James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  McCarthy also claimed that he started the tradition of Texas oilmen marrying movie stars. “I invited Joan Crawford to christen my Flying Shamrock with a bottle of the world’s most expensive champagne. I bought a P38 fighter plane and spent another $50,000 upgrading it. Later that day, I fucked Crawford high in the clouds. My Errol Flynn mustache tickled her twat when I went down on her.”

  “She wanted to marry me,” he said. “But I turned her down. We got a lot of publicity in the papers.”

  [He went on to cite a long list of other oil tycoons from Texas who had “married Hollywood.” Oil magnate Bill Moss had married Jane Withers. After their divorce, Moss wed Ann Miller. Howard Lee married Hedy Lamarr. After Lee dumped her, he married Gene Tierney. Dallas oilman Buddy Ferguson married Greer Garson.]

  Later, back in Marfa, Jimmy omitted details about what happened that night in Houston with the underaged prostitutes whose services McCarthy had arranged. He did, however, tell Stevens, “Glenn McCarthy sure knows how to show a guy a good time. I’ll never be the same again. Finally, I had to tell him to quit sending up any more putas. Enough is enough.”

  Mercedes McCambridge

  “THE MEANEST, MOST MACHO WOMAN IN TEXAS”

  Jimmy bonded with yet another member of the cast, Mercedes McCambridge. Nicholas Ray had shown Jimmy a film he’d directed, the campy Johnny Guitar (1954) with Mercedes and Joan Crawford.

  In reference to her autobiography, Mercedes McCambridge wrote, “I wanted to call the book Life Is a Bitch, but my publisher wouldn’t let me. Jimmy, however, liked what I wanted to entitle my memories.”

  McCambridge, cast as Bick’s butchy sister, harboring a deep-seated hatred for Bick’s wife (Taylor), had won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her debut performance in All the King’s Men (1949) opposite Broderick Crawford.

  “My character in Giant liked Jett Rink,” she said. “We bonded both on and off the screen. It’s true, he was a little bastard, but an amusing one. My role was small, but I was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting actress once again. I didn’t last long in the picture, as I was mangled to death by a mean horse.”

  There were two bars in Marfa, and she and Jimmy often hung out in both of them every night for a while. She told him stories about growing up in Joliet, Illinois and her work in radio before arriving on Broadway for a role in A Place of Her Own. A critic said, “She attracted attention with her tight-lipped performance with her cold, demanding eyes.”

  She discussed working with Broderick Crawford in All the King’s Men. “Believe it or not, that tough, burly, macho bastard was gay as a goose. He would really have gone for you.”

  Pretending to be Texans, and although most of the crew didn’t like them, Mercedes McCambridge and James Dean became friends on the set of Giant. Midway through the filming, she fell off a horse and suffered lacerations to her face.

  She also told him that Joan Crawford was “a mean, tipsy, powerful rotten egg lady. She put the make on me. When I didn’t want to lick her pussy, she turned on me.”

  Night after night, Mercedes drank too much, and Jimmy would have to drag her back to the hotel. “Mercedes would down bourbon after bourbon until she passed out. Quite a gal. I liked her. She told it like it was, and spared no one.”

  She said, “Jimmy wanted to be patted like a little dog. He was the runt of a litter of thoroughbreds, and you could feel the loneliness beating its way out of him.”

  In her memoir, The Quality of Mercy, she wrote: “While he was playing Jett Rink, he was inseparable from Jett Rink. He did not become Jett Rink, but Jett Rink was his constant companion.”

  [September 30, 1955, occurred near the end of Mercedes’s stay at a remote resort in the California desert. Its accommodations had plumbing, but no access to radios or newspapers. As she was driving back to Los Angeles, she stopped at a gas station in the little town of Cholame, where she spotted what used to be a shiny silver Porsche, now a mass of wreckage.

  She inquired about it from the gas station attendant.

  “Oh, didn’t you know?”he asked. “James Dean was driving it. He was killed. It’s been all over the news!”

  She gasped. “I didn’t know.”]

