James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  “The cop seemed like a real regular guy, so Arthur invited him to join the party,” Jimmy said. “The robbery in progress was forgotten. After a few drinks, the cop told us he’d really come to Hollywood to be a male stripper at private parties. And that he’d like to try out his act on us.”

  “Piece by piece, his clothing came off, beginning with that gun. He really put on an act for us. Finally, when he showed it hard, Errol reached for it, and using it as a rudder, guided him into one of the downstairs bedrooms. Neither of them was seen again until a few hours later.”

  “Then the cop stood at the door, in uniform, fully dressed,” Jimmy said.

  “Thanks for the party, guys,” he said. “Real Hollywood stuff, the type I was told went on here, but hadn’t hooked up with until tonight.”

  Jimmy Steals Arthur Loew from Eartha Kitt

  Arthur Loew, Jr. had not only been previously involved in romances with Pier Angeli and her sister, Marisa Pavan, but he’d also had a torrid affair with Eartha Kitt. The black singer was still Jimmy’s best woman friend and “soulmate.”

  “Jamie was always full of surprises,” Eartha told the co-author of this book, Darwin Porter, one night in Key West when she was filming the film adaptation, The Last Resort, of his novel, Butterflies in Heat.

  “I’d been cut off from Arthur, and I was hoping for a reconciliation. I called at two o’clock in the morning on a private line that fed directly into his bedroom. Then, I got the shock of my life. Jamie was in bed with the man I still loved.”

  In her memoirs, she wrote, “I still felt that the love Arthur and I had for each other was stronger than any outside influence. I still believed he’d stand up to the Loew family, who opposed any possibility of an interracial marriage between us.”

  In desperation early one morning, she’d put through a call to him, hoping he had changed his mind about her. “Perhaps I wanted him to say, ‘I love you too much to let anything come between us.’”

  “When Jamie came onto the phone, I felt like I was about to have a heart attack,” Eartha said years later in Key West. “I knew him so well. I could tell by his voice that it wasn’t a case of two men bunking together. I knew they were lovers. Jamie was loving the one man on earth I most desired. At first, my reaction was, how could he do this to me? I wanted to kill him. But I told my heart to settle down. After all, I’d rather Jamie be making love to Arthur than for him to be in bed with some blonde floozie like Jayne Mansfield.”

  Eartha Kitt with Arthur Loew, Jr.

  A photographer captured the tension building between them over pressure from his powerful family about their interracial coupling.

  “Knowing I had caught him red-handed, Jamie told me that Arthur was in the tub taking a long hot bath.”

  He said, “The whole Loew family has moved in. Everyone is unhappy and very cold, and no one says much of anything to each other.”

  “Arthur has been very quiet,” he went on. “He stays in his room most of the time, drinking throughout most of the day. The only person he lets into his bedroom is me. I offer what comfort I can. The operators at MGM warned me to not let any calls from you get through to him. His mother is here. This afternoon, she told me that her son would marry you only over her dead body.”

  “That article about you and Arthur in Confidential really blew the lid off,” Jimmy told her, speaking in a very soft voice. “His mother told him that if he married you, it would mean the death of his grandfather. He’s in his seventies and has suffered two recent stokes. He’s confined to his suite at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The pressure is really on Arthur.”

  “The one man I want to be the father of my child is being emotionally blackmailed,” Eartha responded. “I wish he’d defend his position like a man who’s not afraid to reach out for his happiness.”

  “Take care of him, Jamie,” she said, trying to conceal the jealousy in her voice. “I still love him, you know. And I love you, too.”

  “I will, and I know you must be heartsick and filled with anger and frustration. Please don’t turn on me. The friendship that Arthur and I developed just happened. It was just one of those things.”

  “It’s always just one of those things,” she said. “Sounds like a refrain from a song by Cole Porter.” Then she hung up.

  The next morning, Mrs. Arthur Loew, Sr. confronted Jimmy when he was in the study listening to music. “Please understand this,” she said to him. “I know about you and my son, and I want it kept very quiet, very discreet. My family has a reputation to maintain. Forgive me for saying this, but I’d much rather that Arthur be secretly involved with a faggot than publicly married to a nigger woman.”

