After Jimmy let him in, he found the actor looking distraught. “It’s already done,” he admitted in a choked voice. “Pier’s going to have a baby. My kid. She was already pregnant with my baby when she stood on the altar exchanging wedding vows with Damone.”
“I just sat there, not knowing what to say,” Hyams said. “Jimmy started to cry. I held him in my arms. I hadn’t held a man in my arms since the war.”
“Marriage, Italian Style,” as interpreted by Hollywood. Pier Angeli at her wedding to Vic Damone
Stanley Haggart continued to see Jimmy at his Laurel Canyon home. “He would often drop in. Sometimes, he’d be with a man, at other times, a woman. He never brought Pier by. He and some guy would go for a nude swim in the pool and later stay overnight in my little guest cottage.”
“One night was different from the others,” Haggart said.
Jimmy told him, “Pier’s having a baby. It’s my kid. I went out and bought some baby clothes. Since I don’t know its gender, I bought some blue duds for the boy, pink for the girl. If it’s a girl, I want her named Mildred after my mother.”
Jimmy, in a different mood, told John Gilmore, his friend, “I’m just putting on some broken heart act. Hell, Pier’s screwed half the men in Hollywood. I should have figured she’d end up marrying some joker like Damone. Actually, he’s sorta cute. I might fuck him myself one night if I’m horny enough.”
“Fuck them both?” Jimmy said. “Who needs them? You find people who nobody need, and in a flash, they find each other.”
When Jimmy encountered columnist Kendis Rochlen, he said, “Who gives a shit? I know how you can cure her from her new groom. Lock her up in a room with five-and-dime pictures of Damone plastered on all the walls. She’ll break down the door and flee in horror.”
Obviously Rochlen couldn’t print his Damone’s reaction, if she bothered to ask him for one.
Cal York wrote, “Jimmy makes no secret of the fact that he still hankers for angelic Miss Pizza, as he calls Pier.”
“You might say I’m not exactly delighted that she married Vic,” Jimmy said. “I’ve been dating Pat Hardy, and I’d say she seems a little hurt. My current girlfriend thought Damone was going to marry her. They were practically engaged.”
In 1958, having realized that both Damone and Jimmy had moved on to other women, Hardy married actor Richard Egan. He is remembered today for appearing on screen with Elvis Presley in that singer’s debut film, Love Me Tender (1956).
Jimmy told another reporter, “I’ve got this new girl in my life. It’s a fast new Porsche Spyder Speedstar convertible.”
***
On April 15, 1955, Jim and Lew Bracker were dining together once again at Villa Capri when Damone entered the restaurant. Their previous encounter had turned violent.
But this time, Damone seemed jubilant and conciliatory. Within minutes, he showed up at Jimmy’s table with a bottle of champagne and three glasses. “I’m a father. I was hoping you’d drink a toast to my son.”
Perry Damone, named after Perry Como, had entered the world on July 21, only eight months after Pier’s marriage. Delivered by Caesarian section, he weighted eight pounds, thirteen ounces.
[Perry Damone, also known as Perry Farinola, died of lymphoma in 2014 after a successful career as a top-ranking radio broadcaster for the Phoenix, Arizona-based radio station 99.9 KEZ.]
With a smirk on his face, Jimmy said, “That’s one kid I can definitely drink to.”
After the toast, Damone moved on, never to see Jimmy again.
Bracker said, “I did not then, nor did I ever, ask Jimmy what he was intimating by his toast. But I drew my own conclusions.”
According to Joe Hyams, Damone, two days later, had lunch with a former girlfriend and allegedly told her, “Pier’s a mother all right. But it’s not certain that I’m the father.”
***
As many Hollywood insiders had predicted, Pier’s marriage to Damone did not work out. They divorced in 1958. What followed was a series of bitter custody battles over their son, Perry, that would not be settled until 1965, when Pier got part-time custody.
She would marry musician Armando Trovajoli on February 14, 1962, that union lasting four years.
After his divorce, Damone would marry four more times, one of them an interracial union with singer Diahann Carroll.
An aging Damone entered into his final marriage in 1998 to fashion designer Rena Rowan. Although his first wife, Pier, had died penniless, Damone’s current wife, in poor health after suffering a stroke in 2011, has an estate currently valued at $50 million.
