series of self-help books based on the mystical procedures and philosophies he had gleaned from one of his mentors, Joel Goldsmith, whose papers and writings he had inherited after Goldsmith’s death.

  Up until his death in 2011, Starcke spent the latter decades of his life developing New Age cult following, often from among twenty-somethings. It was then that he demanded that Porter destroy those extensive notes he’d written during the planning stages for his “Babylon-style” Broadway memoir.

  “Do you understand me?” Starcke had said to Porter. “The indiscretions of my Broadway days would doom the development of my philosophies about spiritual development and heightened awareness of the human soul.”

  “Don’t worry,” Porter promised him at the time. “I’ll assign all my notes to hell’s fire.”

  Starcke didn’t seem to realize that Porter had no intention of destroying the most scandalous material ever committed to paper about indiscretions and excesses associated with Broadway and its denizens after dark.

  Chapter Eleven

  TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

  AMERICA’S MOST REVERED PLAYWRIGHT WANTS A SON & INVITES JAMES DEAN TO BE THE FATHER

  Auditioning Replacements for “The Horse,” Tennessee Williams “Interviews” James Dean as His Possible New Lover

  TENNESSEE’S LOST MANUSCRIPT

  THE YOUNG MAN (JIMMY DEAN) WHO TOOK A BITE OUT OF THE MOON

  “I’ve had sex with all four of America’s most famous rebel actors: Marlon Brando, Monty Clift, Paul Newman, and James Dean.”

  —Tennessee Williams

  At several occasions, at parties and at private gatherings, Tennessee Williams and James Dean had circled each other before they eventually rendezvoused, early in 1954 with Elia Kazan and Eli Wallach, at a catered dinner within Tennessee’s Manhattan apartment. The playwright’s lover, Frank Merlo, away visiting relatives in his native Sicily, was conspicuously absent.

  Tennessee had high praise for Jimmy’s performance in See the Jaguar.

  Afterward, although Jimmy and Tennessee each discussed their bonding with a number of friends, the extent of their relationship has remained unreported.

  At that dinner, as witnessed by the other guests, Tennessee claimed, “I have always had a soft spot in my heart and a hard-on for most young actors. It seems that all of them play the waiting game, most often in vain, longing for that big part that might make them an overnight sensation. Marlon, as you know, found it in my creation of Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar.”

  “I’ve watched many an actor grow old without his dream ever coming true. But if my intuition hasn’t betrayed me, I think this young man here, this Jimmy Dean, will be one of the chosen few upon whom the stars will shine ever so brightly.”

  Then he reached over and took Jimmy’s hand in his. “Mr. Dean, you will find your role—in fact, I may be the one to write it for you, a part you were born to play, like it was your destiny. And I’m sure that when I do, Gadge here will direct it with his usual genius.”

  Spectacularly famous and sought-after at the time he met Jimmy, Tennessee Williams was fully aware that his endorsement of an actor for a role in one of his cutting-edge plays usually led to fame and glory. Marlon Brando, playing a key role in A Street-car Named Desire had been one of his early protégés.

  “I may be a little too drunk tonight to write such a play,” Tennessee continued, “but I know I will summon my strength and create a memorable character.”

  Then he turned his attention to Wallach, who appeared jealous that he might be pushed aside after all the fine performances he’d delivered of The Rose Tattoo [as a play, it had opened in 1951], and that Jimmy, and not himself, might emerge as Tennessee’s new discovery.

  “At this time in history, the Broadway stage is more liberal than the film industry in Hollywood,” Tennessee said. “But there will come a day, I predict, when homosexuality will be depicted openly on both the stage and in films. Of course, movies have included prissy homosexuals like Edward Everett Horton and that fussbudget, Franklin Pangborn, but that’s not what I’m talking about; I’d like to depict a football hero as a homosexual.”

  Kazan seemed to agree with his point of view. He said he’d read Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. “Kinsey found that thirty-seven percent of males have had at least some homosexual encounters and experiences in their lifetimes. That should send a message to the shit psychiatrists who still define homosexuality as a mental illness.”

  “I’d be willing to depict a homosexual in a play,” Wallach said, “that is, if the role is good enough.”

  [During this dialogue, Jimmy was fascinated. Later, during his filming of Rebel Without a Cause, he was counseled for a brief period by Dr. Judd Marmor, the psychiatrist best known for his role in
persuading the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.]

