JAMES DEAN

James Dean Blazes a Celebrity-Studded, Pants-Dropping Trail Through Manhattan in a Saga Starring Grace Kelly

HIS FEUD WITH THE ACTORS STUDIO
AFTER AUDITIONING AS “THE MATADOR,” LEE STRASBERG “GORES HIM IN THE GUT.”

After Rogers Brackett wrapped up his advertising work in Chicago, he rode the Twentieth Century Limited to New York and his new Life. From afar, stating his intentions to Alec Wilder, he planned to “reclaim Jimmy.”

The composer told Brackett that “Jimmy thinks he’s in love with this dancer, Dizzy Sheridan. There’s some vague talk of marriage. If anything will break them up, it’s their mutual poverty.”

Since dancing gigs for The Sheridan Trio were few and infrequent, Dizzy had been forced to accept a low-paying, part time job as a photo researcher.

After his reunion with Brackett in Wilder’s suite at the Algonquin, Jimmy’s “moment of truth,” to use Jimmy’s bullfight terminology, had arrived. He had to confess to Dizzy the details of his relationship to his mysterious mentor, Brackett.

In lieu of full disclosure, he opted to present her with a limited, highly edited version, with the excuse that “when I was down and out in Hollywood, Brackett got me film and radio work.” He did not let her know that he’d lived more or less openly with Brackett as his male lover.

“He’s now arrived in New York to find an apartment and establish himself,” Jimmy said. “I have to tell you the truth. Rogers is a little bit queer. He even came on to me, and you, of all people, know what a toro I am in bed. He wanted to suck my cock. I was broke and really desperate, so I gave in to him. Many out-of-work actors have to do that, as you know, ‘cause you’re in show business yourself. It’s all about the casting couch. In Hollywood, or so it seems to me, about as many guys as gals are forced to lie on that couch.”

“When it was over, I felt really, really bad, like a male whore. I had done something distasteful, completely repugnant to my true nature. And I still haven’t come to terms with myself for doing it.”

“As you know, both of us will soon be on the street unless we can raise more money. Brackett has volunteered to help me find work in New York. That guy knows fucking everybody in the industry.”

She later wrote of her shock at hearing about his involvement with Brackett. “I felt physically ill. After all, we’d promised to be together forever. My stomach was churning. I was a wreck.” She finally told him, “I want to meet this Brackett creep. Perhaps when he sees that we’re a loving couple in a committed relationship, he’ll back off.”

“That can be set up,” he said. “I want him to know that, too, so he’ll stop pursuing me.”

Later that morning he left the apartment without telling her where he was going. He didn’t come back until well after midnight when he staggered in drunk, collapsing onto the bed.

Another blow, this one to both of them, occurred at around 10AM the following morning. The building manager pounded on their door. Groggy, Jimmy buried his head under the pillow as Dizzy answered the knock. Bluntly, the manager informed her that because of their mounting and unpaid back rent, the owner of the building had ordered them out no later than the following morning.

After she left, Dizzy turned her anger onto Jimmy, accusing him of spending the previous day with Brackett. “I think he’s a queer. So are you!” She screamed the words at him at peak lung capacity.

“I thought you’d understand,” he said. “I thought you were different. But you’re just another stupid cunt!”

He rushed about the apartment, ripping Sidney Franklin’s matador cape from the wall and stuffing his meager clothing into a battered suitcase.

As he stormed out, heading down the steps, she yelled down at him, “Olé!, you bastard!”

After searching throughout most of the day, hoping to find a cheap place to live, Dizzy, through a contact, located a little basement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen between the Hudson Piers and 9^th Avenue. The rent was only eight dollars a week. She took it.

Having no way of getting in touch with Jimmy, she went to Jerry’s Tavern that night, hoping he’d show up. She found him there looking desolate. He apologized for his outburst that morning, and she did the same. They reconciled, and he followed her back to her tiny (new) rental, which looked so small he labeled it “the bird’s nest.”

The following evening, he agreed to escort her to Brackett’s new apartment, explaining that, “This old queer can help me a lot if he’ll just stop hitting on me.”

She later wrote that she interpreted Brackett as “a sexual predator, a well-connected old queen who took advantage of a star-struck impressionable kid.”

Upon entering Brackett’s building, Jimmy paused in the lobby, assuring her, “You’re worth a hundred Bracketts.”

Introduced to the producer, she found him “a vision in beige—beige hair, beige clothing, beige shoes, beige carpeting, and beige furnishings.” A flickering fireplace provided a welcome touch of flame.

As she sat with Jimmy on Brackett’s beige sofa, he possessively held her hand as if to signal to Brackett, “I’m not queer. I’m in love with a female.”

An hour progressed awkwardly, punctuated with a bit of name dropping and an unspoken one-upmanship as to who was more familiar with Jimmy’s taste in food, drink, and interests.

Brackett had heard of Dizzy’s father, the classical pianist, who was, coincidentally, acquainted with Alec Wilder.

She didn’t like Brackett, and he didn’t like her, although both of them tried to conceal their resentment of each other. She finally made an excuse to leave, hoping that Jimmy would go with her. In the hallway, he promised that he’d catch up with her later at Jerry’s. He claimed he had some urgent matter to discuss with his producer friend. “It’s work related,” he assured her. “No funny business.”

As Brackett later revealed, the business that then ensued wasn’t funny at all. After Dizzy departed, he demanded that Jimmy take him to bed—“and fuck me real hard, like you really mean it. It’ll be your atonement for bringing that possessive little creature here.”

The next day, he didn’t return to her cramped little apartment, but went instead to live with Brackett in his elegant apartment on 38^th Street, just off Fifth Avenue near the site where a young Jacqueline Kennedy, married at the time to a senator from Massachusetts, shopped when she was in New York, Lord & Taylor.

During their first week together, Brackett tried to reassert his dominance over Jimmy. “I plan to keep you drained of all your honey so you won’t have anything left for that silly bitch.”

In the days ahead, Jimmy saw Dizzy whenever he could. Their relationship continued, but certainly not with the same intensity it had in the beginning. For a time, she left Manhattan for a gig in New Jersey.

On most evenings, he was seen out on the town with Brackett “and his queer friends,” as Jimmy called them. Mostly, they were gay men who worked in advertising or in television. Jimmy went with Brackett to concerts, the ballet, Broadway opening nights, and to such restaurants as “21” or Sardi’s, where they often sat at tables with celebrated stars such as Bette Davis or Joan Fontaine. Late one afternoon, as Wilder was moving through the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, he spotted Jimmy and Brackett talking with a drunken novelist, William Faulkner.

On evenings when he was free, and Dizzy was in town, Jimmy often ate a plate of food with her at Jerry’s, which was still a favorite hangout. They seemed to hold out some vision of their future together, although those hopes grew less intense and less realistic as time went by.

Other romantic involvements, both male and female, would loom in Jimmy’s future, especially after he became involved in the Actors Studio.

April of 1952 had been a month without work for Jimmy, but after Brackett’s return to New York, and because of his intervention, small roles emerged for him in a trio of teleplays scheduled to be aired in May or, in one instance, on June 2. The first was a teleplay about young Abraham Lincoln; the second was an episode set at the end of the Civil War featuring then-President Lincoln.

Instead of working at CBS, Jimmy found himself at NBC, playing the role of young Lincoln’s friend, “Denny,” in a telecast entitled Prologue to Glory, a presentation of Kraft Television Theater.

The play from which it had been adapted had been written by E.F. Conkle and had opened on Broadway in 1938. In the TV version sponsored by Kraft, Conkle was also the producer and director.

The teleplay focused on Lincoln’s romance with Ann Rutledge and his grief over her untimely death. Cast as Lincoln was Thomas Coley, who had previously starred on Broadway in such plays as The Taming of the Shrew and Harvey. Pat Breslin, a New Yorker and the daughter of a judge, played Rutledge.

Up until then, the young actresses Jimmy met tended to aspire to stardom in Hollywood films. Breslin, however, was part of a new breed of actress that emerged in the 1950s. Her ambition involved starring in dramas and comedies configured specifically for television. She’d later achieve success with Jackie Cooper, appearing as his girlfriend (later, his wife) in the NBC sitcom, The People’s Choice (1955-1958). She would also co-star with Nick Adams, Jimmy’s former Hollywood lover, in TV’s The Rebel.

After finishing Prologue to Glory, Jimmy returned to CBS to appear in another teleplay, Abraham Lincoln, as produced for Westinghouse Studio One. Its director, John Paul Nickell, cast him as a tragic young soldier, William Scott. [In a previous teleplay, Nickell had hired him as a bellhop in Ten Thousand Horses Singing.]

Following a script written by the British playwright, John Drinkwater, Abraham Lincoln had first been performed in London in 1918 and later in New York. It followed the life of Lincoln beginning with his presidential nomination in May of 1860 and ending with his assassination in 1865. Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater was not depicted in the telecast. “I want the viewer to imagine it,” Nickell said

The role of the soldier, a Vermont farm boy who had lived and worked with his mother before being drafted into the Union Army, was Jimmy’s most memorable and sympathetic to date. In the drama, he has been court-martialed and sentenced to be executed by a firing squad at daybreak. The action takes place on the eve of the battle that ended the Civil War.

The President learns of the youth’s impending death, and orders that the soldier be brought before him. He also learns that the young man had just completed a 23-mile march and had volunteered for double guard duty as a favor to a sick friend and fellow soldier. Based on his portrayal of the wide-eyed and frightened soldier facing death in the morning, Jimmy wins the empathy of the President, who drafts a letter, pardoning him from the firing squad and ordering him to return to his regiment. In gratitude, Jimmy salutes Lincoln for sparing his life.

Lincoln was portrayed by Robert Pastene, who later said, “Young James Dean was perfect for the role. He looked like one of the soldiers in a photograph by Matthew Brady, who captured on his early camera all those marvelous pictures of soldiers during the Civil War.”

Born in 1918 in Massachusetts, Pastene was a successful character actor, who predicted “great things for Jimmy’s future as an actor. He had an exceptional talent, and I liked it off camera when he called me Abe. I found him most endearing.”

Judith Evelyn, cast as Mary Lincoln, originally arrived in New York from South Dakota with the intention of working on Broadway. She is remembered today, if at all, as the lonely alcoholic spied on by James Stewart from across the courtyard in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Jimmy would later have a reunion with her when she played Nancy Lynnton in Giant.

In a conversation with her, he learned that she and her boyfriend, the Canadian radio producer Andrews Allan, had miraculously survived the sinking of the British transatlantic liner, the SS Athenia, at the outbreak of World War II.

[Built in Glasgow in 1923, the SS Athenia was a British steam turbine passenger liner that was torpedoed by a Nazi submarine in September of 1939 off the Atlantic coast of Canada. It was the first U.K. ship to be sunk by Germany during World War II, killing 128 civilian passengers (28 of them U.S. citizens) and crew members.

The act was immediately condemned as a war crime, yet did not immediately provoke the entry of the U.S. into the then mostly European conflict. At the time, Nazi authorities denied that one of their vessels had sunk the ship, delaying admission of any connection to the act until January of 1946.]

Jimmy’s final teleplay that spring season, introduced by Sarah Churchill, was The Forgotten Children, an episode within the Hallmark Hall of Fame series.

It starred the very talented Cloris Leachman portraying Martha Berry (1866-1942), the American philanthropist who advocated teaching reading and writing to impoverished children in the remote hill regions of the Deep South.

In an unusual departure from his norm, Jimmy had been cast as a Southern dandy in frilly formalwear, sitting on the white-pillared porch of the Berry mansion in 1887. His role was that of “Bradford,” an insensitive Southern aristocrat who does not think women, specifically Martha, should enter the workplace.

When Martha assures him that she is an emancipated woman, Jimmy sneers, “The only emancipated woman I ever knew lived in a side street of Memphis.” The character he’s portraying is then chastised for his reference to a prostitute in the presence of genteel southern ladies.

Later, Jimmy (as Bradford) again shows how insensitive he is in a confrontation with a trespassing hillbilly girl whom he calls “a little savage” and “trash.”

Iowa-born Leachman was one of the most talented actresses Jimmy had ever met. He was surprised she had gotten her start through a beauty pageant in Chicago. “You’re one good-looking woman,” he told her, “but you don’t look like the kind of gal who enters beauty contests.”

“All of us have to start somewhere,” she assured him. She would go on to win eight Emmys and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her memorable role in The Last Picture Show (1971).

The director and producer of The Forgotten Children, William Corrigan of North Dakota, became one of the leading directors of television’s Golden Age. Among his many achievements, he would helm a total of 91 episodes for The Armstrong Circle Theater, and would also make adaptations for television of such big screen staples as The Strawberry Blonde and The Miracle on 34^th Street.

Over lunch he talked to Jimmy about his future, advising him against a return to Hollywood with the hopes of becoming a movie star.

“Television drama is the coming thing,” he claimed, “especially for a lot of young actors in their twenties. The big studios like Fox and MGM won’t let their stars under contract perform on television, Also, top talent on Broadway has utter disdain for television. Yet TV will provide a means to learn and to make a name for young actors like you in their twenties.”

[After Jimmy’s death, Corrigan said, “If he had taken my advice, and obviously, if he had lived, I would have cast him as the star in many of the teleplays I directed. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.”]

Jimmy’s Sexual Liaison with Sarah Churchill,

THE REBELLIOUS DAUGHTER OF SIR WINSTON

As Jimmy confided to Alec Wilder, “I’ve had this incredible luck of hooking up, however temporarily, with some famous people—first Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, Walt Disney, and Cole Porter on the West Coast; and Tallulah Bankhead and Peggy Lee in New York City. But about the last person on the planet I expected to ever become intimate with was Sarah Churchill.”

Their introduction came through Brackett, who, as an employee of Foote, Cone, & Belding, was the advertising agent linked to promoting the hit TV series, The Hallmark Hall of Fame.

Through a connection, he arranged a (minor) job for Jimmy on the show. Only his hand was shown on camera, appearing at the end of the teleplay, writing the credits on a blackboard. Sarah had been hired as the series’ well-spoken, upper-crust hostess—in effect, the figurehead and very posh symbol of the entire Hallmark series.

