James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  As Bowers related in his memoirs, he even sold himself to such unlikely persons as J. Edgar Hoover and the Duke of Windsor. He also supplied carefully screened young women to Katharine Hepburn and the Duchess of Windsor.

  He knew many of the handsome young movie stars of the 1950s, usually servicing them himself before supplying them with a steady stream of “tricks” for sale.

  Bowers had only one encounter with Jimmy Dean, and he wasn’t impressed at all, as he’d later relay in his memoirs. Sometimes, Bowers found work moonlighting as a bartender at private parties, as he did one night at the home of the Brazilian millionaire, Ozz Francesca, who maintained a strange friendship with Jimmy that was never fully explored. Francesca was gay, sharing his home with his understanding wife and their daughter. For a while, he reigned in Hollywood circles and was known for hosting some of the most lavish, star-studded parties in town.

  At one party that Bowers worked, the guests were formally dressed. Jimmy showed up in blue jeans and a white T-shirt. Bowers remembered him “moping around the room, puffing on a cigarette and looking decidedly bored and gloomy.”

  At Francesca’s party, Jimmy, according to Bowers, displayed the same antisocial behavior he presented during visits to the homes of Brackett’s friends.

  At one point, Jimmy dropped his lit cigarette on Francesca’s heirloom Persian carpet and crushed it out with his foot. Bowers rushed to clean it up.

  Later, at the bar, Jimmy demanded a glass of champagne. Opening a bottle of Dom Perignon, Bowers poured a glass of bubbly into a tulip-shaped, rose-colored glass.

  Jimmy took only one sip of it before making a face as if he’d swallowed slop, and poured the contents of the glass onto the carpet. “Bartender, serve me something else, and it’d better be drinkable this time!”

  Bowers later dismissed Jimmy “as a prissy little queen, moody and unpredictable. He had a few romantic flings with women, but from all reports, he was essentially gay.”

  One of Bower’s major sources of information was one of his clients, Monty Clift, who had had a sexual involvement with Jimmy in New York. Bowers found Clift “another temperamental, moody queen with a surprisingly vicious tongue.”

  Unlike Jimmy, Clift was exclusively gay, but none of the tricks that Bowers sent over pleased him. “The guy’s prick was an inch too long, or an inch too short. His hair was not parted properly, or his feet were too small, his toes too long, there was always something wrong. Monty was never satisfied.”

  Bowers also found Jimmy’s friend, Roddy McDowall “excessively fussy and hard to please.”

  Both Jimmy and Bowers, at different times, also tricked with actor Anthony Perkins, who was engaged in a long-term relationship with Tab Hunter, although he constantly cheated on his lover. Bowers admitted that, “I tricked with him myself on numerous occasions, but Tony, like Monty, was very fussy, always demanding to be fixed up with ‘someone different.’”

  In his memoirs, Jimmy was the only movie star that Bowers actually despised. He seemed to have gotten on with all the other big names at the time.

  He wrote, “It was only a matter of time before Jimmy did himself in. He was his own worst enemy.”

  ***

  Jimmy and his former roommate, William Bast, had recovered from the feud that had begun when Bast had decided to move out of their shared apartment. They agreed to meet over a bowl of chili at Barney’s Beanery. Jimmy won Bast over by flashing his charm school smile and saying, “Let’s tongue kiss and make up. I’ll suck yours if you’ll suck mine.”

  “Are you sure you’re referring to tongues?” Bast asked jokingly. The two men embraced and sat down to eat.

  Barney warned them, “There will be no man-hugging in my dive.”

  Bast later reflected that Jimmy’s life with Brackett had changed him a lot. “He had acquired more polish, seemingly overnight, or at least learned the rudimentary rules of social behavior. But as I was soon to find out, he could still revert to his bad boy image.”

  “The shitkicker from Indiana was on the way to becoming an urban sophisticate,” Bast claimed. “I don’t want to exaggerate too much. Noël Coward he would never be. But suddenly, he was showing off by talking about French Impressionists, Colette, the Cubists, literature, the brilliance of Stravinsky. My country boy had also joined that hideous array of name-dropping Hollywood. He could drop quite a few: Jack Benny, Walter Pidgeon, Clifton, Webb, Cole Porter, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, Lana Turner. I was jealous…I mean, really, really jealous.”

