James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  ***

  Years later, Brando told Gilman, “Jimmy went out in a blaze of glory. Marilyn Monroe disappeared from the scene just as her youthful beauty entered its final hours and those wrinkles inevitably appeared around her eyes. The trick in Hollywood is to die when you’re young and still beautiful. I’ll probably live to be 102. I’ll look like an old bullfrog, wrinkled and fat, Stanley Kowalski in that sweaty T-shirt only a distant memory.”

  “But Jimmy will be eternally young: Cal Trask, Jim Stark, Jett Rink. Take my word for it, Sam. It’s the lucky ones who fade from the scene while they’ve still got it.”

  “The Hollywood Hills are filled with former movie stars, both male and female, afraid to look in the mirror at the grotesques they’ve become. Marilyn got it right in that god damn song of hers. ‘We all lose our charms in the end.’ That is, those of us who stick around.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  JIMMY COMPETES WITH HIS “SOULMATE” (EARTHA KITT) FOR THE LOVE OF PLAYBOY, PRODUCER, & THEATER MOGUL

  ARTHUR LOEW, JR.

  How Vampira,

  the Weirdest Television Personality of Her Era,

  Lured (and Later, Cursed) Jimmy with Black Magic

  Sammy Davis, Jr.

  PULLS JIMMY TOWARD SATANISM & THE OCCULT

  Jimmy’s Affair With Van Johnson

  America’s (Male) Box Office Sweetheart of the 1940s

  HOW PAUL NEWMAN

  IN THE WAKE OF JIMMY’S DEATH, FILLED HIS SHOES,

  BOTH ON THE SCREEN AND AS A BEDMATE FOR HIS FORMER LOVERS

  “I’m hot shit,” James Dean bragged on the phone to his friend, William Bast, who was still struggling to find his niche as a writer. “I guess I can now have any role I want in this town.”

  “Enjoy your moment,” Bast said, trying to conceal his jealousy. “Hollywood is known for crowning princes, occasionally even kings. It’s also known for dethroning them, sometimes after very short reigns. Then an actor’s got to live with his fall from glory for the rest of his miserable days.”

  “What a downer you are,” Jimmy charged, flashing anger. “Don’t ruin my moment. Why don’t you admit it? You’re a failed actor. You’d love to be in my position.” Then he slammed down the phone.

  It would be several days before he spoke to Bast again.

  But as he’d soon discover, Hollywood wasn’t ready to give him any role he wanted.

  Producer John Houseman had met him at a party, finding him an ideal choice to play the role of a mentally disturbed youth in an upcoming film, The Cobweb. It had been written by John Paxton, who had penned the script for Marlon Brando’s The Wild One based on a novel by William Gibson.

  At a lunch, Houseman handed Jimmy the rough draft of The Cobweb’s script. Jimmy would later refer to it as “Grand Hotel in the Loony Bin.” The plot dealt with a series of melodramatic events in a high-class mental institution. The role being discussed was that of Steven Holte, a troubled young designer with mental problems. Jimmy found the character “sweetly deranged. It’s practically type casting,” he said in a phone call to Houseman the next day.

  Houseman arranged for Jimmy to drive, the following night, to the home of Vincente Minnelli, who was set to direct it. “I hope Judy Garland’s former husband is not going to turn this into a musical.”

  “Have no fear,” Houseman assured him. “He’s equally good at dramas. He should know a lot about mental institutions, having been married to Judy.”

  Over drinks in Minnelli’s living room, Jimmy told him that he had come very close to working with him before on The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), the film he’d directed with Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas. “George Bradshaw wanted to do something really daring. Instead of Lana catching Kirk with another woman, she goes to his house and discovers me in my panties coming out of Kirk’s bedroom. It would have been ground-breaking.”

  “I’m aware of that and actually wanted to film it,” Minnelli responded, but, of course, MGM nixed the idea as too daring. The Production Code just wouldn’t have allowed it.”

  Minnelli had already nicknamed The Cobweb “our mental film,” and told Jimmy that he was hoping for an all-star cast. “You’ll get that chance to work with Lana after all. I’ve offered her a role along with Robert Taylor and Grace Kelly. Not bad. Three of the biggest stars in Hollywood…and you. The movie has a perverse fascination for me. I’m familiar with the psychiatric setting after all those years with Judy, including time at Menninger.”