Brackett had known Sarah ever since she signed on for an appearance with his summer stock company in Marblehead, Massachusetts. When Jimmy met her, she was living in a luxurious penthouse on Manhattan’s Central Park South. She became so close to Brackett that she entrusted him with the keys to her apartment, with the request that he look after it whenever she was out of town.

Two views of Sarah Churchill. Lower photo, with her celebrated father, Sir Winston. She was the “black sheep” of the Churchill family.

After every Saturday night show, she invited its cast and crew to her apartment for what she defined as a “post-broadcast soirée.” There, the liquor flowed, often into Sarah herself.

From the beginning, Jimmy launched a flirtatious relationship with her, jokingly referring to her as “the daughter of a bulldog.” Although she’d been born in London in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, she looked much younger and was quite attractive, with her Titian red hair and her emerald green eyes.

“I’m the lamb who strayed from the fold,” she confessed to Jimmy at one of her parties. “At seventeen, I broke free from the flock and set out to discover the world, finding it one cruel place. I had dreams of becoming a film star. Still do. But that isn’t easy, even with a famous name like mine.”

She enthralled him with tales of her fabled life, including details about the time she accompanied her father to the 1943 Teheran Conference, where she was introduced to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin. “The bloody Stalin came on to me,” she claimed. “I think it would have been a feather in his cap to have seduced the daughter of Sir Winston.”

She also told him that “After all the good men left Britain to fight in World War II, thank God the Yanks arrived in time to take care of the sexual desires of the deserted sweethearts, wives, and recently bereaved widows.”

She was married to Anthony Beauchamp, but admitted, “I never know where he is. Despite my status as a married woman, I’m pretty much a free agent. My father does not approve of my marriage and is very cold, even hostile, to my husband.”

One Saturday afternoon, when Sarah had not arrived on time for the filming of her hostess duties for the Hallmark series, Brackett placed some frantic calls, without success, to her penthouse. Finally, in desperation, he gave Jimmy the keys to her penthouse and instructed him to go immediately to see what was wrong and, if possible, to fetch her. “She drinks, as you well know, a lot.”

At the door to her penthouse, Jimmy rang her bell at least ten times before using her key to let himself in. He found Sarah sprawled nude and drunk on her bed. He later told his friends at Jerry’s, “I was such a devil. Such an opportunist.”

In a call to Brackett, he claimed that he found Sarah “drunk and threatening suicide. I’d better stay with her. Who knows what might happen. Tonight, you can get someone else to write the damn credits on that blackboard.”

Brackett agreed, promising he’d be right over as soon as the show went off the air.

If Jimmy is to be believed, he seduced Sarah after that phone conversation with Brackett. Bragging about it later to his friends at Jerry’s, and later to William Bast, he was said to have stripped down before piling on top of the drunken aristocrat. “In midfuck, she woke up and and we checked each other out, eyeball to eyeball. She seemed pleased, and told me, ‘Go to it, kid.’”

Three hours later, Brackett rushed into Sarah’s penthouse. He found Sarah fully clothed and sitting on her sofa with Jimmy, having yet another drink.

When she left the room for a moment, Jimmy falsely claimed, “I talked her out of her suicide threat. She’s okay now.”

[In November of 1955, Jimmy was scheduled to return to the set of the Hallmark Hall of Fame TV series. This time for an appearance not as a disembodied hand writing anonymously on a blackboard, but as the star of a TV adaptation of The Corn is Green, that play by the gay Welsh playwright, Emlyn Williams.

As a teenager, Jimmy had seen the film adaptation (1945), starring Bette Davis, of the play, which had first been produced in 1940. In this autobiographical tale, a 50-year-old spinster, Miss Moffat, inspires her young male student to greatness.

Rogers Brackett’s other best friend in New York was the designer and art director, Stanley Mills Haggart. For many of Brackett’s TV advertisements or shows, Haggart provided the art direction. Arguably, he had more Hollywood connections than Brackett, having arrived in 1917 in what was then a fledgling “frontier town” with his (formidable) mother.

Over the years, he developed friendships with some of the luminaries of the silent screen, including a very young Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Joan Crawford, William Haines, Ginger Rogers, and Lucille Ball. He became emotionally and sexually involved with the emerging star, Randolph Scott, and later, lived with Scott and Cary Grant, running their household while they were away at work at the studios. Through Grant, he met Katharine Hepburn and Tallulah Bankhead. He was also a close friend of several American playwrights, including Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and William Inge. He was also the former lover of Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society. Years later, the diarist, Anaïs Nin, introduced Haggart to Gore Vidal, with whom he enjoyed a long friendship.

Stanley Haggart (seated) in the 1930s, with his celebrated companion, British director Peter Glenville, relaxing in the garden of the house they shared in Saffron Walden, U.K.

Haggart became friendly with the Who’s Who of Hollywood when he hooked up with William Hopper, son of the popular Hollywood columnist, Hedda Hopper. For many months, he became her “leg man,” prowling through the nightspots of Hollywood with her gay son, William, gathering information that Hedda might either use or bury, depending on studio politics and censorship standards of the time.

Although Hedda adopted many anti-homosexual platforms, and endorsed or reinforced them in her columns, Haggart maintained that in private, she was relatively tolerant. She was obviously aware of her son’s sexual proclivities, but never confronted him with it.

Stanley Haggart, privy to most of the secrets of le tout Hollywood and Broadway, including many associated with Rogers Brackett and James Dean.

She was always warm and welcoming to Haggart, although telling him, “I’m glad to know a lot of the secrets you guys pick up at night but, as you well know, I can’t print much of the crap. But I still want to know. Hedda always wants to know. I think I can use some of this information to my advantage when I face a recalcitrant star who won’t cooperate with me. I can always threaten them. If they don’t give me the personal data I want, I can destroy them by publishing their secrets.”

As his Manhattan residence, Haggart had rented all four of the apartments (the entire allotment on that floor) on the top floor of a midtown apartment building. Although he was legally obligated to retain the floor’s communal hallway and the original entryways to each of the individual apartments, he interconnected their interiors by knocking down some of the interior walls, eventually reconfiguring the top floor’s layout into a huge, mostly interconnected spaces. Its inner doors could be opened or close, and its individual interior spaces flexibly configured for the housing of friends who frequently flew in from Hollywood. The result was an articulate, warm, artistically stimulating, and comfortable environment interspersed with both private and communal spaces. Its appeal became widely appreciated within Haggart’s vast circle of friends and business acquaintances.

A raconteur, Haggart often invited between ten and twelve guests for dinner. They enjoyed the cuisine produced by a huge black cook from Harlem who set a lavish table. Her cuisine nourished luminaries from Hollywood as well as the theatrical elite of New York, including figures from the dance world such as Martha Graham.

Based on Brackett’s bringing him to his home for dinner, Haggart later recalled his first impressions of Jimmy.

“At first, he was shy and awkward around me,” Haggart said. “I think he didn’t want me to assume that he was just another of Rogers’ toy boys. Peering at the world through his horn-rimmed glasses, he seemed to find the place baffling, especially New York. He didn’t care much for small talk, but I saw him closely observing me. I feared at first that he was thinking, ‘How can I use this man?’”

“In those days, I fancied myself a handwriting analyst, and Rogers insisted I give a reading on Jimmy’s. I asked him to write out some lines (he selected something from Hamlet), and I interpreted his handwriting. But I didn’t give him an honest verdict. I thought he was suicidal, but it wasn’t a conscious thing with him. Of course, I could be wrong, as I so often was.”

“It became obvious from his handwriting that he must have suffered a lot in childhood. As an adult, that affected his judgment of people, if indeed he could be called an adult. He’d turned his insecurities inward, and it had taken hold of his personality.”

“Actually, I thought he didn’t like me, but at the door, he hugged and kissed me goodbye, like Rogers always did. He whispered to me, ‘I want to see you.’ I thought it was a sexual come-on, but I was wrong.”

Late the next afternoon, when Haggart returned to his home from a day’s work, it was raining heavily. “To my surprise, Jimmy was standing in the doorway, waiting for me. He was soaking wet. I, of course, invited him upstairs. Once I got him there, I offered him a bathrobe and suggested that he remove his clothes so that I could dry them. He rejected the robe, but stripped off his clothes, all except for his underwear, and handed them to me.

Emerging from the kitchen, I offered him freshly brewed coffee and a pastrami sandwich. He drank the coffee and devoured the sandwich and asked for some ice cream. He still hadn’t put on his clothes, and I thought he was trying to entice me. I had assumed he was a hustler.”

“But it wasn’t that,” Haggart continued. “He told me that he’d particularly loved my rear apartment. It enjoyed direct access to a rooftop terrace I’d ‘decorated’ with potted plants and shrubs. He called it ‘a retreat from the world.’ He said he sometimes needed a place for privacy with someone else, perhaps a stranger. At times, he found that being with Rogers was overwhelming, and he wanted to ask me a huge favor. He wondered if he could use that back apartment any time he wanted as a means to escape from the world.”

“I told him he could. I didn’t think I was being disrespectful of my friendship with Rogers. As Jimmy and I were talking, I knew that Rogers was entertaining an extraordinarily handsome young actor he’d cast in a commercial. So he was cheating on Jimmy, anyway.”

“At any rate, I never assumed that those two had promised fidelity to each other. I not only agreed to let him use the apartment, but I told him that it could become his secret love nest if he so desired.”

“He jumped up and kissed me, and told me he wanted to repay me for my generosity. He took my hand and placed it on his crotch. ‘It’s yours if you want it,’ he said. But I withdrew my hand. ‘That’s not necessary,’ I told him. ‘Believe it or not, there are people in the world who can be generous without you having to put out to show your gratitude.’”

“My aunt, Ortense Winslow, in Fairmount, Indiana, told me there would be people like you in the world, but I never believed her.”

“At the door, he hugged and kissed me passionately, promising we’d meet again real soon.”

“That might just have been something to say,” Haggart said, ‘but in his case he meant ‘real soon.’”

He later recalled, “That was a strange thing for me to say. I meant it in a sort of flippant, irreverent way. The rest of Jimmy’s life passed so quickly, both in New York and when he visited my home in Hollywood. I felt I was just getting to know and understand him, and then he was gone in a flash. It was like someone riding on an airplane, sitting back and having a drink, and the next minute that plane is plunging to earth in flames.”

During the days to come, Jimmy sometimes made use of Haggart’s rear apartment at least once, and sometimes three times a week. Often he didn’t introduce his guests to his host.

One night, Jimmy dropped by and, after a meal, asked Haggart to accompany him to the Astor Bar for a drink. This was the first time Haggart saw Jimmy actively cruising in a public setting.

Gay bars (and gay activity in general) were illegal in those days, but the Astor Bar on Times Square was the discreet pickup joint for homosexuals, often middle-aged, often married, out to snare a young man who was usually broke and often an unemployed actor. Within inner circles, habitués of the Astor Bar were sometimes defined as “The “Closet Brigade.” It was also a dangerous hunting ground, because the person a gay man picked up might be a vice cop, which led to arrest, imprisonment and/or heavy fines, public exposure, and its subsequent humiliation and/or job loss.

As Haggart closely observed, Jimmy seemed to be viewed as fresh meat by the largely middle-aged clientele, and he received several propositions. One man was quite attractive, perhaps thirty-five in age, and well dressed in what was known as the Brooks Brothers style. Haggart noticed that he wore a gold wedding band.

When Jimmy went to the Astor’s oval-shaped bar for another round of drinks, it became obvious to Haggart that he was being propositioned by the man.

When he returned to Haggart’s table, Jimmy asked if he could bring the man back to his apartment, and Haggart agreed. Jimmy told him that the man was an advertising executive connected to The Kate Smith Show, which aired on NBC.

[Fast forward to January of 1953. Jimmy came by and asked Haggart to make a big bowl of popcorn. He then turned on the television. As they sat eating popcorn and watching The Hound of Heaven, an episode of The Kate Smith Show, it became clear that Jimmy had been cast as an angel.]

He didn’t always use Haggart’s apartment just for sexual liaisons. Often, he would arrive unannounced for access to the lavish meals cooked every night by Haggart’s cook from Harlem. He’d tell Haggart that he was tired of hanging out with Brackett’s coterie of “queer friends.”

“I get tired of them ogling me or following me to the toilet at a restaurant,” Jimmy said.

On most of the nights he appeared, Jimmy rarely got caught up in the conversations whirling around among Haggart and his guests. Often, after eating, he would sit in a remote corner of the living room, not saying a word, but looking sullen, even hostile. Sometimes, he’d just stand up, leave the table, and exit from the apartment, not even thanking his host for dinner.

Haggart indulged Jimmy’s rude behavior, although many guests expressed dismay at why Haggart tolerated him.

One night was different from the others. Haggart had invited a friend over for dinner, Lemuel Ayers, who was also of friend of Brackett’s. Both Haggart and Ayers were members of the same labor union, United Scenic Artists.

“He was a scenic designer but a much bigger deal than me,” Haggart admitted. “He’d had a brilliant career on Broadway, having designed or contributed to the ‘look’ of productions that included Oklahoma!; High Button Shoes; Kiss Me, Kate; and Cyrano de Bergerac.”

Jimmy didn’t seem much interested in Ayers until it was revealed that he’d invested in an option on a play entitled See the Jaguar, which contained a key role for a young male actor. Ayers said he was considering offering the part to Anthony Perkins, the son of the famous actor, Osgood Perkins.

“Tony’s name was already familiar to Jimmy, and not in a good way. He still suffered from memories associated with how, back in Hollywood, George Cukor had dangled in front of him a role in the Spencer Tracy movie, The Actress, before eventually awarding it to Perkins.

Although Jimmy at that point did not reveal to Ayers that he, too, was an actor, Haggart watched as he began to “turn his charm and powers of articulation onto Lem,” as Haggart nicknamed his friend.

Although he was married with children to Shirley Ayers, a wealthy woman, Lem was a well-known homosexual. He lived with Shirley in a lavish apartment in Manhattan, but they were better known for their estate at Stony Point in Rockland County, north of the city. Here, they regally entertained the theatrical elite within a mansard-roofed mansion, that had been built in 1849 on a dozen heavily wooded acres a mile or so from the Hudson River.