  En route with Bast to Brackett’s apartment, Jimmy farted three times. “It was that second helping of chili,” he claimed.

  Brackett was “in residence,” as he called it, and Bast later recorded his negative impression of the ad agency producer. “Brackett struck me as an arch, foppish villain out of a Dickens novel or a naughty Max Beerbohm dandy. His unusually long neck supported an avian head, on the thin beak of which was perched large, horn-rimmed glasses, giving him a somewhat owlish look. It took little time for Jimmy to fall prey to this chicken hawk. I think that if it has been Dracula himself, with Hollywood connections, Jimmy would have been a voluntary blood donor. I might have considered a Sugar Daddy myself—but never this Wicked Bitch of the East.”

  Indecent Exposure

  HOW JIMMY MET AND “MADE IT” WITH GODDESS- TURNED-PROSTITUTE, BARBARA PAYTON

  One Saturday when Brackett had an appointment with some client and didn’t want to drag Jimmy along, Jimmy and Bast agreed to drive down to Laguna together for a day at the beach. For the first time since Bast had known him, Jimmy had two-hundred dollars in his wallet. Perhaps to show off his new wealth, Jimmy invited Bast to a chic fish restaurant with a swimming pool and rooms to rent upstairs.

  The figure of a beautiful blonde caught Jimmy’s eye. It was the notorious actress, Barbara Payton, who was wearing the bottom half of a very small polka dot bikini. [aka, a “cache-sexe” (“sex hider” or a very small triangular-shaped garment designed to barely conceal the genitals.)] Everything else she had was on ample display.

  Perhaps to impress Bast with his heterosexual credentials, Jimmy surveyed Payton from top to bottom, claiming, “The hot bitch has more body than a Renaissance Madonna. I’m going to the car to get my sketch pad.”

  Back with his pad, Jimmy approached Payton, and she seemed flattered to pose for him. From a distance of twenty feet, Bast witnessed their interchange, although Jimmy did not invite him over.

  Within the hour, Jimmy disappeared with Payton, heading for a room she’d rented above the restaurant.

  The rooms upstairs opened onto balconies that overlooked the pool. At one point, Jimmy appeared “stark raving nude for about a minute on one of the balconies,” according to Bast. “A ripple went across the crowd as Jimmy showed off his junk to the voyeurs below.”

  Barbara Payton before her decline and collapse. “I am not ashamed,” she stated in a memoir.

  By five o’clock, Jimmy once again joined Bast beside the pool. He claimed he had to clear out of Payton’s room because she’d gotten her calendar mixed up and had invited both of her lovers, Franchot Tone and Tom Neal, to Laguna at the same time. She’d told Jimmy she didn’t know which one she wanted to get rid of. “Joan Crawford and Bette Davis always called Franchot ‘The Jawbreaker” and Tom is known as ‘Donkey Dong.’ So you see what a difficult choice it is for me to make.”

  Jimmy later bragged to Bast that “Blondie is one in a million. An hour or two with her is like a month with any other broad. She’s not only got a great body, but the bitch knows how to use it in bed. She’s electrifying. I’m totally satisfied from my nostrils to my little toe. She has a sexual technique that must have been developed over two-thousand years.”

  Later that night, back in Los Angeles, Jimmy asked Brackett, “Just who in hell is this actress floozie, Barbara Payton? Someone told me she’s a movie star.”

  Before the night was over, Jimmy ended up knowing more about Payton than he really wanted to handle.


  [Payton, “the brassy blonde with a hooker heart” flashed briefly across the movie screens of the early 1950s before she devolved into an alcoholic, drug-addicted prostitute. Marlon Brando, her former lover, once referred to her as “Hollywood’s Number One Trollop.”

  Still young and beautiful at the time Jimmy seduced her, Payton had drifted from the cold winds of Minnesota to the warm beds of such A-list players as Howard Hughes and Gregory Peck. She was graced with sky-blue eyes and a fair complexion that revealed her Norwegian ancestry.

  Hollywood’s most sexually motivated attorney, Greg Bautzer, once said, “You have never been given a blow-job until you’ve been on the receiving end of Barbara’s skilled mouth and tongue. I’ve been blown by the best of them—Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich—you name ‘em. Barbara takes top prize.”

