Chapter 28

The Rebel

Nick Adams—Los Angeles

Nick Adams was born Nicholas Aloysius Adamshock to Ukrainian immigrants in the hardscrabble coal mining town of Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, on July 10, 1931. After his uncle was killed in a mining accident, the family picked up and moved until they ran out of gasoline, ultimately ending up in Jersey City, New Jersey, where Adams spent the remainder of his childhood. Jersey City was not a paradise, and Adams was able to get off the streets by going to the movie theater as often as he could. He read movie fan magazines and dreamed of a better life than his parents had had. New York City was just across the river.

A chance meeting with an actor led Adams to an audition at Carnegie Hall, where he met the actor Jack Palance. After discovering that they were born in the same region of Pennsylvania, they struck up a friendship. Palance was Marlon Brando’s understudy for A Streetcar Named Desire at the time and was doing fairly well for himself. He invited Adams up to his apartment and had sex with him. It was the first time that Adams had sex with a man, but it wouldn’t be his last.

After a couple of weeks, Adams left Palance and hitchhiked to Hollywood. He landed a commercial for Coca-Cola and met the soon-to-be legendary James Dean. Dean and Adams became roommates and, allegedly, lovers. To make ends meet, they both hustled tricks on Santa Monica Boulevard. After tiring of the struggles of show business, Adams enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard.

While on leave in San Diego, and dressed in his Coast Guard whites, Adams showed up for an audition for the Henry Fonda film Mister Roberts. He got the part. After his military service was through, he returned to Hollywood and looked up his friend, James Dean.

Dean, whose star was rising, got Adams a small role in Rebel Without a Cause, and by all accounts Adams had sex with all three of its stars: Dean, Sal Mineo, and Natalie Wood. Wood’s stage mother reportedly asked Adams to be Natalie’s first sex partner, and he obliged.

Adams was devastated when James Dean died in a tragic auto crash on September 30, 1955. He began driving recklessly, racking up nine traffic violations in one year. It probably didn’t help that enfant terrible Dennis Hopper was his housemate at the time.

Adams was getting more acting work in television and films just as Elvis Presley arrived in Hollywood, in 1956. Presley soon put out word that he wanted to meet James Dean’s buddy. Adams and Presley quickly became friends, and Nick was Elvis’ go-to man for anyone or anything he needed while in Los Angeles.

Presley and Adams were seen together all over Los Angeles, and many in the industry believed that Adams had latched onto Presley, as he had Dean, although Presley and Adams were allegedly more than just friends. When Elvis went back to Graceland, he left Nick an airline ticket to Memphis. The gossip columnists had a field day with their relationship. There was nothing the old-school show business people wanted more than to ruin the hillbilly outsider who was turning their children into rock ’n’ roll maniacs. Knowing Adams’ reputation as someone who would have sex with anyone who could advance his career, the gossip columnists spread rumors that Elvis and Nick were lovers.

To derail the rumors, Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker, put Adams on the Elvis payroll while he toured. Parker, who was an illegal alien from the Netherlands, didn’t like Adams and his big mouth. Adams had already told Elvis that the Colonel, who was taking a 50 percent cut of Elvis’ fortune, was ripping him off, and the Colonel thought it would be better to have him on the payroll like the rest of Elvis’ Memphis Mafia, or paid friends. Besides, as long as Elvis was having sex with Adams, the Colonel didn’t need to worry about Elvis impregnating young women and paying for abortions. So close were the two that Adams was the only person allowed to visit Elvis in the days following the death of Elvis’ mother, Gladys Presley.

Adams landed a great part in the film The Pajama Game, starring Doris Day, Tony Randall, and Rock Hudson. The film was a romantic comedy, even though all of the leading men were gay. More film roles and television work fell into Adams’ lap, and he no longer had to deal with the casting couches of film producers. During this time, Adams married former child actress Carol Nugent. Their marriage was filled with infidelities, mostly on Nugent’s side of the bed. They had two children, Allyson Lee and Jeb Stuart.

The Ballad of Johnny Yuma

A young Johnny Cash sang the “The Ballad of Johnny Yuma,” the theme song of The Rebel. The song was released as a single a year after the program went off the air.

Adams got his big break in 1959 with his role as Johnny Yuma in the television program The Rebel, which he also helped write. The show instantly became a hit with teenagers, who were attracted to the themes of rebellion, rejection, and justice. The show was also known as one of the most violent programs on television, and it was cancelled after its second season to placate the conservatives in Hollywood and Washington, D.C.

It wasn’t long before Adams got a choice film role as a malicious murder suspect in the courtroom drama Twilight of Honor. Adams was nominated for best supporting actor at the 1963 Academy Awards, but lost to Melvyn Douglas for his role in Hud.

Adams’ turbulent marriage came to an end in November 1966, when Nugent filed for divorce. The proceedings turned out to be expensive, as the couple fought over custody of their two children. Adams wasn’t getting any younger, and his prematurely thinning hair made his teen rebel roles dry up. There were plenty of younger, cheaper actors in Hollywood to fill the void. Adams was reduced to acting in Japanese monster movies just to pay his attorney’s fees.

With both his prospects and his bank account drying up, Adams paid a call on his old friend, Elvis. The two had had a falling-out in the early sixties over Adams’ demand for money from Elvis. It was time to hit up Elvis again, this time with the threat of exposing his sexual secrets. The King threw Adams out of Graceland.

Word got out in Hollywood that Adams was threatening to write a tell-all book on the sexual preferences of very famous and powerful industry people. Adams was an avid journal keeper and had stacks of notebooks that contained all of the details of who, what, when, where, and how. The list of Adams’ alleged sex partners is astonishing: besides Elvis, Jack Palance, James Dean, and Sal Mineo, there were also Joan Crawford, James Cagney, Rock Hudson, Rory Calhoun, Guy Madison, and director John Ford.

Nobody wanted to see the book written. Not only would it soil the careers of megastars, but millions of dollars would be lost on the bad publicity it would cause. John Wayne stopped by Adams’ home at 2126 El Roble Drive in Beverly Hills to try to talk him out of writing the book and to warn him that it might get him killed. Wayne liked Adams and didn’t want to see anything bad happen to him.

On February 7, 1968, Adams missed an appointment with his attorney, Ervin Roeder. The two were meeting to discuss negotiations with Colonel Tom Parker, who wanted to buy all of Adams’ notebooks and his manuscript for his own personal library. Parker had spent a fortune over the years bribing editors, reporters, and young women and men not to report on Elvis’ private life. Adams was just another brushfire to put out.

Roeder was concerned that Adams had missed the appointment, as he was always punctual. He drove to the actor’s home and got no answer when he rang the doorbell. The house was all locked up, but Roeder managed to force open a window and crawl inside. He found Adams sitting in a chair in his upstairs bedroom. He was fully dressed and absolutely dead, his blue eyes staring across the room.

Dr. Thomas Noguchi, who later wrote two books about his career as the coroner of Los Angeles County from 1967 to 1982, performed the autopsy, and he certified the cause of death as “accidental-suicidal and undetermined.” Massive doses of the sedative paraldehyde and the tranquilizer Promazine were found in Adams’ body. He had a prescription for paraldehyde, but there was no evidence of any other drug in the rented home. Nor were any of Adams’ notebooks, his manuscripts, his guns, or his typewriter found on the premises.

The police left it at that. Two of Adams’ best friends, actors Broderick Crawford and Forrest Tucker, went to their graves believing that Adams had been murdered. However, Hollywood had nothing to gain from solving the mysterious death of a rebel.