JIMMY’S JAILBAIT. HIS AFFAIR & CORRESPONDENCE WITH
BARBARA GLENN
The setting was Cromwell’s Pharmacy, within the NBC Building in Manhattan, as 1952 was drawing to a close. A just-turned sixteen-year-old wannabe actress, Barbara Glenn, who descended from a Jewish family in Queens, was sitting at a table sipping soda with her actor friends, Martin Landau, Rusty Slocum, and Carol Sinclair.
Barbara Glenn with James Dean at the beach. He later described her as “my neurotic little shit.”
At this time in his life, James Dean made almost daily visits to this actors’ hangout, with its bank of pay phones where hopefuls were always phoning their agents to see if any acting gigs had come through.
“Who’s that attractive man?” Glenn asked, as she stared at Jimmy, who stood about twelve feet away. He had already signaled a greeting to his friend Landau.
“I know him,” Landau said. “I’ll bring him over and introduce you to him.” Then he walked over to alert Jimmy that he had an admirer.
From a distance, Jimmy appraised her. “Looks like jailbait to me.” Nonetheless, he came over and greeted her, although he didn’t have much to say.
At least she learned that he was set to open that night on Broadway in See the Jaguar, a play starring Arthur Kennedy.
Glenn later shared her impressions of that afternoon. “Martin told me that Jimmy thought I was ‘magnificently gorgeous.’ Jimmy seemed rather shy, and didn’t talk much, but I found him appealing, but not devastatingly so. He was different from the people I knew, not that I knew many. He was so very young. Actually, I thought he was my age until I learned otherwise. I felt he might be boyfriend material. He was good looking enough, but I sensed something beneath his surface. There was an aura of danger about him, but not enough to scare me off. I wished him luck on his opening night and agreed to meet him at Cromwell’s the following afternoon to hear about it.”
At table with Glenn, Slocum, a late teenager wannabe actor, observed her flirtation with Jimmy. “I didn’t think much would come of it, just another of Jimmy’s passing fancies. He’d hook up with some girl in the afternoon. When you’d see him later that night at Jerry’s, that girl would be someone else. The afternoon brunette had been replaced by the night’s blonde or redhead.”
“Jimmy had this technique when talking to you of making you feel you were uttering words of wisdom and you were the most fabulous person he’d ever met,” Slocum said. “I saw him pull that stunt on the very young and impressionable Barbara Glenn. All of us at the time were just the little girlfriends or little boyfriends of Jimmy’s. We came and we went, like the hamburgers served at Cromwell’s.”
The next day, Jimmy met Glenn at Cromwell’s for a soda, telling her that See the Jaguar had won raves for his performance, but that the play itself had been critically denounced. “I’ll probably be back knocking on the doors of casting agents in a few days.”
She remembered he brought her a short story to read, “A Tree of Night” by Truman Capote. It was the tale of a college girl traveling on a crowded train. On board, she encounters two grotesques, a zombie-like man and a mysterious woman with an oversized head. He told her it was an allegory about a sane person who can succumb to the terror hidden within one’s darkest soul.
Then he leaned over the table and told her, “You remind me of my mother, Mildred. She deserted me long ago. I mean, she up and died on me. She wasn’t even thirty.”
As Glenn later recalled, “No sixteen-year-old girl wants to hear a prospective boyfriend tell her she reminds him of his mother, but our relationship survived that disaster.”
“I felt sorry for him. His mother died even before America entered World War II, but he still hadn’t recovered from her loss. He also told me that his father, Winton, had also abandoned him when he was just a boy. When he discussed his parents, he reminded me of a nine-year-old, a little boy lost.”
“Soon, we were dating,” she recalled. The two of them could be seen speeding through the canyons of Manhattan on his motorcycle, with Glenn holding onto Jimmy for dear life. “He was a terrible cyclist, weaving dangerously in and out of traffic.”
“When I survived yet another ride on that motorcycle, we used to sit and talk quietly on a bench in Central Park,” she said. “I had to walk on eggshells when chatting with him. The slightest remark could make him furious.”