  Hughes once told his pimp, Johnny Meyer, “Payton will do anything in bed—and I mean anything. If you want to piss in her mouth, that’s okay with blondie.”

  Payton had been the Queen of the Tabloids between 1950 and 1952. The single most scandalous movie star ever to emerge from the placid 1950s, Payton dumped her husband in the late 40s and headed for Hollywood determined to make it big. “If a blonde with absolutely no talent like Lana Turner can become a movie star, then I know I can too,” she announced to anyone interested.

  When her test at RKO didn’t work out, she ended up as a carhop at Stan’s Drive-In at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue. Hustling tips and peddling chocolate milkshakes and blood-letting hamburgers, she also did another type of hustling on the side.

  The riches from her nocturnal activities allowed her to buy an expensive wardrobe. Soon she was seen at all the posh clubs, including the Trocadero, Ciro’s, and El Mocambo. She was hailed as “the Queen of the Night.”

  Her love nest on Cheremoya Avenue was paid for in 1949 by none other than the much-married Bob Hope. When the comedian refused to give her an additional $5,000 a week in “spending money,” she threatened to blackmail him in exchange for her silence. Hope settled what was called “a huge sum of money” on her, but she went through all her new loot in just three months, claiming, “I have expensive tastes.”

  One of the most notorious love triangles of the 1950s spun around Franchot Tone (top photo), along with Barbara Payton and Tom Neal.

  As the usually elegant Tone ungraciously described his marriage (1951-1952) to Payton, “I went from Joan Crawford and Bette Davis to a blonde whore.”

  A.C. Lyles, the movie producer, once claimed that “Payton never had an itch she didn’t scratch.” Minor actor Mickey Knox recalled that she’d kept him in bed for three days and nights, all in one stretch. “I had to crawl out of that dump on my hands and knees. What a workout! What a pussy!”

  She even got involved with James Cagney, who secured her a contract at Warner Brothers for $5,000 a week. He put her in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950). The film had hardly been released before she was swallowing Gary Cooper’s mighty sword near the sound stages of Dallas while taking in $10,000 a week. Suddenly, she was seen around town with the classy New York actor, Franchot Tone, who had been married to Joan Crawford in the 1930s. Tone was twenty-two years older than Payton, and he lavished expensive gifts on her, including jewelry.

  During her affair with Tone, Payton also fell for rock-jawed Tom Neal, a sort of dime store John Garfield. Almost sadistically, Payton played one man against the other and would eventually marry each of them, thereby creating two of the shortest marriages ever recorded in Hollywood history.

  Neal learned about Payton’s involvement with Tone, and on the night of September 13, 1951, emerged from the bushes outside Payton’s apartment and attacked Tone, smashing his nose and breaking one of his cheekbones. Tone was rushed to the hospital with a brain concussion and remained in a coma for eighteen hours. Morning newspapers headlined this “Love Brawl” across the world.

  In time, Payton would descend into the status of a drunk on Skid Row. She moved deeper and deeper into heroin addiction and—among other professions—became a lesbian-for-hire. She ended up a broken down and snaggle-toothed whore working Santa Monica Boulevard, jumping inside the cars of strangers and giving fast blow-jobs for ten dollars while her clients kept the motor running.

  In February of 1967, Payton, unconscious, was found in the parking lot of Thrifty’s Drug Store in Hollywood. At first, sanitation workers thought that her reclining body was a bag of trash. She’d been living on the streets for the past three months. She was rushed to Los Angeles County General Hospital.

  After her release from the hospital, she went to stay with her parents, both of whom were also alcoholics. In May of 1967 her mother found her slumped over a toilet. Her daughter was dead. An autopsy revealed that she’d died of a heart attack and liver failure just six months shy of her 40th birthday.]

  Jimmy Studies Method Acting with James Whitmore

  “THE POOR MAN’S SPENCER TRACY”

  Their friendship renewed, Bast enticed Jimmy into taking acting lessons from James Whitmore from premises on the upper floor of the Brentwood Country Mart, a shopping area at 26th Street and San Vicente Boulevard near the boundary between Santa Monica and Los Angeles.