Alec Wilder, Brackett, and Haggart were frequent visitors there, along with an artistic elite of artists, producers, and show-biz personalities.

[One member of their entourage was novelist John Steinbeck, who, coincidentally, would create the story of Jimmy’s first feature film, East of Eden. Other guests on occasion included theatrical producers David Merrick and Lucille Lortel, actor Mel Ferrer, and an array of actresses who included Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, and Agnes Moorehead. Orson Welles visited on two separate occasions.]

“Jimmy was never hostile around Lem,” Haggart said. “Shirley wasn’t there that night, and it was just as well, although she was aware of her husband’s adventures. Before the night was over, Jimmy was practically crawling over Lem. It was on one of those occasions that an embarrassed host should tell his guests, ‘get a room,’ but I didn’t have to do that, because before midnight, Jimmy made an offer inviting Lem onto the garden terrace for a view of the city.”

“I didn’t see Lem until two days later, when he had nothing but praise for Jimmy, practically wanting to adopt him.”

“However, I did encounter Jimmy the next morning in my kitchen. He was wandering about naked with a semi-erection, which he called a ‘piss hard-on,’ trying to make a pot of coffee. I agreed to cook breakfast for him. He wanted bacon and eggs. My cook wasn’t scheduled to arrive until noon, which was just as well, considering how Jimmy was dressed. ‘Dressed,’ of course, is not the right word.”

During the weeks to come, Jimmy and Ayers made frequent use of Haggart’s love nest. Once, when Haggart peered out onto his garden terrace, he found both of them enjoying the summer sun in the nude.

At one point, Jimmy told Haggart that he’d been invited to go yachting that August with Ayers and his wife, Shirley. “We’ll be cruising around Cape Cod.”

Haggart asked him about the status of See the Jaguar and whether Ayers had decided to cast him as the young male lead in lieu of giving the role to Perkins.

Brackett seemed unaware of the sexual and emotional link that had developed between Jimmy and Ayers. In fact, based on their perceived status as “a couple,” Brackett and Jimmy received two separate invitations to the Ayers family’s country house in Stony Point. Sometimes, both of them were included in evenings at The Algonquin, along with Alec Wilder, Haggart, and David Swift with his wife, Maggie McNamara. Sarah Churchill sometimes joined the coven. Behind her back, Jimmy referred to his former conquest as a “dipso.” [A dipsomaniac is someone with an uncontrollable craving for alcoholic liquors.]

This confusion, or lack of communication, about the status of the relationship between Jimmy and Brackett was a precursor of the changes that were about to take place. Both Haggart and Wilder shared front-row seats to watch as they unfolded.

The changes became obvious late one Saturday afternoon when Jimmy arrived alone at Haggart’s apartment, wanting to talk privately. He looked agitated and troubled.

“He seemed filled with indecision,” Haggart said. “He admitted quite frankly that at this point in his career, he did not want to sleep with older men as a means of getting ahead in the theater, and that he wanted to have sex with men or women his own age.”

“More than a sleeping arrangement, I want to forge ahead on my own talent, not having someone offering me roles because of my performance on a casting couch.”

“Besides, except for you and Lem, none of Rogers’ friends like me,” Jimmy said.

“I’ve seen you around Rogers’ friends,” Haggart said. “You become surly and withdrawn.”

“That’s because I don’t like to be fawned over by a pack of queers,” Jimmy protested.

“If you’re going to stay in show business, you’d better get used to being surrounded by ‘a pack of queers’ as you call them. Half the guys you meet will be gay. And they won’t like you calling them queer. Let’s face it: Being a star involves getting people to like you—those who will cast you in roles and, of utmost importance, the public. That’s the price of stardom. Get used to it or get out.”

“I hate being used by Rogers like some Saturday night whore,” he said. “He makes me feel cheap. I’m more than some floozie.”

“I can’t advise you about what to do,” Haggart said. “And in addition, I’m a friend of Rogers. He gets jobs for me, he sometimes hires me as an art director, and I have to maintain some loyalty to him. So if you’re expecting me to urge you to leave the comfortable life he’s providing for you, I won’t do it. My point is that if you feel compromised because you’re living a comfortable life, then go live on the hard, cold streets. “

“What you’re telling me is that I have to make up my own mind and suffer the consequences,” Jimmy said.

“Suffer, perhaps, or else triumph on your own. I think you have the talent for it. But it’ll be a rough ride.”

“What if, after staging a dramatic walkout from Rogers, I fail to become a big star?” Jimmy said.

“Do what I did,” Haggart said. “In the 1930s, I had dreams of becoming a leading man in Hollywood, a romantic leading man, that is. But it didn’t happen for me. So I came to New York, reinvented myself as an art director, and here I am, leading the good life.”

When Jimmy left the apartment, Haggart didn’t know whether he’d move out of Brackett’s apartment or not.

Unexpectedly, Jimmy received a call a few days later from William Bast, his former roommate from Santa Monica. Bast told him he’d just arrived in New York and that he’d checked into the YMCA, where Jimmy had once stayed during leaner times. Bast had been graduated from UCLA in late May.

Over a “get re-acquainted” breakfast, Jimmy told Bast that he was back living with Brackett, who was procuring small roles for him in teleplays.

Jimmy was not forthcoming with a lot of additional information, but Bast assumed that he also had another involvement. He spoke of a dancer named Dizzy Sheridan. “She’ll be joining us for breakfast.”

Almost as soon as he’d said that, she appeared. Bast later remembered her as being a “long. lithe, supple beauty with pixie humor. She was warm and friendly, and very broke. She wasn’t pretty in the conventional sense, but she was right there where you could touch her and know that she was real.”

Over breakfast, Bast spoke of his dilemma in finding a place to live. “I don’t want to spend every night running from the homos at the Y.”

Dizzy suggested that he and Jimmy pool their resources and look for a place together. She was not aware that Jimmy and Bast had once shared a lodging in Santa Monica as part of a union that had ended violently.

After breakfast, all three of them strolled along the sidewalk, spotting the Royalton across the street. “I know someone there,” Jimmy said.

Dizzy had to leave them. After her departure, Jimmy, with Bast, walked across the street and into the lobby of the Royalton. After riding the elevator to one of the upper floors, they arrived at the door to one of the apartments and rang its bell.

After a while, Jimmy rang again. Finally, the door was opened a crack. Recognizing who had rung, Roddy McDowall opened the door more fully, standing there sleepily, wearing only a pair of briefs. “Oh, it’s you, Jimmy. Come in. Who’s your friend?”

When McDowall disappeared into the bathroom, Bast turned to Jimmy. It was obvious to him that Jimmy was having a fling with this former child star. Bast remembered him from playing opposite an 11-year-old Elizabeth Taylor in Lassie Come Home (1943).

Bast later recalled, “Count on Jimmy. Although Brackett’s boy, he was slipping off banging Dizzy Sheridan, Roddy McDowall, and God knows who else.”

Fully dressed, McDowall emerged from the bathroom and listened to their plight about finding a place to live. He suggested that they check at the desk in the Royalton’s lobby.

Half an hour later, at the door, McDowall kissed Jimmy on the lips. “See you at five this afternoon,” he said before turning to shake Bast’s hand.

At the desk, Jimmy and Bast learned that the only accommodation available in their price range was the size of a broom closet.

Jimmy remembered his stay at the Iroquois and asked Bast to walk over with him. There, their luck improved. For ninety dollars a month, they rented a room with twin beds and a bath. It was more expensive than what they’d paid in Santa Monica, but this was Manhattan.

As the day drifted into night, Bast came to know a different Jimmy. “Whatever the price he’d paid, he owed Brackett an enormous debt for opening up his narrow world to greater resources of knowledge, experience, and awareness, as well as valuable social contacts. Sadly for Brackett, he failed to recognize his protégé’s almost pathological abhorrence of indebtedness, and that Jimmy could not merely bite, but eventually devour the hand that fed him.”

“Jimmy was stronger than he’d been in Hollywood, more independent. He had greater confidence in himself. After all, he was now hanging out with Sarah Churchill. He had an aura of contained excitement about him.”

Bast did not know if he’d phoned Bracket or not, but he spent the night with Jimmy in their drab new lodgings at the Iroquois. Bast later wrote: “It felt good to be reunited with my teammate. Or was ‘teammate‘ the right word for it? Maybe it was something more. Our new relationship had not been defined. Surely anything was possible.”

The next morning, Jimmy escorted Bast to Brackett’s apartment after he’d departed for a day’s work at his ad agency. Hurriedly, Jimmy packed his belongings, including some new clothes Brackett had recently purchased for him. He also took Sidney Franklin’s blood-soaked matador cape, which he would use to decorate the bare wall of his new lodging. He left a note for Brackett to read when he returned from work.

From their new lodgings, Jimmy set out to show Bast the world he’d discovered. Sometimes, Dizzy joined them; at other times, she was busy.

Jimmy never specifically informed Bast whether he’d called Brackett for a concluding dialogue, but Bast suspected that such a talk took place. Even though he’d moved out without notice, he obviously didn’t want to lose a valuable contact like the producer.

Within two weeks, Bast had found a job at the New York headquarters of CBS, based at least to some extent on his successful stint as an usher at a CBS theater in Los Angeles. At the company’s New York location, he started out in the mail room with the assurance, “You can work your way from here to the top.”

Announcing “Christine White,” an Ambitious Newcomer

BUT IS IT LOVE?

Even though Jimmy was still romantically involved with Dizzy Sheridan, another pretty young woman was about to enter his life. Their meeting began unexpectedly.

Late one morning, he visited the office of his agent, Jane Deacy, hoping to “goose her into stirring up some more gigs for me. Summer was coming, and reruns were dominating the TV set.”

In her reception area, he encountered a thin, blonde-haired, and rather pretty young girl in a red polka dot dress typing away. He assumed that she was Deacy’s new secretary.

He approached her and stood looking down at her, perhaps surveying her bosom, or perhaps checking out what she was typing. “Get lost!” were her first words to him. “I’m busy.”

Although he moved away, retreating to sit on a couch, he continued staring at her. Every now and then, she looked up from her typing. “You’re spoiling my concentration. If you don’t stop staring, I’ll charge admission.”

He picked up the latest copy of Photoplay and pretended to read it, but he kept staring at her until it was time for a 12:30PM luncheon break. So far, Deacy had been tied up with other actors trying to cement deals.

Picking up her purse, the young woman walked past Jimmy. Perhaps she felt guilty for treating him so rudely. She glanced back at him. “What’s your name?”

I’m Christine White. My friends call me Chris. But you can call me Miss White.”

“I could be your friend if you’d go with me for a cup of coffee. We could split a hamburger. I’m low on bread.”

“So am I,” she said. “But OK. Let’s walk over to the Blue Ribbon Café.”

Over a shared burger, her wall of indifference began to crumble. She genuinely liked Jimmy, although she thought he was much too short for an actor—and those horn-rimmed glasses had to go. Under questioning, he gave a highly edited version of his life.

She was more forthcoming. Born in Washington State, she had come to New York to try to break into the theater. She’d developed a desire to be an actress since appearing in college plays at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She later graduated from Catholic University, where she majored in speech and drama. Along with three other underfinanced and wannabe actresses, she was living in a studio apartment on Madison Avenue at 92nd Street.

She told him that she wasn’t a secretary, but a new client of Deacy’s, and that instead of typing anything associated with her new agent, she’d been typing a scene she’d written for presentation at Actors Studio as part of an audition.

“I’ve been wanting to get into the Actors Studio ever since I came to New York,” he told her. “I have a letter of recommendation from James Whitmore to Elia Kazan. I figured they did all right for Monty Clift and Marlon Brando, so why not me?”

“Why not?” she asked. “My scene takes place on a beach with another actor playing a bum who’s at least twelve years older than me. Perhaps you’ll do.”

“I’ll help you with your script. We’ll work together, rehearsing and polishing it. How about it?”

“I’m not only it, I’m more than it. I’ll become Laurence Olivier to your Vivien Leigh.”

Three nights later, Jimmy escorted White to Haggart’s apartment. “We’re working on this skit together to rehearse for an audition at Actors Studio. Do you mind if we use the little apartment in back?”

Haggart was most gracious, but first he introduced them to his dinner guests. They included the actress Kim Stanley and her lover, Brooks Clift, an advertising executive who was the brother of Monty Clift.

Both White and Jimmy were delighted to meet and talk with Kim because they knew she had been a student of the Actors Studio, and famously trained by both Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg.

Kim had made her Broadway debut in 1949 and was considered by some at the time as the most promising young actress on Broadway. Haggart invited Jimmy and White to join their dinner party, and it was at around midnight that his quartet of guests broke up.

Brooks and Kim left for her apartment, and Jimmy and Chris retreated to Haggart’s rear studio. Before bidding good night to Haggart, Jimmy said, “Chris and I are virgins. This will be the first time we’ve ever done it. We’re just going to let nature take its course, and see what happens. It’s all learned as you go.”

Haggart was amazed that Jimmy could say that with a straight face, but—in front of White—he remained discreetly silent, and otherwise wished them luck.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Chris and Jimmy came and went from Haggart’s rear apartment. Their host was aware that Jimmy had reconciled to some degree with Brackett, and that their friendship was now being conducted on radically different terms from what it had been in the past. Jimmy, who confided to Haggart that he planned to seduce his roommate, William Bast, was still carrying on his affair with Dizzy.

“I’m working up to it, like giving him gentle little kisses on the mouth and indulging in teenage talk like ‘Have you ever tasted semen?’”

When White was alone with Haggart, she told him, “Jimmy is still a very young boy. Rather impish, but with a certain kind of charm. Wouldn’t you agree?”

She then made an odd comparison. “Jimmy and I are like two mudlarks splashing around on the street.”

Throughout most of the summer, Jimmy spent whatever time he could with White, writing and rewriting her script and rehearsing it endlessly. Haggart witnessed the first tryout, and he made several helpful suggestions which they incorporated. In the script, White, a very nervous girl, meets a beach bum. The setting is Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. A hurricane is looming.