  ROCK HUDSON AND JIMMY DEAN

  In and Out of Elizabeth Taylor’s Bed

  JIMMY EXPOSES HIMSELF TO 250 RUBBER NECKERS

  Elizabeth recalled, “In Texas, Rock and I hit it off right away. The heat, humidity, and dust in Marfa were so thoroughly oppressive we had to bolster our spirits any way we could. So we stayed out drinking all night and luckily were young enough and resilient enough to go straight to the set in the morning with fresh complexions and with no bags under our eyes. During our toots, we concocted the best drink I’ve ever tasted—a chocolate martini made with vodka, Hershey’s syrup, and Kahlua. How we survived, I’ll never know.”

  “Rock and Elizabeth were like kids again,” claimed Stevens. “They indulged in a kind of baby talk, and they liked to play pranks on each other, tossing water at each other from our rapidly dwindling supply.”

  She told her assistant, Dick Hanley, “Rock has become my second best friend—no one will replace Monty as Number One.”

  In Texas, Hudson and Elizabeth discovered nachos, devouring them along with a massive consumption of alcohol. “Then they staged belch-and-fart contests,” Dennis Hooper said.

  During the filming of Giant, Rock Hudson provided emotional support for Elizabeth Taylor. She was distraught, as her marriage to Michael Wilding was crumbling. According to Hudson, “She is very extreme in her likes and dislikes. If she likes, she loves. If she doesn’t like, she loathes. She liked me.”

  On the set of Giant, Elizabeth had to battle her weight problem. All those chocolate martinis she consumed with Hudson were obviously fattening. But Stevens complained that she compounded the problem with her midnight snacks, which consisted of homemade vanilla ice cream drenched in fudge and peanut butter, preceded by a series of mayonnaise sandwiches, “which I just adore.”

  For about ten nights, Hudson seduced Elizabeth. Actually, she was the aggressor. She’d later tell Roddy McDowall something he already knew: “Rock is really endowed, and I mean really. As a lover, he’s very efficient and eager to get on with it. For me, it’s over before it begins. We’ve decided to be great friends, not lovers. No woman will ever succeed in igniting his enthusiasm in bed, and of that, I’m certain.”

  ***

  In the beginning, Jimmy was leary of Elizabeth, mainly because she’d lobbied to have Monty Clift designated as Jett Rink. Yet he was attracted to her. One hot afternoon between set-ups, he confided to Chill Wills one of his sexual fantasies. “In World War II, I heard women wore a shade of lipstick called Victory Red. My greatest turn-on would be to have three women, their mouths painted with that lipstick, each give me a blow-job—Elizabeth Taylor, Tallulah Bankhead, and Edith Piaf.”

  Elizabeth Taylor as Leslie Benedict calls on Jett Rink (Jimmy) for tea. The sexual tension between them inflamed the hot Texas afternoon.

  [Wills agreed on Elizabeth, but didn’t know who Bankhead and Piaf were.]

  James Dean had difficulty filming this “crucifixion” scene with Elizabeth. To ease his tension, “I took the most famous piss in the history of cinema, with all of Marfa looking on.”

  Elizabeth confided to Hanley, “Jimmy and I, in Texas, were at first rather suspicious of each other. We circled each other like two animals of prey. I was just another Hollywood star to him, all bosom and no brains. To me, he was a would-be intellectual New York Method actor. We were not prepared to dig each other at all.”

  Stevens later referred to the June 3rd filming of Jimmy’s first scenes with Elizabeth as “a day that will live in infamy in the annals of cinema history.” They were filmed on an open set at the Worth Evans Ranch, which Stevens had temporarily rented. It was the site of the famous scene where Jimmy was depicted with a rifle hoisted over his shoulders—he called it “my crucifixion pose.”

  Time and time agai
n, he flubbed his lines. Watching the proceedings, Dennis Hopper said, “That was one nervous queen. He was fucking up big time with another Queen (i.e., Elizabeth) of Hollywood.”

  In front of at least 250 onlookers, Jimmy ruined take after take by freezing up. A total of sixteen shots failed. Suddenly, he broke from the set and walked over to a wire fence in front of the assembled population of Marfa, some of whom included children who had skipped school to attend this first ceremonial film shoot. As everyone looked on, he unzipped his jeans and hauled out his penis. Hopper claimed it looked about four inches soft. Shock waves were heard from the crowd as he took what he called “a horse piss.”