  [The Menninger Clinic, a respected drug and alcohol rehabilitation center that at the time was located in Topeka, Kansas (and now located in Texas), had, for a while enrolled Judy Garland in one of its programs.]

  Jimmy also said that he was looking forward to working with Susan Strasberg, daughter of Lee, who had been cast in the film as one of the mental institution’s patients.

  He was also impressed with the rest of the cast. “Fay Wray from King Kong. My God. And Adele Jergens. Ronald Reagan proposed marriage to her after Jane Wyman dumped him. Lillian Gish is also in Cobweb. What a dear. Do you know that she ‘invented’ the close-up?’”

  It was well known in Hollywood circles that Minnelli was gay, and, as Jimmy later admitted, “I was waiting for the inevitable invitation to his casting couch.”

  The next day, he phoned Bast to make up with him, and to tell him what had happened at Minnelli’s home.

  “Did he seduce you?” Bast asked.

  “No, but his mouth was watering. I’m too big a star to lie on any more casting couches. I did wear a pair or tight jeans and no underwear to tempt him. His eyes kept darting to my crotch. I should have given the poor guy a break, but I held out. After all, I’d fucked Judy.”

  When Houseman phoned Jimmy the next day, he told him, “I talked to Vincente. He thinks you’re perfect for the role. It’s yours.”

  Jimmy phoned Bast again. “I got the part. And I got it without having some old guy suck my dick.”

  But Minnelli’s dream cast didn’t work out. Instead, he cast Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, and Gloria Grahame. Taylor and Turner had drifted on to make other pictures, and Kelly claimed she was exhausted after making four films virtually in a back-to-back row.

  Jimmy was delighted to learn that Leonard Rosenman, one of his best friends, had signed to do the musical score.

  He was also looking forward to meeting Gloria Grahame, who had been married to director Nicholas Ray until he caught her in bed with his thirteen-year-old son, Tony. And he was especially interested in a face-to-face with Lauren Bacall.

  Humphrey Bogart and Bacall lived together in Benedict Canyon a few miles north of the Beverly Hills Hotel, in a ranch-style house that had been originally built for Hedy Lamarr.

  Lauren Bacall with Humphrey Bogart...a May to October affair.

  Bacall called Jimmy and invited him over for a drink. She was aware that he’d played a brief role in Deadline, U.S.A, with her husband. But she didn’t know that Bogie and Jimmy had had had several vicious encounters.

  Jimmy brought along a recording of some of Rosenman’s music to play for her, with the understanding that his friend had already been commissioned to compose a musical score for The Cobweb.

  Bacall would later tell Patricia Neal, who had worked with Jimmy before, “I found him charming and attractive. Unlike some of these punks in Hollywood today, he seems to appreciate an older woman. Actually, I’m only eight years older than he is.”

  “Many find Jimmy difficult, but I thought he was delightful,” Neal said. “Coop [Gary Cooper] just adored him.”

  Neal also learned what happened later that night. “As we were listening to the music, Jimmy asked me to dance,” Bacall said. “He held me very close, pressing his body against mine.”

  “All of a sudden, Bogie arrived home early and caught us dancing,” Bacall said. “He’d been to the clinic. As you know, his health is failing. It was perfectly harmless. Maybe we kissed. I don’t remember. Bogie went ballistic. He grabbed Jimmy by his neck and liter
ally tossed him out the door on his ass.”

  Jimmy fared better with another member of the cast, Oscar Levant, who had signed to play the mother-fixated Mr. Capp. In the original novel, he was a homosexual. “Minnelli wants to leave the gay stuff in, but I’m sure MGM will object. Instead, he’s having it rewritten. However, he’s bringing all my neuroses and complexes into the plot, so I will, more or less, be playing myself.”

  Levant was an eccentric pianist known for his sharp tongue. His streams of barbed witticisms appealed to Jimmy’s sense of humor. A friend of Levant’s, Joan Collins, said, “Oscar and Dean were total opposites, but they got along fabulously, each relishing the other’s unusualness.”

