A TV PRODUCER AT CBS “ADOPTS” A KID FROM THE STREET,
JAMES DEAN,
SHOWING HIM OFF AS A TROPHY TO THE HOLLYWOOD ELITE
It was a rainy Thursday night when Jimmy packed his meager belongings into his old Chevy and drove to the luxurious apartment of Rogers Brackett on Sunset Plaza Drive. His car almost stalled as he headed along the inclined road that meandered uphill to the Hollywood Hills from the nightclub-studded Sunset Strip. Actually, as he was to learn that night, the apartment was a sublet from William Goetz. [Goetz was a film producer and studio executive and one of the founders of what was eventually renamed 20th Century Fox. Brackett later informed Jimmy that Goetz was married to Edith Mayer, daughter of MGM’s Louis B. Mayer. Jimmy met Goetz casually one afternoon when he came by to check on his property. Since Jimmy didn’t know who he was, he let one of his remarks (“you should be in pictures”) go by unchallenged.]
A skilled chef, Brackett had prepared a lavish dinner for Jimmy as a gesture of welcome into his new living quarters. Jimmy had told his friends that he’d occupy a separate bedroom, but the small garden apartment had only one bedroom, and it contained a double bed.
Jimmy wanted his freedom, but even before he opted to move in, he had known what to expect. The question that had not been asked was how often he’d have to put out.
Brackett, who later worked for Grey Advertising in Manhattan, told Jimmy that he loathed the commercially oriented job he had. “I do it for a paycheck, and for no other reason. My true love is the ballet, the theater, concerts. I’m the cultural type.”
The dinner he’d prepared was spectacular and, as Brackett later admitted, the sex was sensational. “It was a two-way, reciprocal street.”
The next morning over breakfast, in reference to his new, glamorous address, Jimmy said, “I like living here. It makes me feel superior to be looking down on the city and its dreary residents. It’s like living on some magic carpet high in the sky.”
As part of their living arrangement, Brackett was quick to produce acting jobs for Jimmy. He got him a gig in Alias Jane Doe, the radio show, and another in Stars Over Hollywood for CBS Radio, a production that had been staged and promoted by Brackett’s employer, the advertising agency, Foote, Cone, and Belding. Stars Over Hollywood had been broadcast most Saturday mornings since 1941, featuring such second-tier stars as Ann Rutherford, who had played Vivien Leigh’s younger sister, Careen O’Hara, in Gone With the Wind (1939). Alan Hale, Sr., a beefy, hearty actor with a bushy mustache, was also a regular.
One afternoon, Jimmy was introduced to Basil Rathbone. He found the actor suave, imperious, and grandly self-satisfied, evoking some aspects of Clifton Webb. To Jimmy, Rathbone was the definitive screen version of Sherlock Holmes. That night over dinner, Jimmy confessed to Brackett. “Did you know that Rathbone is secretly gay? He made a pass at me.”
“And what did you do?”
“I told him to catch me later.”
Brackett began to expand Jimmy’s cultural horizons, introducing him to some of his favorite writers, including André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and Shakespeare. One night the two of them sat through a performance of Hamlet together.
Brackett had never seen Jimmy so mesmerized by a literary work. When it was over, Jimmy asserted, “I feel it is my destiny to play Hamlet on the stage.”
Wes D. Gehring, a professor of film history, wrote that themes associated with Hamlet were replicated in Jimmy’s screen persona in East of Eden, “playing the most uncertain of characters attempting to resolve situations that have fathers at their centers. In fact, one might also interpret the morose, brooding Hamlet as a possible catalyst for Dean’s decisions as they related to his interpretation of his angst-ridden character.”
On the social circuit, Brackett escorted Jimmy to many of Hollywood’s social venues and introduced him to his friends. Alec Wilder, the composer, later said, “Rogers took this Indiana farm boy, used to slopping the hogs, and introduced him to a world of culture and sophistication. Jimmy would always remain that farm boy in his heart, but with a more cutting edge as time went by.”
Some of Brackett’s friends were completely turned off by Jimmy. One of them was Leonard Spiegelgass, an aggressive homosexual who was a Hollywood player and the powerful story editor at Metro. “The boy was not housebroken. I’d installed this expensive new beige carpet, and he tracked in mud. He was a chain smoker, and he dropped ashes on my carpet. At one point, he jumped up and announced, ‘I’ve got to take a piss. Where’s the fucking john?’ He unzipped and had his dick half way out before he left the living room. I considered him toxic, but Rogers thought him the hottest thing since he’d once sucked off Lex Barker, Lana Turner’s Tarzan. I had planned to seduce the kid, but he was such a turn-off, I kicked him out into the rainy night.”
Ironically, Spiegelgass’s sister, Beulah Roth, befriended Jimmy. She’d been a speechwriter for Franklin D. Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, and was married to the photographer, Sanford H. Roth, who later also became a close friend of Jimmy’s.
One Sunday afternoon during their time together in Hollywood, Brackett escorted Jimmy to the rented Malibu cottage of Miles White, who, for a period of twenty-five years, had been the top costume designer of Broadway musicals. He had designed the wardrobes for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first two Broadway hits, Oklahoma! and Carousel. He had also designed clinging and/or glittering on-stage garments for Carol Channing, Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, and Lena Horne.
White later remembered Jimmy’s visits. Like Brackett, he referred to him as “Hamlet.”
Miles White, the leading costume designer on Broadway, was not impressed by Jimmy’s hustler approach. “He wanted me to help get him cast in either Oklahoma! or Carousel.”
“I was on the West Coast designing costumes for the Civic Opera House and also for the circus, Barnum & Bailey. During each of his visits, Hamlet sat in the corner, nursing a Bud and not saying a damn thing. I found him very hostile.”
One weekend, when Brackett had business in San Francisco, he didn’t invite Jimmy to go along. To White’s surprise, Jimmy showed up that Sunday alone. He was drunk.
“Rogers must have told him that movie versions of Carousel and Oklahoma! were in the works,” White said. “Jimmy was particularly interested in playing the (leading) role of Curly in Oklahoma!, with a dubbed voice, of course, for the singing parts. He also thought he’d be ideal in the role of the irresponsible carnival barker in Carousel. He wanted me to recommend him.”
“I listened to his pitch—suddenly he’d found a voice—but he didn’t impress me then or now. Other actors, notably Gordon MacCrae, were far better suited for the role, and Gordon could sing.”
At one point, when Jimmy thought he was not going over with me, he stood up in my living room and unzipped his jeans. I couldn’t believe it. He pulled out his dick. ‘If you get me just one of those roles, you get this.’ Then he shook his dick at me. I ordered him out of the house. I never told Rogers about that Sunday afternoon.”
***
One of the most important show biz moguls that Brackett introduced to Jimmy was Ralph Levy, a pioneer in early TV comedy shows.
Levy had tried to launch himself into show business way back in 1946, when he answered a “cattle call” audition for the role of a chorus boy in Annie Get Your Gun. From that early failure, he rose, over a period of only eight years, to a position as director of Mary Martin in a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical on Broadway.
Later, Levy migrated from the theater to the emerging medium of television, producing The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and the highly successful Jack Benny Show. In time, he’d produce The Bob Newhart Show, and direct such stars as Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Ed Wynn, and Edgar Bergen. He also directed A-list film stars, including Marlon Brando, Shirley Jones, David Niven, and Doris Day. Later, his career included key involvements in The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and Hawaii-Five-O.
Jack Benny in (upper photo) a comedy schtick celebrating his “39th” birthday and (in lower photo) in drag.
When he could, Levy hired Jimmy as an extra on The Alan Young Show, an entertainment venue that had begun as a situation comedy on the radio, and eventually evolved, by 1951, into a major-league TV variety show, eventually winning some Emmy awards. Jimmy approached its MC, Alan Young, directly and asked if he could use his influence to snag a speaking role. Young told Jimmy, “I’ll get back to you, kid.” Of course, he never did.
Levy always had frequently stated that Jack Benny—who appeared frequently on his show—was a marvelous man—and that he was privy to many aspects of Benny’s secret life. As Levy’s friend, Brackett later said, “To put it bluntly, Levy pimped for Benny. Even though Benny schtick included a sort of gag gay comedy act, American TV viewers usually assumed he was straight. After all, he’d been married to Mary Livingston since 1927. Yet throughout his career in show biz, Benny maintained a secret preference for delivering blow-jobs to good-looking guys.”
Brackett went on to assert, “Although he played a miser on TV, in private life, Benny was very generous, giving these guys a hundred-dollar bill, big money back then. As I found out later, Levy delivered Jimmy one afternoon to Benny’s dressing room for a quickie. I later forced Jimmy—if he wanted to go on living with me and paying his bills, to reveal the truth.”
In the TV comedies that Levy helped administer, he really couldn’t use an actor like Jimmy. However, he did make several phone calls to help him get jobs in the theater after Jimmy moved to New York City.
Jimmy had become hooked on the art and mystique of bullfighting during his childhood in Indiana. James DeWeerd, a local preacher who fell in love with the young boy, sparked his interest in the sport by showing him home movies he’d taken in Mexico of bullfighters in the ring.
Budd Boetticher next to a poster displaying his passion, bullfighting. He gave Jimmy a “magic talisman,” the blood-soaked matador’s cape once owned by...
Jimmy’s future director, Nicholas Ray, later tried to explain the young actor’s fascination with bullfighting: “There was the ritual, the matador’s inescapable endurance test, the challenge of proving himself, and there was the physical grace of the bullfight itself, almost like a ballet. All of this intrigued Jimmy to the point that it almost became an obsession.”
When Brackett became aware of Jimmy’s interest in bullfighting, he invited him for at least three weekend visits to Mexicali.
En route to points south of the (U.S.) border, Brackett complained about Jimmy’s driving loudly protesting that he was going too fast. A speed demon, Jimmy ignored his lover’s pleas to slow down.
the celebrated American matador, Sidney Franklin, depicted in 1937 with Ernest Hemingway. Franklin is demonstrating a bullfighter’s maneuver with a cape that’s very similar to the one Jimmy received as a gift and talisman of good luck from Budd Boetticher.
In Mexicali, both Brackett and Jimmy became swept up in festive moods, attending the bullfights and drinking too much tequila.
By chance, Brackett ran into an old friend, Budd Boetticher, a film director known mainly for his low-budget westerns, many of them starring Randolph Scott, the former lover of Cary Grant. A bullfight aficionado, he had worked as the technical director of the wildly popular bullfighting film, Blood and Sand (1941), starring Tyrone Power as a matador.
Boetticher was in Mexicali working for John Wayne Productions, shooting The Bullfighter and the Lady, which featured such B-rated actors as Robert Stack and Gilbert Roland, a fading Latin lover of yesterday.
Boetticher was said to be gay, and he was mesmerized by Jimmy, arousing Brackett’s jealousy. Jimmy and the director managed to sneak away for some time together. Boetticher invited him to his hotel suite where he gave Jimmy a most precious gift, the blood-soaked cape of Sidney Franklin. As a matador, Franklin had the unique distinction of being born a Jew in Brooklyn. Ernest Hemingway helped fan Franklin’s legend through praise for his “intelligent valor,” facing death in the afternoon.
From within his hotel suite, Boetticher asked Jimmy to try on a flamboyantly pink “suit of light” designed in the tight-fitting style worn by matadors. Jimmy could hardly pull himself into the very tight garments.
Boetticher assured Jimmy that although no bullfighter could compete with the size of the genitals of the bulls they appeared with, matadors wore their pants that way as “proof of their manhood.” Hemingway had advised bullfighters who were not particularly well-endowed to stuff their crotches.
It was later assumed—but never verified by Brackett—that the director performed fellatio on Jimmy after he undressed in his hotel suite.
After one of their trips to Mexicali, en route back to Los Angeles, Brackett and Jimmy engaged in a lovers’ quarrel. At one point near Laguna, Jimmy braked the car and jumped out, racing toward the beach. As Brackett recalled, “I was furious at him, so I drove off, even though I knew he’d left his wallet in the back seat. Two days later, he managed to make it back to Hollywood looking worse for wear. I didn’t ask what he’d been up to. We survived our first big quarrel and resumed our life together.”
During their next trip to Mexicali, Jimmy and Brackett were accompanied by actor David Wayne and his wife, the former Jane Gordon.
