James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  “The next day, I took him to Steinbeck’s apartment to see what he thought of him,” Kazan said.

  [The popular novelist had sold the movie rights to East of Eden in 1952 for $125,000, a goodly price for a literary property at mid-century. He had also contracted for twenty-five percent of the profits.]

  Steinbeck reserved his opinion of Jimmy until he could deliver it discreetly and privately. He telephoned the director the next day to tell him, “He’s a god damn snotty kid, but, by God, he is Cal. Good luck working with a shithead like that neurotic boy. Whereas before, I thought Clift and Brando would have been the ideal casting, I no longer believe that after meeting this Dean character.”

  ***

  Kazan invited Jimmy to fly with him to Los Angeles for a screen test, although he was virtually certain he’d get the role. A few hours before the scheduled departure of their flight, a long black limousine, with Kazan inside, pulled up in front of Jimmy’s brownstone. Disheveled, Jimmy raced down the steps carrying two grocery bags filled with clothing and tied with string.

  It was his first ride on an airplane, and Kazan noted with amusement that he spent most of the flight with his nose pressed against the glass of the window adjacent to his seat.

  After their arrival in California, Jimmy asked Kazan if they could stop at a hospital where his father worked as a dental technician in a lab.

  Kazan remained in the back of the limousine, and Winton Dean emerged ten minutes later. “I sensed the tension between those two,” Kazan said. “I think Jimmy’s father hated him. He did not seem impressed, either with the limo or with Dean’s chance of starring in a major motion picture. He told me that he had wanted Jimmy to study law at U.C.L.A. They stood side by side without anything to say to each other. I ordered Jimmy into the car and we moved on.”

  “But at least I realized how deeply Dean could identify with the errant son, Cal, who was alienated from his father,” Kazan said. “It would be a slice from his own life.”

  Because Kazan had already demonstrated his knack for Oscar-winning success, Jack Warner at Warner Brothers had more or less given him free rein in casting. Kazan had already alerted Warner that the role called for a nineteen-year-old-version of Brando or Monty Clift. He had also warned the studio boss that Jimmy was idiosyncratic and somewhat eccentric.

  Warner’s spies soon reported to him that Jimmy was extremely temperamental and hard to control. Kazan received a telegram from Warner. “I hope this Dean fellow isn’t too odd. It’s getting to the point now where if we make a picture with someone who is odd, the whole machine is thrown out of order, not to mention the expense to the studio as pictures fall behind schedules. You know it takes only one odd spark to make the motor miss. I am fed up with people who are too odd. But I’ll take your word that you can control this little talented upstart.”

  Kazan dreaded introducing Jimmy to Warner. “He was used to such male stars as Errol Flynn, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Gary Cooper,” Kazan said. “Now I show up at his doorstep with this fidgety kid from New York. Warner was pleasant enough, but skeptical of my judgment. As Jimmy waited for me outside, Warner kept me in his office.”

  “Is it true that this kid is a cocksucker?” he demanded to know.

  “It’s just a rumor,” Kazan replied. He went on to assure him that the role called for a young man who could combine masculine virility with feminine softness and insecurity.

  Over lunch in Warners’ commissary, Kazan ordered Jimmy to drink a pint of cream every day to put on some weight and “for God’s sake, get a suntan. You’re as pale as the Queen of England, and I want you to look like a healthy farmboy who works in the fields.”

  That afternoon, Jimmy’s first reunion was with his former roommate, William Bast. Barging into his apartment, he gave Bast a deep and passionate kiss. “Come on, guy,” he said. “Let’s hit the road. I’ve rented a car. I’ve been cast in East of Eden, and Gadge [Kazan] wants me suntanned. Nut brown, please.”

  Bast seemed overjoyed for Jimmy and somehow managed to conceal his jealousy.

  Within the hour, the two men were heading east to the Anza-Borrego Desert, an hour’s drive from Palm Springs.

  Bast had never seen Jimmy this enthusiastic. “When I was out here before, I took a lot of crap, kissed a lot of asses. No more! I danced to the fiddle of these Caligula wannabes, but not this time around. The bastards need me, they want me, and I’m gonna make them lick the dust off my boots.”