  ***

  Back in Hollywood, Eartha checked into a suite at the Sunset Towers. Later, with two escorts, both of them black and both of them jazz performers, they went to Ciro’s for dinner.

  She later wrote that as she was ordering food, “the hair on the back of my neck began to send messages. I knew that he was there. I could feel him. He was coming closer. Or was I going mad?”

  It was Arthur. He looked down at her, telling her he was hosting a late night party, and asked her and her friends if they’d like to drop in.

  She didn’t commit herself, but later, with her escorts, she drove to his house.

  “It was Jamie who opened the door,” she said. “We fell into each other’s arms, but something was different. ‘What have they done to you? I feel your spirit is gone.’”

  He laughed. “Ah, Kitt, you’re on one of your voodoo trips again.”

  Soon after her arrival, she retreated from the guests in the living room, heading to her favorite part of the house, Arthur’s study. He followed her and joined her on the sofa. Without saying a word, he took her hand.

  In about ten minutes, Judy Garland entered the study, followed by Jimmy. She stood, confrontationally, in front of Arthur. “You bastard! You are so much in love with this girl you can’t see straight, and you’re too fucking weak to do anything about it. Arthur, when in the fuck are you going to grow up and be your own fucking man?”

  Then, she stormed out of the room. Arthur jumped up and followed her. Jimmy noticed that the two of them became engaged in an animated conversation outside the door. He sat down on the sofa with Eartha and took her hand.

  Two hours later, it was time to go. Jimmy walked Eartha to the door, where her escorts awaited her. Arthur was there, kissing Garland good night.

  He turned to Eartha. “Sunset Towers, right? I’ll call you tomorrow.” Although he had kissed Garland goodbye, he had only shaken Eartha’s hand.

  The next day, that call from him never came in.

  Two days later, Jimmy called her and invited her to Arthur’s home on Miller Drive. He was at the door to let her in. Arthur was nowhere to be seen. He asked her to go with him in his Porsche to retrieve some records, including some of her own recordings, from his own residence.

  When they got back, Arthur still had not appeared. “Give him time, Kitt,” he said. “He’s got to get rid of a lot of shit that he’s been trying to get over for years. You know, family stuff. He’s trying, but you’ve got to give him time.”

  “With this encouragement, Jamie and I parted,” she later wrote in her memoirs.

  She left the next day for Las Vegas, where she was performing in a show.

  The following Sunday, she was in Las Vegas, in her dressing room. A chorus girl came in and announced, “I just heard over the radio that James Dean is dead in a car crash.”

  Eartha later wrote about her reaction. “I mourn you, Jamie, not so much for your death, but for cheating me out of your presence in my life. How dare you cheat me of that? You took the only friend I had, my one true friend. Jamie, you cheated me. I won’t let you leave me. I will hold your spirit with me. You won’t leave me, Jamie. Ever!”

  She later admitted, “I fell to pieces. Jamie was long gone. So was Arthur. Forever.

  ***

  In 1956, Arthur Loew, Jr. established
the James Dean Memorial Fund at the Actors Studio in honor of his former friend.

  ***

  In 1959, Eartha was dining with her friend, Jack Dunaway, in Hollywood. “Oh, did you hear?” he asked her. “Arthur Loew just married Tyrone Power’s widow. She was three months pregnant. It was the right thing to do.”

  He was referring to actress Deborah Ann Minardos, who Arthur married and then divorced within the same year.]

  Vampira

  GLAMOUR GHOUL OF TV REVEALS SECRETS FROM THE MORGUE

  “Nicolas Ray, the director, told me that James Dean was ‘intensely determined not to be loved—or to love.’ Jimmy himself told me that the only success is immortality. In that he succeeded brilliantly. In spite of his small oeuvre of only three pictures, the world remembers him and not dozens of guys who made more than fifty movies.”

  —Vampira

  If you were alive and living in Los Angeles in 1954, you knew who Vampira was. Resembling a more sexually alluring version of Morticia Addams, she appeared on the then-new medium of television like an exotic voodoo priestess.