  True to Tennessee’s prediction, Jimmy, cast as Jim Stark, would eventually appear in romantically compelling scenes with Sal Mineo, who interpreted his teenaged character as an obvious homosexual with an overpowering crush on Jimmy.

  “If I write a role for a homosexual, I will do so with some subtlety,” Tennessee said. “In other words, he won’t be shown taking it up the ass. I prefer characters with certain sexual ambiguity. I believe that all characters, gay or straight, should end their performances with an aura of mystery about their futures. If you’re a member of the audience who demands a road map about what will eventually happen to a character, then I’m not your playwright.”

  Once again, he turned to Jimmy and took his hand. “As a possible character both on and off the stage, I find you fascinating. You are nothing if not sexually ambiguous. There is an androgyny about you; you’re completely unlike that brutal male Brando played in Streetcar. I’d even say that although his character was never seen by any audience, you might have played Blanche DuBois’ doomed, and gay, husband.”

  Tennessee later revealed to his most enduring confidante, Maria Britneva [later, Lady St. Just, aka Maria St. Just] the ground rules he relayed to Jimmy that night after Wallach and Kazan left his dinner party:

  He informed him that ever since he’d started having sex, he preferred to be sodomized. “But in December of 1953, I was horribly afflicted with thrombosed hemorrhoids as large as a hen’s egg. I had to undergo the most painful operation of my life in New Orleans. I think that before he worked on me, that quack doctor performed medical experiments on Jews during the war. Ever since then, the thought of rectal penetration frightens me. I have therefore decided that the human mouth on a penis can be equally gratifying.”

  Later, Jimmy discussed details of his evening with Tennessee with Stanley Haggart, who was also a friend of the playwright: “He’s insatiable,” Jimmy lamented. “Just insatiable. He wants to repeat everything again and again and again. If I see too much of him, I won’t have any honey left for anybody else.”

  As the days and weeks went by, Jimmy—fearing that Tennessee was “auditioning” him for a role as his full-time lover—kept Haggart posted on the status of their “romance.”

  Long time companions and collaborators Frank Merlo (left) with Tennessee Williams, together at their home on Duncan Street in Key West.

  According to Haggart, “Jimmy, as was his nature, was out to get what he could get. He’d done that ever since he’d become an actor, and the pattern continued from Hollywood to New York and back to Hollywood again. And from what Tennessee told me, he was ‘crazy about the boy.’”

  Tennessee had nicknamed his Sicilian lover, Frank Merlo, “The Horse.” From the beginning, their relationship was volatile. In the summer of 1952, Merlo left him. “Tennessee and I went our separate ways,” Merlo told Darwin Porter.

  Tennessee lamented his loss to Jimmy. “The Horse left me at one of the most desperate times of my life. I’d had two great successes, but the critics had turned on me, and I was insecure. I felt as alone as a man feels at the moment of death.”

  “I immediately asked myself if I could find someone else. Or could I live alone, without love, drifting from bed to bed? I was falling apart—and by the way, I had plenty of company. Almost everyone close to me was also falling apart, stricken with fatal diseases, or whatever. In the case of Maria, she had an abortion. There were other horror stories, too. I refer to that time as ‘The Summer of the Long Knives.’”

  Jimmy was made aware when Merlo eventually returned from Sicily for a reunion with his lover. But after that, he sometimes spent weeks at a time at their cottage in Key West, leaving Tennessee alone in New York. “When he came back, he displayed the charm of a porcupine—grouchy, sullen, irritable,” Tennessee complained to Jimmy. “If I ever write a play about him, I’ll entitle it, Something Unspoken from the Distant Heart.”

  During that period, Maria St. Just attended most of Tennessee’s social gatherings. Although she and Jimmy deeply resented the other, they maintained a superficial politeness.

  Before Jimmy’s first dinner with Maria, Tennessee had issued a warning to him: “She has a savagely mordant sense of humor. Watch that it’s not turned on you. She seems to say all the things that a discreet woman would not even think. And that tongue of hers: It’ll either be turned on you viciously, or it will be lapping at your rosebud.”

  “She has a powerful sex drive, and has never been known to turn down a sexual advance. In fact, I sometimes have to curb her, like those ladies who lunch do to their poodles during their walks along Fifth Avenue. I have no doubt that if Maria had remained in Leningrad, she would by now have become a reincarnation of Catherine the Great.”

  Since it seemed that both of them had become the objects of Tennessee’s current obsession, Jimmy set out to learn more about Maria.