According to Wayne, “All that Jimmy talked about was bullfighting, even though Rogers told me he wanted to be an actor. I finally got him talking about acting when I told him that I was one of fifty applicants who had been granted membership in the newly formed Actors Studio in Manhattan. He told me he’d go to New York one day to try to get into the Actors Studio himself.
Death of a Toreador (1864), by Edouard Manet, interpreted by some (including Jimmy) as a celebration of the heroism of sudden, unexpected death.
Wayne also said that Jimmy seemed to forgot about bullfighting when he learned that he would soon be appearing in a movie, As Young As You Feel (1951) with Marilyn Monroe.
[In a short time, Wayne would go on to star with Monroe in three more films, more than any other actor. They included We’re Not Married (1952); O’Henry’s Full House (1952); and How to Marry a Millionaire (1953).]
In Mexicali, sitting above the bullfighting arena between Wayne and Brackett, Jimmy was mesmerized by his view of the matador, Carlos Arruza, performing brilliantly in the ring.
Jimmy later purchased a copy of his favorite painting, Manet’s Dead Bullfighter, [a.k.a. The Dead Toréador, painted around 1864] referring to it as “The Dance of Death.”
Throughout the rest of his life, Jimmy carried around Sidney Franklin’s blood-soaked cape wherever he went. It became something of a security blanket for him. In a series of apartments, he tacked the cape onto a wall, often as the room’s only decoration.
Sometimes, he even wore it, draping it casually over his left shoulder. In New York, in one of his more daring escapades, he treated oncoming cars as if they were the bull in a ring. Once or twice, he was lectured by a police officer, although never arrested, despite its obvious dangers as a pastime.
During Jimmy’s time with Brackett, he posed for one of the most controversial sets of nude photos in the history of Hollywood movie stars. One day, he stripped and posed naked after climbing a tree, at one point exhibiting himself with a full-blown erection. For years, Brackett carried a copy of the blurry snapshot in his wallet, showing it to his friends. Some of them reported that eventually, after it was lost, he wept.
Many biographers have disputed that it was Jimmy depicted in these candid shots, published long before the technology of “doctoring” photographs (through computer programs such as Adobe’s PhotoShop) became widely available.
Among Jimmy’s biographers, the full frontal, fully erect nude of Jimmy was first published in Boulevard of Broken Dreams, a biography written by Paul Alexander, a former reporter for Time who had also written two books on Sylvia Plath.
Another chronicler of Jimmy’s life, John Gilmore, claimed that the young man depicted in the tree was not Jimmy. “The image isn’t even close,” he was quoted as saying.
X-rated Jimmy
Perhaps he should look again. The image not only resembles Jimmy, it’s a dead-on likeness.
Brackett, who was perhaps the most experienced judge of Jimmy’s genitals, insisted that the nudes were real, “not only the erection, but the testicles. I spent quite a few months nesting there, so I think I’m qualified to identify them.”
John Willis of Theatre World also provided authentication. Founded by David Blum in 1945, the magazine, published annually, was widely regarded as the pictorial and statistical “book of record” for virtually everything associated with the American Theater.
Willis took over the editorship of Theatre World after Blum. He claimed that the nude photos of Jimmy had been snapped by Earle Forbes, the magazine’s staff photographer. “There was a very exhibitionistic quality in Jimmy,” Willis said. For a while, Forbes was one of the world’s premiere photographer of male nudes. Some of his work was eventually published in a book entitled Reed Messengill’s Uncovered—Rare Vintage Male Nudes.
Willis also claimed that both Forbes and Blum not only owned a collection of Jimmy’s nudes, but also nudes of other young performers, many of them posed before their subjects became famous. Among those cited by Rose included actors Rock Hudson and Warren Beatty, along with singers David Bowie, Elvis Presley, David Cassidy, and Jim Morrison.
Brackett had many friends in Hollywood, but in many ways, the gay writer, George Bradshaw was his closest companion.
When both Bradshaw and Brackett were on the West Coast together, it became something of a tradition to spend Sunday afternoons with each other, sharing observations and catching up on the latest gossip.
From the beginning, Jimmy was rude, erratic, and rebellious around Bradshaw. Once, when Brackett was in a huddle with Bradshaw in the kitchen, both men heard Jimmy call out: “FIRE!”
Bradshaw rushed into the living room to discover a Queen Anne armchair on fire. Brackett was right behind him with a pitcher of water, which he used to douse the flames. Bradshaw thought he’d set the fire on purpose, despite Jimmy’s apologies and assertions that he’d accidentally set fire to the chair with his cigarette.
Of course, Brackett was ready and willing to pay for the damages.
During their drive together from Bradshaw’s back to Hollywood, Brackett lectured Jimmy like a stern father. “Do you really have to test my love by performing one outrageous stunt after another? You have my love, god damn it. So quit pulling this shit. The next thing I know, you’ll be smashing up my car.”
When Bradshaw talked to Brackett the next day, the writer said, “Naturally, you’re invited over Sunday for brunch, but do you have to bring Jimmy with you?”
“Please understand that I’m afraid NOT to bring him. I don’t trust him wandering around Los Angeles by himself on a Sunday afternoon. Who knows what trouble he’ll find?”
“Okay, but I’ll have the fire department standing by.”
Jimmy’s negative attitude about Bradshaw changed completely after he heard that the author was working on a Class A movie script entitled Tribute to a Bad Man, whose plot revolved around three betrayals catalyzed by the manipulations of a Hollywood producer. There was a small role in it that called for a sullen but exceedingly handsome young man. Bradshaw told Brackett. “I had your Jimmy in mind when I created this pivotal scene.”
[After additional input from Charles Schnee, Bradshaw’s original title was later changed to The Bad and the Beautiful. A campy showcase forever after associated with the life and legend of Lana Turner, it was directed by Vincente Minnelli and released in 1952.
That week, instead of adhering to their usual Sunday afternoon schedule, Brackett took Jimmy to Bradshaw’s home on a Monday night, because Brackett wanted to meet Lana Turner, who had agreed to show up there at around 8PM. He knew many stars in Hollywood, but had never met Lana, who was one of his all-time, most fixated-upon favorites.
That Monday night at Bradshaw’s, Brackett and Jimmy were each eagerly awaiting Lana’s arrival, who didn’t appear until 9:30PM. She had been driven to Bradshaw’s house by an anonymous, shadowy-looking male escort who refused to join the gathering, opting instead to remain within her car, parked outside.
She politely accepted “gushing tributes” from both Jimmy and Brackett, as if it were her due. At one point during their conversation, she expressed her dislike of the leading men emerging from Hollywood of the 1950s, notably Marlon Brando and Monty Clift. “Give me Clark Gable or Robert Taylor any time, especially that handsome devil Tyrone Power. Errol Flynn was a darling, and I just adored John Hodiak, not to mention Victor Mature!”
Honey, don’t fail to mention your Tarzan, Lex Barker,” Bradshaw said. “Talk about sex appeal!”
“There were problems with him I don’t care to discuss,” she said, stiffly, changing the subject.
Lana had read the first draft of Bradshaw’s film script, and she was thrilled with her role of Georgia Lorrison. “I think it might be my greatest part to date. For the daring car scene alone, when I leave the home of my lover who has betrayed me, I’ll probably get an Oscar if I can pull it off. MGM kicked out poor Judy Garland, but I want to hold my own. Incidentally, I saw Judy two days ago. She’s a pathetic little thing. Fired from Annie Get Your Gun. I think it’s all downhill for her from now on, but not for me.”
Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas in a scene from The Bad and the Beautiful that, based on censorship standards of its day, was “shockingly erotic.”
The first draft of the script had Lana discovering that her lover, as played by Kirk, also had a male lover, to be played by James Dean.
“Judy was good for my ego. She told me her greatest desire in life was to be Lana Turner. She said that compared to me, she was a polliwog, a tadpole on its way to becoming a frog.”
At one point, Lana seemed to take notice of Jimmy, who was flattered by her attention. “Don’t tell me: You want to be an actor?” she asked. “Please, not another Brando clone.”
“Hell, no!” he said. “I have my own style and technique. I can act rings around Brando and make an audience actually understand what I’m saying.”
“Good for you, dear heart.” Within minutes after a final drink, Lana was ready to leave. “I’ve got a hot date waiting for me in the car. I would have invited him in, but I didn’t want you guys to go ape-shit over him and steal him from me for the night.”
***
The following Sunday afternoon, according to their ritual, Brackett and Jimmy were back at Bradshaw’s home. This time, Bradshaw read a scene to them through which Jimmy might make his screen debut. “Can you imagine a guy like me making love on screen to Lana Turner?” Jimmy asked.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Bradshaw cautioned. He outlined the scene for them, and it was, indeed, a dazzling one. For the first time, and against the Production Code, he wanted to blatantly depict homosexuality on the screen.
In his draft of the script, Georgia Lorrison, as played by Lana, arrives unexpectedly at the home of director Jonathon Shields (to be portrayed by Kirk Douglas). She confronts him in his foyer to demand an explanation and/or apology for his failure to escort her, as had been pre-arranged, to a premiere.
During their confrontation, a shadowy, mostly undressed male figure suddenly appears at the top of the stairs, having just emerged, it’s made clear, from Shields’ bedroom. It’s a handsome young man clad only in a pair of boxer shorts. Without uttering a word, he stares enigmatically, perhaps with a sense of triumph, down at Lana.
“If Jimmy is assigned the part,” Bradshaw predicted, “the girls will swoon and the gay men will go crazy.”
Although Jimmy was vastly intrigued, Brackett suspected and feared that the scene would never pass the scrutiny of the censors.
“You won’t have any spoken dialogue,” Bradshaw said. “But your defiant face will show it all. You’ll portray the man who stole the (male) lover of Lana Turner, one of the most desirable women on the planet.”
Before Bradshaw headed back to New York, the cast of Tribute to a Bad-man (aka, The Bad and the Beautiful) had been approved by producer John Houseman. Vincente Minnelli, Judy Garland’s former husband, had cast the major roles. In addition to Lana and Kirk Douglas, other leading actors included Walter Pidgeon, Dick Powell, Barry Sullivan, and Gloria Grahame.
Motivated in part by politics associated with the studio, Bradshaw hosted a cocktail party to which he invited the stars along with the film’s producer and director. Lana had an important engagement that night and didn’t show up, but the rest of the distinguished guests did.
Brackett had informed Jimmy that Minnelli was gay and that he would probably come on to him. That was more or less what happened, although the director’s time was for the most part monopolized by his stars.
During the party, Jimmy got to spend at least twenty minutes with Houseman, who was not gay, but seemed genuinely interested in the young man as an actor. “Let me know how I can reach you. There’s a picture coming up that might be ideal for you. And don’t think that is some bullshit line. I like women. I really know of a role in an upcoming movie that you might be ideal for, but you’ll have to pass a screen test.”
Jimmy had been in Hollywood long enough not to be shocked at what transpired at parties there. But later, he was nonetheless surprised when Pidgeon engaged him in a long conversation on the oceanfront terrace.
Pidgeon? Gay? Could it be? It certainly appeared that way to Jimmy. Pidgeon asked if Jimmy could come to the address he provided on the upcoming Friday night at around 9PM. “I want to talk to you about your career.”
Jimmy decided to do something impulsive. Pidgeon, even though his career was in decline, was one of the most influential stars in Hollywood. As a kid, he’d seen those Pidgeon and Greer Garson movies, including Mrs. Miniver (1942).
Before they parted, Jimmy kissed the veteran actor passionately on the lips. “That’s so you won’t forget me.”
Greer Garson with Walter Pidgeon in the hugely influential Mrs. Miniver, one of the greatest tear-jerking propaganda films to emerge from the early days of World War II.
“I’ll count the hours until we meet again.”
***
Jimmy, as was his way, later confessed details of his sexual encounter with Walter Pidgeon to Brackett. Perhaps he had two reasons: One to make his sponsor/lover jealous, and perhaps also to prove that he could inaugurate contacts with major stars all on his own.
Hedda Hopper once labeled Pidgeon as “the only guaranteed straight man in Hollywood, and I’m not using the expression in the comedic sense.”
The Canadian actor’s homosexuality was whispered about by the elite of Hollywood and once came to the attention of that homophobe, Louis B. Mayer at MGM.