  Born Maila Elizabeth Syrjäniemi in Finland in 1922 (some sources say 1921), she emigrated to the United States and adopted the last name of her famous uncle, Olympic runner Paavo Nurmi, emerging as Maila Nurmi.

  Although she failed as an actress, in 1944 she’d been cast on Broadway with Mae West in a play Mae had written, Catherine Was Great. It was produced, incidentally, by Elizabeth Taylor’s future husband, Mike Todd. West, fearing that the younger girl was upstaging her, booted her out of the play.

  Migrating to Hollywood, Maila supported herself by posing for pinup photographs in men’s magazines such as Gala.

  After several more failed attempts at acting, she hit it lucky. Attending a masquerade ball, she dressed as a female vampire, complete with ghoulish white makeup, evoking a Charles Addams cartoon. She won first place in costume design.

  A TV producer at station KABC spotted her and offered her the role of television hostess for a series of horror films they were going to run. She gladly agreed and officially changed her stage name to “Vampira.”

  An exotic & campy cult celebrity from the early days of television: Maila Elizabeth Syrjäniemi, aka Maila Nurmi, aka VAMPIRA.

  During her brief reign, Vampira ruled the night, terrorizing audiences with her just-risen-from-the-coffin appearances, many of them configured as introductions to blood-sucking horror movies.

  Her series ran for 16 episodes in 1954, with frequent reruns throughout the rest of the decade. For each of them, Vampira made a spectacular entrance amid dusty spider webs and dry ice fog. As the camera zoomed in on her vampire-deadly face, she’d let out a piercing scream before introducing the movie of the night. Usually, she reclined seductively on a skull-encrusted Victorian sofa.

  Like a Zombie-mate of Bela Lugosi, she accessorized herself with all the trappings of Fright Night. Her drag included long, heavily painted fingernails in midnight black, with a mane of ravencolored hair, and a big-busted, slim-waisted, black-as-night outfit set off with fishnet hosiery.

  Vampira...Mae West viewed her as too much competition.

  Her eyes were heavily mascara-ed which contrasted with her blood-red lipstick. In character as a vampire-inspired sex kitten driven by a powerful thirst for fresh blood, she introduced such films as Devil Bat’s Daughter and Revenge of the Zombies.

  [In 1989, she lost a $10 million lawsuit in which she had charged that Cassandra Peterson’s late-night hostess “Elvira” had pirated her character.]

  She was an overnight sensation and developed a campy cult following thanks partly to a ghastly appearance that made her look like she’d just emerged from a haunted coffin.

  When she wasn’t emoting in front of a TV camera, Vampira became a kind of “Mother Confessor” to the Bad Boys of Hollywood, notably and most famously James Dean, her on-again, off-again lover. She also hovered over Paul Newman and Tony Perkins, and was privy to their off-the-record romance with each other.

  In that punitive era, these secretly bisexual men found it difficult to talk—with the noteworthy exception of Vampira—to a woman and make her privy to their affairs. Vampira, or so it is said, gave birth to the term “fag hag.”

  Googie’s, that zippy, populuxe-style coffee house where stars gathered on Sunset Strip, was a major venue during the last summer of Jimmy’s life. A new woman was about to enter the scene.

  Vampira arrived nightly at Googies, emerging from a long black hearse, which she’d purchased from a funeral home. She called it “The Black Death.”

  Nurmi recalled meeting Jimmy. “One night, he walked into Googie’s, and I was devastated by his male beauty and those blue eyes. He was a bit short, and I’d been seduced by men with more buffed bodies, but the kid had something, and I wanted a part of it. I thought he was a knock-out.”

  “I was coming down from an affair with Brando, who had just kicked me out on my ass after only three nights, and I was shopping for some fresh new meat to devour. However, I suspected that one of the pretty boys at Googie’s would get him before I had my chance. How right I was. His name was Tony Perkins.”

  Nurmi would later claim that during that fateful summer, Jimmy, his close friend, Jack Simmons, and herself became almost a part of a “love triangle. We were almost never separate.”

  That, of course, was a gross exaggeration, although for a while, they did form an intense relationship, mainly because of their shared interest in the occult.