“I was always fearful of his motorcycle riding,” Glenn claimed. “I consider his machine an instrument of death. I remember half of my time with Jimmy involved waiting for him to show up, because he was always late, and I was always wondering if he was going to make it. I always had the feeling that somehow, some way, some day, he was not going to show up. He did crash his motorcycle on one occasion. Fortunately, he wasn’t badly hurt. But what about the next crash, or even the crash after that?”
“I can never get along without my little cycle,” he claimed. “I guess I’ll never sell it. It’s like a brother to me. Of course, there is danger. I’m reminded that an actor with only half a face is no actor at all.”
Their motorcycle rides often came to a stop in front of Figaro’s, their hangout in Greenwich Village at the corner of MacDougal and Bleeker Streets.
When he introduced her one night to Arthur Kennedy, backstage at one of See the Jaguar’s few performances, he warned the older actor, “Barbara’s neuroticism is the equal of my own, and that’s saying a lot. But her eighteen-inch waist and thirty-six inch bust go a long way.”
As one of Glenn’s girlfriends later reported, “Every sixteen-year-old girl supposedly has to lose her virginity. Although I wasn’t there, I just assumed that Barbara eventually lost hers to this Jimmy Dean, who apparently liked to deflower virgins.”
William Bast wanted to know who this new woman—or girl—was in Jimmy’s life. During a telephone call, he described her as, “She’s good looking, as busty as Marilyn Monroe, tall, very, very young, rather thin, as hyperactive and combustible as I am. We have lots of fights, tons of makeup sessions. We both have the temperament of Mount Vesuvius.”
During the spring of 1953, the two of them often engaged in epic battles, but would eventually come together and be seen on his motorcycle again.
“Sometimes, I would scream at him and pound his chest,” she said. “People who knew us compared us to a fighting cat and dog.”
At times, he was worried that he might accidentally get her pregnant. “I hate using a rubber,” he told his friend, Stanley Haggart. “It dulls the sensation for me. I like skin meeting skin, like rubber hitting the road in a car.”
With summer approaching, Barbara managed to get a gig at the Cragsmoor Playhouse in the Catskills. When Jimmy heard the news, he exploded in anger.
Friends of her were giving her a farewell party, to which she invited him. “He showed up in a real foul mood, ignoring everybody, even me,” Glenn said. “It was a horrible night. He finally stormed out the door without even a goodbye.”
Devastated, she left her own party to find him, figuring he might have gone over to Jerry’s Tavern, where he often spent his evenings. He wasn’t there. She sat alone at a table, not managing to hold back her tears. About an hour later, he showed up.
“He didn’t apologize for his outrageous behavior,” she said. “That was not his style. He just held my hand and looked deeply into my teary eyes. Without saying a word, we made up and later spent the night together.”
He wrote to her in the Catskills, complaining that except for some teleplays that spring, “the pickings are slim here. Television has gone into the summer doldrums. Jane Deacy has lined up only two or three teleplays for me, each of which pays starvation wages.”
He told her he was going to perform two dramatic readings, one of which was from Metamorphosis, a stage play adapted from the novel by Franz Kafka. “It was really Kafka’s nightmare,” he wrote. “I play a man who wakes up one morning to discover that overnight, he’s been transformed into this hideous giant insect. My reading is set for August at the Village Theatre. Definitely off-Broadway.”
The second reading was of Jonathan Bates’ play, The Fell Swoop, presented on June 23 at the Palm Gardens in the New Dramatists’ headquarters on West 52nd Street.
During the summer of 1953, Jimmy lived in Bates’ apartment during periods when he was out of town. Rather cherubic looking, Bates was Irish and worked as a purser for Trans World Airlines. He had three dogs, and, in exchange for free lodging, Jimmy agreed to feed and walk his animals whenever Bates was away tending to business abroad.
“Jimmy was an animal lover,” Glenn said. “But he complained about having to walk them, and he also said that the dogs kept him up at night.”
Glenn often visited him in Bates’ apartment, which was above the Brown Derby Restaurant at 40 West 52nd Street. “I remember its cabaret sign flashing all night, lighting up the living room with its neon glow.”
Jimmy told Glenn that he’d lost a few pounds. “Meals are few and far between unless I bum a few.”
“That drew a response from her, and she sent him a check for a hundred dollars, with a note: “For seventy-five cents, you can get a huge plate of spaghetti and meatballs on Thompson Street in The Village.