But public or written exposure of Pidgeon’s gay life has been rare. A notable exception occurred when Hollywood’s “star fucker,” Scotty Bowers, published his memoirs, Full Service, in 2012. The book was reviewed twice in The New York Times and received the endorsement of such skeptics as Gore Vidal.
Bowers serviced both male and female stars. He opens his book with a description of his seduction by Pidgeon at the home of his longtime lover, Jacques Potts, a milliner to the stars. Despite the status of Potts and Pidgeon as lovers, Pidgeon was married to Ruth Walker, whom he’d wed in 1931.
The following Friday, after a rendezvous at their designated location, Pidgeon drove Jimmy up Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills to a spacious, elegantly furnished home. He told Jimmy that the house had been built by Harold Lloyd, the famous comic actor of the silent screen in the 1920s.
Potts was at the door to greet “Pidge,” as he called him. He kissed his lover before turning to appraise their conquest. Then he smiled his approval. “Dear boy,” he said to Pidge. “You sure know how to pick ‘em. This kid is impressive, indeed.”
Jimmy resented being treated like a “piece of meat,” as he’d later tell Brackett, but decided to go along with the act for the money.
After being offered a drink, Jimmy was invited out onto the terrace that encircled a heart-shaped swimming pool. Since it was a hot night, Pidgeon suggested he might like to take a dip, informing Jimmy that he didn’t need to wear a swim suit since Pott’s servant wasn’t scheduled to arrive until morning.
As Jimmy later confessed, “I sort of got off on the attention and compliments they gave me. When I emerged from the pool, both men had undressed, and they toweled me off.”
In the bedroom, each was a skilled oral artist, taking their turns with me while they jerked off. At the climax of the evening, Pidge “topped Potts as I was invited to watch,” Jimmy said.
It appears that Jimmy, during the next few weeks, made a total of three more visits to Lloyd’s former mansion. The sexual routine was the same except on one occasion, when Jimmy arrived with fellow actor/hustler Nick Adams, with whom he was living at the time, during a period when Brackett had relocated in Chicago.
Although both Potts and “Pidge” found Jimmy the cuter of the two, much attention and praise was heaped on Adams’ exceptional endowment. Jimmy later claimed, “I watched both men work Nick over at the same time, and it was some workout. Nick and I each left with a hundred-dollar bill in of our pockets.”
***
Regrettably for both Bradshaw and Jimmy, Vincente Minnelli rejected Bradshaw’s first screenplay and even changed the title to The Bad and the Beautiful. Charles Schnee was called in to drastically revise it, and in 1952, the film noir would win five Oscars out of six nominations.
In the rewrite, Jimmy’s possible role was rewritten and the gender of the interloper emerging from Douglas’ bedroom was changed from male to female. Minnelli cast the emerging starlet, the sultry brunette, Elaine Stewart, into the role.
Even though he never appeared in a film scene with Lana, Jimmy’s fascination with the blonde goddess continued.
Years later, when he was in the process of searching for a place to live in West Hollywood, his prospective landlord, David Gould, showed Jimmy the master bedroom of a fully furnished house for rent.
The previous tenant of 1541 Sunset Plaza Drive, had been Lana Turner. “She slept in this very bed—and never alone,” Gould claimed to Jimmy.
“I’ll sign the lease,” Jimmy said. “I’ll be sleeping in Lana’s bed myself. And never alone!”
***
Jimmy would later dismiss and eventually, abandon “all of Brackett’s social whirl of gossipy queens and cocktail party chatter. It was pure hogwash. There were two favorite topics, depending on one’s sexual preference. ‘How big is his cock?’ or ‘What size are her tits?’ I grew bored by many of Rogers’ friends. I was treated like a court jester, ready to perform at any minute, preferably with my pants down. I’m not just some dick to suck or rosebud to plug. I’ve got talent. I want to make it on my merits as an actor—not as some good-looking Hollywood stud hustling his ass.”
Years later, on the set of Rebel Without a Cause, he would reflect with director Nicholas Ray about this period of his life. “Behind Roger’s back, these jerks would invite me to dinner on their luxurious oceanfront terraces. After a few drinks, their greedy little hands would be closing in on my dick. I knew that if I kept this up, the year would be 1975, and I would be some aging ex-pretty boy waiting tables or pumping gas. In Hollywood, they drain you to the last drop and then you’re discarded as yesterday’s toy.”
“Now that I’m a star, I’ve got these jerks—many of them out of work today—by the balls.”
Brackett was hip and well-informed about which stars were gay “or used to be gay.”
Jimmy was shocked to learn that such macho icons as Gary Cooper and John Wayne, during their early days, were known to lie on the casting couch.
He and Brackett became regulars at The Club, a watering hole which attracted gay men late at night to its darkened precincts on Hollywood Boulevard.
Jimmy invited his university friend from his days at UCLA, James Bellah, to Brackett’s apartment. Bellah later recalled, “This ad agency guy flew into the living room on gossamer wings. When he went to the kitchen to get us some ice, I turned to Jimmy and said, ‘What the hell? This guy is queer as a three-dollar bill.’”
“So what?” Jimmy responded, defiantly.
One night, Jimmy asked Brackett to go with him to see Marlon Brando perform in the filmed (1951) version of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. It would mark the eighth time that Jimmy had seen the movie.
According to Brackett, “Although he would never admit it, Jimmy was mesmerized by the screen acting of Marlon Brando, who would loom so large in his future. The two actors were very much alike, although Jimmy would almost slug you if you ever compared him to Brando. I think he was also strongly attracted sexually to Brando. It was like a schoolgirl crush that grew more serious until he actually stalked Brando at night.”
Marlon Brando, as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, mesmerized James Dean.
Elia Kazan, who directed both actors, said, “Marlon as Apollo is driving the Sun Chariot. But he’s looking back to see an even brighter ball of fire on the distant horizon.”
“Unlike the lies I’ve transmitted to many an interviewer, in which I stated that I hooked up with him because I believed in his talent, from the beginning, when I first met him in that parking lot, I wanted to get in the kid’s pants. He was just my type, real cocky.”
“I didn’t admire all that Method acting crap and that Brando posturing, but Jimmy certainly did. One night I found him imitating Brando in front of the mirror.”
“A lot of people have referred to our affair as a father-son relationship, that is, if I’d fathered Jimmy when I was only fifteen. If it were father and son, then it was pure incest from the beginning.”
As William Bast later claimed, “Jimmy was eager to learn. He sapped the minds of Brackett’s friends as a bloodsucker saps the strength of an unsuspecting man.”
To his straight friends, Jimmy dismissed his arrangement with Brackett “as a meal ticket.”
It was around this time that Jimmy became worried that he’d be drafted into the Army, fighting in a war for South Korea. Harry S Truman had upped the draft quotas in the summer of 1950.
Jimmy had been contacted by his Selective Service Board in Grant County, Indiana. He showed Bracket their letter that night, wondering if he should inform the board that he was a conscientious objector.
Brackett had another idea. A few days later, he took him to a gay psychiatrist (Dean J. Taylor of Canada) whom he’d met at a party.
After a long session with Jimmy, at which Brackett sat in, Taylor, for a fee, agreed to write a letter to the Selective Service Board of Indiana on behalf of Jimmy. In his claim, he stated that “James Dean is a hopeless psychotic, DO NOT GIVE THIS YOUNG MAN A FIREARM.”
Bracket had left the room an hour before the end of Jimmy’s interview with Taylor. Jimmy later informed Brackett “I had to prove to the good doctor that I was indeed a homosexual.”
“And how did you do that?” Brackett asked.
“That’s for you to imagine.”
Later, thanks mostly to Taylor’s intervention, Jimmy was classified 4-F.
It has been suggested that Jimmy did not need to resort to evasive tactics to avoid being drafted into the Army. After an eye examination, because of his severe nearsightedness, he was pronounced “all but blind.” That defect alone seemed enough to have justified his designation as 4-F.
***
Scotty Bowers either tricked with or supplied handsome members of his former Marine Crops to a bevy of Hollywood stars, including Charles Laughton (who ate shit sandwiches), Tyrone Power (a fellow Marine), Errol Flynn, Spencer Tracy, George Cukor, Randolph Scott, Cole Porter (who was known to have blown twenty Marines in one night), Rock Hudson, and Noël Coward.
As Bowers related in his memoirs, he even sold himself to such unlikely persons as J. Edgar Hoover and the Duke of Windsor. He also supplied carefully screened young women to Katharine Hepburn and the Duchess of Windsor.
He knew many of the handsome young movie stars of the 1950s, usually servicing them himself before supplying them with a steady stream of “tricks” for sale.
Bowers had only one encounter with Jimmy Dean, and he wasn’t impressed at all, as he’d later relay in his memoirs. Sometimes, Bowers found work moonlighting as a bartender at private parties, as he did one night at the home of the Brazilian millionaire, Ozz Francesca, who maintained a strange friendship with Jimmy that was never fully explored. Francesca was gay, sharing his home with his understanding wife and their daughter. For a while, he reigned in Hollywood circles and was known for hosting some of the most lavish, star-studded parties in town.
At one party that Bowers worked, the guests were formally dressed. Jimmy showed up in blue jeans and a white T-shirt. Bowers remembered him “moping around the room, puffing on a cigarette and looking decidedly bored and gloomy.”
At Francesca’s party, Jimmy, according to Bowers, displayed the same antisocial behavior he presented during visits to the homes of Brackett’s friends.
At one point, Jimmy dropped his lit cigarette on Francesca’s heirloom Persian carpet and crushed it out with his foot. Bowers rushed to clean it up.
Later, at the bar, Jimmy demanded a glass of champagne. Opening a bottle of Dom Perignon, Bowers poured a glass of bubbly into a tulip-shaped, rose-colored glass.
Jimmy took only one sip of it before making a face as if he’d swallowed slop, and poured the contents of the glass onto the carpet. “Bartender, serve me something else, and it’d better be drinkable this time!”
Bowers later dismissed Jimmy “as a prissy little queen, moody and unpredictable. He had a few romantic flings with women, but from all reports, he was essentially gay.”
One of Bower’s major sources of information was one of his clients, Monty Clift, who had had a sexual involvement with Jimmy in New York. Bowers found Clift “another temperamental, moody queen with a surprisingly vicious tongue.”
Unlike Jimmy, Clift was exclusively gay, but none of the tricks that Bowers sent over pleased him. “The guy’s prick was an inch too long, or an inch too short. His hair was not parted properly, or his feet were too small, his toes too long, there was always something wrong. Monty was never satisfied.”
Bowers also found Jimmy’s friend, Roddy McDowall “excessively fussy and hard to please.”
Both Jimmy and Bowers, at different times, also tricked with actor Anthony Perkins, who was engaged in a long-term relationship with Tab Hunter, although he constantly cheated on his lover. Bowers admitted that, “I tricked with him myself on numerous occasions, but Tony, like Monty, was very fussy, always demanding to be fixed up with ‘someone different.’”
In his memoirs, Jimmy was the only movie star that Bowers actually despised. He seemed to have gotten on with all the other big names at the time.
He wrote, “It was only a matter of time before Jimmy did himself in. He was his own worst enemy.”
***
Jimmy and his former roommate, William Bast, had recovered from the feud that had begun when Bast had decided to move out of their shared apartment. They agreed to meet over a bowl of chili at Barney’s Beanery. Jimmy won Bast over by flashing his charm school smile and saying, “Let’s tongue kiss and make up. I’ll suck yours if you’ll suck mine.”
“Are you sure you’re referring to tongues?” Bast asked jokingly. The two men embraced and sat down to eat.
Barney warned them, “There will be no man-hugging in my dive.”
Bast later reflected that Jimmy’s life with Brackett had changed him a lot. “He had acquired more polish, seemingly overnight, or at least learned the rudimentary rules of social behavior. But as I was soon to find out, he could still revert to his bad boy image.”
“The shitkicker from Indiana was on the way to becoming an urban sophisticate,” Bast claimed. “I don’t want to exaggerate too much. Noël Coward he would never be. But suddenly, he was showing off by talking about French Impressionists, Colette, the Cubists, literature, the brilliance of Stravinsky. My country boy had also joined that hideous array of name-dropping Hollywood. He could drop quite a few: Jack Benny, Walter Pidgeon, Clifton, Webb, Cole Porter, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, Lana Turner. I was jealous…I mean, really, really jealous.”