Roots was the title of the skit. It had been inspired by a dialogue between Jimmy and White, after she asked him, “What have you done for most of your life?”

After they rehearsed their audition skit in front of Haggart, Jimmy told him, “Chris and I are partners in crime. We are soulmates.”

Late one night before closing, the manager of Jerry’s Tavern allowed Jimmy and Chris to perform their skit in front of his diners, who applauded loudly. They also rehearsed in Central Park, often in front of otherwise idle curiosity seekers.

An interlude in their respective commitments fell upon them in August. Taking advantage of it, Jimmy accepted an invitation to sail with Lemuel and Shirley Ayers aboard their yacht around Cape Cod.

[Years later, White wrote about her first meeting with Jimmy for International Press Bulletin. For some reason, she chose to express herself in the third person: “He walked slowly back to the doorway. She looked at his hunched shoulders, the pockets with hands in them. If he were an actor, she might have talked to him, but ambition was too precious a power to waste on a funny-looking guy with glasses who couldn’t possibly be an actor. She watched him hesitate in the doorway, then careen around the frame and disappear into the waiting room.”

Christine White (left) about a decade after her first introduction to James Dean, in an episode of The Twilight Zone entitled Nightmare at 20,000 Feet (1963).

In the 1960s in Hollywood, years after Jimmy’s death, Haggart by chance encountered White. She was appearing in roles on television in shows that included Bonanza, Perry Mason, The Rifleman, and The Untouchables. Her most famous TV role had been Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, aired in 1963 for the TV series, The Twilight Zone.

She spoke with sadness about Jimmy. “In that summer of 1952, we believed the world was ours, and that everything was possible. He seemed like such an all-American boy to me. At first, I didn’t see this moody, promiscuous, even dangerously suicidal young man. At least not at first. I thought about marrying him and settling down and having joint stage careers. How foolish dreams can be.”

For their annual yachting vacation aboard The Typhoon, Lemuel and Shirley Ayers invited Jimmy to accompany them as their cabin boy, although he’d had absolutely no prior experience sailing.

The trip began near their estate on the Hudson River. They sailed down the river, then continued on into the open sea to Martha’s Vineyard. From there, they embarked on a casual ten-day exploration of the coast of Cape Cod. During the first two days of their trip, the weather was so rough that Lemuel said, “Only a member of the Kennedy clan could sail through waters like this.”

When he returned to New York, Jimmy gave Bast a highly edited version of that sea adventure.

“You mean. Lemuel took his wife along when both of us knew that one of the purposes of the trip involved seducing you?”

“I made a few visits to Lem’s stateroom for a blow-job while Shirley was on deck. “She’s a very understanding wife and has a really masculine voice.”

“It was a wild trip on the seas,” Jimmy recalled. “At one point at this party where Lem’s friends came aboard in Provincetown, Lem stripped me completely naked and had me appear as Neptune on a throne he’d made. After all, he’s a scenic designer. I went over big with his gay pals that night, and I got a lot of sleepover offers. Fortunately, Shirley was away that night visiting these two dyke friends of hers.”

While aboard, Jimmy heard Lem discussing his play, See the Jaguar, scheduled for an opening that autumn. He had already signed Arthur Kennedy as the lead, with Michael Gordon directing it and Alec Wilder composing the music. To Jimmy’s great delight, it included an important role for a teenage boy.

By the fourth day of the cruise, Jimmy was actively campaigning for inclusion in the cast, but without directly asking for that key role.

“At least Lem is assured of access to your dick—at least until he’s signed someone else to the part,” Bast commented, sarcastically.

Before the end of the cruise, the only assurance Jimmy had received from Lem was his promise that he’d arrange for a reading in front of Gordon, See the Jaguar’s director. “If you’re good at the reading, the part is yours.”

Jimmy eagerly read the play, learning that the character of Wally Wilkins is seventeen-year-old boy who has been locked up since childhood by his paranoid mother, who wants to shield him “from the terror of the world.”

To lure potential “angels” who might invest in the production of the play, Lem staged a series of theatrical sales presentations. The first of them was a run-through that unfolded within the luxurious Fifth Avenue apartment of Shirley’s wealthy aunt. There, actor James O’Rear read the part of the teenage boy, even though he was in his thirties at the time and wrong for the role. Accompanied by Brackett, Jimmy attended, although he was severely disappointed that Lem had not asked him to deliver the reading.

Boris Karloff, best known to movie audiences as Frankenstein, attended the reading. Later, within earshot of Jimmy, the aging actor lavished praise on O’Rear’s talent to Lemuel. That made Jimmy jealous to the point of overt anger.

By the end of summer, Lem still had not raised enough money to mount the play, so he staged a more lavish presentation at the Warwick Hotel. Once again, O’Rear was summoned to portray the teenaged boy.

Later, Jimmy complained to Brackett that, “The guy is reading my part. After all, I paid my god damn dues on that fucking wind-tossed yachting trip.”

In September of 1952, Lem’s fundraiser at the Warwick drew the attention of writers at the New York Herald-Tribune, who noted: “Producer Lemuel Ayers doesn’t seem to be worried about being able to raise the rest of the cash needed for See the Jaguar. Mr. Ayers, the noted scenic designer, has gone ahead and arranged for tryouts in both Boston and Hartford.”

Jimmy called Lem at his Manhattan apartment, learning that Shirley was out. He asked if could come by.

Two hours later, as he sat on the Ayers’ sofa, Lem’s fingers moved toward his zipper, as they had so many times before.

“You’d better mean that,” Jimmy said. “OK, go ahead, have your fun, but swallow every drop so I won’t have to shower.”

At long last, the day had come for Chris White and Jimmy to audition for admission to the prestigious Actors Studio, home turf of Brando, Monty Clift, Julie Harris, and so many others. A lot depended on his getting accepted. After all, his stated reason for coming to New York involved learning Method acting as promulgated by the Actors Studio.

Both White and Jimmy faced stiff opposition. Some 150 other young men and women were also auditioning for admission, and fewer than a dozen, maybe less, would be accepted.

The father of the Method was the Russian director and co-founder of the Moscow Art Theater, Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938). As taught by Lee Strasberg, aping the master, the actor “learns to use his senses, his mind, and especially his feelings as effectively as he employs his voice and body to project his character.”

The day was cold and windy as Jimmy and White headed out. He was not adequately dressed for the bitter weather. They took the elevator to the tenth floor of 1697 Broadway, near 54^th Street. Getting off, he was freezing, and he went and sat on the hall radiator. “My balls are frozen. I’m defrosting them.”

When he was warmer, he shocked White by telling her, “I can’t go through with it. I’m too nervous.”

“Listen to me, you little prick,” she said, confronting him. “This was my audition all along. You horned in. Now you’re trying to fuck it up for me.” She reached into her handbag and took out two cans of Budweiser that had been intended as props for their upcoming presentation. “Here, drink this,” she said. “Maybe you won’t be so nervous.”

Within a few minutes, the secretary came out and called for Dean, a name near the top of the list of candidates whose auditions had been scheduled for that day.

White was stunned when he bolted from the room, heading for the stairwell, not the elevator. She quickly recovered and asked the secretary to put their names under “W” for White, which meant that they’d be called near the end.

Within half an hour, Jimmy reappeared with two cans of unopened Budweiser. “I just couldn’t do the audition pretending to drink beer from an empty can,” he explained to her. “Also, running up and down ten flights of stairs has made me less nervous.”

When their names were recalled, Jimmy removed his glasses and raced out onto the stage. Since he was so nearsighted, he missed his mark by almost ten feet, hitting the hard floor with a bang. It was supposed to represent sand on a beach before the debut of a hurricane.

Nervously, White followed his dramatic entrance. He could hardly make her out, so he squinted at her. He flipped open the can of beer and said, “Hi,” which was not in the script.

Their scene about loneliness and alienation began. They’d rehearsed it many times, but he threw her off by inserting impromptu phrases. Although she masked her feelings, she was furious.

The scene’s ending called for him to invite her into his ramshackle beach shack, but she runs away. The skit was suddenly over.

From the front row, there was a long silence. Elia Kazan asked, “Who wrote this skit?”

“Rather sensitive,” Cheryl Crawford chimed in. [Producer Cheryl Crawford was one of the founding members of the Actors Studio. She had produced such plays as Porgy and Bess in 1941, as well as Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo (1951). Later, she expressed a dim view of Jimmy. “As a human being, he was just too sick.”]

Finally, Lee Strasberg spoke. “I found the scene quite natural. That’s why I let you guys run three minutes’ overtime.”

Days would go by before they were notified that they had both been accepted into the Actors Studio. Of the dozens who had applied, fewer than ten had been accepted.

To celebrate, Jimmy asked White out to a dinner at Jerry’s Tavern. “Maybe he’ll let us dine for free, since he’s been rooting for us.”

On the way there, and quite by coincidence, Jimmy and White ran into Dizzy, who was returning from her summer dance gig along the Jersey Shore. Embarrassed to be caught with an attractive young woman, Jimmy explained to Dizzy that White had been his partner in his successful audition before the admissions committee at the Actors Studio.

Dizzy seemed satisfied with that explanation and set up a time to meet him the following evening after she’d settled back into her Manhattan routine.

As the autumn winds blew into New York, and the multi-colored leaves began to fall in Central Park, it was time for Jimmy to find a place to hole in for the winter. Dizzy and Jimmy decided once again to set up residence together, this time in a large but bleak apartment at 13 West 89^th Street, just off Central Park West. There was a big difference from their previous arrangement. This time, they would have two roommates, William Bast and a woman identified only as “Tina.” Both Jimmy and Bast had attended UCLA with Tina.

The only decoration on the walls was Jimmy’s battered and ragged matador cape. The furnishings consisted mainly of bare mattresses with no linens.

Dizzy and Jimmy shared the sole bedroom with twin beds, and Tina and Bast agreed to sleep on day beds in the living room. The kitchen had virtually no utensils. Jimmy suggested they could eat with their hands—that is, if there were something to eat in the bare cupboards. Bast remembered their first night in the apartment. They each shared a bowl of boiled vermicelli, the only food left. “We picked off the bugs floating on top.”

Two weeks later, Jimmy arrived at the apartment with a large box, which his three roommates assumed contained foodstuff. When he opened it in front of them, it turned out to be an expensive set of luxurious pillows and bedsheets from Bloomingdales.

The objects were a gift from Rogers Brackett, with whom Jimmy still maintained an uneasy truce, not having submitted to the producer’s never-ending requests to move back into his apartment with the luxuries associated with it.

In an act of showy ostentation, Jimmy spread the chocolate-colored sheets over his bare mattress, arranged the pillows, stripped down to his briefs, and crawled inside after wishing his roommates a good night.

Angered and envious, all three of them moved toward his bed, overturning his mattress and sending him sprawling onto the cold floor.

“There was little privacy,” Bast said. “I got a preview of the breasts and vaginas of Tina and Dizzy, and each girl learned how we were hung. Of course, Dizzy and I had seen Jimmy in the nude many times before. Tina hadn’t. She grew accustomed to his parading around the apartment with his balls dangling.”

Bast also remembered the maze of bras, panties, and stockings hanging out to dry in the bathroom; the complaints about toilet seats being left up; the bathtub rings; and the snoring from both Jimmy and himself. There were also conflicts about dishes. “We had a few dishes by then being left unwashed in the sink. There were fights over which radio programs to listen. We were not a compatible quartet.”

As each day went by, Jimmy grew more irritable and difficult to live with, as he faced increasing anxiety about why he had not been called for an audition of See the Jaguar.

A surprise invitation came in for Jimmy to visit his aunt and uncle, Ortense and Marcus Winslow, in Fairmount, Indiana. He was told that his father, Winton, would return to Indiana for a short visit. If Jimmy could make the trip, the dentist technician would arrive with two new front teeth for his son.

Jimmy invited Dizzy and Bast to join him on the trip. They immediately complained that they did not have the plane fare. “That’s no problem,” Jimmy said. “We’ll hitchhike. It’s only 800 miles.” He told them that he’d seen that 1934 movie, It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Colbert had shown Gable how to hitchhike by lifting her skirt and revealing one leg. “What I’ll do is unbutton my shirt and reveal my chest. If not that, I’ll pull up my pants’ leg and show off one of my shapely gams.”

“Then you’ll be queer bait,” Dizzy said. “But we’ll go with you since you’ve promised comfortable beds and all the food we can eat. I also want to go horseback riding.”

It was an unseasonably cold morning on October 9, 1952, as this trio rode a bus from midtown Manhattan to the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel. Rejecting Jimmy’s suggested technique, they each stuck out their thumbs and, within an hour, they’d procured a ride to the (far western) end of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

They still had to cross the width of Ohio. Bast said they were picked up by a “weasel-like man, real creepy, and an obvious sexual pervert. Everything he said to us was sexually suggestive. Finally, it all came out when Jimmy and I went to take a leak with him in a gas station. He said he liked to lick the balls of young men and eat pussy. He wanted the four of us to check into a sleazy motel for the night. We didn’t get back into his car, heading instead for the open highway with our thumbs out.”

Luck was on their side. A Nash Rambler slowed down and offered them a ride, the motorist claiming that he’d be driving throughout the night en route to Dubuque, Iowa, for an exhibition baseball game. It turned out that he was Clyde McCullough, at the time a famous player for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

When they stopped for dinner, he invited them to join him, but they told him they were on a limited budget. “Forget it,” he said. “I’m loaded. Order anything you want.”

COLLECTIBLES: Clyde McCullough, depicted on a baseball card as he appeared in 1951, around the time he picked up Jimmy and his entourage as they were hitchhiking to Indiana.

Jimmy ordered “the biggest steak you’ve got.” After devouring it, he asked the waitress, “Can I have seconds?”

“As long as you’re paying, or your friend here, you can have the whole cow,” the brassy waitress snapped.

The sports figure drove them to a point where Marcus could motor up from Fairmount and haul them back to his farm. All three of them thanked McCullough profusely for his hospitality.

[It was twenty years later, while watching Giant, that McCullough turned to friends and said, “God Almighty! I once picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be a big-time cow eater in this little dive. My passenger was James Dean, and I’m not making this up.”]