  He later told Hedda Hopper, “I knew that if I could piss in front of some two thousand (sic) people, I could do anything. I’m a Method actor.” Then he returned to the set and did the scene perfectly in one take. When it was over, he turned to Elizabeth: “I’m cool, man. It’s cool.”

  When Jimmy saw this picture of himself as a Texan cowboy, he proclaimed, “This is the sexiest photo I’ve ever posed for. I could go for me myself.”

  Eventually, they developed a friendship. “One night, he arrived at my house. He seemed engulfed in loneliness. We talked for hours. He loved our Siamese cats, and I gave him one of them. I knew he wanted something that belonged to him, something of his own, so I gave him a kitten. He cried when he accepted my gift.”

  Jimmy seemed to dote on Marcus, the Siamese cat, but later gave the animal away. When asked why, he said, “I lead such a strange and unpredictable life that some night, I might never come home again. Then what would happen to Marcus?”

  “After a while, we found we were just two human beings, and we became intimate friends,” Elizabeth said. “There was sex in the beginning, but none of that kinky shit that Rock talked about.”

  “But, as in the case with Rock, Jimmy and I decided that we could hold each other to protect each other from the cold winds, but as friends, not as lovers.”

  Perhaps as an emulation of Rock’s relationship with Elizabeth, Jimmy engaged in playful games with her. “Two kids on the playground,” Stevens called their intimacy.

  However, during their moments of manic giddiness, he had a tendency to go too far. One day, he grabbed Elizabeth, picked her up off her feet, and turned her upside down so that her skirt fell over her head, exposing her “unmentionable” regions to photographers.

  As she later told Stevens, “Fortunately, unlike Marilyn Monroe on most occasions, I wore my panties that day, or else my twat would be hanging on every bathroom wall in every man’s toilet in America.”

  To Elizabeth, Jimmy always remained a mystery, but she came to love him. “Sometimes, Jimmy and I would sit up until three in the morning, talking, and he would tell me about his past life, his conflicts, and some of his loves and tragedies. And the next day it was almost as if he didn’t want to recognize me, or to remember that he had revealed so much of himself the night before. And so he would pass me and ignore me, or just give me a cursory nod of the head. And then it took him a day or two to become my friend again. I found all that hard to understand.”

  As regards his military record, or lack thereof, he told Elizabeth, “I would have been shot down by some yellow boy in Korea, but I escaped the draft.”

  Shortly before his death, he was said to have confided his most painful secrets to Elizabeth, sordid details of his life he shared with no other. One of these was revealed after Elizabeth’s death in 2011 by writer Kevin Sessums in The Daily Beast. Elizabeth had granted Sessums an interview in 1997.

  “I’m going to tell you something, but it’s off the record until I die,” she told Sessums. “When Jimmy was eleven, he began to be molested by his minister. I think that haunted him the rest of his life. In fact, I know it did.”

  [His biographers have long suspected there was a sexual relationship with the Rev. James DeWeerd, a Wesleyan pastor in Fairmount, Indiana, who had a penchant for young boys. For more on this, refer to Chapter Four of this biography.]

  When Hudson learned that Elizabeth was having an affair with Jimmy, he jokingly asked her, “Did he piss on you, or did you piss on him?”

  “Let’s just call it a tinkle-winkle,” she said, perhaps jokingly.

  ***

  Stevens had a closeup view of the shifting alliances and shifting romances of his major stars throughout the production of his film. Some of them later revealed some enticing details:

  “George always had to have a patsy to pick on throughout every one of his films,” Elizabeth claimed. “On Giant, it was both Jimmy and me. Actually, Rock and I speculated that George secretly had the hots for Jimmy. Whenever he thought Jimmy wasn’t looking, he was always eying him like a lovesick schoolgirl. One scalding hot afternoon, when Jimmy didn’t show up for work, George told Rock and me, ‘I should punish the little bastard and make him suck my dick.’”

  “George and I staged some epic battles under that hot sun,” Elizabeth said. “Our biggest fight was when he wanted me to wear those thick brogue shoes and a long ‘grandma-in-the-wilderness’ skirt, plus a man’s battered old cowboy hat. I attacked him for trying to force this ludicrous getup on me. I told him, ‘What are you trying to do? Make me look like a lesbian in drag? I’m Elizabeth Taylor, in case you forgot it.’”