En route with Bast to Brackett’s apartment, Jimmy farted three times. “It was that second helping of chili,” he claimed.
Brackett was “in residence,” as he called it, and Bast later recorded his negative impression of the ad agency producer. “Brackett struck me as an arch, foppish villain out of a Dickens novel or a naughty Max Beerbohm dandy. His unusually long neck supported an avian head, on the thin beak of which was perched large, horn-rimmed glasses, giving him a somewhat owlish look. It took little time for Jimmy to fall prey to this chicken hawk. I think that if it has been Dracula himself, with Hollywood connections, Jimmy would have been a voluntary blood donor. I might have considered a Sugar Daddy myself—but never this Wicked Bitch of the East.”
One Saturday when Brackett had an appointment with some client and didn’t want to drag Jimmy along, Jimmy and Bast agreed to drive down to Laguna together for a day at the beach. For the first time since Bast had known him, Jimmy had two-hundred dollars in his wallet. Perhaps to show off his new wealth, Jimmy invited Bast to a chic fish restaurant with a swimming pool and rooms to rent upstairs.
The figure of a beautiful blonde caught Jimmy’s eye. It was the notorious actress, Barbara Payton, who was wearing the bottom half of a very small polka dot bikini. [aka, a “cache-sexe” (“sex hider” or a very small triangular-shaped garment designed to barely conceal the genitals.)] Everything else she had was on ample display.
Perhaps to impress Bast with his heterosexual credentials, Jimmy surveyed Payton from top to bottom, claiming, “The hot bitch has more body than a Renaissance Madonna. I’m going to the car to get my sketch pad.”
Back with his pad, Jimmy approached Payton, and she seemed flattered to pose for him. From a distance of twenty feet, Bast witnessed their interchange, although Jimmy did not invite him over.
Within the hour, Jimmy disappeared with Payton, heading for a room she’d rented above the restaurant.
The rooms upstairs opened onto balconies that overlooked the pool. At one point, Jimmy appeared “stark raving nude for about a minute on one of the balconies,” according to Bast. “A ripple went across the crowd as Jimmy showed off his junk to the voyeurs below.”
Barbara Payton before her decline and collapse. “I am not ashamed,” she stated in a memoir.
By five o’clock, Jimmy once again joined Bast beside the pool. He claimed he had to clear out of Payton’s room because she’d gotten her calendar mixed up and had invited both of her lovers, Franchot Tone and Tom Neal, to Laguna at the same time. She’d told Jimmy she didn’t know which one she wanted to get rid of. “Joan Crawford and Bette Davis always called Franchot ‘The Jawbreaker” and Tom is known as ‘Donkey Dong.’ So you see what a difficult choice it is for me to make.”
Jimmy later bragged to Bast that “Blondie is one in a million. An hour or two with her is like a month with any other broad. She’s not only got a great body, but the bitch knows how to use it in bed. She’s electrifying. I’m totally satisfied from my nostrils to my little toe. She has a sexual technique that must have been developed over two-thousand years.”
Later that night, back in Los Angeles, Jimmy asked Brackett, “Just who in hell is this actress floozie, Barbara Payton? Someone told me she’s a movie star.”
Before the night was over, Jimmy ended up knowing more about Payton than he really wanted to handle.
[Payton, “the brassy blonde with a hooker heart” flashed briefly across the movie screens of the early 1950s before she devolved into an alcoholic, drug-addicted prostitute. Marlon Brando, her former lover, once referred to her as “Hollywood’s Number One Trollop.”
Still young and beautiful at the time Jimmy seduced her, Payton had drifted from the cold winds of Minnesota to the warm beds of such A-list players as Howard Hughes and Gregory Peck. She was graced with sky-blue eyes and a fair complexion that revealed her Norwegian ancestry.
Hollywood’s most sexually motivated attorney, Greg Bautzer, once said, “You have never been given a blow-job until you’ve been on the receiving end of Barbara’s skilled mouth and tongue. I’ve been blown by the best of them—Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich—you name ‘em. Barbara takes top prize.”
Hughes once told his pimp, Johnny Meyer, “Payton will do anything in bed—and I mean anything. If you want to piss in her mouth, that’s okay with blondie.”
Payton had been the Queen of the Tabloids between 1950 and 1952. The single most scandalous movie star ever to emerge from the placid 1950s, Payton dumped her husband in the late 40s and headed for Hollywood determined to make it big. “If a blonde with absolutely no talent like Lana Turner can become a movie star, then I know I can too,” she announced to anyone interested.
When her test at RKO didn’t work out, she ended up as a carhop at Stan’s Drive-In at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue. Hustling tips and peddling chocolate milkshakes and blood-letting hamburgers, she also did another type of hustling on the side.
The riches from her nocturnal activities allowed her to buy an expensive wardrobe. Soon she was seen at all the posh clubs, including the Trocadero, Ciro’s, and El Mocambo. She was hailed as “the Queen of the Night.”
Her love nest on Cheremoya Avenue was paid for in 1949 by none other than the much-married Bob Hope. When the comedian refused to give her an additional $5,000 a week in “spending money,” she threatened to blackmail him in exchange for her silence. Hope settled what was called “a huge sum of money” on her, but she went through all her new loot in just three months, claiming, “I have expensive tastes.”
One of the most notorious love triangles of the 1950s spun around Franchot Tone (top photo), along with Barbara Payton and Tom Neal.
As the usually elegant Tone ungraciously described his marriage (1951-1952) to Payton, “I went from Joan Crawford and Bette Davis to a blonde whore.”
A.C. Lyles, the movie producer, once claimed that “Payton never had an itch she didn’t scratch.” Minor actor Mickey Knox recalled that she’d kept him in bed for three days and nights, all in one stretch. “I had to crawl out of that dump on my hands and knees. What a workout! What a pussy!”
She even got involved with James Cagney, who secured her a contract at Warner Brothers for $5,000 a week. He put her in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950). The film had hardly been released before she was swallowing Gary Cooper’s mighty sword near the sound stages of Dallas while taking in $10,000 a week. Suddenly, she was seen around town with the classy New York actor, Franchot Tone, who had been married to Joan Crawford in the 1930s. Tone was twenty-two years older than Payton, and he lavished expensive gifts on her, including jewelry.
During her affair with Tone, Payton also fell for rock-jawed Tom Neal, a sort of dime store John Garfield. Almost sadistically, Payton played one man against the other and would eventually marry each of them, thereby creating two of the shortest marriages ever recorded in Hollywood history.
Neal learned about Payton’s involvement with Tone, and on the night of September 13, 1951, emerged from the bushes outside Payton’s apartment and attacked Tone, smashing his nose and breaking one of his cheekbones. Tone was rushed to the hospital with a brain concussion and remained in a coma for eighteen hours. Morning newspapers headlined this “Love Brawl” across the world.
In time, Payton would descend into the status of a drunk on Skid Row. She moved deeper and deeper into heroin addiction and—among other professions—became a lesbian-for-hire. She ended up a broken down and snaggle-toothed whore working Santa Monica Boulevard, jumping inside the cars of strangers and giving fast blow-jobs for ten dollars while her clients kept the motor running.
In February of 1967, Payton, unconscious, was found in the parking lot of Thrifty’s Drug Store in Hollywood. At first, sanitation workers thought that her reclining body was a bag of trash. She’d been living on the streets for the past three months. She was rushed to Los Angeles County General Hospital.
After her release from the hospital, she went to stay with her parents, both of whom were also alcoholics. In May of 1967 her mother found her slumped over a toilet. Her daughter was dead. An autopsy revealed that she’d died of a heart attack and liver failure just six months shy of her 40th birthday.]
Their friendship renewed, Bast enticed Jimmy into taking acting lessons from James Whitmore from premises on the upper floor of the Brentwood Country Mart, a shopping area at 26th Street and San Vicente Boulevard near the boundary between Santa Monica and Los Angeles.
Whitmore was not a Hollywood pretty boy, but a serious actor with a stocky build, a rather gruff personality, and a reputation as a blunt conversationalist.
As regards roles he was considered suitable for, some Hollywood talent agents described him as “the poor man’s Spencer Tracy,” and “a less expensive Spencer Tracy type.”
He preferred acting on stage to working in Hollywood movies, but, as he admitted when he moved to the West Coast, “a paycheck comes in handy.”
Before meeting Whitmore, Jimmy had seen him in the 1949 World War II drama, Battleground, in which Whitmore had played a battle weary, tobacco-chewing Army sergeant.
James Whitmore, depicted above in Battleground, evolved into a noteworthy acting coach, exposing Jimmy to the tenets of “The Method.”
[For his role in Battleground, Whitmore won an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor. He also starred with Marilyn Monroe in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and with Nancy Davis in The Next Voice You Hear (also 1950). He would later play a dumb thug in the movie versions of Kiss Me Kate (1953), and Gloria Grahame’s grizzled father in Oklahoma! (1955).]
In a classroom with about a dozen dedicated actors, male and female, Jimmy interpreted Whitmore as a stern teacher, suggesting that it took “blood, sweat, and tears” to become a successful actor. “Don’t go into acting seeking movie star fame or glory. For every Marilyn Monroe, there are ten thousand other dyed blondes taking the train back to the Middle West, hoping to find a husband who’ll let them be a housewife. There’s personal gratification in acting, supreme gratification, in fact, but it will cost you plenty to obtain it.”
At first, Jimmy did not impress Whitmore at all. The older actor found him “shy and very introverted. He never volunteered to act out any scene before the class, always holding back, giving nothing of himself. But in time, he began to open up a bit, and came to sense that he possessed a great talent, though masked behind all his neurotic behavior.”
During the weeks that followed, when Whitmore saw actual demonstrations of Jimmy’s acting talent, he urged him to abandon Hollywood and head for New York. There, he could seek work on the stage and in the burgeoning TV industry that was turning out dramas by the day. Before the film sets and production facilities of most television shows had moved to the West Coast, the early TV industry was based in Manhattan. Jimmy later confided to Brackett and others what happened when Whitmore asked Bast and Jimmy to perform an improvised scene in front of the class.
Jimmy’s assignment involved the portrayal of a poor college student who had stolen a valuable watch. Bast would portray a jeweler who had been warned by the police to be on the lookout for a young man who might fit Jimmy’s description, who would arrive with a (stolen) watch with intention of getting it repaired so that he could then sell it for a lot of money.
The task of the character played by Bast involved detaining Jimmy’s character “at any cost” until the police could arrive. In the ensuing struggle over the watch, Bast denounced Jimmy as “a pompous bastard” and accused him of being “a nearsighted little son of a bitch.” [This line in the script echoed what the two men had said one night in a fight over Jimmy’s failure to pay half the rent on the penthouse they shared.]
Suddenly, without meaning to, and in front of the class, Bast and Jimmy got into an onstage wrestling match that turned violent. At one point, Jimmy was on top of Bast, staring into his eyes as he choked him.
Bast later recalled, “Those were the eyes of a killer staring down at me. All of our past conflicts seemed to bubble up in Jimmy. It was no longer an actor’s improvisation. This was serious.”
It appeared to Whitmore that if he didn’t intervene, Jimmy would choke Bast to death.
Later, as Jimmy related to Brackett, “In my worst moment, I couldn’t control myself and I almost suffocated Bast. Now I’ve got to confess something. I’m not proud of this—in fact, I’m ashamed—but that act of violence against him gave me a raging hard-on.”
In 1955, Jimmy discussed his workshop experience in Whitmore’s classroom with a reporter for Seventeen magazine. “I learned a lot from him. One thing he said helped me more than anything. He taught me the difference between acting as a soft job and acting as a difficult art. Another thing, he warned me never to be caught acting.”
“Whitmore opened my eyes. There is always someone in one’s life—at least there should be—who opens your eyes so that you can see for the first time. For me, it was definitely Whitmore. He told me to go to New York, and he was right. That’s when things started to happen for me. He also changed my life forever by giving me a letter of introduction to [the famous director] Elia Kazan.
Only weeks before his untimely death, Jimmy once again extolled the importance of Whitmore in his life as an actor, ignoring any mention of the spade work of Rogers Brackett.