At the Winslow Farm, Jimmy introduced his aunt and uncle, whom he referred to as “Mom” and “Dad” to his best friends, Bast and Dizzy. Bast recalled, “They were wonderful to us. We’ve never eaten so much—fried chicken, thick steaks, cream gravy and mashed potatoes, cornbread with rich butter, and endless ears of corn on the cob and green beans cooked in bacon fat.”

In the barn, Jimmy rescued his motorcycle, a CZ, from mothballs and went roaring through the countryside with Dizzy hanging onto his back for dear life.

After a reunion with his former drama coach, Adeline Nall, the teacher asked Jimmy to address her drama class about insights into the New York theater and how to break into it. Bast was asked to talk about writing for films, and Dizzy performed some of her best modern dance movements. “All three of us were very green in our so-called professions, but the students were impressed,” Bast said. “Of course, Jimmy gave a very limited impression of how to break into show business. He left out that he had been on many a casting couch.”

In front of Nall’s class, he demonstrated an actor’s changing faces by saying, “My name is James Dean” in several different ways, beginning with a melancholy sadness and ending tearfully. Along the way he said the line with aggression, with reluctance, with manic energy, and also hysterically, as if he were shouting, “FIRE!”

On the third day, Winton Dean arrived with Jimmy’s new front teeth. Painfully, both Bast and Dizzy observed Jimmy’s attempt to embrace his cold, distant father.

“At least we got to see what Jimmy would look like in twenty-five years,” Bast said. “Winton was very reserved and self-conscious around his son. He didn’t laugh or smile once during his short visit. Watching father and son left me with nothing but a deep sadness. At least Jimmy made off with two new front teeth. He knew that Jimmy didn’t have money and would have to hitchhike back to New York. He could have lent him at least a hundred dollars, but he chose not to.”

Fortunately for Jimmy during that return visit to Fairmount, his child-molesting pastor, James DeWeerd, was in Chicago, so some potential embarrassments were avoided.

Shortly after Winton’s return to California, a call came in for Jimmy from his agent, Jane Deacy, in New York. Lemuel Ayres wanted him right away to audition for See the Jaguar. He had raised enough money to bring the play to Broadway for an opening on December 2 at the Cort Theatre.

Before leaving Indiana, Jimmy paid a visit to his mother’s grave. In front of Bast, he broke down and cried. “The pain of desertion is still there,” he said.

Marcus drove the trio from his farm to the main highway for the beginning of their long hitchhike east.

Their most memorable ride en route to the outskirts of New York was with a drunken Texan driving a big cream-colored Cadillac. He came to a screeching halt and called out to them, “Y’all jump in!” As he drove along, he kept a bottle of whiskey between his legs, every now and then taking a gulp.

He seemed rather rich and invited all of them to dine with him at a steak house. Everyone ordered a T-bone, but the Texan claimed, “These tough pieces of leather must have come from Kansas. You guys will have to come down to my ranch in Texas to get the steak of a lifetime.”

At a gas station, when Dizzy was in the toilet, the Texan told Jimmy and Bast, “I drive up once or twice a year to New York. You see, I’m into black poontang, and there’s this place in Harlem I should give you guys the address to. In my home state, it’s frowned upon for a white man to like black pussy.”

En route to New York, he stopped the car, opened the door, and “vomited the Rio Grande” (Bast’s words). He explained to his passengers that he had an ulcer but liked to drink and eat a lot. “I enjoy the taste, but then I have to throw it all up. My ulcers can’t handle it.”

After that, he seemed too drunk to drive, so Jimmy took the wheel. When they’d reached one of the outer boroughs of New York, he stopped at a subway station, where they got out and caught a train into Manhattan. Bast and Jimmy moved the Texan to the back seat, left the keys with him, but locked his car doors so he could sleep off his drunk before heading to Harlem.

Arriving exhausted with Bast and Dizzy in Midtown, Jimmy learned that his audition reading of See the Jaguar had been scheduled for ten o’clock the following morning. He desperately wanted the role and was filled with anxiety. Yet at other times, he was very optimistic because of his intimate connection with Lem Ayers.

She later wrote, “I hope Jimmy has a big career as an actor, but I also wanted him to want nothing more in his life than me.”

James Dean, Tom Tryon, and Jack Cassidy

SOMETIMES, IN SHOW-BIZ, THREE’S NOT A CROWD

Dizzy Sheridan’s wish to have Jimmy want her did not come true, although her hope for his big career was on the horizon. If she wanted to keep Jimmy in her life, she would have to learn to share him with others, both men and women.

Less than a week after returning to New York, he was pursuing Chris White again. Not only that, but her new boyfriend as well.

Perhaps with a touch of malice, Rogers Brackett showed Jimmy an item in Walter Winchell’s gossip column. It claimed that the handsome young actor, Tom Tryon, had been seen dating starlet Chris White. “Rumors are that the nuptials are to be in Hartford, Tryon’s hometown.”

Consumed with jealousy, Jimmy demanded, “Who is this Tyrone Power?” deliberately misstating his name.

He later told Bast, “I feel a sense of betrayal. But I’m not going to confront her. I have another, much better, scheme.”

Tryon, who was five years older than Jimmy, had served for three years in the U.S. Navy beginning in 1943. Upon his return from the war in the Pacific, he entered and later graduated from Yale.

Back in New York, he had studied acting under the tutelage of the acting coach Sanford Meisner, who at the time was as well-known as Lee Strasberg.

Currently, Tryon was one of the players in the long-running Broadway musical Wish You Were Here, starring alongside Jack Cassidy, Patricia Marand, and Sheila Bond. [Studded with musical numbers, many of which went on to successful lives as hit singles, it had opened in June of 1952 on Broadway at the Imperial Theatre, running for almost eighteen months and 600 performances.]

Jimmy was aware that Brackett knew the director of the play, and he asked him if he would obtain seats to see a Saturday night show.

Brackett was willing and seemed delighted that Jimmy wanted to go on a very public date with him again, since he’d been slipping around and seeing him privately instead of dining out or going to the theater with him, as he had done months before.

After the show, Brackett and Jimmy went backstage to greet the director and to congratulate the stars. Jimmy left Brackett as he was talking to Cassidy and the director. He wandered over to introduce himself to Tryon.

Years later, Tryon, at his home in Key West, told Darwin Porter, co-author of this biography, what then transpired between Jimmy and himself:

“I didn’t know who Dean was at the time. He had yet to open on Broadway in See the Jaguar. He really turned on the male charm. I had never been so lavishly congratulated on my acting in my life. He also told me I was a goodlooking guy. He must have learned that I was gay, because he claimed that the moment I walked onstage, he got an immediate erection.”

“I considered him very sexy and handsome, too, though a little bit short for me. Mostly, I go for guys who are tall in the saddle. He was doing more than talk to me. He was standing so close, we could have had sex.”

“He told me that he wanted to let me in on a secret, but swore me to keep it to myself. He said that he was about to be cast as the second male lead in a play called See the Jaguar produced by Lemuel Ayers. I’d heard of him. Dean revealed that Ayers was in the process of deciding whether he wanted to cast Arthur Kennedy as the primary lead. Dean went on to say that Ayers was not satisfied with Kennedy, and that he was discreetly searching for another actor to play the male lead instead.”

“Dean suggested that secretly, he could arrange an invitation for me to the Ayers estate up on the Hudson, and that after Ayers met me, he’d be sure to favor me as See the Jaguar’s leading actor. He also claimed that even though Ayers was married, he was as gay as a feather boa.”

“My dream,” Tryon continued, “involved appearing as a star in a Broadway play. Stupid schemer that I was, I fell for Dean’s line. Later, of course, I realized what a bullshitter he was, and the real reason he came on to me.”

“No doubt he was turned on. I was at the peak of my male beauty back then. But, as I was to learn later, he had vengeance on his mind. Specifically, he wanted to punish his girlfriend, Chris White.”

“The main reason that had motivated my decision to go out with Chris involved press and public perceptions. I was an actor on the rise, with hopes of becoming a movie star, and I wanted to dispel rumors that I was gay. There was nothing very serious between Chris and me.”

“Arriving at the Ayers estate on Sunday, I found Lemuel and Shirley marvelous hosts. I think he had the hots for me, but I belonged to Dean that weekend. Frankly the sex was great. Jimmy and I performed every known act, and a few he invented. I discovered a streak of masochism in him. At times, he wanted me to hurt him, and I obliged, but I’m not much into that. Otherwise, he did everything I wanted him to do—and then some.”

“By Monday night, when we returned to New York, I was fairly certain that Lem would consider me as the lead actor in his upcoming play. As for Dean, he was talking seriously about the two of us living together. I mean as a sort of unofficial husband and husband, with me as the top.”

A few days after their return to Manhattan, Jimmy received a call from Tryon. “You want some more of this hot young actor?” Jimmy asked him.

“I can’t get enough,” Tryon said. “But I’m calling with a slightly different invitation. Jack Cassidy wants to have us up to his suite for a late night supper tonight after the show.”

“Let’s call him bisexual. After all, he’s married to the actress Evelyn Ward.”

“I’m game for anything,” Jimmy said. “I’ll meet you at the theater’s rear entrance after the performance. I’ll be your Stage Door Johnny.”

After sitting through another performance of Let’s Do It Again, Jimmy was waiting outside when Cassidy and Tryon emerged that night from the theater. As a trio, they headed out into the street, looking for a taxi. Along the way, Cassidy encountered a bevy of young women or late teenaged girls clamoring for his autograph.

[Jack Cassidy, five years older than Jimmy, was the handsome star of the musical, Wish You Were Here, in which Tryon had a secondary role. Jimmy knew very little about him, other than that he was a singer and actor.

A lot of his success derived from his talent as a musical performer on Broadway. His persona was often that of a vain, shallow, urbane, super-confident egotist with a dramatic flair.

His son, David Cassidy, born in 1950, later became a teen idol and pop star, best known for his key role in the 1970s musical TV sitcom The Partridge Family.

After divorcing Ward in 1956, Jack married actress and singer Shirley Jones, with whom he had three more sons, including Shaun Cassidy. In his 1994 autobiography, C’Mon, Get Happy, David claimed that his father was bisexual, as did Jones. He suffered from bipolar disorder, and could be seen watering his lawn in the nude.

Partial Portrait of a Dysfunctional Family: Jack Cassidy (left); his second wife, Shirley Jones (center); and Jack’s son by his first wife, pop singer and teen idol, David Cassidy.

Jack Cassidy died in 1976, alone in his apartment when he fell asleep drunk and ignited his Naugahyde couch. His body was identified by his dental records and a signet ring.]

Midway through his career as a porn star, Cal Culver (aka. Casey Donovan) wanted to break into screen acting. In pursuit of that goal, he made overtures for a role in a possible film production of Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner; and Darwin Porter’s Butterfies in Heat, later filmed in Key West as The Last Resort.

Despite Culver’s considerable talent as an actor, film producers refused to hire him, based on his notoriety in porn. He billed himself as “The New James Dean,” and for a while, he thought he’d be awarded the lead role in a film, The James Dean Story, but the deal fell through.

Over dinner in his suite that night in 1952, Cassidy amused Jimmy and Tryon with stories of his life.

Jimmy found Cassidy dashing and debonair, admiring his devil-may-care attitude. He was refined, suave, and charming, but Jimmy sensed a dark streak in him.

Privately that night, surrounded by likeminded companions, he indulged in gay chatter.

Jimmy learned that he and Cassidy had shared something in common: Both of them had been seduced as part of casting auditions by Cole Porter.

Cassidy had continued his sexually charged visits to Porter’s bedroom. “I made him work for it,” he said. “I’d strip naked and sit in a corner with my big cock dangling over the side of the chair. Cole, that old sod, had to get out of his wheelchair and crawl across the carpet for access to what I have.”

Jimmy found the story insensitive and sadistic, but strangely erotic. “I’ll have to try that someday. All I need is a cripple.”

“When I was a teenager,” Cassidy continued, “I cultivated my voice and my speech patterns by seeing about ten movies a week, preferring double features,” Cassidy said. “John Barrymore was my idol. I modeled a lot of my style after him.”

[By 1976, Cassidy had perfected his Barrymore persona to such an extent that he was hired to portray “The Great Profile”, Barrymore himself, in the feature film W.C. Fields and Me.]

Two nights later, Jimmy dropped in for a visit with Stanley Haggart, this time without a companion. Running low on cash, he wanted to see if Haggart could get him cast in one of his television commercials. He didn’t want to go back to Brackett and ask him.

Haggart knew Cassidy. After learning that Jimmy had spent the night in his hotel suite, along with Tom Tryon—who would later become a friend of Haggart’s in Key West—he asked about him.

“We had a three-way,” Jimmy admitted. “I don’t want to go into a blow-by-blow account of what happened. But Tom screwed me as Cassidy and I blew one another.”

“Then, after the sex was over, Cassidy got drunk with us and broke down and cried. He told us that his mother had borne him late in her life, and that she had never loved him. ‘She rejected me,’ Cassidy said, ‘and hired a woman two doors away who had just had a child to nurse me. I can never remember my mother ever having kissed me.’ In response to that, I said ‘The same could be said for my father.’”

Tryon’s dream of appearing as the male lead in See the Jaguar never materialized. The actor learned later that Ayers had never deviated from his desire that Arthur Kennedy be designated as the play’s male lead, even though Jimmy had dangled it in front of Tryon as a trophy that was up for grabs.

Years later, according to Tryon, “Basically, the role had been assigned to Kennedy even before I got involved with jimmy. It was never really available at all. After that night with Jimmy and Cassidy, I never saw the boy again. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a liar.”

[Although bigtime stardom eluded him, Tryon went on to greater things. His greatest role came in 1963, when Otto Preminger cast him as an ambitious Catholic priest in The Cardinal, for which he received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama. “Preminger practically killed me. Never before and never again would I suffer such abuse.”

“I almost got to work with Marilyn Monroe on her last unfinished picture, Something’s Got to Give, directed by George Cukor. But when Marilyn was fired, I was, too.”

