JAMES DEAN

“Working with this monster boy was my worst experience ever with an actor.”

—Playwright Ruth Goetz, co-author of The Immoralist

“The Role Calls for a Feygele”

Billy Rose, the famous impresario and theatrical showman, was set to bring André Gides’s The Immoralist to Broadway. It was daring and avant-garde for its era, relaying the tale of a long-suffering wife married to a homosexual who gets embroiled in a blackmail scheme after a sexual liaison with a scheming Arab boy.

The controversial French intellectual, ex-con, and commentator on sexuality and colonialism, André Gide.

Rose met with his director, Herman Shumlin. They had already agreed that Geraldine Page, Jimmy’s friend, would play the lead role of the anguished wife of the closeted husband. The Arab boy was yet to be cast.

“For the husband, we’ll need one of the famous feygele—you know, faggots such as Brando, Monty Clift, or perhaps Tyrone Power. Perhaps a bisexual like Richard Burton.”

About the last person one might ever have expected Gide or his work to ever be linked to was the flamboyant Broadway impresario, Billy Rose, depicted above

...But as industry veterans have often said, “THAT’S SHOW BIZ!”

“But where in the fuck are we going to get some kid to play the little Arab queer, that blackmailing, insolent, thieving, pervert who rents his ass to soldiers at the local barracks?”

“The kid has to be good looking,” Shumlin said. “Enough for the soldier to want to fuck him. He could be slightly effeminate, but not too much so, since he is also athletic. Perhaps a swimmer’s build. I’ve seen this one kid perform before. He’s the only boy I know who can pull it off.”

“His body is lilywhite but it can be darkened with makeup,” Shumlin answered. “We don’t want him too dark. We don’t want to get into any interracial protests here. But from what I hear, the kid can take it up the ass and he’s a Method actor, so he can use his personal experience to add authenticity to the role.”

Playwrights Ruth and Augustus Goetz had scored a hit when they adapted Henry James’ novella, Washington Sqare into a play, The Heiress, which opened on Broadway in 1947. [It was later adapted into a film, a box office hit, with triumphant acting by Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift]

A few years later, the playwrights decided to tackle a dramatization of André Gide’s controversial novel, The Immoralist. The great and defiantly homosexual avant-garde French writer had based his work in part on his own unconsummated marriage to Madeleine Rondeaux.

Set in French colonial Algeria at the turn of the 20^th Century, the story is that of complex marital problems a young archeologist faces in the wake of his marriage to the most respectable woman in the Norman village where they lived. She cannot understand his coldness to her until he explains that he is a homosexual, with past scandals that return from time to time to haunt him. That revelation leads to his wife’s descent into alcohol abuse, insanity, and death.

Homosexuality was a daring subject to dramatize, or even discuss, during the homophobic Eisenhower era. Many unsophisticated critics would refer to it in odious terms, one of them defining it as “the abominable crime,” another labeling it as “an affliction.

Nonetheless, plays with homosexual themes had already begun creeping into mainstream Broadway venues. The New York-born theatrical showman Billy Rose had been impressed with the box office success of Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy (1953), whose theme involved a schoolboy falsely accused of homosexuality and the (supposedly successful) efforts of an older woman to alleviate his anxieties. Its male ingenu protagonist had been brilliantly portrayed by John Kerr, Jimmy’s former lover. Perhaps with that in mind, Rose decided to apply his skills, as a producer, to a Broadway release of The Immoralist.

[Billy Rose was deep into a flamboyantly successful career. Once married (1929-1938) to Fanny Brice, he was also a lyricist credited with such famous songs as “Me and My Shadow” (1927), and “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (1933). Controversy had surrounded his staging of other plays he’d produced, including Clifford Odets’ Clash by Night (1941), adapted eleven years later into a movie with Barbara Stanwyck and Marilyn Monroe; and Carmen Jones (1943), featuring George Bizet’s opera score orchestrated for Broadway with performances by an all black cast.]

Actors who were considered for The Immoralist’s lead character, Michael [Michel in the original novel], included Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Tyrone Power. After each of them rejected it, it was assigned to Louis Jourdan.

Born in Marseille, he had made his American film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947) opposite Gregory Peck. Jourdan had also scored a hit in Max Ophüls Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), appearing opposite Joan Fontaine.