Brackett’s composer friend, Alec Wilder, knew why. “The kid lived in terror as he became famous that his homosexual life would be exposed. He didn’t want the world to know he’d been some plaything to some older, male, TV producer.”
***
Whereas he’d been deeply impressed with the dramatic potentialities of Hamlet, Jimmy became even more enthralled with the symbolism of The Little Prince, a copy of which had been provided to him by Brackett.
The original French-language classic by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry became Jimmy’s Bible. He read it and reread it, and soon was quoting lines from it.
A post World War II bestseller, translated from the French. It influenced James Dean more than any other book he ever read.
One of his favorite excerpts from it was: “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” To anyone willing to listen, Jimmy maintained that the novella contained “some of the most profound observations of the human condition ever written. It shows how life really should be lived.”
[Penned as a French-language novella or “adult fable” in 1943 The Little Prince (aka Le Petit Prince) is the third most translated book in the world, and was voted in France as the best book of the 20th Century. Translated into 250 languages, it has sold more than 150 million copies, with an annual sales rate of two million a year. Styled as an arch and artful children’s book, it focuses on its author’s wistful conclusions about human existence and love. Emotional “truths” are expressed by a fox to an isolated and highly spiritual alien child (The Little Prince) whom the author/narrator discovers wandering in a desert:
On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. (“One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eyes.”);
Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé. (“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”); and
C’est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante. (“It is the time you have lost for your rose that makes your rose so important.”)
Jimmy became obsessed with turning The Little Prince into a movie, although Brackett warned that the novella, in part because of its abbreviated symbolism and poetic brevity, would be difficult to adapt into a screenplay. Jimmy wanted to play the aviator who counsels and guides a young boy who wants to learn about life.
To pacify Jimmy, Brackett made some queries at CBS and learned before the end of the same day that film rights to the novella had been purchased by Hedy Lamarr, the sultry brunette screen goddess from Vienna, hailed in some quarters as “the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Jimmy had been enthralled by Lamarr’s performance as the exotic temptress in Samson and Delilah (1949), the steamy and campy Cecil B. DeMille epic co-starring Victor Mature.
Behind Brackett’s back, Jimmy was continuing his sessions with the psychiatrist, Dr. Dean Taylor. The Canadian was counseling him without expectation of payment, in return for Jimmy unzipping after an hour of pouring out his troubles.
After one of their sessions, the doctor told him that he had to hurry and get cleaned up and that Jimmy had to leave. “I’m seeing Hedy Lamarr at five o’clock.”
Jimmy was stunned by the news. It was the equivalent of one of those weird coincidences that happen within the context of a Charles Dickens novel. As instructed, Jimmy left Taylor’s inner office, but remained in the doctor’s waiting room, with his secretary, for Lamarr’s arrival.
Outfitted in a black suit with mauve accessories, Lamarr made a glamorous entrance fifteen minutes later. She walked past Jimmy as the secretary escorted her into Taylor’s inner office.
As Jimmy remained in place for an hour, he flirted with the impressionable young girl behind the desk. He got her to agree to introduce him to Lamarr when she emerged from the psychiatrist’s inner office. He told her that he was a great fan of the glamorous star, and that he wanted her autograph. He also agreed to go out on a date with the rather unattractive secretary.
Later, after Taylor uncovered how Jimmy had maneuvered, he said, “I’m not surprised that Hedy found Jimmy enticing. I’ve never known her to turn down the amorous attention of any handsome young man. She’s oversexed.”
Among other reasons, Lamarr was consulting a psychiatrist because of conflicts associated with her career. Although Samson and Delilah had been a worldwide hit, she had recently made two flops in a row— A Lady Without a Passport (1950) and Copper Canyon (also 1950), in which her best scenes weren’t caught on film—i.e., episodes within the shrill and brittle feud she maintained throughout production with her leading man, Ray Milland, who detested her.
Long without an MGM contract, and in the process of visibly aging, Hedy’s career options were narrowing. She expressed her rampant fears that she’d end up “on Poverty Row,” chained to a dwindling roster of low-budget, badly scripted potboilers, or—even worse—ignored forever.
Two views of Hedy Lamarr: lower photo, in Copper Canyon (1949), the last film she’d made before meeting Jimmy. Her career was in decline.
It is not known exactly what Jimmy said to Lamarr after she emerged from her session with Taylor. He obviously delivered his pitch about bringing The Little Prince to the screen, and perhaps exaggerated the influence and intentions of Brackett, who might, he insinuated, be willing to produce it.
Lamarr seemed to find Jimmy very appealing, as he focused upon her the full power of his manly charm and sex appeal. She agreed to receive him at her residence that evening at eight o’clock.
In the only suit he owned, he arrived on her doorstep exactly at eight. He was ushered into her living room by a butler. Lamarr had carefully and artfully arranged herself on a sofa.
He was stunned by her glitzy appearance. She wore a full-bodied, off-the-shoulder turquoise gown that had been designed by Edith Head for her performance in Copper Canyon.
Over drinks and dinner, there were only small references to The Little Prince. Lamarr was the most self-enchanted actress in Hollywood, or so Jimmy believed, knowing that competition for that label was stiff.
She expressed numerous complaints: “I’m tired of hearing that people adore me for my beauty. I want to be adored for myself, for the person who inhabits my soul. My beauty has lever led to my finding love.”
“I may be the world’s most beautiful woman, but I was a disappointment to my parents. They wanted a boy. My father was a very large man, and very ferocious. One time, I wore this red ribbon in my hair, thinking it would please him. It did not. I learned he hated bows. He beat me severely.”
Her main concern was that she was moving into “the dangerous years” for a woman in Hollywood. She had been born in 1913 in Vienna, and now was living in America in the ‘50s. “Many Hollywood actresses commit suicide at this time in their lives. They can’t stand the emotional strain of a fading career.”
“I can get you involved in bringing The Little Prince to the screen,” Jimmy promised. “You still have the rights, don’t you?”
“Indeed I do,” she said. “But I must warn you. I may look like a delicate hothouse flower, but I’m one strong negotiator. You must tell your producer friend that I don’t sell my rights cheaply.”
Jimmy didn’t return to Brackett’s apartment until 2AM. He didn’t tell Brackett or Bast what had transpired with Lamarr. It was obvious that she had seduced him, as she had many other young men and even women. If legend is to be believed, she had even been seduced by Adolf Hitler, defining him afterward as “under-endowed and with only one testicle.”
Months later, when The New York Journal-American announced that Lamarr was arriving in New York, Jimmy did tell Alec Wilder that he’d been sexually intimate with the star. “She was a femme fatale all right. Very demanding in bed. Very hard to satisfy. I pictured her as the Black Widow spider.”
“My God,” Wilder said. “I don’t know about the Hitler thing, or even the Mussolini claim, but I know of some of the other men who have preceded you into La Lamarr’s boudoir: Howard Hughes, Charles Boyer, Errol Flynn, Chaplain, Clark Gable, David Niven, and Senator John Kennedy.”
To Jimmy, she confessed that the men in her life had ranged from a classic case of impotence—a Texan, no less—to a whip-wielding sadist who enjoyed sex only after he tied her up.
***
Although Brackett reported that he was shopping The Little Prince to potential movie producers, Jimmy didn’t believe him. This led to a brutal fight, during the heat of which Jimmy stormed out of the apartment and disappeared for two days.
“You could have found a producer if you’d wanted to,” Jimmy said to Brackett accusatorily after he returned. “You just want to keep me tied to you so I can’t become a star myself.”
[The Little Prince finally made it to the screen in 1974 as a British movie directed by Stanley Donen, and it did not include an onscreen appearance from Hedy. The role of the aviator, so ferociously coveted by Jimmy, was assigned to Richard Kiley after Richard Burton rejected an offer to play it. The young prince was portrayed by Steven Warner. The musical score by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe was not particularly memorable.
Meanwhile, Hedy had devoted her time to other pursuits, including another painful bout of plastic surgeries, and endless rewrites of a screenplay coauthored with Christopher Taaj. Entitled Untamed, it was about a Viennese femme fatale who become romantically involved with a brutal Teutonic dictator until he discovers that she is a Jewess. For her description of this European goddess, she surprised a reporter by saying that for inspiration, she had drawn upon the persona of four different American movie stars—Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean.
“I’ll sure have to wait and see how you combined those four all-American stars into a European femme fatale,” the newsman had queried.
“An artist sometimes draws inspiration from the strangest sources,” Lamarr responded.]
Rogers Brackett was anxious to meet Winton Dean, Jimmy’s estranged father, so one Sunday afternoon Jimmy drove his “surrogate” father figure, Brackett himself, to the modest Dean home in Reseda, California, north of the campus at UCLA , which Jimmy had briefly attended.
The ostensible goal of the visit involved hauling away mementos from Jimmy’s schoolboy days in Indiana. Winton had stored boxes of his son’s memorabilia in a leaky woodshed in his backyard.
Later, Brackett recalled that visit to Winton’s home, where he lived with his wife, the former Ethel Case. To Brackett, the home evoked his favorite novel about Hollywood, Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust. In Jimmy’s former bedroom was a small, caged, colony of chinchillas, which the Deans were raising to eventually sell for their fur.
Jimmy and Brackett tried to make small talk with Winton, but both the son and the visitor found him unwilling to communicate. The hostility between father and son was too apparent, and it became clear from the two or three remarks he made that Winton suspected that “something perverted” was going on between Jimmy and his older “roommate.”
“As for Ethel, she disappeared into the kitchen and didn’t come out even to tell Jimmy goodbye,” Brackett said.
***
On another occasion, Jimmy drove William Bast to visit his father and stepmother. “Two less responsive creatures I have seldom encountered,” Bast recalled. He found Ethel “mousy and shy, Winton reserved and monosyllabic.”
Bast later wrote that he felt sorry for Jimmy, “as he twisted himself in knots trying to please his father.”
He also suggested that Jimmy performed a virtual tap dance for his father. “We smelled something good that Ethel was cooking in the kitchen, but we were offered only a cup of coffee. Both of us were hungry.”
Bast claimed that he found Winton “a dreadful, stupid, uncaring father. He was awful with his son, even when he became successful. Instead of taking pride in Jimmy’s sudden fame, Winton was jealous of his achievements.”
Jimmy complained to his father about his transportation, explaining how hard it was to move around Los Angeles in search of a job. Two weeks later, Winton delivered a battered 1939 Chevy, which had otherwise been sitting, unused, in his garage, long ago replaced with a newer vehicle.
Gradually, over a period of months, both Bast and Brackett managed to elicit some meager biography from Jimmy about his childhood years in Indiana.
***
Jimmy’s father, Winton, had been born into a Quaker family which had settled in Indiana in 1815. A tall, very taciturn man, Winton worked as a dental technician at a local veterans’ hospital in Marion.
Born into a Methodist family, Mildred Wilson was Jimmy’s mother, the daughter of a factory worker. Short and a bit plump, she was rumored to be part Indian, as evidenced by her complexion and black eyes. Quiet and sensitive, given to daydreaming, she played the piano and often escaped to books.
Jimmy was born six months after his parents’ marriage, on February 8, 1931. They lived as a family together at the poetic-sounding Seven Gables apartment complex in Marion, Indiana, which is about seventy miles north of Indianapolis.
Mildred was fond of poetry, citing Lord Byron as her favorite. She decided to name her newborn James Byron in honor of that poet.
The Dean family moved frequently, and Jimmy was a very unhealthy child, suffering from frequent vomiting, rashes on his skin, diarrhea, nosebleeds, and other maladies. Their causes were unknown. However, it was later speculated that Mildred painted every apartment they moved into, using paint that contained dangerous toxins which may have been the reason for Jimmy’s chronic bad health.
He was four years old when his family moved to Greater Los Angeles, living in Santa Monica while Winton worked at the local hospital.
As Jimmy grew up, he became a stubborn child. Winton believed in “bare butt” spanking, hoping to force his rebellious son to behave. That didn’t work. Years later, a psychiatrist who examined Jimmy in Los Angeles suggested the possibility that his taste for being spanked by his sexual partners in advance of anal penetration had originated with his father’s harsh discipline.