By the late 1960s, Tryon was disillusioned with acting, and he went on to become a famous writer, specializing in horror and mystery books. His best known work was The Other (1971), about a boy whose evil twin brother may or may not be responsible for a series of deaths in a small rural community in the 1930s.

When Darwin Porter became Tryon’s friend in Key West, Tryon had taken as his live-in lover Cal Culver (also billed as Casey Donovan), the leading gay male porn star in America.]

Awakening early for his first audition for the role of Wally Wilkins in See the Jaguar, Jimmy borrowed William Bast’s only clean white shirt and his charcoal-gray slacks that had just come back from the cleaners. After endless preening, he asked Bast and Dizzy, “How do I look?”

After winning their approval, he headed toward the Royalton Hotel, where his sometimes lover, Roddy McDowall lived. N. Richard Nash, the author of Meet the Jaguar, was conducting the reading in McDowall’s room, for reasons known only to him.

Jimmy knew very little about Nash. Born in Philadelphia, he’d been a ten-dollar per match boxer before going on to study English literature and philosophy in college. He had written for Broadway before, having authored works that included the Shakespearian-themed comedy, The Second Best Bed, produced in 1946, and the highly acclaimed drama, The Young and the Fair (1948). His greatest success would come later, when he wrote the original Broadway version of The Rainmaker (1954), which was adapted into a movie two years later starring Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn.

Nash recalled Jimmy’s reading. “He wasn’t really trying to sell himself to me, and I respected that quality in him. As he began to read for the role of Wally, I sensed he had something that other actors didn’t. We’d auditioned at least a hundred of them before Jimmy read for me. At the end of his reading, I told him, ‘If it were up to me, I’d give you the role this morning. But you’ll have to read tomorrow afternoon before our director, Michael Gordon. You have that special quality the role of Wally calls for.”

Before it opened, Nash had billed See the Jaguar as “an allegorical Western without the horses.” Set in the “backwash of civilization,” the rural South, it was loaded with symbolism, much of it difficult to understand. One early reader of the play had dismissed it, accusing Nash of having “earthy characters break from their role to spout philosophical pronouncements.”

[In the play, Wally Wilkins is a seventeen-year-old boy, who has been locked up since he was a child in an ice house by his neurotic mother, ostensibly to protect him from the cruelty of the world. Shortly before her death, she releases him. As an innocent naïf, he discovers the cruelty and horror of the world, encountering both brutality and beauty.

A kindly schoolteacher, Arthur Kennedy, aided by his pregnant partner, takes him in and shelters him to the degree he can. Kennedy’s partner was portrayed by Constance Ford, who had been awarded the role after Maureen Stapleton turned it down.

After his release from his prison, Wally had set out with a rifle, and at one point, he kills a mountain jaguar about to attack him. That angers the local sheriff (played by Cameron Prud’Homme), who, previously, had built a cage with the intention of exhibiting the animal as a sideshow at his gas station. He’d even painted a sign—SEE THE JAGUAR—with the intention of displaying it, along with a menagerie of other abused and caged wild animals, as a tourist attraction.

When the sheriff’s hopes about capturing the jaguar alive are thwarted, he captures Wally and displays him in the cage in lieu of the jaguar. The teacher (as played by Kennedy) later frees him, an act of defiance that so enrages the sheriff that he shoots him as “retribution” for his kindness.]

During his second audition, this time in front of the director, Michael Gordon, a very different-looking Jimmy showed up for his reading.

Born a Jew in Baltimore, and later a member of the left-wing Group Theatre, Gordon was, at the time of Jimmy’s audition for See the Jaguar, under scrutiny from Congressional witch-hunting committees, as spearheaded by the dreaded Joseph McCarthy. Gordon was a friend of director Elia Kazan and John Garfield, one of the few Hollywood actors that Jimmy admired.

Shortly before he met Jimmy, Gordon had directed the 1950 production of Cyrano de Bergerac, which had won a Best Actor Oscar for José Ferrer.

[Amazingly, after Gordon survived the blacklist, film producer Ross Hunter hired him to direct a comedy for a 1959 release. It was Pillow Talk, starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day. It became one of the biggest-grossing box offices successes of that year.]

“I couldn’t believe it,” Nash said. “The day before, Jimmy had been so neat and well-dressed. But when he showed up to meet Gordon, he looked like he was recovering from a two-night drunk. He was disheveled, his hair uncombed, and one of the lenses in his spectacles had been cracked. His reading was very bad. Gordon met with me and rejected Jimmy, even those he was close to Ayers, the producer.”

“Finally, I persuaded Gordon to give Jimmy a final chance the following day. I went to Jimmy and angrily asked him, ‘What in hell happened to you?’”

Jimmy told the playwright that he’d had a sleepless night owing to a personal problem. He hadn’t repaired his glasses, since he had no money.

Nash agreed to lend him ten dollars. But when he showed up the following afternoon, although he was neatly dressed, he wore no glasses. “You don’t need glasses anymore?” Nash asked.

“I went to buy a new pair with your ten dollars, but I saw this vicious-looking knife in a store window. So I went inside and bought it. I’m carrying it now.”

Then he claimed that two friends had rehearsed with him throughout most of the night, and that he knew all the lines by heart, so he wouldn’t have to read from the script.

The difference in the quality of his third reading from that of the reading he had flubbed was amazing. Even Gordon admitted that Jimmy read the lines this time with deep understanding and perception. When it was over, Gordon told him, “the part is yours.”

Rehearsals were scheduled to begin on October 20^th, 1952. Back at his apartment, he told Bast, “I’ve got it! I’ll dazzle Broadway! I’ll be a star at the age of twenty-one.”

Bast later confessed that he was jealous of Jimmy, since he, too, had wanted to be a bigtime actor until deciding that he had a better chance at writing scripts than performing in them.

Alec Wilder had been commissioned to compose See the Jaguar’s musical score, and he met with Jimmy to teach him the lyrics of his big musical number, “Green Briar, Blue Fire.”

“The kid was tone deaf. Imagine Jimmy auditioning for the role of Curly in Oklahoma! We rehearsed and rehearsed. He finally got it half right. But Frank Sinatra need not fear any competition.”

Wilder also wasn’t impressed when he saw Jimmy coming under the spell of Arthur Kennedy. [Arthur Kennedy had originally billed himself as “John Kennedy,” changing it after perceiving too many comparisons to the then-on-the-rise politician with the same name.]

A competent but average-looking actor, Kennedy’s career had been built on a widely diverse cluster of roles, some of them trivial and forgettable, that had included villainous portrayals in both Westerns and police dramas. Like Jimmy, he studied at Actors Studio.

His big film break had occurred when James Cagney discovered him and cast him as his younger brother in City for Conquest (1940). What especially impressed Jimmy was that he’d been in the original casts of some of Arthur Miller’s great Broadway dramas, most visibly as Biff Lomon in Death of a Salesman (1949). He’d gone on to play Chris Keller in Miller’s All My Sons (1947), and there was talk that Miller wanted him as a key player in his upcoming drama, The Crucible (1953).

The New York Film Critics had designated him as Best Actor for his role in Bright Victory (1951), in which he played a soldier facing an uncertain future after being blinded. That year, he was also nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, but lost to Humphrey Bogart’s performance in The African Queen.]

“I stood by and watched Jimmy hero-worship Kennedy and all that Method crap,” Wilder said. “Kennedy brainwashed Jimmy into believing that no one in the production was of any consequence except the actor. That simply is not true. What about the director and the playwright, not to mention the composer? I’ve always felt that this attitude instilled in Jimmy accounted to a great extent for his shocking behavior when he hit the big time in Hollywood.”

Arthur Kennedy, cast as a school teacher in See the Jaguar, talks with his pregnant partner (Constance Ford) about seventeen-year-old Willy Wilkins (James Dean), who has been locked up by his paranoid mother since childhood.

Kennedy had a very different impression of Jimmy. “I liked the kid a lot. He was uniquely talented. He didn’t suffer all the posturing, mannerisms, and mumbling of Brando. He delivered his lines pure and clear, and had one of the most sensitive faces of any young man in the theater. But I must add a caveat. He was the most peculiar actor I’ve ever worked with, and he tried to murder the director.”

For the most part, Jimmy took Gordon’s direction without protests. However, there was major disagreement over the interpretation of one scene that Jimmy was to perform with Kennedy. “Gordon insisted that Jimmy play the scene one way, but he protested that such an act would ruin his own interpretation of the role,” Kennedy said. “Things got out of hand. Finally, in disgust, Gordon called Jimmy ‘a little punk.’ That set Jimmy on fire.”

“He pulled out this knife he’d recently bought and lunged toward Gordon. I did something either dumb or smart. I positioned myself between them, thereby preventing Jimmy’s execution on the electric chair for murder. That was the smart thing I did. The stupid thing I did was that I might have had the knife plunged into my gut.”

Cast as Kennedy’s pregnant girlfriend, Bronx-born Constance Ford had little personal contact with Jimmy in See the Jaguar. Later, they’d co-star together in a teleplay with Ronald (then an actor) Reagan.

She was friendly with Kennedy, however, having previously appeared with him in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Later, she became known for her portrayal of Ada Hobson on the long-running daytime soap opera, Another World.

[As a fashion model during World War II, Ford’s image had been closely associated with a massive ad campaign by Elizabeth Arden hawking lipstick in a shade of scarlet marketed as “Victory Red.” All of the big-name female stars of World War II—Betty Grable, Lana Turner, and Veronica Lake—wore it. Even Tallulah Bankhead added to public perceptions of its desirability with public statements that included: “I wouldn’t walk out the door without a coat of it on, Dah-lings.”]

Jimmy shared a dressing room with Philip Pine, an actor who played “Hilltop,” a character with an obsessive lust for Kennedy’s pregnant girlfriend, as played by Ford. “Jimmy plastered the wall with bullfight posters,” Pine recalled. “I think he wanted to be a matador more than an actor.”

Eleven years older than Jimmy, the California-born Pine would develop a career that spanned seven decades in television and film. He was also a writer, director, and producer. He often appeared in TV Westerns, portraying legends who included Kit Carson.

He would forever remember Jimmy: “He was a real pain in the ass, a sentiment echoed by many other actors, including Rock Hudson, although Hudson may have meant that literally.”

“His lack of discipline created tension. Once, he thought the director was treating me like an adult and him like a kid. He believes only in himself and to hell with everybody else.”

In a sensitive scene with Arthur Kennedy (left), a barefoot James Dean, looking years younger than his actual age, gives a brilliant performance as a bewildered lad who, after years of being locked away, is coming upon both the beauty and brutality of the real world.

“In spite of my resentment, we became friends and often would go out drinking together and chat for hours—real personal stuff—about our hopes and dreams.”

“He didn’t have a good pair of shoes, so I arranged through Actors Equity to get him a new pair. We would rehearse a scene, and without any warning, he would play it completely different from the way we’d rehearsed. Even though he pissed me off, I had a soft spot for him. He was undisciplined. He didn’t have an understanding that a theater company needs to work together like a harmonious family. But I knew he was deeply insecure. Without saying a word—his face said it all—he seemed to be crying out, ‘Love me. Why won’t someone love me?’”

“Jimmy and I both knew hurt,” Pine said. “We grew up without fathers. We bonded over that. I wanted to let him know that an actor can use pain and hurt he’d suffered to enhance a performance.”

Released at last from his confinement, and on his own, coping with new realizations about the world and its inhabitants, the character interpreted by James Dean in See the Jaguar fights back.

“I knew Jimmy before he became a legend. I even replaced him in a role on Broadway. Yes, there was some envy and jealousy on my part, not uncommon among actors. God damn it, why didn’t Elia Kazan discover me instead of Jimmy?”

Tryouts had originally been slated for Boston, but blue nose city fathers, who were still censoring the art and entertainment industries back then [BANNED IN BOSTON! eventually became an activist slogan in the battle for weakening the grip of censorship in America.] read the script and rejected it as “indecent.” In reaction, Lemuel Ayers selected Hartford and Philadelphia as the sites for trial runs instead.

During its first performance in Hartford, because of technical difficulties, the curtain rose half an hour late. Jimmy upstaged Pine. He was supposed to be submissive when he is dragged offstage by Pine, but instead, he put up a fight and fiercely resisted. Furious, Pine managed to subdue him and somehow managed to drag him into the wings.

Each of the local papers criticized Nash’s play, but gave special accolades to Jimmy. The Hartford Courant described his performance as “tender and touching.”

The trial run then moved on to Philadelphia, where it opened on November 8 at the Forrest Theatre. Pine recalled that Nash was up every night, hysterically rewriting the script, desperate to plug the “loopholes in my play.”

As in Hartford, the Philadelphia papers, despite his rewrites, were not kind to Nash. Once again, however, Jimmy was hailed for his stage debut. The Philadelphia Bulletin praised his “excellent character portrait” of the innocent kid, and his acting was also lauded by The Philadelphia Inquirer, its review suggesting that the theater had a new star shining.

Lem Ayers was a friend of Tennessee Williams, and he invited the playwright to Philadelphia to see his bound-for-Broadway discovery.

Later, Ayers threw a party for the cast and crew at Philadelphia’s Variety Club. A slightly drunken Tennessee arrived. The actor and the playwright would later develop a relationship, but, as Jimmy later reported, “On that night in Philly, Tennessee only flirted with me. Outrageously so.”

“Not since I first saw Brando as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire have I had such a thrilling night at the theater. I found your acting and male beauty startling,” Tennessee claimed.

Tennessee gave him a card with his name and New York City address on it. He also threw out a tantalizing tidbit. “We have a mutual friend, David Swift. He’s invited both of us to his Christmas party.”

“As soon as I get to New York, I’ll start working on a play that includes you as its star.”

“I’m sure you will,” Jimmy said. “You wouldn’t be trying to hoodwink a farm boy from Indiana, would you?”

“Me? Never!” Tennessee answered “Unlike a character I’m creating, Big Daddy, I have never believed in mendacity.”

See the Jaguar opened in December at the Cort Theater. Lemuel Ayers invited several friends, including Mildred Dunnock, the distinguished actress who was part of the Actors Studio. “I want you to get a look at James Dean,” he told her. “My new discovery. I think he’ll be sensational.”