  At a small, rustic resort, they rented a modest cabin for a week. It contained two double beds and a private shower.

  That night, over dinner, Jimmy told Bast, “I’m gonna fuck those Tinseltown bastards like they’ve never been fucked before.”

  Bast later concluded that he “knew that Jimmy had the tenacity of a Gila monster, but even a Gila monster has to roll over on his back to allow the poison in his jaws to flow.”

  “Hollywood hasn’t changed,” he told Bast. “It is still the same hostile, predatory place it always was, with a lot of hungry mouths looking for a pretty boy with a big cock.”

  That first night in their cabin, after the lights were off, Jimmy whispered to Bast, “Are you still awake?”

  Bast later wrote, “El momento de verdad had arrived.”

  He answered Jimmy’s siren call in the dark, crawling naked into his separate bed. He later told friends, “Then the inevitable happened. We made love all night. It was amazing it hadn’t happened before. I mean, at our penthouse in Hollywood, we’d shared a double bed, and on many occasions, I’d felt Jimmy’s erection pressing up against me. But this time, in his bed at that desert resort, that erection would do a lot more than ‘press.’”

  Jimmy’s pursuit of a suntan, as demanded by Jack Warner and Kazan, evolved into a sort of honeymoon for the actor and actor turned writer. “I knew it wouldn’t last,” Bast said. “And as our lazy days went by, I feared a return to the real world, knowing I was bound to lose Jimmy to a dozen temptations, maybe more.”

  During their final day in the desert, Jimmy told Bast, “I am the sun.”

  “And so he was for me,” Bast wrote in a memoir.

  ***

  Back in Hollywood, Jimmy invited Bast to meet his agent, Dick Clayton. Jane Deacy did not have a West Coast Office, so she had designated Clayton, from the Famous Artists Corporation, to represent his and their movie interests.

  Jimmy had known Clayton since the days they had appeared together in bit parts in Sailor Beware!

  Clayton helped hammer out the details of Jimmy’s movie contract with Warners. Finalized on April 7, 1954, it stipulated Jimmy’s receipt of $1,000 a week during the shooting of East of Eden. To tide him over until the beginning of filming, the studio advanced him $700.

  [In October of 1954, Warners renewed the contract with a six-month option. The contract was renewed again and expanded on April 2, 1955, into a long-term commitment. It called for him to earn $3,000 a week by his ninth film. However, from New York, Jane Deacy negotiated a better deal that would have granted him $100,000 for every film. “He was the hottest property we had,” Jack Warner said. “We had big plans for him. I mean big plans.”]

  As an agent, Clayton would later represent such high-profile clients as Jane Fonda, Farrah Fawcett, Harrison Ford, Nick Nolte, and Angie Dickinson. For twenty-two years, he functioned as the personal manager of Burt Reynolds. In time, he would build and occupy a home with Jimmy’s rival, Tab Hunter.

  After signing the contract with Warner Brothers, as funneled through Clayton, Jimmy invited Bast as a visitor onto the studio lot. He introduced Bast to Kazan, with the boast that, “Gadge, you’re shaking the hand of the best writer in Hollywood.”

  En route to the commissary for a meal together, Bast and Jimmy encountered Paul Newman, who was preparing himself for his leading role (one that Jimmy had previously rejected) in The Silver Chalice.

  Newman told Bast, “Jimmy got the role of Cal that I wanted so bad I could taste it.”

  Despite t
heir rivalry, Newman and Jimmy maintained an easy going relationship, almost like lovers, in the view of Bast, who suspected that some passion had flared between them back in New York. “They were just too god damn good looking for something not to have happened during the time they hung out together.”

  Over food, Newman attacked the script of The Silver Chalice, and their conversation remained pleasant until Newman said, “There isn’t a single bastard in this lousy business who made it by himself. No matter who they are, someone was there to open the door for them.”

  Jimmy almost exploded in rage. Obviously, Newman had touched a nerve. “No one ever did anything for me. I did it myself. I don’t owe nothing to nobody. Not a god damn cent,” he said, slamming his fist against the tabletop.