During her months with him, Glenn would often supply Jimmy with enough cash to tide him over between work assignments in teleplays.
For some reason, he eventually wrote to Glenn in the Catskills, describing the nighttime scene in Manhattan, a venue with which she was already familiar.
“In the pensiveness of night, the cheap, monotonous, shrill, symbolic sensual beat of suggestive drums tattoos orgyistic images on my brain. The smell of gin and 90% beer, entwine with the sometimes suspenseful, slow, sometimes labored static, sometimes motionless, sometimes painfully rigid, till finally, the long-waited for jerks and convulsions that fill the now thick chewing gum haze with a mist of sweat, fling the patrons into a fit of suppressed joy. The fated 7 days a week bestial virgin bows with the poise of a drunken pavlova. Rivulets of stale perspiration glide from and between her once well-formed anatomy to the anxious, welcoming front-row celebrities who lap it up with infamous glee. The Aura of Horror. I live above it and below it…It is my Divine Comedy. The Dante of 52nd Street. There is no peace in our world. I love you. I would like to write about nice things, or fiction, but we shouldn’t avoid reality should we? The things I have just written are the truth. They are very hard to write about. I am lonely. Forgive me. I am lonely. Love, Jim.“
In a letter he wrote to her in August, shortly before her return to New York, he said:
“I am very lonely for you. I am alone. Thoughts are sweet, then wicked, then perverse, then penitent, then sweet. The moon is not blue. It hangs there in the sky no more. Forgive me for such a sloppy letter. I’m a little drunk. I drink a bit lately. You see, I don’t know what’s going on. Remarkable lot, human beings. In an antiphonal azure swing, souls drone their unfinished melody. When did we live and when did we not? In my drunken stupor, I said a gem. Great actors are often time pretentious livers. The pretentious actor, a great liver. God Damnit! I miss you!”
When Glenn returned to New York, she resumed her relationship with him. She didn’t ask him if he’d dated other girls while she was away. But he did say, “You must have met a lot of handsome guys this summer, chasing you up and down those Catskill mountains.”
“He was physically as gorgeous as ever,” she said. “Still, with that lost boy quality. He obviously hadn’t found himself since I left him. When I did ask him a direct question, he mumbled an answer. I came to suspect he was leading a double or triple life, one with me, and two or three with other lovers. He seemed to have a lot of needs to satisfy, and I suspected I couldn’t fulfill all of them. Yet he talked of marriage, but didn’t give me a direct proposal, much less an engagement ring, not that he could afford one.”
As 1953 progressed through autumn and winter, he would disappear from her life for two or three days at a time without calling. Once, he was gone for two weeks and returned without apologies or explanations.
His friend, Stanley Haggart, was aware of at least two affairs he was having, one with the actor John Kerr, and another with Betsy Palmer. He’d appeared in teleplays with each of them.
“There were a few others along the way,” Haggart recalled. “I vaguely remember a woman named Arlene Sachs. Jimmy told me some wild stories. All this was going on before he left for Hollywood to work with Elia Kazan. I don’t think Barbara Glenn knew half of what Jimmy was up to. Perhaps I’m wrong.”
His love affair with his old motorcycle ended when he saved up enough money to purchase a better one. Even though it was deep in winter, he told Glenn that he planned to ride his motorcycle back to Fairmount.
“Please, if you’re going to die, why not stay in New York?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “I’m heading home to Indiana, all eight hundred miles, and on my new motorcycle. I’ve got to try it. It’s great…don’t worry.”
“It’s your life,” she said, almost wanting to give up on him and stop worrying about his safety.
“Soon, he was presumably in Indiana,” she said, “or else dead on the highway somewhere. I didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks. When he came back to Manhattan, he told me horrendous stories of snow and ice that would make Greenland look like a tropic zone.”
“There were times I practically froze to death,” he claimed, “but I drove all the way there and all the way back without one accident, except that time on an icy road when I crashed into a snowbank. But I emerged without a scratch, except I hurt my balls. But they’re in working order once again.”
At long last, Jane Deacy got him another role on Broadway, this time for an appearance as a blackmailing homosexual Arab boy, tangling with French actor Louis Jourdan and co-starring Geraldine Page, in the stage adaptation of André Gide’s autobiographical novel, The Immoralist.