  “Sometimes, I went home to my husband…what’s his name…I forget.”

  Nurmi only pretended she didn’t know the name of her husband. Dean Reisner was a former child actor in silent films, and he later became a screen writer, penning the script of Dirty Harry. Newman turned it down, the career-making role going to Clint Eastwood.

  “Jack, Jimmy, and I would stay together at Schwabs Drugstore until it closed, later moving next door to Googie’s,” she said. “After midnight, we’d wander off to some experience, perhaps unmentionable.”

  “When I first met Jimmy, I was the star, and he was completely unknown. Fans of Vampira would push him aside to get to me. He’d be lost in a sea of what he called ‘asses and elbows.’”

  He referred to Vampira as “the Witch.”

  “But during our relationship, our positions changed. Fans pushed me aside to get to him.”

  Jimmy held court almost nightly at Googie’s, sometimes lingering till long after the sun came up. Vampira was always there among his devoted listeners.

  Almost nightly at some point he would speak about the implacability of his upcoming death. “Live fast, die young,” was his motto.

  Both Jimmy and Vampira shared the same ghoulish humor. For a publicity photo, Vampira once wandered through a local cemetery, announcing to the press that “I’m attending my own funeral.”

  Vampira cultivated a devoted following of campy gay men in the 50s, and many of them often performed free favors for her just for the privilege of being in her company. One man arranged her hair; another designed outfits for her, and one, Freddie Brandell, drove her around Hollywood, without charge, in his car, a luxurious Cadillac, a gift from his rich father.

  At the peak of her fame, Vampira had at least eight gay boys on call. Each of them was introduced to Jimmy, and each developed a crush on the sexily handsome and increasingly famous young actor.

  Dean referred to the boys as “flamers,” and rejected each of their invitations for sex.

  Freddie, who himself would die in a car crash in 1966, developed the most overwhelming crush of them all on Jimmy. He told Vampira, “I’m gonna have him if it’s the last thing I do on this earth. I’m mad about the boy.”

  Jimmy would abuse Freddie, send him on stupid errands, or even give him his dirty underwear to wash. Vampira protested the abuse. “Girly boy loves it,” Jimmy told her. “He’d even eat my shit if I asked him to.”

  In some respects, Vampira agreed with that.

  She claimed that s
he was surprised by how intensely Newman bonded with Tony Perkins and Jimmy Dean. “Tony and Jimmy were wild boys,” she claimed. “They should have been put away somewhere. They were such tormented souls. In contrast, Paul seemed only mildly disturbed, but he drank a lot. It was a difficult time for him. He couldn’t make up his mind if he wanted to be straight or gay. I think Paul was basically straight, and had a great love for women. But back in those days, a good-looking gay guy could get him into bed.”

  “I dated Tony, but he always took me home early, usually at nine o’clock, and I had to settle for a kiss on the cheek. With Jimmy, I saw some action.”

  “One night I took Jimmy to meet my friends at the Maleficarum Coven, the oldest coven of witches in Los Angeles.”

  Jimmy was only momentarily intrigued with these witches, later telling author Joe Hyams, “It’s all a bunch of cow pies, but weird and kind of fascinating.”

  Once, Vampira and Jimmy attended a ghoulish Hollywood party of witches and warlocks. She came dressed in her Vampira drag, and he came as Boris Karloff impersonating Frankenstein.

  “Even after Jimmy became a star and could afford to treat us once in a while, he would pay only his part of the check—nothing else,” Nurmi said. “He was a real miser.”

  “The first time Jimmy invited me back to his apartment, I was shocked to see a noose hanging from the ceiling,” Vampira said.

  “He told me he kept it there in case he wanted to commit suicide in the middle of the night. Of course, who was I to be surprised? At the time, I was driving around in a funeral hearse. I also noted that he kept a lot of books on black magic scattered around the room. One night he threw a party. What a motley crew of friends he had. A lot of bongo players and dope smokers, and a lot of ‘actors’ who had never acted in anything. Dope, dope, and more dope—that’s all that crowd was interested in. Jimmy could have had any beautiful woman in Hollywood, but he was sleeping with guys.”