  Newman gracefully changed the subject. As he was leaving, he told Jimmy, “We’ll meet at seven like we agreed.”

  That more or less confirmed Bast’s suspicions that they were secret lovers.

  ***

  Other “blasts from the past” (Jimmy’s words), also reappeared in his life after his return to L.A. for East of Eden. One of them was Nick Adams, Jimmy’s hustler buddy and sometimes lover.

  Having heard that Jimmy was in L.A. and starring in a major-league movie, Adams arranged a reunion with him, through Bast. Access to Jimmy was getting more competitive, thanks to renewed competition from Bast and now, from Paul Newman.

  “How can any guy compete with that fucking Paul Newman?” Adams asked.

  Nevertheless, Jimmy agreed to see him from time to time, eventually promising him a role in his upcoming film.

  Adams later said: “For most of the time, Jimmy was straight with himself. He’d never known the good life, and he wanted to know what it was like. He made his own way in life, and on his own terms. Whatever didn’t fit into his new life, he dropped. I hoped it wasn’t going to include me.”

  ***

  Dick Davalos was cast in East of Eden as Jimmy’s “good” brother, Aron.

  Before he was awarded the part, he, with Jimmy, submitted to a series of screen tests, in which Jimmy was paired alongside Joanne Woodward, even though Kazan, by this point, had more or less determined that Julie Harris would be the female lead.

  “I remember rehearsing at his apartment the night before the screen test, and really assimilating our characters and developing our brotherly relationship as best we could,” Davalos said. “I remember we were extremely tired the next day when we went to the studio.”

  Kazan later said to Harris, “I wonder if Davalos and Dean are tired from rehearsing all night, or from something else.”

  “Boys will be boys,” Harris said, “especially if you have two handsome young men spending the night together. They do have strong urges at that age, you know.”

  “I remember it well,” Kazan said.

  On the Warner’s lot, Jimmy survived both the screen tests and the wardrobe fittings, and even got a review from the boss himself, Jack Warner. Warner told the cinematographer assigned to East of Eden, Tim McCord, “Kazan brought this sad-eyed pretty boy with almond eyes and brown hair into my office. A rotten dresser. He’s small—too short, really—slight, and looks as vulnerable as a lost puppy dog. God help us.”

  Warner had made a wise choice in his selection of McCord, whose almost monochrome cinematography captured the charm of an old-fashioned photo album from 1917, the year in which the story is set.

  ***

  In the final lineup, top billing would go to Julie Harris in the lead role of Abra. In the beginning of the film, she is Aron’s girlfriend, but later falls for Cal.

  Raymond Massey was cast as the judgmental, puritanical, Bible-quoting father, Adam Trask, a lettuce farmer who clearly favors Aron. Jo Van Fleet plays Kate, who was once married to Adam but abandoned him and her two sons. She is now the deeply embittered owner of a bordello in a neighboring town.

  The cast was augmented with Burl Ives as the sheriff; Albert Dekker as Will; and Barbara Baxley as a sadistic nurse. Months earlier, Jimmy had had a brief fling with Baxley when they each resided at the Iroquois Hotel in Manhattan.

  James Dean with Julie Harris, his brother’s fiancé in East of Eden. Is their embrace an allegory for a biblical sin? (“Thou shalt not covet thy brother’s wife”)

  On the set of East of Eden, she tried to renew their affair, but was brutally rejected by him. “Why do I need you now?” he responded. “Since I arrived in Hollywood, my phone’s been ringing off the wall.”

  One by one, Jimmy met the cast. He already knew Harris from the Actors Studio in New York, and he had already prepared for and been evaluated in screen tests with Davalos.

  ***

  Growing up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Harris had been enrolled for a year at the Yale School of Drama. In 1954, she’d won a Tony for her interpretation of Sally Bowles in the original Broadway version of I Am a Camera, in which Jimmy had unsuccessfully competed for the role inspired by Christopher Isherwood. In time, Harris would receive ten Tony nominations.

  She had made her screen debut in 1952, repeating her Broadway success as the lonely teenaged girl, Frankie, in the film adaptation of Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding, for which she was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress.