After weeks of traumatic rehearsals and endless conflicts with his fellow actors [for more on this, refer to chapter 14 of this biography], tryouts were in Philadelphia. From there, he wrote to her from his lodgings in the St. James Hotel, illustrating his letter with whimsical illustrations and doodles.
“I hate the god damn brown makeup I’m forced to wear. The play is full of shit. Stereophonic staging and 3-D actors. I’s so bad it will probably be a monstrous success since the theater-going public on Broadway is stupid, filled with bored housewives and insurance salesmen guaranteed to sleep through most of the play after a hard day’s work.”
“I bought a new magenta-colored gown for the opening night of The Immoralist, and thought I looked dazzling,” Glenn recalled. “I thought it was going to be a glorious night for Jimmy. His aunt, Ortense, and his uncle, Marcus Winslow, flew in from Indiana. I was not introduced to them, and I got the idea that Jimmy had told them I was going to be his bride.”
“I met Jimmy backstage in his dressing room, and he invited me to Sardi’s, where the cast would be headed after the show. But instead of dressing up, he put on a smelly T-shirt and a pair of ripped blue jeans.”
Of course, once at Sardi’s the doorman turned him away, and he had to go back to his apartment and put on a suit.
“When he did arrive, the tension was awful,” she said. “He immediately insulted Louis Jourdan, and also the director, Daniel Mann. He told them he didn’t want to be in their stupid play ‘written by that French faggot, André Gide.’ I couldn’t take his bitching any more, and I left quickly. He followed me onto the street, and we had this big blow-up fight there on the sidewalk.”
“Orson Welles was coming in the door with Janet Leigh, of all people. They stopped and witnessed our domestic violence. At one point, Jimmy slapped me, and I ran screaming down the street. We didn’t speak for days, but once again, we made up. I knew, though, that our relationship was doomed.”
***
When Jimmy went to Hollywood to film East of Eden, he wrote letters to Glenn in New York, telling her how miserable he was. [One of them is replicated, with its errors in spelling and grammar, immediately below.]
“I don’t know why people reject me. I don’t want to write this letter. It would be better to remain silent. Wow! Am I fucked up.
Got here on a Thursday went to the desert on Sat, week later to San Francisco. I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM. Rented a car for two weeks. It cost me $138.00. I WANT TO DIE. I have told the girls here to kiss my ass and what sterile, spineless, stupid prostitutes they were. I HAVEN’T BEEN TO BED WITH NO BODY. And won’t until after the picture and I am home safe in N.Y.C. (snuggly little town that it is) sounds unbelievable, but it’s the truth I swear. So hold everything stop breathing. Stop the town all of N.Y.C ., untill (should have trumpets here) James Dean returns.
I got no motorcycle I got no girl HONEY, shit writing in capitals doesn’t seem to help either. Haven’t found a place to live yet HONEY. Kazan sent me out here to get a tan. Haven’t seen the sun yet (fog and smog). Wanted me healthy looking. I look like a prune. Don’t run away from home at too early an age or you’ll have to take vitamens the rest of your life. Write me please. I’m sad most of the time. Awful lonely too. (I hope you’re dying) BECAUSE I AM.
Love,
Jim (Brando Clift) Dean
While he was in Hollywood, she wrote him with news that she’d gotten a job posing for a swimsuit photo layout. He wrote back, “Boy, that‘s selling out cheap.”
Years later, she remembered her feelings at the time: “He accused me of selling out cheap. A boy who had allegedly posed for nude pictures, perhaps even porno.”
Before the filming of East of Eden began, director Elia Kazan summoned all the principal actors, including Raymond Massey and Julie Harris, to rehearsals. Jimmy wrote to Glenn in New York with a description of how they were progressing. His reference to “Lennie” in his letter was about Jimmy’s good friend, Leonard Rosenman, who had been commissioned to compose music for the film.
“Have been very dejected and extremely moody last two weeks. Have been telling everybody to fuck off and that’s no good. I could never make them believe I was working on my part. Poor Julie Harris doesn’t know what to do. Everyone turns into an idiot out here. I have only one friend, one guy that I can talk to and be understood. I hope Lennie comes out here. I need someone from New York. Cause I’m mean and I’m really kind and gentle. Things get mixed up all the time. I see a person I would like to be very close to (everybody), then I think it would just be the same as before and they don’t give a shit for me. Then I say something nasty or nothing at all and walk away. The poor person doesn’t know what happened. He doesn’t realize that I have decided I don’t like him. What’s wrong with people. Idiots. (I won’t fail please.)”