When he was old enough, Jimmy entered the public school system. Noticing that her son had an artistic bent, Mildred saved up money for violin and tap-dancing lessons for her young son. When news of that reached his classmates, bullies beat him up after school and called him a sissy.
Jimmy later confessed to Alec Wilder that “My father married my mother only because he knocked her up.”
Theirs was not a compatible marriage, and each of the two spouses had very different interests and tastes. Based on her interest in the arts, Winton contemptuously referred to his wife as “my little bohemian.” He constantly lectured her that by cuddling Jimmy and encouraging him to learn dance techniques and to play the violin, “You’re turning him queer.”
Tragedy struck in July of 1940 when Mildred, who had been suffering for months from ovarian cancer, suffered a painful, lingering death. In twisted reasoning, Jimmy interpreted his mother’s death as a rejection of him.
His father shipped him back to Indiana, where he went to live with Marcus and Ortense Winslow. (Ortense was Winton’s sister.) They emerged as kindly guardians of the troubled youth, and welcomed him to their 178-acre farm outside Fairmount, Indiana. Jimmy was assigned his own bedroom within a large white house dating from the turn of the 20th Century.
***
Aboard the train, on his ride back to Indiana, then nine-year-old Jimmy slipped into the baggage car that was carrying the coffin and the body of his mother. Prying open the lid of the coffin containing her body, he clipped a lock of her hair and carried it in his wallet throughout the remainder of his own short life.
Within eighteen months of his mother’s death and Jimmy’s departure from his father’s California home, Winton was drafted into the U.S. Army in the wake of the surprise December of 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Throughout the rest of his life, Jimmy suffered from the loss of his mother. On the set of Rebel Without a Cause, he told Natalie Wood, “God played a dirty trick on me, taking my mother from me. That led to my father abandoning me.”
He told another co-star, Dennis Hopper, that he used to sneak out of the Winslow household late at night and cry at his mother’s gravesite. “I would demand that she answer me and tell me why she left me when she was only twenty-nine years old. Sometimes, I fell sobbing onto her grave. I would cry out, ‘I need you! I want you back!’”
During Jimmy’s adolescence in Indiana, he decided one summer that he wanted to be a trapeze artist, and began practicing trapeze acrobatics in the family barn in Fairmount. During one of his improvised “rehearsals,” he lost his balance and fell, knocking out his two front teeth.
His father was due for a visit in two weeks. During his time in Indiana, he fashioned a removable bridge for his son. Forever after, as a joke, whenever Jimmy wanted to portray a snaggle-toothed hillbilly, he removed the bridge and shocked whomever he happened to be dating at the time.
Later on, even when he became a movie star and could afford expensive dentistry, Jimmy preferred to keep the removable front teeth crafted by his father.
He was graduated from Fairmount High School in May of 1949, where he had excelled in sports. By June of that year, he’d packed up his meager belongings and headed for Los Angeles.
He rode the Greyhound bus, a transit requiring four days and nights. As he later recalled, “I was propositioned by at least five guys, usually when I went to take a leak. But I didn’t accept any of their offers.”
For a while, he lived with Winton, who, upon his arrival in California, greeted him rather coldly at the door. Ethel, his stepmother, wasn’t at all welcoming. Winton had married Ethel Case in 1945, right after his discharge from the military.
Jimmy and Ethel took an instant dislike to each other.
Even though he tried to get close to Winton, he never could. The years had made his father even more distant than before. When Jimmy confided that he wanted to become an actor, Winton dismissed the dream, defining all actors as “faggots. At least you’ll get your cock sucked frequently if you go into the movie racket. That’s how handsome young actors break into the business, or so I heard.”
During his stay with Winton and Ethel, Jimmy enrolled in the nearby Santa Monica City College, a two-year junior college. But he wasn’t happy there, and didn’t fit in.
When he transferred to the campus at UCLA, he moved out of Winton’s house and found lodging at the Sigma Nu fraternity residence, where he was a pledge. After a few weeks, he was kicked out.
He would never return to Winton’s home, and his father never welcomed him back. Jimmy grew increasingly uncomfortable during his infrequent reunions, which usually lasted less than an hour.
When he played his roles in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, he claimed, “I’ve lived these parts. I know about father-son alienation.”
At a chance meeting at a Hollywood cocktail party, Rogers Brackett spoke to an acquaintance, Isabelle Draesmer, an agent who booked actors into movie roles. Privately, he contemptuously referred to her as “small fry,” but she was willing to take on new, untested actors and often found bit parts for them in films.
She had known Brackett casually for several years, and trusted his judgment, based on his far-flung experience within the film colony. He claimed, “James Dean is the hottest undiscovered male star in Hollywood.”
“It sounds like you’re in love with him,” she said with a smirk.
“Perhaps I am.”
The following day, a spruced-up Jimmy arrived at Draesmer’s modest office at 8272 Sunset Boulevard. She, too, was impressed with him, and by that afternoon, following a lunch, she signed him as a client of her agency.
She said, “He had some hidden talent. Of that, I wasn’t sure, what it was, exactly, but it was something. I was aware that his farm boy diction, technique, and posture needed to be vastly improved. Yet I sensed he was a possible new Monty Clift, whom I’d first seen perform on the stage in New York.”
She telephoned a photographer friend of hers, Wilson Millar, who agreed to take publicity shots of Jimmy for her to send out to casting directors.
The next day, Jimmy arrived at Millar’s studio at 2060 North Highland Avenue, where, as he later claimed to Brackett, “I got the once over of my life. I didn’t strip for him, but I felt he has X-ray vision.”
“Dean was a handsome boy,” Millar later said. “Not your typical Hollywood pretty boy of the ‘50s. In profile, he looked better. Full frontal, he was just another good-looking kid, of which there were thousands hounding casting offices. Frankly, I thought his eyes were too close together. He was nearsighted and tended to squint.”
“I thought he might find a minor role or two as a juvenile. His mouth intrigued me, as he had perfect lips. I asked him what kind of movie star he’d like to be. He surprised me when he claimed he wanted to be turned into a male Marilyn Monroe. Later, I heard he’d used that line on others. To say it again, his sex appeal definitely stemmed for the movement of that succulent mouth.”
Draesemer went to work “hustling Rogers’ boyfriend,” as she phrased it. Within a week, she managed to land him a very small part in Fixed Bayonets!, a 1951 war drama directed by Samuel Fuller for 20th Century Fox. Coincidentally, Fuller was a friend of Brackett’s.
The movie was set during the first brutal winter of the Korean War (1950-1953), just after that country’s invasion by Red China. The grimy tale involved the fate of a lone forty-eight man platoon. The picture starred Richard Basehart and Gene Evans.
Jimmy avoided the actual draft, but ended up as a foot soldier on screen in Fixed Bayonets! His helmeted face appeared for about a minute.
Cast in the uncredited role of “Doggie,” a sentry, Jimmy appears only briefly, near the end of the film. His brief role was later whacked a bit, but he still made the final cut. In the original sequence, he runs up to Lieutenant Gibbs (Craig Hill) and squats beside him. “Lieutenant,” he says. “I think I hear them coming. Could it be the rear guard, huh?” He then cocked his rifle.
Many sources claim that Jimmy‘s appearance was completely cut, and it’s true that many movies were later edited (i.e., “shortened”) for release on television. Jimmy may not have been recognizable, since the film was shot at night, his face was blackened, and he wore a helmet.
After his scenes were filmed and completed, through the interventions of Brackett, who used his link to Fuller, Jimmy lingered on the set for three extra days with the hope that the director might need him in another scene.
When Brackett came on set to visit him, he introduced Jimmy to the film’s star, Richard Basehart, who agreed to accompany them to lunch in the studio’s commissary. Basehart had been cast as the sensitive Corporal Denno, who had an innate aversion for taking responsibility for the lives of his men. His character says, “I can take an order, but I can’t give one.”
Previously, Basehart had starred with Valentina Cortese in The House on Telegraph Hill (1951) and had married her. He told Jimmy and Brackett that he and his new wife wanted to play the leads in an upcoming production of Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending.
“I’m willing to take off my boxer shorts for Tennessee if he’ll give us the roles. Valentina claims I have Grade A government-inspected meat.”
Jimmy was surprised at the actor’s frankness, and suspected that perhaps he was joking. Later, Jimmy would learn that many actors often spoke that provocatively during unguarded moments.
After lunch, Brackett brought Jimmy over to meet Fuller, who was a cult director, hoping he might have a future role for his protégé. After they chatted a bit, Jules Buck, an influential producer, arrived on the scene. He, too, was introduced to both Brackett and Jimmy.
Among other achievements, Buck had been the cameraman for John Huston, shooting film for some of Huston’s wartime documentaries, including The Battle of San Pietro (1944).
But instead of focusing on Jimmy, Buck told them that he had opted to relocate to Paris. In time, he would launch his own film production enterprise, Keep Films, in England with his “exciting new star,” Peter O’Toole. Eventually, Keep Films turned out entertainment that included O’Toole performing in Becket (1964), Lord Jim (1965), and Woody Allen’s What’s New, Pussycat? (also 1965).
For his movie debut, Jimmy was paid $44. The check was sent to Draesemer, who deducted her ten percent. He later told friends, “I played Doggie, doling out death to little yellow men.”
When the movie was released, the cantankerous critic, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, wrote: Fixed Bayonets! was a tribute to the U.S. Infantry, but it is something less than inspired.”
During his first dinner with Draesmer, Jimmy told her he’d had to face two hard choices. “I wanted to do what was best for my career. I could marry Joan Davis’ daughter (Beverly Wills), or I could move in with Rogers, our chicken hawk. Joan hated me, and Beverly could do nothing for me. But Rogers is a producer, if only a minor one, but he knows everyone who’s ever farted in Tinseltown.”
“But with Rogers, it’ll be a sing-for-your supper deal,” Draesmer said.
“I can keep him at bay if he comes at me with his tongue hanging out,” he said. “Besides, there’s a second bedroom.”
Let’s be honest with each other,” she said. “I’ve been to his apartment for a party. There’s only one bedroom with a double bed.”
“So be it,” he answered. “Let’s change the subject. That wasn’t much of a part in Fixed Bayonets!. What juicy part have you got in store for me next?”
His agent later recalled, “No one ever denied that Jimmy was anything but an opportunist. In that regard, he had something in common with a female star, Marilyn Monroe. I predicted those two would eventually make movies together and create box office magic. What a pair! Alas, their candles gave off a magic glow that would not last the night.”
***
Jimmy’s next role was not for the big screen, but for what was called at the time “the little black box”: Television.
Draesemer sent him over to meet with Frank Woodruff, the writer, director, and producer of a TV drama for the Bigelow Theater Series. He spent only ten minutes with Jimmy before casting him in an uncredited role for which he would be paid $45 for a day’s work.
The drama was entitled T.K.O. (Technical Knock Out), scheduled for release in the autumn of 1951.
Its plot focused on a teenage boy, played by Martin Milner, a young actor who would go on to greater fame thanks to his pivotal role in the hit TV series, Route 66. In T.K.O., he portrayed a boxer fixated on paying for an expensive operation his father desperately needed.
Hanging out on the set, Jimmy talked with Milner. He had seen him in the 1947 classic, Life With Father, a film that starred William Powell and Irene Dunne.
Jimmy didn’t appreciate Powell or Dunne’s acting style at all, but he was intrigued by one of the film’s young co-stars, Elizabeth Taylor. He boasted to Milner, “One day I’m going to fuck that beautiful little wench.”
Also cast was Regis Toomey, who, although he was not Jimmy’s type of actor, impressed him with a contest he had won. In 1941, when he starred in You’re In the Army Now, he scored the record for the longest screen kiss in cinematic history, an osculation that lasted three minutes and five seconds. The female object of his affection was Jane Wyman, who had recently divorced Ronald Reagan.
Even though his role in T.K.O was minor, Jimmy alerted The Fairmount News back in Indiana that he was in the show. His family and friends tuned in. The role was so small that some TV viewers in Fairmount didn’t even notice when Jimmy appeared on the small screen.
He never saw the completed film. By the time it aired as a TV show in Los Angeles, Jimmy had already left the city.
Months after Jimmy died in 1955 and right before his own death in 1957, Bogie told his closest friend, Spencer Tracy, “Did you know I once made a movie [it was released in 1952] with that little prick, James Dean? Deadline—USA.”