[Dunnock, in the autumn of 1954, would be co-starring with Jimmy in a teleplay for CBS.]

Later, after sitting through See the Jaguar, she delivered her own review: “Poor Dean. He was trying to breathe reality into a heavy plot that was far too loaded with portentious symbolic references. It was an uphill struggle for him, but he tried valiantly to cope with the impossible lines. Nash should have been kicked in the pants. Dean could tell his lines weren’t real. They rang a false note. Something an enfant sauvage wouldn’t say. Even so, he brought some faux Method magic to this clunker.”

Nash, of course, had a very different view from that expressed by Dunnock: “Jimmy was the only one in the cast who truly caught the spirit of what I was trying to convey. He had from the beginning.”

After its opening on Broadway, the cast convened at Sardi’s to await the reviews in the morning papers. Jimmy invited Bast and Dizzy to the dinner party, assigning them to a table in a far corner. He didn’t spend much time with them.

To the jealous Bast, “Jimmy’s feet were never on the ground. Like Peter Pan, he flew from table to table, accepting congratulations from his adoring public. I truly felt he was on the road to stardom, even before the newspaper reviews arrived. There was adulation in the restaurant. Broadway had a new prince, or at least that was what Jimmy thought. Personally, I had my doubts. I thought the play stunk.”

At long last, the morning papers arrived, and Jimmy devoured the reviews. His acting received raves, but Nash’s playwrighting skills were attacked as “murky and at times, silly,” One described the play as pretentious, claiming that it “was a contrivance of jejune symbolism.”

Richard Watts, Jr., in The New York Post, claimed, “James Dean achieves the feat of making the childish young fugitive believable and not embarrassing.” Although praising Jimmy, the critic went on to define the play itself as “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

In The New York Herald Tribune, Walter Kerr wrote: “James Dean adds to an extraordinary performance in an almost impossible role.” One of the most sensitive comments was made by George Freedley in The Morning Telegraph: “James Dean acted the mentally retarded boy with sweetness and naïveté that made his torture singularly poignant.”

Actress Margaret Baker, who played Jimmy’s deranged mother, was also at Sardi’s that night. As regards the opening night of See the Jaguar, she pronounced it, “the nicest funeral I have ever attended.”

After those bad reviews, except for Jimmy’s performance, See the Jaguar played to dwindling audiences. Lemuel closed it after four more performances.

After Sardi’s, Jimmy invited Dizzy to the Royalton Hotel, where Lem had, as an opening night gift, offered him a single night’s lodging in a suite, complete with room service. Jimmy ordered dinner for the two of them, choosing a juicy big steak for himself.

Midway through the meal, the manager telephoned, suggesting that “the young lady will have to leave after her dinner. It is hotel policy. We have a house detective.”

When their meal had ended, he accompanied her out onto the sidewalk and hailed her a taxi. Then he kissed her goodbye.

[Billing herself years later as “Elizabeth Sheridan,” she would go on greater glory, her face becoming known in thousands of homes across America when she played Jerry Seinfeld’s mother in the hit TV sitcom, Seinfeld, whose much-awarded 180 episodes were originally released between 1989 and 1998.]

The next morning, Jimmy returned to his shared apartment uptown to find Dizzy gone, but Bast was there. He packed his meager belongings and announced that he was moving out. He made a point of noting that he was going back to the Iroquois, where both of them had lived. “But this time, I’m renting only a single room. Like Greta Garbo, I want to be alone.”

Later, when Dizzy was apprised of the news, she wrote: “I knew that our romance no longer burned with the intensity we once felt. Our love had already moved into the comfortable stage, its brilliant colors gently diminishing like a rainbow too long in the sky.”

With Jimmy gone, Tina, Bast, and Dizzy could no longer afford their apartment, and each of them moved out to go their separate ways.

From the Iroquois, Jimmy called his agent, Jane Deacy, who was lining up teleplays for him. “Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world,” he said. “You’re all alone with your imagination, and that’s all you have.”

During the week that followed, he visited the apartment of Stanley Haggart, this time, alone. He told his older friend that he had been going through affairs with both men and women at an unprecedented rate. “I run a bed-and-breakfast,” he claimed. “In my bed at night, breakfast the next morning, and then adieu. In the last week, I’ve had at least ten conquests, six women and four men. All were my own age, often much younger. No more god damn aging producers and directors for me… unless.”

When Haggart asked why he felt compelled to take on so many different sexual partners, Jimmy answered, “I’m a tumbling tumbleweed. My favorite song—in spite of the fact that that shithead, Roy Rogers, sings it—is ‘Don’t Fence Me In.’”

He also revealed that Deacy was getting lots of job offers for him. “MGM wants me to fly to Hollywood for a screen test. She turned them down. She wants me to become more seasoned, and she’s lining up more TV dramas for me. Frankly, I’m impatient to become a movie star, but before that, I want to study with the Actors Studio,” he said.

Frank Corsaro, as depicted in an National Endowment for the Arts interview documenting his contributions to the New York City Opera; to operatic stagecrafting; and to the interconnectedness of an opera’s music with a sense of dramatic technique.

Although many new lovers loomed on his horizon, Jimmy rarely, if ever, lived with anyone again. “I want my lovers to pass through my life like ships in the night. Pardon the fucking cliché.”

To his aunt and uncle in Fairmount, Jimmy wrote about how proud he was to be a part of the Actors Studio—“and it’s free. Very few get in. It’s the best thing that can happen to an actor. I’m one of the youngest to belong. If I can keep up and nothing interferes with my progress, one of these days I might be able to contribute something to the world.”

On his first day at the studio, Jimmy met Frank Corsaro, who was to have an important impact on his life.

[A native New Yorker, born in the Bronx, Corsaro eventually became known as one of the country’s foremost stage directors of opera and television. One of his best-received and most famous productions was the original Broadway version of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana (1961), starring Miss Bette Davis. In 1988, after a hugely successful career with the New York City Opera, and New York’s Metropolitan Opera, he was designated as Artistic Director of the Actors Studio.]

When Jimmy first became friends with Corsaro, he was known for his cultural background, his wit, and his keen intelligence. Jimmy found him intellectually stimulating, and Corsaro expanded his knowledge, introducing him to literature (especially the novels of Aldous Huxley) and the music of Arnold Schönberg and Johann Sebastian Bach.

According to Bast, “Jimmy fell completely under Corsaro’s influence. He was a slight little man, a bundle of nervous energy that kept him plugged into some electric current both night and day.”

Before auditioning for Lee Strasberg, Jimmy learned what he could from his peers about the director and acting teacher. He’d been born in Ukraine during the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Along with director Harold Clurman, he’d cofounded the Group Theater in 1931, America’s first true theatrical collective. When Jimmy met Strasberg, he had just become the director of Actors Studio.

Although others may lay claim to the title, Strasberg was recognized as the father of Method acting in America. In time, he’d train such illustrious actors as Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Monty Clift, Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Julie Harris.

Strasberg told Jimmy that each new member had to perform a theatrical piece to an audience comprised of his or her fellow students. After reviewing and rejecting many scripts, Jimmy settled on a piece adapted from Matador, a novel by Barnaby Conrad, that had sold three million copies.

Unlike Jimmy, Conrad had actually faced a bull in a ring, and as a result, he had been badly injured, afflicted with a wound so damaging that he was rejected for admission into the U.S. Navy in 1943.

Jimmy envied the life Conrad had led, hanging out in Seville, Madrid, and Barcelona with such bullfighters as Manolete, Carlos Arruza, and Juan Belmonte. Matador, Conrad’s second novel, had been a gift to him from his pastor lover back in Fairmount, James DeWeerd.

The scene inspired by Conrad was actually very dramatic, that of an aging matador who accepts a challenge from a young bullfighter to enter the ring for a final time, knowing that it might well lead to his “death in the afternoon.” Without saying a word of dialogue, Jimmy wanted to act out the bullfighter’s emotion before he comes face to face with death itself.

For props, he used Sidney Franklin’s blood-soaked cape, a candle, and a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Halfway through his solo performance, he seemed to realize that the skit wasn’t working. He cut it short and, in an attempt to gracefully conclude his time on stage, with his back to the audience, he performed a set of muleta passes.

Geraldine Page, also a student at Actors Studio, was in the audience that day. Within months, she would be co-starring on Broadway with Jimmy in The Immoralist.

“I didn’t hear all of Lee’s attack on the Matador, because I had to leave for an appointment,” Page claimed. “But other members of the studio told me it was not only a devastating critique, but that Jimmy was devastated by it. Lee had done the same thing for me when I performed my own introductory skit at Actors Studio. He asked me, ‘Who are you trying to impersonate, Joan Fontaine?’”

After a performance, Strasberg always asked an actor, “Just what are you trying to accomplish?”

At that time, Jimmy lacked the understanding of exactly what he wanted to do as an actor, and he couldn’t come up with an answer. He wanted to become the first post-modern actor, but wasn’t exactly sure what that meant.

Strasberg continued. “In the Matador skit, you were acting, not being. You must learn the difference if you ever want to succeed in the theater. There is a mammoth difference between the actor who thinks that acting is an imitation of life, and the actor who feels that acting is living.” From there, Strasberg went on to caustically rebuke Jimmy’s performance.

Strasberg was accurate in his attack on Jimmy’s motivation and his characterization, even though he had performed many of the matador’s movements to perfection.

As Strasberg lashed out at Jimmy’s acting, he sat slumped down in his seat, scowling in a sort of poutish mess. An original member of the studio, David Stewart, phrased it vividly: “Dean sat there like his skin was being ripped off.”

From the start, Jimmy showed that he lacked an actor’s ability to take criticism.

David Garfield in A Player’s Place explained it: “Dean’s Matador provoked a long and penetrating critique from Strasberg. Dean listened impassively, but the color drained from his face. When Strasberg had concluded his remarks, the young actor slung his matador’s cape over his shoulder and silently walked out of the room.”

The next day, he bitterly complained to Bast, “I can’t let Strasberg attack me. He doesn’t understand what I’m trying to do. I don’t understand it myself. I need more experience. I don’t know what’s inside me yet. If I let him dissect me like a rabbit in some laboratory, it might destroy the creativity bubbling up in me. Strasberg doesn’t have the right to tear away at my very soul. He’s trying to sterilize me. If you attack a guy enough, you destroy his guts. What’s an actor without guts?”

Bast claimed, “Jimmy simply didn’t have the stomach to survive the soulsearing, psychologically destructive criticism Strasberg seemed to take pleasure in dishing out.”

To his friends, Jimmy was very critical of Strasberg, calling him “a mess of hot air. He also has a personal vindictiveness against me.”

John Stix, who chaired the studio’s board of directors, claimed, “Jimmy’s self-indulgence was not tolerated by Strasberg. Nor did he allow him to use it as a defense against criticism. He disliked everybody there except for Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley, who allowed him his indulgences. By the time Jimmy arrived, Clift and Brando were already stars.”

Months later, when Page actually co-starred on stage with Jimmy, she claimed, “He learned a lot more about acting from Monty Clift and Brando than he did from Strasberg.”

“It wasn’t my criticism that kept Dean away,” Strasberg later claimed. “He was sensitive about letting other people get too close unless they were very special. Marlon Brando and Paul Newman were special. So was Marilyn Monroe and even my daughter, Susan. He seemed to shy away from people, even those who wanted to be his friend. He was afraid they would get to know him and judge him. He didn’t want to be judged, yet every actor has to face the critics.”

Elia Kazan shared similar memories. “I didn’t see Dean very much at the Actors Studio. He went there only a few times. I remember him sitting out in front, a surly mess. He didn’t want to participate in anything, seemingly there only as a venue for judging his fellow actors.”

After Jimmy’s death, Strasberg told a reporter, “I sensed a doomed quality in the boy. There was something destructive about him. Frankly, he didn’t learn anything at my studio, because he never wanted to give of himself. Acting is nothing but giving.”

During one of his rare interviews, Jimmy spoke to Erskine Johnson, the well-known Hollywood columnist. “The most important lesson I took away from the Actors Studio was how an actor should take care of himself. How an actor need to protect himself from the glitz of Hollywood and from the hazards of the stage and this new medium of television.”

“There are tricks to every trade, as there are in acting, and I learned some of them. Some of these tricks can help you survive bad scripts and bad directors, even bad actors with whom you have to work. However, so far, I haven’t had the need to unleash my bag of tricks.”

Tennessee Williams had accurately described the forthcoming invitation from their mutual friends, David Swift and Maggie McNamara. However, it was not for a Christmas Party but for a New Year’s Eve celebration.

Assuming that Rogers Brackett and Jimmy were still an interconnected couple, the Swifts extended an invitation to both of them. Jimmy was seeing Brackett only infrequently, yet agreed to escort him to the party anyway, knowing that Tennessee would be there. He kept telling friends, including Stanley Haggart and William Bast, “Look at what Tennessee did for Marlon Brando. Imagine what he could do for me, an actor with real talent.”

Arriving at the door to the Swift apartment, Brackett and Jimmy were greeted by McNamara, who kissed both of them on the cheeks. She gave no indication that she’d ever been intimate with Jimmy in Chicago.

As he’d later relate to Bast, “The guest list was short but choice. I was the only one there who had not won any theatrical awards or produced any hit shows.

“Tennessee was already drunk, and he introduced me to his chief rival, playwright William Inge, who practically creamed in his pants when he shook my hand. I didn’t think I was going to get my paw back. I heard that in the 1940s, these two guys used to be lovers.”

At the party, McNamara introduced Brackett and Jimmy to Grace Kelly and her lover, Gene Lyons, a television actor from Pittsburgh. To Jimmy, Grace evoked a goddess—blonde, prim, proper, and ladylike—but he sensed a strong undercurrent of sexuality within her. “She put the ‘grace’ in graceful,” he later said. “She was both serene and serenely beautiful. Probably born a rich girl, she acted like one. I dig her…I mean, I really dig her. Up to now, when stacked up against Grace, the girls I’ve screwed were Saturday night whores in comparison to this stunning young beauty.”

Grace Kelly, in an MGM publicity photo that managed to hint at her upcoming status as Her Serene Highness, Princess of Monaco.