In May of 1954, from Hollywood, he wrote this to Glenn:
“Pleased to hear from you. That’s putting it mildly. Gadge [Elia Kazan] and Tenn [Tennessee Williams] are nice but I wouldn’t trust the sons-a-bitches far’s I could throw them. They can take advantage of you like nobody else.
“HONEY!!! I’m still a Calif, virgin, remarkable no. I’m saving it—H-bomb Dean.
“A new addition has been added to the Dean family. I got a red ’53 MG (milled head, etc. hot engine). My sex pours itself into fat curves, broadslides, and broodings, drags, etc. You have plenty of competition. My motorcycle, my MG, and my girl. I have been sleeping with my MG. We make it together, honey.”
In yet another letter to Glenn, he wrote:
“I haven’t written because I’ve fallen in love. It had to happen sooner or later. Enclosed is not a very good picture of him. That’s Cisco the Kid, the new member of the family. He gives me confidence. He makes my hands strong. May use him in a movie.” [Jimmy was referring to his latest acquisition, a thoroughbred palomino horse.]
It was during his filming of East of Eden that Glenn wrote Jimmy a “Dear John” letter, informing him that she’d met someone new, the love of her life, and that she had agreed to marry him.
Jimmy accepted the news good-naturedly Actually, it wasn’t that painful to him, because he was dating Pier Angeli, the Italian actress.
After mailing her “Dear John” letter, Glenn’s affair with her new love came to an abrupt end when she discovered that her husband-to-be was simultaneously engaged to another young actress. She broke up with him, but a few weeks later, fell madly in love once again—this time with the man she would eventually marry.
When he returned to New York, she confronted Jimmy with news about the changes in her life, telling him she could no longer be his girlfriend. “This time I mean it,” she told him. “This man really loves me and doesn’t have a cheating heart like some men I’ve known.”
Jimmy realized that that reference included him.
To her surprise, he asked to meet her husband-to-be. She reluctantly agreed, fearing he would make a scene. However, their dinner went pleasantly enough, although the two rivals in love had little to say to each other.
Jimmy later told William Bast, “When he got up to go to the men’s room—men don’t call it powdering their noses, do they?—I followed him. There were three urinals. I stood beside him and looked down. His piss was white, not yellow. If she didn’t already know it, I should have warned Barbara that she wouldn’t be getting ‘Long John.’”
After dinner, Jimmy insisted on seeing her alone for a final farewell and, to the surprise and dismay of her new lover, she returned with Jimmy, alone, to his apartment on West 68th Street.
There, he shocked her by pleading with her to marry him, not her intended fiancé.
She noticed a small suitcase on his bed. It was filled with cash. “This looks like a lot of money,” she said.
“Now that you have money yourself, are you trying to pay me back? From the looks of things, I never lent you all this much.”
“You can’t leave me, Barbara, please!.” He was pleading, beseeching her. “If you leave me, I’ll kill myself. My death will be on your hands. Do you want that?”
“Of course I don’t, and you’re not going to kill yourself,” she said. “You and I wouldn’t last in a marriage for more than two weeks, and in your heart, you know that I’m getting married to the man you met tonight. And that’s final. I’m leaving. Goodbye forever, Jimmy. Don’t ever call or write to me again.”
As she headed out the door to the stairwell, he ran after her, carrying the suitcase of money. Impulsively, he threw some of the cash after her, the bills cascading down upon her.
She did not look back. All she remembered was his calling out to her. But instead of “Barbara,” it was “STELLA! STELLA! STELLA!” He had lapsed into a re-enactment of the famous scene where Brando screams with primal anguish for his wife in A Streetcar Named Desire.
***
After hearing about Jimmy’s death in 1955, Glenn told a reporter: “He was a terribly destructive person. Our relationship was destructive. I knew he would destroy himself in the end, and that’s why his death did not come as a surprise. It was as if my reaction to it happened so long ago.”