  [Maria Britneva was born in the Soviet Union in 1921, the daughter of one of the former Court physicians to the Tsar. Her father had fled from St. Petersburg during the 1917 revolution and was later murdered in one of the Soviet purges. With her mother, Maria emigrated to London, where she became a ballet dancer, living on whatever her mother could earn translating the plays of Chekhov for John Gielgud’s acting troupe.

  It was through Gielgud that she met Tennessee Williams, with whom she probably fell in love, later sublimating it into a devoted “amitié amoureuse,” ferociously shielding him from sycophants and managing his chaotic domestic affairs. After moving to New York, she had studied at the Actors Studio, during which time, Tennessee had allowed her to interpret the role of Blanche DuBois in an Off-Broadway production of his play, A Streetcar Named Desire.

  On July 25, 1956, she married Peter Grenfell, Lord St. Just, the wealthy son of Edward Grenfell, the British banking partner of J.P. Morgan.

  Tennessee designated her in his will as the literary executor of his estate. It was rumored that he regretted that decision, and that as time went by, he was on the verge of eliminating her from his will completely, but he died before he filed the paperwork. By most accounts, Maria evolved into a tyrannically restrictive executrix, refusing requests from directors to produce many of Tennessee’s more obscure plays, and systematically denying scholars’ access to his private papers. Some scholars, however, have credited her ferocious territoriality as the means whereby Tennessee’s literary reputation was salvaged from the dissipation of his drug excesses in the years before his death.]

  Ferociously protective: Maria St. Just with Tennessee Williams

  To his friends, Tennessee described Maria as “My Five O’Clock Angel. She’s always waiting for me at that time of day when I could always count on her being on the other end of the phone as I described my emptiness after a day laboring on my typewriter. She is my friend, but also my court jester, confidante, cheerleader, dogsbody, and ultimately, the keeper of the flame.”

  Truman Capote had another view of her. He told Jimmy, “Tell her that if she sees me to stay clear, or else I will slap her tits and kick her down the stairs. You should see the crap she’s written about me. Quel bitch! You tell her from me that she’s a dreadful liar!”

  Maria and Jimmy maintained an uneasy alliance, continuing to conceal their respective hostilities. She’d later express her view of him, merging it somehow into an anecdote about Montgomery Clift:

  “Montgomery Clift was a friend of Tennessee. I visited him on a number of occasions when he was living with the torch singer, Libby Holman. There was something curiously intangible and inconclusive about Monty. But at least he wasn’t as cracking a bore as James Dean, whom I met on a number of occasions with Tennessee. Dean simply sat there glumly, thinking no doubt about himself.”

  Jimmy later told Stanley Haggart, “I must be a god damn good actor because I’ve successfully managed to conceal my distaste for Maria. At least some of that is based o
n the weird idea Tennessee proposed for us the other night.”

  Tennessee had said: “I’ve been thinking for months about an element that’s missing from my life—a son of my own. I don’t think I’m capable of penetrating a woman to have an actual son the way nature intended, and I don’t plan to adopt one. But I’m opposed to artificial insemination.”

  “How in hell, then, do you plan to have a son?” Jimmy asked.

  “That’s where you come in,” Tennessee said. “I want you to seduce Maria in the missionary position—nothing kinky, just a straight fuck like the ones Richard Nixon gave Patricia, only twice in his life to produce two daughters.”

  “Of course, I could get ‘The Horse’ (Merlo) to fuck her, but I don’t want a son with Sicilian blood. Actually, I want my son to have a Russian soul like Maria’s, but to be imbued with all-American boy beauty like yourself. Hence, you’re the perfect specimen.”

  “All right,” Jimmy said, concealing his reluctance. “You name the time and place. I’m sure I’ll score a home run my first time at bat.”

  “I, too, am certain of that,” Tennessee said. “I noticed that your semen is extra thick and creamy, not watery like some guys emit. I think your sperm must be crawling with little baby-making gametes.”

  Later, Jimmy told Haggart, “Tennessee never mentioned that subject again. Nor did I. Having to do the dirty deed with that Russian bitch would have been one of the truly formidable challenges of my life, even though you know I love to fuck.”

  ***

  Whenever Frank Merlo, Tennessee’s lover, was out of town [in most cases because of trips he made to their shared home in Key West] Tennessee’s parties and social gatherings in Manhattan included James Dean.