Like Jimmy, Grace had appeared in commercials and teleplays. Her biggest break had come when she’d been cast opposite Gary Cooper in the Western, High Noon (1952).

[Gary Cooper, in an irreverent and disrespectful reference to Grace Kelly, once said, “She looks like a cold dish with a man until you get her pants off, and then she explodes.”]

Both New York and Hollywood were buzzing with rumors that during the making of High Noon, she and Cooper had become lovers, in spite of the difference in their ages. [He was born in 1901, Grace in 1929.]

The future prospects of Gene Lyons (above), her date the evening Jimmy met her, were not as glamorous.

In time, of course, Cooper became just one of many big-name stars headed for her bed: Marlon Brando, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, William Holden, Ray Milland, Frank Sinatra, and James Stewart, as well as designer Oleg Cassini and the Shah of Iran (Mohammed Reza Pahlavi) thrown in for extra seasoning.

One of her lovers, actor Don Richardson, expressed his disappointment in her when she ran off with Jean-Pierre Aumont, the handsome French actor. “She fucked everybody she came into contact with who was able to advance her career. She screwed agents, producers, directors, bigtime stars, whomever.”

At the party, in response to Brackett and Jimmy’s applause for her performance in High Noon, she expressed disappointment with her part: “It was Gary’s picture. You look into his face and you know everything he’s thinking. You look into my face and you see nothing but a blank stare. I thought I was going to be a big movie star. I’m not so sure. Frankly, now that I’m back in New York, I think I should take acting lessons.”

Lyons, her escort, seemed to suffer through the party from his seated position on a sofa, sometimes holding her hand. The red-haired Irishman was tall and good-looking, but it was obvious he’d had too much to drink.

Grace told them that she was taking him home to Philadelphia to meet her father, Jack Kelly. “I want him to see if Gene is marriage material.”

“If he has me investigated, he’ll learn that I’m already married,” Lyons said, “but seeking an annulment.”

“Everybody in the theater claims that Gene looks like Marlon Brando, but I think he’s so much more handsome than Brando,” Kelly said. “Don’t you think so, James?”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Jimmy answered, diplomatically, though perceiving that Gene wasn’t all that handsome, or all that charming, either.

“The reason I asked you is that you seem to know what the standard of male beauty is, to judge by your looks,” she said. “The question is, do you take advantage of your good looks, using that as a weapon on those who fall under your spell?”

He couldn’t believe she was flirting with him. He removed his glasses, so she could get a better look at his face.

Jimmy talked briefly with Lyons when Grace went to powder her nose. He was surprised to learn that he was a lifetime member of the Actors Studio. Quite by coincidence, Jimmy would soon be starring in a teleplay opposite him. In most cases, most of their off-screen talk would center around Grace.

“I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire,” Tennessee Williams (depicted above) told James Dean.

At some point, Swift broke away from his other guests and chatted with Brackett and Jimmy. He had achieved great success in July of 1952 when NBC went on the air with his TV sitcom, Mister Peepers, starring Wally Cox as a junior high school science teacher.

“It’s been a long journey,” Swift claimed. “I dropped out of school when I was seventeen and rode the rails to Hollywood. I began as an office boy for Walt Disney, but by 1938, I was his assistant animator. He told people I was like the son he never had.”

“Do you know something I don’t?” he asked, rather sharply. Both Swift and Brackett stared at Jimmy, waiting for some revelation.

Feeling trapped, Jimmy extricated himself with: “Sorry—It was a stupid thing to say. I don’t know Disney myself. I think one night I shook his hand at a party at George Cukor’s house. I’m not the type of actor for a Walt Disney movie—unless maybe if a Minnie Mouse role comes up.”

Maureen Stapleton, one of Tennessee’s favorite actresses, arrived at the party with her husband, Max Allentuck, the general manager to producer Kermit Bloomgarden.

Jimmy knew of her long association with the Actors Studio and was impressed with her talent, especially her star involvement in Tennessee’s Broadway version of The Rose Tattoo, which would earn her a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a play.

Like others at the party, she was an alcoholic. “Marilyn Monroe gets the ditzy blonde roles, although I suspect the girl has real talent. As for me, when I come out on the stage, people take one look at me and say, ‘Jesus, that broad better know how to act—or else, what in hell is she doing up there?’”

As an actor, Maureen Stapleton gave Jimmy some advice: “Sometimes the acceptance of a lesser role, or even a rotten part, regardless of how humiliating, is the result of needing a paycheck.”

During the course of the evening, Tennessee, also drunk, kept making passes at Jimmy, which he planned to intercept within a different setting at some future date.

Inge also seemed sexually attracted to Jimmy, but shy and introverted, living deep in the closet. He implied to Jimmy that he’d like to get together to discuss starring him in one of his upcoming plays. Jimmy hoped it would be the previously announced Broadway opening of Picnic. [Inge’s much-awarded, much-celebrated Picnic, opened on Broadway in 1953 and ran for almost 500 performances. Its original version featured Ralph Meeker as the male lead, with Paul Newman in a secondary role.]

Jimmy was understandably impressed with Inge as a playwright. Brackett had taken him to see Come Back, Little Sheba on Broadway, which had won a Tony for its star, Shirley Booth.

Jimmy would later tell Stanley Haggart, “In spite of what I told you, I know that at some point, I’ll have to shack up with both Bill Inge and Tennessee—call it ‘singing for my supper.’ They’re the hottest playwrights in town, and I know they want to get into my drawers. So I’ve changed my mind about sleeping with old queers. Girls are always changing their minds. So why not guys?”

On New Year’s Day, Jimmy telephoned Bast to report on the party. “Both Tennessee and Bill Inge are hot for me as an actor. Each of them wants to star me in a play. Which ones, I don’t know yet.

“Aren’t you jumping to conclusions?” Bast asked. “Why not face up to the truth? Those two queens just want you to fuck them! They’re using that casting shit as bait.”

“You’re god damn jealous!” Jimmy shouted, enraged, into the phone. “I’ll think I’ll go for a week without speaking to you. After that, we’ll see about our so-called friendship.”

Two weeks after meeting Grace Kelly, she called Jimmy at the Iroquois, having been provided with his phone number by David Swift. “So sorry to bother you, dear, but I have a problem. You were so charming at the New Year’s Eve party given by David and Maggie. I just knew you’d help a damsel in distress. David thought you would.”

“For you, I would climb the highest mountain, swim to the bottom of the deepest ocean,” he said.

“That’s a bit dramatic, but I love it,” she said. “Sarah Churchill is throwing this elegant dinner at her penthouse. David told me you were a good friend of hers. Normally, I would invite Gene (Lyons), but he’s a bit incapacitated.”

Jimmy knew that meant he was too drunk to escort her. Without her having to ask, he immediately chimed in, “I’d love to be your escort.”

“Oh, that would be delightful,” she said. “The answer to a girl’s dream.”

After negotiating his way through the details with her, he put down the phone, later telling Bast about the invitation. “I am thrilled. Tennessee and Bill Inge have the hots for me, and now the ice queen herself. High Noon Grace Kelly wants to see what I’m hauling around in my jockey shorts.”

“It sounds to me like she merely wants you to escort her to Lady Sarah’s bash. What are you going to do? You don’t have a tux.”

“Leave it to Jimmy,” he said, speaking in the third person. “I’ll turn on the James Dean charm and have that tux by five o’clock this afternoon.”

An hour later, he was inside Swift’s apartment. “You started this thing about me being in the escort business. I need some fancy duds.”

“I have three tuxedos,” Swift said. “If you can’t fit into one of mine, I’ll rent you one from a place nearby.”

At exactly five o’clock, Jimmy called Bast “I have the tux. I’ve tried it on. I look like a million dollars.”

“I hear Gary Cooper (they call him ‘the Montana Mule’) is a tough act to follow,” Bast said.

“Whatever I lack, I’ll make up for with youth, beauty, and stamina. I hear Grace is going to become the Queen of Hollywood. Guess who’ll be her Prince Consort?”’

Inside her penthouse, as hostess at her dinner party, Lady Sarah welcomed Grace and Jimmy warmly. “Come in, dear hearts,” she said, “and let the butler get you a drink. I’ve had a few libations already.”

Sarah introduced him around. First, he met the French star, Louis Jourdan, who had been recently voted the most handsome man in the world. Shortly thereafter (in 1956), he’d be making a movie with Grace (The Swan), in which he’d be cast as a tutor in love with a princess-to-be, a bit of real life casting. Ironically, Jimmy, too, would soon be co-starring with Jourdan in the Broadway play, The Immoralist.

To Jimmy’s surprise, Jourdan’s escort for the evening was a most unlikely choice—Danny Kaye, the red-haired, highly excitable comedian who always seemed to be cavorting hilariously on screen.

Later, the tipsy Sarah whispered into Jimmy’s ear: “Louis and Danny are lovers—that is, when Danny isn’t having to fuck Larry Olivier.”

Looking as elegant and serene as Grace herself, another (slightly older) blonde goddess, Joan Fontaine, arrived at the party with an obviously gay escort. Jimmy had previously met her at Sardi’s.

Cecil Beaton arrived with Roddy McDowall, but whereas Roddy hugged and kissed Jimmy like an old friend, Beaton pretended to be meeting him for the first time. Memories of staging that sexual exhibition for Beaton and his British friends came rushing through Jimmy’s brain. He was tempted to say to him in front of the other guests, “Cecil, I haven’t seen you since you last sucked my dick,” but discretion won out.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was another guest. He was the most elegantly dressed of all the male guests. His date was the formidable Marlene Dietrich, his old flame from the 1930s. After Sarah introduced her to Jimmy, she eyed him skeptically.

Months later, columnist Hedda Hopper asked Jimmy if he’d like to meet Dietrich. He didn’t tell her he already had. “I don’t know if I would,” he said. “She’s such a figment of my imagination. I go whoop in the stomach when you ask me if I’d like to meet her. Too much woman. You look at her and you think, ‘I’d like to have that.’” [Jimmy’s quote about Dietrich appeared in Hopper’s book, The Whole Truth and Nothing But.]

After his death, Dietrich shared her opinion of Jimmy to Hopper. “He was small, ugly, hunchbacked with a potbelly, and bow-legged. If he’d lived, he’d have a larger potbelly, wear a wig, and have died of AIDS.”

Fairbanks was more charming than Dietrich, announcing to anyone within earshot, “I saw Bette Davis the other night,” he said. “She recalled our first meeting at a party. I was married to Joan Crawford at the time. We chatted politely until I suddenly thrust my hand into her bra. I felt her tits—rather large. I recommended that she use ice on her nipples like my wife did. Bette later said she found my behavior appalling. Imagine saying such a thing about a gentleman like me.”

“Sarah told me that Noël Coward will be arriving soon,” Fairbanks said to Jimmy. “Watch out for that one. He had such a crush on me back in the 1930s. Did you know that he wrote that hit song about me, ‘Mad About the Boy?’”

Fairbanks had no sooner uttered that revelation than in walked Noël Coward himself, with Judy Garland on his arm.

Garland hugged and kissed Jimmy like a long-lost lover. “Darling,” she said, in reference to their drunken three-way long ago back in Los Angeles. “You took French leave. You didn’t even stick around for breakfast with John [Carlyle] and me.”

“He was my lover,” she said. “As you well know, I can’t rely on the unreliable dicks of the jerks I’ve married.”

Throughout the remainder of the evening, Coward and Sarah—although giving the impression that they were the best of friends—shared some long sequences of rather cutting banter.

“Noël, darling,” Sarah said. “Opinions about you vary so. Lord Louis Mountbatten once told me that no one could prick the bloom of pomposity quite like you. On the other hand, Rex Harrison claims that in so many ways, you’re a terrible cunt.”

At one point, Coward joined Jimmy on the sofa during a moment when Grace was away. Then he very bluntly asked him, “Are you gay, dear boy?”

“I can take it, but not with a woman,” Coward said. “All that open plumbing revolts me. I imagine doing it with a woman is like feeling the skin of a rattlesnake. Perhaps you and I will get together during my time in New York. As Mae West might say, ‘Come up and see me sometime.’ The sooner the better. How about tomorrow night in my suite at the Waldorf Astoria? I’ll leave clearance for you at the desk.”

Based on Coward’s influence in the theater and his “celebrity quotient,” Jimmy had every intention of keeping that date. But the following morning, something came up.

After the party at Lady Sarah’s, Jimmy had escorted Grace back to the Plaza. She had kissed him good night in the lobby, but had not invited him upstairs.

She telephoned him at eleven the next morning. It seemed that Gene Lyons had still not recovered, and that he had accused her of cheating on him. In the aftermath of the fight that ensued, they had canceled their plans for a rendezvous that night.

Into her end of the phone, Grace said to Jimmy, “I had planned this lovely dinner for him in my suite,” she said. “And I hate to dine alone. I even purchased a lovely new gown from Oleg Cassini, and I’m dying to show it off. Would you be a doll and fill in for Gene one more time? At eight o’clock tonight?”

Bubbling over with excitement, Jimmy phoned Stanley Haggart. “Can you believe it? Two dazzling invitations at the same time tonight—one to Noël Coward’s suite, another to Grace Kelly’s. What to do? I’m not really suited to Coward’s comedies or musicals. I’d do better as Grace’s co-star in her future movies. She’s going to be big. She told me she’s returning to Hollywood. MGM wants to cast her in a jungle movie with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner.”

“Well, it looks like Coward’s loss will be Grace’s good fortune,” Haggart responded.

The question remains unanswered. Did Jimmy seduce Grace Kelly that night in her suite at the Plaza? Or, phrased another way, did she seduce him?

When Haggart was asked about this, he said, “Frankly, I don’t know. He never described to me how the evening went.”

“And I was too polite to ask,” Haggart said. “But based on their reputation—and I mean, both of their reputations—I can be almost 90% certain that they did the dirty deed. And why not?”

As preposterous as it sounded at the time, Jimmy’s dream of co-starring with Grace Kelly almost came to be. After she left New York for Hollywood, she did not disappear from his life completely. They would meet again when George Stevens wanted to cast them together as co-stars in Giant with Rock Hudson.