  Jimmy was drawn to Levant’s music, but he also was impressed with him as an actor. He’d appeared in Humoresque (1946), with John Garfield and Joan Crawford and in such films as An American in Paris (1951) with Gene Kelly.

  In his 1968 memoir, The Importance of Being Oscar, Levant wrote of another visit by Jimmy to his home.

  “Jimmy Dean once spent a night until five in the morning talking to me about himself and his world. At that time, he was working on his biggest picture, Giant. Arthur Loew, Jr. brought him to our house, along with Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Wilding, Joan Collins, and the producer of Giant, Henry Ginsberg. Arthur knew that one of my daughters was an ardent Jimmy Dean fan. It was a strange thing, but seeing my daughter’s room filled with dozens of pictures of him in various poses did not seem to please Dean. On the contrary, it depressed him. He said he felt crushed under the weight of such adulation. He turned out to be a fascinating and intelligent young man who talked fluently about artists in music. And he was surprisingly knowledgeable about such recondite composers as Schönberg and Bartók.”

  Two weeks later, Jimmy was disappointed when Warners refused to release him from his contract to film The Cobweb. He also was enraged to learn that John Kerr, his former lover and now his rival, had been assigned the role he’d wanted to play. To add to his fury, Kerr was being billed as “the new James Dean.”

  [After Jimmy’s death, Bogie, nearing the final months of his own life, told the press: “The kid died at the right time. If he had lived, he’d never have been able to live up to his publicity.’]

  “It’s Not the Whore Who Pays”

  —JAMES DEAN TO ROGERS BRACKETT, A FEW MONTHS AFTER THEIR AFFAIR ENDED

  In one of those embarrassing coincidences that occur too often in life, Jimmy, on a chance encounter on Third Avenue in New York, ran into Rogers Brackett, his former mentor and lover. Before Jimmy’s rise to fame, Brackett had introduced him to important people in the industry and procured roles for him in teleplays.

  But now, Brackett was no longer the powerful TV advertising executive he’d been during his heyday. He’d fallen on bad days and had taken to drinking. His bosses on Madison Avenue, who had been trying to peddle their products to typical American families, had been turned off by his numerous homosexual indiscretions.

  Jimmy had also heard stories about how Brackett was going around taking credit “as the man who discovered James Dean,” and he resented that. Now that he was a movie star, and fully aware that there were aspects of his past that it would be wise to conceal, he did not want to acknowledge the role that Brackett had played in his past.

  Brackett explained his financial predicament to Jimmy, and then, with a twinge of desperation, asked to borrow $10,000 from him, a sum he promised to pay back with interest.

  “I didn’t know it was the whore who paid,” Jimmy said. “I thought it was the other way around.”

  “I no longer need a mother hen cackling over me,” Jimmy said. “Now, struggling young actors turn to me, asking me to get them work. I’ve learned that to get where I want, I’ve had to fly over some badlands. That explains my involvement with you. I’ve flown over those badlands and landed in green pastures.”

  At the time, Brackett was living in Stanley Haggart’s garden apartment, the setting of many of Jimmy’s former sexual trysts. Haggart was grateful for the artwork commissions that Brackett had directed his way during his tenure as a powerful TV producer.

  When the composer, Alec Wilder, still Brackett’s best friend, heard about Jimmy’s treatment of him, he scolded him. “Rogers should sue you for overdue payment of all the money he’s extended to you,” Wilder said.

  “He got his pound of flesh from me,” Jimmy countered.

  Wilder later wrote, “I read Jimmy the riot act when he came by the Algonquin. His treatment of Rogers was dreadful. Nowhere in any of Jimmy’s publicity was Rogers’ name even mentioned, and he had done so much for Jimmy.”

  “I told him that what he had done was morally wrong, and that he owed Rogers an apology. Jimmy replied that he couldn’t do it, so I drafted the letter for Jimmy, and then demanded that he rewrite it in his own handwriting.”

  The following evening, I invited both Rogers and Jimmy to come by the hotel,” Wilder said. “The three of us had a very pleasant, giddy time. But the damage had been done. As far as I know, they never saw each other again.”

  Brackett related to Haggart how painful and embarrassing his final goodbye to Jimmy had been, and how he’d tried to put a good face on it. “Frankly, I was humiliated and heartbroken.”