Pier spent the final years of her life mostly wandering in Europe looking for work. Slowly, she descended into a twilight of drugs and alcohol. Another of Jimmy‘s girlfriends, Susan Strasberg, met with her in Rome, finding her “still beautiful, even with heavy makeup, although it didn’t cover the strain of her features.”
Arriving back in Hollywood, she had no money left. She moved in with her longtime friend, Helena Sorell, at 355 South McCarty Drive in Los Angeles.
She’d just been featured in Addio Alexandra (1969) an X-rated, English-language comedy filmed in Italy and released in the U.S. as Love Me, Love My Wife.
Desperate for some sort of comeback, she went to see her former lover, Marlon Brando, asking him to use his influence to get her cast as one of the wives of a Mafia don in his upcoming film, The Godfather (1972). He dismissed her, telling her he had no control over casting.
Pier was most candid in her final interview, telling the National Enquirer:
“Jimmy was the only man I've ever loved as deeply as a woman can love a man. I never loved either of my husbands the way I loved Jimmy. I tried to love my husbands, but it never lasted. I would wake up at night and find I had been dreaming about Jimmy. I would lie awake in the same bed with my husband, and I would think of my love for Jimmy and wish it were Jimmy and not my husband in bed next to me. I had to separate from my husband because I didn't think I could be in love with one man—even if he were dead—and live with another.”
Her former movie career but a memory, Pier died on September 10, 1971. Helena Sorrel found her dead in her apartment, where she’d consumed an overdose of phenobarbital. Pier Angeli was thirty-nine years old.
Jimmy’s Affair With Ursula Andress
THE “BERNESE OBERLAND BEAUTY” WHO LATER BECAME FAMOUS AS THE LOVE OBJECT OF JAMES BOND, “007”
After his star-crossed affair with Pier Angeli, Jimmy began dating Ursula Andress, a Swiss-born actress newly arrived in Hollywood and hailed as “the female Marlon Brando.” She was struggling to learn English, with some vague hope of making it as a Hollywood star. She had beauty and the physical assets, but lacked talent and never seemed to work hard to master the King’s English.
Ursula became friendly with Dick Clayton, Jimmy’s agent, who later said to Jimmy, “Ursula is going to be the screen’s next Marlene Dietrich. Marlene’s getting a bit long in the tooth.”
An Ursula-with-Jimmy date was arranged.
She remembered it later: “He came by my house an hour late. He came in room like wild animal and smell of everything I don’t like. He stalk through my house, then sit down like an animal. He just sat there and said nothing. When we did start to talk, we got into an argument about music. I knew then I had become an American. No European woman would argue with a man.”
He took her to a jazz club on the Sunset Strip, where he sat with her for only about fifteen minutes. “He get up from table and play bongo drums with the band. I sat there an hour, got up, and went home. He came by an hour later. Ask me if I want to see motorcycle. We sit on sidewalk in front of this motorcycle and talk and talk and talk until 5AM. Then he get up and go home. No kiss.”
Soon, she was seen riding around Hollywood on the back of his motorcycle. She was also spotted in fast-moving cars driven by him—in fact, she was with him on the day he purchased his silver Porsche that would cost him his life.
“I didn’t know it at th
e time, but Jimmy was buying his coffin.”
Ursula Andress in Dr. No (1962)...Venus emerging from the ocean.
“I once ask Jimmy why he drives so fast,” she said. “He told me, ‘I’ve got to, since I’m not going to be around much longer.’”
“What does that mean?” she asked. “‘You plan to commit suicide?’ He said nothing.”
“I go out with him, but we fight like cat and dog—no, two monsters,” she said. “But we make up and have fun.”
“Ursula has a mind of her own,” Jimmy told Clayton. “She doesn’t depend on a man to form an opinion.”
When Jimmy met Ursula, she was only nineteen years old and had been imported from Europe after executives at Paramount had become impressed with her beauty and presence during previews of the Italian film The Loves of Casanova (1955), originally released in Italy as Le avventure di Giacomo Casanova.
Instead of calling her “the female Marlon Brando,” another reporter dubbed her “the female James Dean.”