The Immoralist’s role of the morally upright, long-suffering wife was assigned to Geraldine Page, Jimmy’s friend from the Actors Studio, who had previously scored a huge hit as Alma, the lonely spinster, in Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke (1948).

As director, Rose selected Herman Shumlin, one of the most respected names on Broadway. He was already known for his direction of plays which included Watch on the Rhine (1941), and Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1939).

Rose fully understood that the role of the thieving teenaged pervert, Bachir, would be hard to cast. A blackmailing schemer, he rents out his body for sodomy to the (French) soldiers at the local barracks. He’s also on the lookout for rich tourists he can ensnare in his web. Immediately, he recognizes Michael as a closeted homosexual and sets out to seduce him.

Jimmy’s theatrical agent, Jane Deacy, had read the script and thought he would be ideal in the role. She arranged for him to show up at a reading before the play’s director (Shumlin) and its co-author (Ruth Goetz).

Ruth recalled her first encounter with Jimmy. “He appeared in a ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots, a bright green vest, and jeans—he looked like a little Irishman, hardly ideal for playing an Arab boy. Then he read, and he was instinctively right, charming, but with a nasty, suggestive sexual undercurrent.”

Shumlin agreed. “Dean was absolutely perfect for the role, once we applied some brown makeup and darkened his blonde hair. He perfectly combined the quality of pretend sweetness with a sinister kind of evil under his skin.”

Rehearsals were at the old Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan, where Jimmy reunited with Page.

Paul Hubner, one of the cast members, said, “We thought they were lovers. They were always hugging and kissing.”

Jimmy denied it: “She’s like a mother to me, very supportive. Would you fuck your mother? Wouldn’t that make you a mother-fucker?”

Page seemed delighted with her role. “As an actress, it is a dream part for me. I get drunk. I go mad. And I die!”

“Louis and Jimmy hated each other on sight,” Page said. “They had met before at Sarah Churchill’s party, where Jourdan had appeared with his sometimes lover, Danny Kaye. Louis was a classically trained actor, and he detested Jimmy’s Method approach. His style of acting was not really the Method, but it was Jimmy’s way, which Louis—to his utmost frustration—could never really decipher.”

During rehearsals, Page was the only player who understood Jimmy’s way of approaching a role. “He had to work himself into the character, during which time he was slowly committing the script to memory. He would mutter and mumble, filling in the blank spaces with words not in the script.”

After he saw this photo of himself, French actor Louis Jourdan said, “I was voted the handsomest man in the world, but I should also have been voted the sexiest.”

Furious, Jourdan complained to Shumlin about this: “The jerk is uttering obscenities. He whimpers, he cries, he curses.”

According to Page, “Jimmy is like a cat that jumps a great distance without the need to know how far he was to jump. I assured Louis that Jimmy would be perfect on opening night.”

“Working with Dean, this monster boy, was the worst experience I ever had with an actor,” Ruth Goetz said. “He was slovenly, always late, unspeakably detestable.”

Alert to the eccentricities of artistic talent, Shumlin granted Jimmy free rein, letting him improvise wildly until he worked himself into the character. After a few days, he evolved into a sort of father figure for Jimmy. During a break in rehearsals, Jimmy was sometimes spotted resting his head on the director’s shoulder.

Cast and crew eventually headed to Philadelphia for a week of tryouts at the Forrest Theater.

“I don’t know from fairies,” Rose told Ruth. “But I hear Jimmy’s one, and the play is about fairies. So I’ll sit through it and tell you what I think.”

Consequently, Rose rode the train from New York to Philadelphia, and watched one of The Immoralist’s dress rehearsals. Then, after conferring with Ruth and Augustus Goetz, he decided to fire Shumlin.

Although he was both respected and talented, and had directed many Alist stars, Shumlin had seemed reticent, even embarrassed, by the homosexual overtones of the play. In Rose’s view, Shumlin was “skirting the issues associated with love that dare not speak its name.”

Shumlin was dismissed immediately. As his replacement, Rose appointed Daniel Mann, another well-known director.

In front of Mann, before commuting back to New York, Rose articulated his opinion of Jimmy: “The kid has all these adolescent notions about being a man. He carries a switchblade and rides a motorcycle. A big fucking man, that one! I think he’s mentally disturbed.”