  At first, Jimmy and Carroll Baker sat together whispering conspiratorially. “Our main diversion was making fun of Rock and Elizabeth,” Baker later said. “We were cruel and cutting.”

  Carroll Baker, cast as Luz Benedict, daughter of the characters played by Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor in the multi-generational saga, Giant.

  Baker was popular both as a sex symbol and also as a dramatic actress. She and Jimmy were the same age. She had beautiful features, striking blonde hair (not dyed), and a slight Southern drawl, despite her birth in Pennsylvania. A year later, Baby Doll (1956) earned her some screen notoriety, thanks to Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan.

  Unaware of Jimmy’s past, Baker, at first, didn’t believe that he was a homosexual. She thought that the rumors about him being gay had begun on the set of Giant when he began to hang out with a “posse” of Texas cowboys. Unknown to the cast, these cowboys were gay, as were many men in the Old West. They rode together, slept together in bunks, bathed together, gave each other massages, including paying special attention to their buttocks, which were sore from riding too long in the saddle. And they made love at night.

  An aging, lecherous Jett Rink (Jimmy) courts Luz Benedict (Carroll Baker), the daughter of his bitter rival.

  Author Randall Riese wrote; “During the shoot of the bar scene in which Jett Rink proposes marriage to Luz, Jimmy slid one of his hands under the table and allegedly assaulted Carroll between her legs in a schoolboy fit of one-upmanship.”

  After the release of her 1956 picture, Baby Doll, Carroll was absurdly billed as “The Female James Dean.”

  “Jimmy desperately wanted to be a part of that camaraderie,” McCambridge said. “He talked openly about it to me. He’d heard that I was a lesbian, so I guess he felt his secrets would be safe with me.”

  Baker admitted that Jimmy worked hard to pick up the speech patterns of Jett Rink. “He listened to the cowboys’ speech patterns and watched their mannerisms. He not only learned to ride and wore those slant-heeled cowboy boots,” she said, ‘but he walked with the bowlegged gait of a man born in the saddle.”

  ***

  During their first two weeks in Marfa, whereas Elizabeth and Hudson spent nearly every evening together, Jimmy was frequently seen bonding with Baker, whom he’d known from the Actors Studio in New York.

  In one scene in Giant, Dennis Hopper, depicted above, has a push-shove altercation with Jett Rink (Jimmy). Gossip columnists later reported that Hopper was sent to a local hospital for treatment of injuries sustained during that onscreen fight with Jimmy.

  Hudson constantly complained to Elizabeth about Stevens. “He gives Dean all the close-ups, and I’m left out in the cold.”

 
Elizabeth and Hudson feared that Jimmy was stealing the picture. Both actors set out to woo Baker into their cabal. In that, they succeeded, and subsequently, Jimmy stopped speaking to her, feeling betrayed.

  “Dean got the ultimate revenge,” Baker said. “He succeeded in stealing Elizabeth from Rock and me. The dirty rat wanted Elizabeth for himself, and I went into a state of mourning. Elizabeth went off every evening with Jimmy, ignoring Rock and me. The tables had turned.”

  During the final three weeks of the shoot, Elizabeth temporarily deserted both Hudson and Baker. [Her friendship with Hudson would be recharged after Jimmy’s untimely death.]

  The film’s cast and crew were shown the daily rushes in a battered old movie theater that had closed down with the coming of television. Most of the participants preferred to sit on the theater’s ground floor, but Elizabeth and Jimmy usually retreated to the balcony where they were alone. She brought popcorn from her house to share with him.

  “They were like two lovebirds,” Chill Wills said. “I never could figure out these switch-hitters. One night, Jimmy is taking it up the ass, and on another night, he’s pounding pussy. You figure.”

  Throughout the filming of Giant, Elizabeth was plagued with various illnesses, some of which required hospitalization. The first of her health emergencies began in July of 1955, when she developed a severe sore throat and could not deliver her lines. That was almost immediately followed by a bladder infection and thrombophlebitis, a blood clot in a vein of her left leg. She blamed its flare-up on Stevens for “making me wear those tight breeches.”