“She looked more like Brando than me,” Jimmy said to Clayton. “Especially with that short, cropped hairdo and her pouting lips.”
In contrast, composer Leonard Rosenman was struck by how much Ursula resembled Jimmy. “I came to believe that Jimmy’s relationship with her was essentially narcissistic for both of them.”
Jimmy later told Clayton, “Ursula is a real free spirt, she survives on almost no sleep. After a night out with her, I need matchsticks to prop my eyes open.”
One night, having arrived to pick her up for a date, he immediately sensed her anxiety. “Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy,” she said. “I make big mistake. I’m rushing to get ready. I made date with another man. He’s waiting for me outside in this old, horrible car.”
Jimmy looked outside her window, noticing a car parked under a street-light. He recognized that “piece of junk” right away. “Could your date be Howard Hughes?” he asked.
“Jimmy, how did you know?”
“Never mind,” he answered. He had no intention of telling Ursula that he and Hughes, and not that long ago, had been lovers.
She suggested to Jimmy that he join them for a night out on the town. For some perverse reason of his own, he happily agreed that it would be a fine idea.
Out on the sidewalk, she introduced Jimmy to Hughes, who did not acknowledge that he already knew him. “Pile into the front seat,” he told Ursula.
She sat in the middle, with Jimmy on her right, while a stone-faced Hughes headed toward Malibu, where it had been prearranged that he’d take her to dinner.
Stopping at a traffic light on Santa Monica Boulevard, near a gas station, Hughes told Jimmy that he didn’t have any cigarettes, and asked him if he’d go to the gas station and purchase a package for him from a vending machine.
Obediently, Jimmy got out of the car and walked toward the station. Midway there, he looked back. The traffic light had turned green. Hughes stepped on the gas and disappeared, with Ursula, into the night.
“That was the last I ever saw of the elusive Mr. Hughes, Jimmy told Clayton. I guess he has Robert Francis to play with instead.”
***
Ursula and Jimmy spent time within his rental home, for which he paid $250 a month. He’d rented it from Nikko Romannhos, the maître d' at the Villa Capri.
In Sherman Oaks, the A-frame cottage resembled a modernized replica of a Bavarian hunting lodge. Downstairs was a seven-foot stone fireplace. Above it, configured as a kind of balcony, was a sleeping alcove. To reach it, Ursula and Jimmy had to climb a wooden ladder and pass through a trap door.
Sometimes, he took her to Villa Capri, where she always ordered a steak. He complained that she was driving him into bankruptcy. “Can’t you settle for spaghetti and meatballs?”
The next week, he flew to Texas for the filming of scenes from his third and final picture, Giant. She suspected that while there, he’d be making love to both Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor.
When the picture wrapped, he returned to Hollywood and to Ursula. But the relationship wasn’t the same as it had been before.
“I tried to love him,” she later said, “but it didn’t work out. I was not ready for marriage to him, as he was too unstable. While he was away, I fell in love with this American Adonis, John Derek, the most beautiful male animal in Hollywood. Everybody, both men and women, was after him, but he was mine. I had to tell Jimmy the truth.”
Lew Bracker, his friend, recalled, “Jimmy didn’t miss too much of a beat when Ursula switched to John Derek. He wasn’t even out of sorts and certainly not heartbroken. I think Jimmy knew that a split would happen sooner or later. As I look back, Jimmy never mentioned Ursula to me ever again. It was a seamless change.”
***
The next actress Jimmy introduced to Bracket was starlet Lori Nelson, who was also dating Tab Hunter. “Lori was very girlish, Bracker said. “she was sweet and vanilla—not what Jimmy was interested in. She was all over Jimmy, oohing and cooing and telling him about her doll collection, her cutesy bedroom with dolls all over the bed and all over the room. This kind of conversation made Jimmy cringe.”
***
Jimmy would see Ursula for a final time right before his tragic death. He stopped by in his Porsche and asked her to go to Salinas with him for a car race.
She turned him down. “You arrive at bad moment. John Derek is due any minute. Better go. He might get jealous.”
Despite all that, she noticed that Jimmy was waiting around, as if he wanted to encounter Derek. When he pulled up in his car, he acknowledged Jimmy and shook his hand. He was all smiles. The two men seemed to bond.