  “I wanted so much more from Jimmy,” Brackett told Haggart. “I wanted him to love me.”

  “You must have gotten some enjoyment out of it, because you kept going back for more,” Haggart said. “Everybody wants more out of a relationship, but, as you know, we so rarely get that. As for me, I take what I can get—and move on. You have to do that, too.”

  After Brackett had moved out and away from Haggart, Jimmy came by to visit. Unlike Wilder, Haggart didn’t denounce Jimmy for his cavalier attitude to Brackett.

  “Rogers was silly to think you could love him back,” Haggart said. “He’s been around Hollywood and New York long enough not to be so naïve.”

  “When Rogers used to seduce me, I closed my eyes and imagined it was someone else,” Jimmy confessed. “I know Rogers is going around spreading this shit about his having discovered me in that damn parking lot. Should the jockey take credit for the speed of the race horse? I think not!”

  RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS

  Jimmy’s “Affair of the Heart” with Toni Lee

  One of Jimmy’s most bizarre friendships was with entertainer Toni Lee, who later wrote a book, A Kind of Loving (1970), about her involvement with him.

  A popular vocalist, she had appeared on the TV shows of Mike Douglas, Johnny Carson, and Steve Allen, and was a familiar fixture in nightclubs, attracting jazz fans and pop lovers across the country.

  Whenever the beautiful brunette swung into a song, no one in the audience seemed to know that she had had the misfortune of losing a leg in a motorcycle smash-up when she was nineteen.

  For her public appearances, she wore a prosthetic leg and long, floor-length dresses.

  Toni later wrote of her friendship with Jimmy, describing ”the ominous, almost occult portents of their first meeting, and the quick, warm relationship that grew between them.”

  Jimmy and Lee had fallen into the habit of ending their respective late night venues with breakfast at Googie’s. Each had noticed the other, but had not yet spoken.

  One evening, both of them entered Googie’s, each alone but virtually at the same moment, for a late night supper. Four actors were sitting at a nearby table, loudly unaware that Lee had come in. They were discussing possible dates to escort to the premiere of Judy Garland’s A Star Is Born.

  One of the actors said, “Too bad we have to show up with a girl. Will the day ever come when we can be escorted by our boyfriends?”

  “Why not take Toni Lee?” one of the actors suggested.

  Both Lee and Jimmy overheard the answer. “For a premiere this important, do you think I’d want to show up with a one-legged woman?”

  Humiliated, Lee quickly exited from the restaurant.

  She later revealed in her me
moirs that about two hours before dawn, she’d heard her doorbell ring. When she stumbled to the door, she found it was a man she recognized from Googie’s. Although they’d never spoken, she’d seen him many times before, and somehow, he’d gotten her address.

  “Hi, I’m James Dean,” he said. “You know, from Googie’s?”

  She was wearing a robe, and he said, “I want you to take off your clothes.”

  “What?” she asked, thinking that she might have misunderstood him.

  “Your clothes,” he said. “Take them off!”

  To her own utter amazement, she claimed that she obeyed his request and stripped. “I didn’t have that fake leg attached,” she said. “Jimmy kneeled down in front of me and ran his fingers over the scars on my stump. He went over the scars one by one, very delicately with his fingers. At the end of his inspection, he gently rained down little kisses on my stump.”

  “Don’t listen to those jerks at Googie’s,” he said. “You are beautiful. Forget those morons. Now, get dressed.”

  She told him that for a few months after the accident, she’d kept her deformed, scarred, unusable, and withered leg, “But it looked so hideous, I went to a surgeon and had him cut it off.”

  After their unusual introduction, she said that in the weeks to come, she grew used to Jimmy ringing her doorbell at three or four o’clock in the morning. According to her, it was a friendship, not an affair.

  “We’d have long talks, which always ended with his reassurance that I was beautiful. Later, I’d prepare raisin toast and hot chocolate for his breakfast.”

  “Over and over, he kept telling me I was beautiful until I came to believe it,” she said.

  “You’ve got a good mind,” he said. “Use it! Develop your insight so you can look behind their words and see why people say them. Learning to appreciate people—that’s hard, but important. But first, learn to appreciate yourself. Because you’re very special, very special indeed. So don’t be smothered under all the ugliness of Hollywood.”