  A complicated triangle that gets increasingly complicated as the movie progresses: Dean (left), Davalos (center) and Harris (right)

  Jimmy maintained fond memories of her. “Her voice was like the gentle rainfall on a summer night. Her eyes reflected the depths of her tender heart.”

  Harris later stated that “Jimmy and I were almost killed before filming began. One night he knocked on my door right after I’d arrived in Hollywood. He invited me to ‘go for a spin’ in the Hollywood Hills. He had just bought a new scarlet red MG.”

  “We rode into the night at top speed. At one point, he had trouble lighting a cigarette, and he almost ran off the road and down an embankment, which would have meant sudden death since it was so steep. I didn’t dare lecture him. That would have made him go much faster. I let him do whatever his heart desired. He was the kind of man who did whatever he wanted to.”

  When he finally returned her to the pavement in front of her apartment, she gracefully turned down his invitation for a sleepover. “He was Tom Sawyer to me, a very wicked but adorable Tom Sawyer. He manipulated people, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He was mercurial, unpredictable, and very beguiling.”

  “I did not suffer the misfortune of falling in love with Jimmy,” Harris said. “It would have been a destructive relationship. Instead of seducing me, he went for Pier Angeli, who was starring in The Silver Chalice opposite that divine Paul Newman.”

  “Hollywood was nothing but a rumor factory. There was talk on the set that Paul and Pier were involved, and even that Paul and Jimmy were an item. I got left out of all these complicated sleeping arrangements.”

  “I remember Jimmy showing me this locket. In it, he had a lock of Pier’s hair and a scrap from the dress she’d worn when he met her. It was all so romantic.”

  “But he was always upsetting Pier,” Harris continued. “She was so prim and proper, so perfectly made up, and so well dressed. She invited friends of hers for lunch in the commissary so that they could meet Jimmy. He showed up without his shirt, his body smeared with a mechanic’s grease. He wore a dirty pair of blue jeans with a big hole in the rear revealing bare skin and the fact that he wore no underwear. She burst into tears and went a week without speaking to him.”

  ***

  Richard (“Dick”) Davalos, born in the Bronx a year before Jimmy and just as good looking, was of Finnish and Spanish descent. His career never lived up to its early promise. [Coincidentally, he did play opposite Paul Newman as the convict, “Blind Dick,” in Cool Hand Luke (1967), a role that might have gone to Jimmy had he lived.]

  Unlike Jimmy’s flamboyantly non-conformist character, Cal, Davalos, as Aron, had to be sober, diligent, God-fearing, hard-working, humorless, and the obvious favorite of his mora
listic father.

  As part of a plan to improve their ability as actors to portray brothers, Kazan decided to house Davalos and Jimmy together as roommates in a one-room studio apartment across the street from the entrance to the Warner lot in Burbank.

  Although there has never been any direct confirmation, word soon spread that Davalos and Jimmy were lovers.

  According to Davalos, “As roommates, Jimmy and I became ‘Cal & Aron’ off screen. I was Mr. Goody Two-Shoes. Consistent with the character of Cal, Jimmy usually left our place in a mess, and I was always tidying up, à la Aron. Jimmy was very heavy into Cal.”

  “He asked me what my previous experience had been,” Davalos said. “I told him I’d been an usher at the Trans-Lux Theater in Manhattan. But I let him know I’d beaten Newman out for the role.”

  “I beat Newman out for more than one role,” Jimmy bragged.

  On screen, Jimmy’s scenes with Davalos carried a suggestion of latent homosexuality. One scene was so provocative that Jack Warner ordered that it be cut because of its hint of brotherly incest. Davalos was shown presumably nude in bed while Jimmy, wearing pants but shirtless, played a horn nearby. “The censors will never go for that,” Warner said.

  Many brothers have shared the same bedroom, but this sequence in East of Eden was ordered cut by Jack Warner even before it faced censorship. The studio mogul told Kazan, “They’re half nude and look like they’ve been fucking all night.”

  After two weeks, Davalos told Kazan that he’d grown tired of Jimmy’s constant mood swings and sloppiness, and moved out into better lodgings. After that, the rumor mill went into overdrive once again when the story spread that one night Jimmy “tried to rape the actor playing his brother.”