Fresh from his triumph in The African Queen (1951), with Katharine Hepburn, Bogie signed for the story of a crusading newspaper editor. Deadline—U.S.A. had been written by Richard Brooks, who was also the director, and set for release by 20th Century Fox. Brooks hired Jimmy for a bit part.
Bogie’s leading lady in the film—hardly anyone’s romantic interest—was Ethel Barrymore, the grande dame of the American theater. Bogie had once starred with her brother, Lionel Barrymore, in Key Largo (1948).
Jimmy followed his bit part in Fixed Bayonets! with an even smaller role in Deadline—U.S.A. Others in the cast, each a well-known name, included Kim Hunter, Ed Begley, Martin Gable, Paul Stewart, and Jim Backus, who would later play Jimmy’s father in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).
Jimmy had a nonspeaking role, appearing only briefly in a scene set in a busy press room as one of the newspaper workers. The scene was filmed in the press room of the New York Daily News. Deadline—U.S.A. has since been praised as one of the best films about the newspaper industry ever made.
Some sources claim that Jimmy never appeared in Deadline. However, when Fox digitalized and re-released the picture, its promoters hired Humphrey Bogart’s biographer, Darwin Porter, the co-author of this book, to narrate the behind-the-scenes events of the film as an added bonus included on the CD. Porter specifically points out the footage within the film devoted to pre-fame Jimmy, whose face was immediately recognizable.
Humphrey Bogart with Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, the film that made them famous as a screen team. Their subsequent marriage would not be as idyllic as their onscreen romance.
Jimmy was never formally introduced to Bogie on the set, and he was awe struck by the veteran actor, secretly admiring his talent and envying his great fame. He closely observed Bogie from a distance. Jimmy’s custom of hanging out on a movie set after the completion of his brief footage had by now become a tradition.
He was there the afternoon that Bogie lashed out at Brooks. Bogie had just learned than upon orders from Darryl F. Zanuck, Brooks had first offered his role as a crusading newspaper editor to Richard Widmark, who had rejected it. Then, Brooks offered the part to Gregory Peck, who had also rejected it.
“Here I am, a fucking Oscar winner, and I’m given sloppy seconds,” Bogie shouted before storming off the set.
After his departure, Jimmy overheard Brooks talking to Ed Begley and Martin Gabel.
According to Brooks, as transmitted through Begley, “Deadline probably marks the beginning of the end for Bogie. He looks like shit. He’s not the same man we loved. He’s arrogant and grumpy, and he shows up without knowing his lines. He’s very sarcastic to other actors, all except to Miss Barrymore, whom he treats with the respect she deserves.”
It wasn’t until months later that Jimmy was actually introduced to Bogie. Their first “official” encounter was both explosive and disastrous.
On the set of East of Eden, Merv Griffin arrived at around noon for a reunion with Jimmy, whom he had always been attracted to ever since they’d lived in adjoining apartments at the seedy Commodore Arms Hotel in Los Angeles. After Jimmy’s patron, Rogers Brackett, was transferred to Chicago, Jimmy moved in with Nick Adams, a fellow actor dreaming of stardom but down on his luck. Brackett left Jimmy no money, and Nick was out of work, so Nick suggested that both of them turn to hustling.
As a gay young man himself, although with more money than either Jimmy or Nick, Griffin was “a buyer in the meat market,” as Jimmy rather crudely described it. “Flash a twenty-dollar bill at either Nick or me, and we get a hardon.”
Griffin, on the set of East of Eden, was hoping for some repeat action, but he quickly found that Jimmy was no longer in a position where he needed to hustle. Playing the lead in East of Eden, Jimmy, by then, had already—after a long struggle—achieved stardom.
Merv Griffin in 1945 as a sports announcer and radio personality
Griffin sat with Jimmy for about fifteen minutes, gossiping and smoking during the lunch break.
Looking up, Griffith spotted two figures approaching them. One was Bogart, the other Solly Biano, head of casting at Warner Brothers. Under his breath, Griffith whispered, “I hope Solly does more for your movie career than he did for mine.”
Ignoring Griffin, Solly introduced Bogie to Warners’ rising young star, although Jimmy avoided making eye contact with Bogie. Solly had thought that Bogie and Jimmy might hit if off because both of them were graduates of the “I Don’t Give a Fuck” school of acting.
During part of his time on the set that morning, Bogie had stood on the sidelines, concealing himself and watching Jimmy perform in a scene.
“I hear you’re the hot new rebel of Hollywood,” Bogie said. “I remember when they said the same thing about me. Welcome to the Rebel Club.”
Jimmy took the extended hand of the screen legend, still refusing to make eye contact.
Bogie complimented him on his technique, but Jimmy continued to stare at his feet, still not speaking.
“They tell me you’re great, kid,” Bogie said to him.
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “So they say, whoever the fuck they are. As if I give a god damn rooster’s asshole what people think of me.”
That was too much for Bogie. He grabbed Jimmy by the lapels of his jacket and yanked him around. “Look me in the eye, you little cocksucker! When I talk to you, show me some respect. You’re just another stupid punk with skid marks on your underwear. Another Brando clone. Just what Hollywood doesn’t need. In two fucking years from now, you’ll be gone and forgotten.” He shoved Jimmy back, nearly knocking him down.
Looking perplexed, Griffin stood with Solly as Bogie stormed off the set.
Jimmy watched him go, with contempt on his face, even though he had always admired Bogie. Perhaps it had all been an act on his part to conceal his idol worship. “I never saw Casablanca, and I never intend to.” Actually, he’d seen the film three times, and it had always been his favorite.
“I hear that Mr. Bogart plays a queer who ends up with Claude Rains in the final reel, not Ingrid Bergman.”
Then Jimmy turned and walked away. Griffin would never see him again. But Jimmy would suffer through two more unfortunate encounters with Bogie.
***
[When stardom came, Jimmy no longer patronized his former hangout, Googies and instead, became a client of the chic Villa Capri, where the stars dined. One evening, he arrived at the restaurant accompanied by Lili Kardell, a nineteen-year-old Swedish actress.
Sitting two tables away were Bogie and Frank Sinatra with three male companions. To razz Jimmy, Sinatra called the waiter over and ordered him to deliver milk and crackers to “Baby Jimmy.”
Bogie quickly scribbled a note: “Dear Punk, next time try combing your hair with an actual comb, not a dishrag!”
Jimmy would have a final run-in with Bogie, one even more violent than first introduction.]
Sailor Beware (1952) was a loosely equivalent remake of the hugely popular 1942 movie musical, The Fleet’s In, that had starred Dorothy Lamour and William Holden.
In spite of a weak script and stale jokes, Sailor Beware did better box office than Gary Cooper’s High Noon and MGM’s Singin’ in the Rain, which later was hailed as the best musical ever made. Sailor Beware was built around the onscreen antics of Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, then the number two box office attraction in America.
Once again, Jimmy was disappointed with his small role, but it was a larger part than he had been given in Fixed Bayonets!. Playing a “corner man” for Lewis’ boxing opponent, Jimmy was featured in several minutes of screen time, mostly in the background, but only one line of dialogue.
On his first visit to the set of Sailor Beware, the cast and crew attended a studio breakfast paid for by the producer, Hal B. Wallis. Jimmy was perhaps the only member of the cast who found Lewis and Martin funny that morning. The comedic duo ran around the film set pouring pancake syrup over everybody’s head, including Jimmy’s. Production was delayed for two hours that morning while everybody showered.
During the shoot, Lewis paid no attention to Jimmy, although he later claimed, “I discovered the boy,” after Jimmy became a famous star.
Although Jimmy was needed on the set for three days of shooting, he convinced the film’s director, Hal Walker, to let him hang out afterwards, asserting, “I want to see how movies are made.”
“OK, kid,” Walker said, “but don’t get in the damn way or I’ll kick you out on your ass.”
An unfunny, exhibitionistic, neo-slapsticking, caper
A footnote in Hollywood history, Walker, who hailed from Iowa, is known mainly for helming some early Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis films. He’s even better known for directing Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in their famous road pictures during their (cinematic) travels to Bali, Morocco, and Zanzibar.
Jimmy was on the set when Betty Hutton appeared on Walker’s arm. She had signed for a cameo role as Martin’s girlfriend, a character named “Hetty Button.” She’d had a supporting role in the wartime version of the film, The Fleet’s In.
She had recently scored big triumphs, first in Annie Get Your Gun (1950), in which she’d replaced Judy Garland and consequently faced a hostile cast and crew; and in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). Yet her career was heading for a nosedive, and, to Jimmy, she seemed to be coming unglued. Walker introduced him to Hutton, who seemed to clutch him. When the director was called away, she continued to cling to Jimmy, whispering to him, “I’m afraid.” He noticed that she was trembling. “Hold onto me. Don’t let me go. God help me!”
Tragi-Funny Lady: Betty Hutton
This embarrassing moment for Jimmy continued for about four minutes before Walker returned for her. She immediately transferred her emotional dependence to Walker, not even looking back at Jimmy.
Two views of the French sex kitten, Corinne Calvet.
Lower photo: With her errant husband, pinup hottie, John Bromfield.
That night he told Rogers Brackett, “If that’s what big stardom does for you, count me out!”
Two days later, Jimmy got to witness the star of the picture, the Parisian actress, Corinne Calvet. In postwar France, she had become the country’s number one pinup girl, although she had originally studied criminal law at the Sorbonne. Her mother was a distinguished scientist, who played a part in the development of Pyrex glass.
As a regular patron of Paris’ famously artsy Left Bank café, Les Deux Magots, Calvet held her own in animated conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau.
American audiences came to know her when she played opposite sexy Burt Lancaster in Rope of Sand (1949). Privately, she cut a seductive path through Hollywood’s forests of studly men, seducing the likes of Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Jimmy Stewart, and John Barrymore, Jr., among others.
All of this was accomplished despite her marriage at the time to John Bromfield, considered by his admirers as the sexiest man in Tinseltown. This hunk of beefcake was known to bestow his favors on both men and women.
Jimmy stood with Bromfield as both of them watched Calvet emote in a scene from Sailor Beware with Dean Martin. Jimmy and Bromfield seemed to size each other up, and, as events would later prove, they liked what they saw. Their flirtation was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Wallis on the set. From a concealed position behind the camera, he’d been watching Calvet and Martin during the filming of their love scene.
He stepped forward and yelled, “Corinne, I told you I don’t allow my actresses to wear falsies.”
Her French temper flared. “I’m not wearing them,” she shouted back at him.
“Go to your dressing room at once and remove those god damn fake tits!”
“Are you calling me a liar?” she asked. She walked toward him and, in front of Jimmy and her husband, who stood nearby, she took Wallis’ hand and placed it inside her brassiere. Does that convince you they are for real?”
Then, without saying a word, Wallis stormed off the set. As he was leaving, Martin yelled “Bravo!”
Bromfield whispered to Jimmy, “Let’s get the fuck out of here. I’ve seen enough for one day. I’m sure when the scene is over, Martin will take my wife to his dressing room to fuck her.”
Outside the sound stage, Bromfield directed Jimmy to two motorcycles, which he had borrowed. He asked Jimmy to ride with him into the Hollywood Hills. “We’ll stop for lunch somewhere.”
Over sandwiches, Jimmy learned that he’d been a tuna fisherman and that he’d been discovered by that notorious Hollywood agent, Henry Willson, whom Jimmy had already met. “He examined all my body parts,” Bromfield candidly admitted. “I was also introduced to his second prize, Rory Calhoun. Rory and I are just coming down from a white heat affair. Rory’s a love ‘em and leave ‘em kind of guy. He seduces as many women as he does men.”
Jimmy never discussed any of the details of his brief fling with Bromfield. However, he did tell William Bast, “That Corinne Calvet is one god damn lucky French gal.”
The following day, Jimmy faced the cameras himself, playing one of two managers of an amateur Navy boxer, who must face Lewis in the ring. In one scene, Jimmy massages his boxer as he listens to Lewis boast that he’s won one hundred and one previous bouts in the ring. Of course, this is all comedic bluff. Jimmy delivers his one line to his own boxer: “That guy’s a professional.”
He conspires with the other manager to bring in the sailor’s older professional brother to face Lewis in the ring. Entirely by accident, Lewis knocks out the pro and wins the bout.