It can be argued that Daniel Mann (aka, Daniel Chugerman, depicted above) suffered more than any other director because of James Dean.

In his words: “I directed Shirley Booth, Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, and Elizabeth Taylor, but James Dean was my biggest headache. When Billy Rose, phoned me from New York about casting him, I told him, “That Dean’s acting is like a fox trying to fuck a football. He’s all around it, but he can’t get into it.”

Bill Gunn, an African-American actor and playwright, had been cast as Jimmy’s understudy. “I predicted fireworks would result from Mann’s attempts to direct Jimmy, and, indeed, some Fourth of July blasts went off.”

Soon after Mann’s takeover of the play’s direction, the other cast members, mainly Jourdan, expressed harsh appraisals of Jimmy and his work habits. Only Page took up for him.

During their first encounter, Mann told Jimmy, “I’m not going to sugar-tit you.”

“Too bad, Jimmy replied, defiantly. “Most men claim my tits are sweeter than any honey a bee ever made.”

“Forget everything you’ve ever learned from the Jewish Pope [a reference to Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio] and listen to me,” Mann demanded.

Then, much to Jimmy’s annoyance, Mann set about revising the script, cutting out many of Bachir’s lines.

“I think the bastard wants to write me out of the play,” he complained to Page.

From then on, Jimmy launched a war against Mann, at least when he wasn’t battling with Jourdan.

Ruth said, “The battle raged through and included the final rehearsals. At times, Dean seemed to be performing in a play that he’d written himself, something that had nothing to do with my script.”

According to Page, “One day, Jimmy stormed out of the theater, and we didn’t think he was going to return. Finally, after a few hours, he showed up to discover Bill Gunn rehearsing Bachir’s part with the other actors. This sobered Jimmy, and he was back in the role.”

Mann wanted to fire him altogether until he discovered that from the beginning, he’d had a run-of-the-play contract, which meant that he would have to be paid whether he worked as a participating actor or not.

Rose told Mann, “If the little prick doesn’t cut the shit, he walks, contract or no contract. Let him sue me.”

Jimmy’s big scene was the so-called “scissors dance,” where moved sinuously, suggestively, even frenziedly, while brandishing a pair of scissors.

According to Gunn, “For the first time, I think Jimmy really listened to Mann’s direction.”

Mann had advised, “For this dance, imagine you’re bouncing up and down on a very big cock. From what I hear, that is something you really know how to do.”

Geraldine Page (above, left) claimed that Jimmy looked “the least like an Arab boy of anyone you could imagine. That face, that blonde hair. But he made us feel he was an Arab—not by his looks, but by his acting.”

As Gunn later said, “Jimmy was no Yvonne de Carlo, but his dance would become the highlight of the show.”

Jimmy discussed his scissors dance with Page. “It was the strings I was snipping away, the strings that bound the Frenchman’s character to the staid middle class morality of his early days in Normandy. The more I snipped and cut away with the scissors, the more I removed Michael from his hopeless respectability.”

For the play’s out-of-town opening in Philadelphia, Jimmy, as Bachir, appeared onstage with brown makeup and a seductive leer. From there, he attempted to entrap Michael with his sensual charm and that homoerotic scissors dance.

Ruth was amazed by the brilliance of Jimmy’s performance that night. “Backstage, he’d been a terror, the most unprofessional actor ever. But that night, he was a pro, playing the role perfectly and winning the approval of most of the Philadelphia critics.”

“Louis Jourdan truly detested Jimmy, based partly on his behavior during rehearsals, but I adored him,” said Geraldine Page, pictured above with Jourdan in a publicity photo for The Immoralist. “But it was hard to forgive him for walking out on the play after only two weeks, especially after getting such rave reviews. When he left, the play seemed to lose its power.”

Jimmy’s good behavior didn’t last long. At a Wednesday matinee, to demonstrate his loathing for Jourdan, Jimmy upstaged him. During the French actor’s execution of one of his key scenes, Jimmy reached into his pocket and took out an imaginary lollipop. Then he went through “pretend” motions of putting it in his mouth and vigorously sucking it.

When the curtain went down, Mann was furious. He chased Jimmy out through the stage door and into the street. He yelled, “If I get my hands on you, I’ll kill you, you bastard punk.”