Jimmy invited Derek for a spin in his Porsche. To Ursula’s amazement, Derek accepted. Jimmy wanted to show his rival his ersatz “hunting lodge.”
Jimmy had hoped to meet Derek ever since director Nicholas Ray told him that he had campaigned for the role of Jim Starck in the upcoming Rebel Without a Cause. Ray had, in fact, discovered Derek and had cast him with Humphrey Bogart in Knock on Any Door (1949). In that film, Derek played a killer, Nick Romano, appropriately nicknamed “Pretty Boy.”
John Derek as a fighting priest in The Leather Saint (1956). Paul Douglas was in that film and is on the left.
En route to his pad, Jimmy learned that even though Derek was dating Ursula, he was married at the time to Pati Behs, a Russian-born prima ballerina. Derek told Jimmy that his wife had uncovered the affair and was threatening to bring legal action against Ursula. Since she had arrived in the U.S. with a work visa, a lawyer had informed Behs that her litigation, if filed, might lead to Ursula’s deportation on a morals charge.
A Jimmy’s “hunting lodge,” the actors had a few beers and talked about Ray and Hollywood.
Derek confessed that he’d gotten his start in Hollywood first as a male hustler and then by “lying on the casting couch of Henry Willson. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.”
“I’ve met the creep,” Jimmy said, “Wanted to get in my pants.”
“He wanted more that getting in my pants,” Derek said. “He took them off time and time again, getting his go damn pound of flesh before giving me some breaks. My real name was Derek Harris, but the fucker wanted to rename me Dare Harris.”
Four or five years after Jimmy’s death, Otto Preminger cast Derek and Jimmy’s gay friend, Sal Mineo, together in Exodus (1960). Derek told Mineo what happened at that hunting lodge during the final hours of Jimmy’s life. “I’m not sure why, but I did this impulsive thing,” Derek confessed. “After a few beers, I needed to go to the john. After I took a piss, I stripped off all my clothes. With a semi-erection, I walked back into Jimmy’s living room naked.”
“From the look on his face, I knew he wanted me. He got down on his knees and paid homage, giving me this terrific blow-job. He didn’t seem to want to get off after I exploded.”
“I knew he was a better actor than I would ever be,” Derek candidly admitted to Mineo. “By the time he was old and gray, he would probably have won eight Oscars. Bu
t for those minutes in that hunting lodge, I was king, and he was my sex slave. It was a great ego trip for me. Although I’d spend the rest of my life chasing after beautiful women, the sex was really good.”
“As far as I know,” Derek told Mineo, “I was the last person on earth Jimmy had sex with. He died very soon after I met him. I was very sorry, so very sorry, even though we were rivals. I hoped that I had given him some pleasure. I called our time together A Kiss Before Dying. I stole that title from another picture I desperately wanted to star in. But the part I wanted went to Robert Wagner.”
Contacted by the Hollywood Reporter in the aftermath of Jimmy’s death, Ursula said, “If I had not broken off with him, he would not have committed suicide in that car. I tried to understand him, but I just couldn’t make it work. I’m so sorry about how things turned out. Without meaning to, I think I led him to his suicide. That car crash was no accident.”
[Derek would later marry Ursula, divorce, her, and wed Linda Evans, divorce her, and finally settle down with Bo Derek.
After Derek, Ursula had an eight-year affair with the French actor, Jean-Paul Belmondo, an actor sometimes defined as “The James Dean of France.” That was followed by a longtime liaison with actor Harry Hamlin, with whom she had a son.
Along the way, Ursula attracted other men, including Warren Beatty, Ryan O'Neal, and Fabio Testi.
Jimmy never got to see Ursula become a household name. Dr. No, the first of the James Bond thrillers, contained what became an iconic clip of her emerging from the sea, clad in her soon-to-be famous white bikini. Cast in the role of Honeychile Ryder, she brought a smoldering presence to the film, becoming an almost overnight legend.
Even though she was paid only ten thousand dollars for her contribution to the film, her performance helped launch the Bond movies as a Hollywood staple. She later sold the bikini at an auction for $61,500.]
James Dean Page 74