Although he had nothing more to say, Jimmy can be seen in the background climbing in and out of the boxing ring as the action unfolds. He is dressed in a white T-shirt and slacks, with a towel wrapped around his neck.
Jimmy never saw Bromfield again, but on his final day on the set, he met another actor, equally handsome and well built. He was billing himself as Vincent Edwards, later as Vince Edwards. Eventually, he became a household name thanks to the role he played of Dr. Ben Casey in a popular TV series (1961-1966).
The whacky, campy 50s. Two views of heartthrob John Bromfield.
top photo: in Revenge of the Creature (1955); lower photo: Beefcake fiesta with Tab Hunter
Both actors were bisexual. The Brooklyn-born Edwards was three years older than Jimmy. A top-rate swimmer, he had been part of the U.S. Ohio State University swim team that won the U.S. National Championships.
When Jimmy met him, he was about to sign with Paramount Pictures for his major film debut in Mister Universe (1951). According to Bast, to whom Jimmy revealed his fling with Edwards, Jimmy was both attracted to Edwards and jealous of him at the same time. Edwards appeared to be heading for film success much faster than Jimmy.
He was not particularly modest, telling Jimmy, “I studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, but I think I can make it big in the movies based on my looks alone.”
Unlike Jimmy, Edwards had been assigned a private dressing room. After meeting Jimmy, he invited him there during a luncheon break.
Once inside, Jimmy had to take a leak, heading to Edwards’ cramped little bathroom. Over the toilet hung a full frontal nude of the actor, revealing his well-muscled body and endowment.
Back in the dressing room, Jimmy became more flirtatious with Edwards. As he was undressing, Jimmy moved in. “I’ve already gotten a sneak preview of what I’m going to get.”
“Oh that!” Edwards said. “I was photographed for an arts style class. The male nude, you know.”
“Mighty impressive physique,” Jimmy said, weaving himself into Edwards’ arms.
[Two days later, when Jimmy returned to the set where he was not needed, he spotted Edwards and approached him, whispering, “Thanks for showing a guy a good time. You’re one hot dude.”
“Fuck off, faggot! Edwards said. “Get out of my face or I’ll slug you.”
Later, Jimmy learned that he’d approached the wrong Edwards. Vince had a twin, Anthony Edwards.]
Sailor Beware was the fifth cinematic teaming of Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. Jimmy overheard Lewis bragging about their conquests of women. “All the broads are crazy for Deano,” Lewis said. “Even Marilyn Monroe. Actually, I’ve fucked more women than Deano, but most of them want to burp me.”
Ironically, later, both Martin and Jimmy would pursue the same actress, Pier Angeli.
Brackett claimed, “From Jimmy, Angeli heard talk of love. But Lana Turner set me straight on Martin. He was romantic at night, all wine and candlelight. But come the dawn, all a gal got was a pat on the ass and a promise ‘to see you around, kid.’”
Two views of Vince Edwards, a.k.a., Dr. Ben Casey. “I’m a grower, not a show-er.”
Sailor Beware marked the first time that Jimmy’s name appeared in The Hollywood Reporter under “castings.” Jimmy later told Bast, “My acting, if that is what it was called, mostly involved standing around looking at Lewis go through a lot of crazy antics. At one point, he pretended to be punch drunk and cauliflower brained.”
Where Jimmy’s future was concerned, the most important contact he made on the set was with another struggling young actor, Dick Clayton. He admitted he didn’t have much talent as an actor, and decided he was going to become a theatrical agent instead.
“You interested in signing on as my first client?” he asked Jimmy.
Clayton was told by Jimmy that he planned to go to New York to seek stage work. “In that case, I want to set you up with an agent, Jane Deacy. She’s not the biggest but she’s one of the best agents.”
Jimmy wrote down all the details. “I’ll call her for you and recommend you as a client,” Clayton promised.
“Great!” Jimmy said. “Soon, I won’t have any more need for Isabelle Draesemer.”
Ironically, in just a few short months, Clayton was working as an talent agent for the Famous Artists Corporation, and in that capacity, signed Jimmy on as a client for the duration of 1954 and 1955.
Clayton later was quoted as saying, “Jimmy seemed very vulnerable when I met him, very impressionable, with this little boy lost puppy dog look. We were friendly, but something in his attitude made me pull back. I figured he wasn’t the type of boy you hugged.”
Draesemer’s later claim to fame involved her “discovery” of James Dean, thus guaranteeing her a footnote in Hollywood history.
Like James Whitmore, she, too, encouraged Jimmy to move to New York, even though it meant losing him as a client. She also coached Buddy Ebsen and Hugh O’Brien to stardom.
After swearing all her life that she’d never marry an actor, she wed the Bpicture cowboy star, Tex Terry, and retired to Indiana, Jimmy’s home state.
With her husband, she opened Tex’s Longhorn Tavern in the state’s famous Parke County, known for its collection of covered bridges. Until her death, she was always willing to talk about Jimmy to out-of-state tourists, relaying her version of that famous teenage boy from Indiana who wandered into her office so long ago.
Jimmy’s last Hollywood film before his relocation to New York City via Chicago was Has Anybody Seen My Gal? When he signed for a bit part within it, it was entitled Oh Money, Money. It was the best of a lackluster group of Hollywood films in which he would briefly appear before he hit the bigtime.
The 88-minute color film, released in the summer of 1952, was the first in which Jimmy uttered a complicated line of dialogue from a position in the foreground of the frame.
Helmed by Danish-born director Douglas Sirk, Has Anybody Seen My Gal? starred Piper Laurie in the lead, with Rock Hudson and Charles Coburn getting second billing. Also featured was child actress Gigi Perreau, whose chief rival was Natalie Wood, Jimmy’s future co-star.
In her memoirs, Learning to Live Out Loud, Laurie claimed that she was rather embarrassed to be billed over Coburn, an Oscar-winning actor. She also alleged that “He had this tic about pinching women’s bottoms, and if you were female and under one hundred and five, you had to give him wide berth.”
She also said that at the time she was unaware of “the young boy who sat at the end of the counter in a drugstore scene.” Years later, her uncle called from New York after watching the movie in its TV release. “Did you know you were in a movie with James Dean?”
That was her first awareness of that. By that time, Jimmy was well on his way to becoming Hollywood legend.
As for Rock Hudson, Laurie admitted that she was unaware of his gender preference when they starred together. “There was no chemistry between us. He never made a pass at me. I just assumed I wasn’t his type.”
In contrast, Jimmy was well aware of Hudson’s sexual preference, having flirted with him at a party at the home of Hudson’s gay (and predatory) agent, Henry Willson. Hudson recognized Jimmy and invited him for lunch. He was filled with gossip, telling Jimmy that he’d heard that Laurie had had an affair with Ronald Reagan.
Jimmy would be appearing in a television drama with Reagan within a few months.
Over sandwiches, Hudson seemed bitter at Universal for awarding star billing to Laurie and for arranging for studio publicists to promote her career more aggressively than his. “They claim that she bathes in milk every day and that she dines on flower petals as a means of protecting her luminous skin. What bullshit!”
Like Jimmy, Laurie in time, would tire of making bad films in Hollywood and would retreat to New York to study acting and to seek work on the stage and in television.
After lunch, Hudson invited Jimmy to his dressing room, since he wasn’t needed on the set. The invitation from the tall, handsome actor was blunt: “I like to fuck and get fucked. How about it, Kid?”
“You’re on, Big Boy,” Jimmy said. He’d later give a blow-by-blow description of his sexual encounter to William Bast.
Usually, men came on to Jimmy during his early appearances in Hollywood. An exception was Lynn Bari, a co-star in the film. She was seventeen years his senior and found Jimmy very attractive. At this stage in her declining career, she’d been reduced to portraying matronly characters rather than the femmes fatales she’d been known for in the late ‘30s and ‘40s.
During World War II, the sultry, statuesque brunette, once known as “the Scarlett O’Hara of Virginia,” was the nation’s second most popular pinup girl, ranking just under Betty Grable. Bari had played man-killers in some 150 films for Fox.
After hanging around the set for days, Jimmy was called for his scene. He had tried unsuccessfully to get Sirk to notice him, but he had seemed more intent on promoting Hudson, who had been cast as Laurie’s soda-jerk boyfriend.
Sirk told Coburn that he found it amusing that Hudson towered over Laurie. “Rock looks great in his raccoon coat.”
Two years later, Sirk would cast Hudson in a remake of Lloyd Douglas’ novel, Magnificent Obsession, in a role that interacted, romantically, with the Oscar-winning Jane Wyman, the former Mrs. Ronald Reagan. Like Laurie, Jane was unaware of Hudson’s sexual preference and made the mistake of falling in love with him.
Before facing the camera, Jimmy heard Sirk’s direction: “Act superior and offhand.”
The director approved Jimmy’s red bow tie, his 1920s-era college sweater, his straw boater, and his white trousers.
In an extended interlude, Jimmy comes into the drugstore where Coburn is working as a soda jerk. Jimmy says, “Hey, gramps, I’ll have a choc malt, heavy on the choc, plenty of milk, four spoons of malt, two scoops of vanilla ice cream, one mixed with the rest and one floating.”
Coburn snaps back, “Would you like to come in on Wednesday for a fitting?”
Sirk shot the scenes three times until he got it right. At the end, he ignored Jimmy, but complimented Coburn as “the perfect Frank Capra curmudgeon.”
Later, Coburn invited Jimmy for coffee. The young actor learned that the older actor had been born in Macon, Georgia, in 1877. He confessed to Jimmy that, “I have the hots for Nancy Davis.” At that time, she had not yet married Reagan.
Coburn also told Jimmy that he had been cast in the 1953 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. “I’m faced with a hard choice,” he said. “Do I chase after busty Jane Russell or go for that bleached blonde thing, Marilyn Monroe?”
With his work finished, Jimmy tallied up his total receipts for his brief appearances in three separate films. They came to $300.
His romance with Hudson lasted on and off for about ten days. Roddy McDowall, who came to know Jimmy quite well in New York, claimed, “Rock and Jimmy started out as lovers, but in time, they became bitter enemies. There was a lot of jealousy on Jimmy’s part. He would have given anything to be Rock Hudson.”
Years later, Hudson was asked if he’d met Jimmy during the making of Has Anybody Seen My Gal?. “Yeah, I ran into the kid. He had a very small role with slicked back, wavy hair, very neatly combed. That’s all I remember.”
Actor Nick Adams had a different memory. Late one afternoon, Adams had arrived at Hudson’s home at five o’clock. He’d been hired as a staff member attending the bar—shirtless, of course—at a seven o’clock gay male cocktail party. He was ushered into the living room, where it was understood that he’d be setting up the bar.
“To my surprise, both Rock and Jimmy were sitting on his thick carpet, jaybird naked. They were spreading some kind of foul-smelling lotion into their crotches. It seems that each guy had a bad case of the crabs.”
***
Rogers Brackett and his sophisticated mother, Tess, were very close. She was fully aware of her son’s homosexuality, and never chastised him for it. During his Hollywood months with Jimmy, Brackett took him over to his mother’s home in Culver City at least once a week for dinner.
One night, Brackett informed Jimmy that he was packing up and moving out of Hollywood. His employers had temporarily transferred him to Chicago for some short-term assignments, with the understanding that after that, he be permanently relocated to Manhattan.
He promised to send for Jimmy in Chicago after he settled in. His announcement led to a bitter fight, with Jimmy accusing his patron, “You’ll never send for me. You’ll meet some other good-looking guy in a parking lot—and that will be that.”
As a parting gift, Jimmy asked Brackett for $2,000 to tide him over until he could find more work in films. Brackett refused, claiming he need all his cash on hand to get reestablished—first in Chicago, then in New York.
“I may be a producer for CBS, but the job doesn’t pay that much.”
On his final day in Los Angeles, when Brackett had to report to CBS to close down his office, Tess arrived at his apartment to assist her son in packing up his possessions, since he would not be returning to the rented apartment.
Later that afternoon, she heard Jimmy sobbing in the bathroom. The door was half open.
She knocked on it, calling out to him, “What’s the matter? Can I help?”
“I’m afraid!” he shouted at her. “Afraid of being left alone. All my life, I’ve been abandoned. And now this!”