The next day, Jimmy’s friend, Martin Landau, called from New York. “How’s it going, working with Jourdan?”

Louis Jourdan, onstage, with James Dean his bitter enemy, in The Immoralist. “We have a juvenile delinquent on our hands,” he told the director.

“He’s great,” Jimmy said in a mocking voice. Last night, he wasn’t his usual wooden self. He even managed to raise both of his hands at the same time.”

Cast and crew rode the train from Philadelphia back to New York to prepare for the play’s opening night on Broadway at the Royale Theatre on February 8, 1954. Its big-time debut, coincidentally, occurred on Jimmy’s 23^rd birthday.

On opening night, fifteen minutes before the curtain, Jimmy, outfitted in full Arab makeup and drag, took off on his Triumph motorcycle from an alley beside the theater.

Mann went into a frenzied panic, as did the rest of the cast and crew. Jimmy’s understudy, Bill Gunn, was ordered to prep himself as a replacement.

“I had never seen such tension backstage,” Page said. “Finally, at the last minute, Jimmy returned. I had been very patient with him, but this act to deliberately alarm everybody pissed me off, too.”

Jimmy’s destination, impetuously, even maniacally, pursued fifteen minutes before curtain time, had involved a meeting, bizarrely scheduled, with James McCarthy, a friend from his U.C.L.A. days. He told him, “I don’t want to be a good actor. I want to be the best actor there is. I told you I’d take the big town someday. My moment arrives tonight.”

Based on Jimmy’s brilliant performance, after the descent of the opening night’s final curtain Mann and Rose opted to forgive Jimmy’s horrible behavior. “Jimmy wooed audiences, and Louis [Jourdan] didn’t do badly either,” Page said.

But although rumor and fact are hard to decipher at this point, Jimmy nonetheless released a shocker, virtually during the curtain’s final descent. Still clad in his caftan, and with the understanding that he never wore underwear beneath his caftan, he curtsied like a girl.

James Dean performing the “Scissors Dance” onstage in The Immoralist.

His frequent mentor and supporter, James Sheldon, thought Jimmy was miscast. “The dirty, evil, seductive part he had down pat. But he was just too Indiana farmboy to be really convincing.”

Later, some members of the audience got a glimpse of just a flash of genitals as he curtsied; others maintained that only his upper thighs were visible. Confronted with this unexpectedly, it gave both Rose and Mann something else to be furious about, but when they realized what a hit Jimmy had been, they managed to control their tempers.

That very night, Jimmy would infuriate them even more when he officially and legally notified them of his plan to abandon his involvement in their play within fourteen days.

“It was his final ‘fuck-you’ to me and to everyone else in the play,” Rose said. “I confronted him and we really went at it. I threatened him that if he did that, he’d never work another day on Broadway, and he didn’t. ‘You’re a hit…Why throw it away?’ I asked him.”

Jimmy glared at Rose with fury. Then he spat on the floor. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

After that evening’s final curtain, Rod Steiger, a friend of Page at the time, was one of the first members of that night’s audience to arrive backstage. “Jimmy is playing Bachir like a Manhattan faggot. He’s not an Arab boy, but a hustler working Third Avenue.”

Other immediate, informal appraisals were less caustic; in fact, most of them were raves.

Within a few hours, key members of the cast gathered at Sardi’s to await that night’s late-edition newspaper reviews. Nearly all of them, despite its homosexual context, reviewed the play and its performers favorably. Jimmy, however, came out by far as the best.

William Watkins of The New York World-Telegraph wrote: “It is James Dean as the Arab houseboy who clearly and originally underlines the sleazy impertinence and the amoral opportunities which the husband must combat.”

Walter Kerr in The New York Herald Tribune noted, “James Dean makes a colorfully insinuating scapegrace.”

Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times referred to Jimmy’s “insidious charm,” and Richard Watts, Jr., of The New York Post found Jimmy “realistically unpleasant as the slimy one.”

In the Morning Telegraph George Freedley wrote: “James Dean gives the best masculine performance in the role of the Arab boy, a part which could easily have become extremely offensive with less good acting and direction.”

Henry Hewes in the Saturday Review made a prophecy: “At the play’s final curtain, one is left with the impression that Michael is a homosexual living ahead of his time, and that at some later date in the history of civilization, it will be possible for the abnormal to live undisguised and unapologetic within our society.”

Jimmy’s infuriating decision to abandon The Immoralist was catalyzed by Elia Kazan, who had dangled a pivotal role in his upcoming film East of Eden. The part that Kazan, and perhaps Destiny itself, had envisioned for Jimmy was that of Cal Trask, the rebellious and misunderstood younger brother, around whom the film revolved.

At the time, East of Eden’s screenplay was being adapted from John Steinbeck’s novel by Paul Osborne, author of Portrait of Jennie, a successful 1948 movie that had co-starred Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones.

Osborne had attended an out-of-town preview of The Immoralist and subsequently pleaded with Kazan that Jimmy would be perfect as Cal. Kazan, already familiar, through the Actors Studio, with Jimmy’s reputation and potential, went to see The Immoralist too.

Ultimately, Kazan agreed with Osborne’s assessment. “As I got to know Dean, I came to realize he was a shit, absolutely rotten to the core. He was a real cocker and an asshole. But he was the most perfect actor I knew for the part of Cal. All that Dean had to do was to play himself.”

On February 23, 1954, Jimmy delivered his final performance on Broadway, never to return. Mann transferred his part to Philip Pine, who had previously worked with Jimmy in See the Jaguar. Pine remained with the play until it closed on May 1 of that same year.

“After I got the part, my daughter, Macyle, wouldn’t speak to me for many days,” Pine said. “She was a great fan of Jimmy’s, and was mad at me for taking his role, even though I explained that Jimmy had quit and hadn’t been fired.”

Pine later expressed regret that The Immoralist didn’t make him a movie star. “Jimmy and I had the same aspirations when we knew each other,” he said. “In the end, that fickle goddess, Fame, decided to shine on him and not on me.”

Before Jimmy flew away to Hollywood for East of Eden, he telephoned John Gilmore. “I’m going to L.A. for a job, but I can’t tell you what it is. I’m sworn to secrecy. But I can tell you this: “I’m going to shake the shit out of Tinseltown.”

In Hollywood, long after memories of the Broadway opening of The Imoralist had faded, Beulah Roth encountered Rock Hudson and Louis Jourdan at a party. At the time, the two actors were engaged in a short-term affair.

She and her husband, Sanford Roth, the renowned photographer, had become close friends of Jimmy’s during his short lifetime. “We more or less adopted him in the summer of 1955,” she said.

“I asked the men what it was like working with Jimmy,” she said. “Rock gave me ‘that look,’ and Jourdan told me with a Gallic chill, ‘Never mention that boy’s name in my presence ever again.’”

In the wake of her stage appearance in The Immoralist, Page would go on to enjoy a splendid film career. She was nominated seven times for a Best Actress Oscar before carrying one off for her role as Carrie Watts in The Trip to Bountiful (1985).

Having survived Jimmy, Daniel Mann went on to direct Burt Lancaster and Anna Magnani in The Rose Tattoo (1955); Susan Hayward in I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955); Marlon Brando in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956); and Elizabeth Taylor in BUtterfield 8 (1960).

As for Jimmy, based on his brief appearance in The Immoralist he would be awarded a Tony as best newcomer of the year, and he would also win the Daniel Blum Award as Best Newcomer.

But as is the rule for actors, his involvement in the play did generate its share of bitchy, snarky comments: An out-of-town critic from Los Angeles, David Bettmann, wrote: “From what I hear of Mr. James Dean, I understand the character of the homosexual Arab boy is too close to his own personality to justify the term ‘acting.’”

Struggling to get ahead as an actor, James Dean read whatever teleplay came along, if it contained a possible role in it for him. “I was an apprentice, and I took almost any crap.”

Months before he went to Hollywood to feud with such film directors as Elia Kazan and George Stevens, Jimmy’s rude and sometimes juvenile behavior alienated many directors in TV and on Broadway. This was best exemplified by his endless conflicts with Daniel Mann during rehearsals for The Immoralist.

Chapter Fourteen

James Dean Opens on Broadway as an Arab “He-Slut” With a Hundred Bitchy Tricks, Including Blackmail

HATRED BACKSTAGE, AS LOUIS JOURDAN & JIMMY EXCHANGE VENOM

“The Role Calls for a Feygele”