  Whitmore was not a Hollywood pretty boy, but a serious actor with a stocky build, a rather gruff personality, and a reputation as a blunt conversationalist.

  As regards roles he was considered suitable for, some Hollywood talent agents described him as “the poor man’s Spencer Tracy,” and “a less expensive Spencer Tracy type.”

  He preferred acting on stage to working in Hollywood movies, but, as he admitted when he moved to the West Coast, “a paycheck comes in handy.”

  Before meeting Whitmore, Jimmy had seen him in the 1949 World War II drama, Battleground, in which Whitmore had played a battle weary, tobacco-chewing Army sergeant.

  James Whitmore, depicted above in Battleground, evolved into a noteworthy acting coach, exposing Jimmy to the tenets of “The Method.”

  [For his role in Battleground, Whitmore won an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor. He also starred with Marilyn Monroe in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and with Nancy Davis in The Next Voice You Hear (also 1950). He would later play a dumb thug in the movie versions of Kiss Me Kate (1953), and Gloria Grahame’s grizzled father in Oklahoma! (1955).]

  In a classroom with about a dozen dedicated actors, male and female, Jimmy interpreted Whitmore as a stern teacher, suggesting that it took “blood, sweat, and tears” to become a successful actor. “Don’t go into acting seeking movie star fame or glory. For every Marilyn Monroe, there are ten thousand other dyed blondes taking the train back to the Middle West, hoping to find a husband who’ll let them be a housewife. There’s personal gratification in acting, supreme gratification, in fact, but it will cost you plenty to obtain it.”

  At first, Jimmy did not impress Whitmore at all. The older actor found him “shy and very introverted. He never volunteered to act out any scene before the class, always holding back, giving nothing of himself. But in time, he began to open up a bit, and came to sense that he possessed a great talent, though masked behind all his neurotic behavior.”

  During the weeks that followed, when Whitmore saw actual demonstrations of Jimmy’s acting talent, he urged him to abandon Hollywood and head for New York. There, he could seek work on the stage and in the burgeoning TV industry that was turning out dramas by the day. Before the film sets and production facilities of most television shows had moved to the West Coast, the early TV industry was based in Manhattan. Jimmy later confided to Brackett and others what happened when Whitmore asked Bast and Jimmy to perform an improvised scene in front of the class.

  Jimmy’s assignment involved the portrayal of a poor college student who had stolen a valuable watch. Bast would portray a jeweler who had been warned by the police to be on the lookout for a young man who might fit Jimmy’s description, who would arrive with a (stolen) watch with intention of getting it repa
ired so that he could then sell it for a lot of money.

  The task of the character played by Bast involved detaining Jimmy’s character “at any cost” until the police could arrive. In the ensuing struggle over the watch, Bast denounced Jimmy as “a pompous bastard” and accused him of being “a nearsighted little son of a bitch.” [This line in the script echoed what the two men had said one night in a fight over Jimmy’s failure to pay half the rent on the penthouse they shared.]

  Suddenly, without meaning to, and in front of the class, Bast and Jimmy got into an onstage wrestling match that turned violent. At one point, Jimmy was on top of Bast, staring into his eyes as he choked him.

  Bast later recalled, “Those were the eyes of a killer staring down at me. All of our past conflicts seemed to bubble up in Jimmy. It was no longer an actor’s improvisation. This was serious.”

  It appeared to Whitmore that if he didn’t intervene, Jimmy would choke Bast to death.

  Later, as Jimmy related to Brackett, “In my worst moment, I couldn’t control myself and I almost suffocated Bast. Now I’ve got to confess something. I’m not proud of this—in fact, I’m ashamed—but that act of violence against him gave me a raging hard-on.”

  In 1955, Jimmy discussed his workshop experience in Whitmore’s classroom with a reporter for Seventeen magazine. “I learned a lot from him. One thing he said helped me more than anything. He taught me the difference between acting as a soft job and acting as a difficult art. Another thing, he warned me never to be caught acting.”

  “Whitmore opened my eyes. There is always someone in one’s life—at least there should be—who opens your eyes so that you can see for the first time. For me, it was definitely Whitmore. He told me to go to New York, and he was right. That’s when things started to happen for me. He also changed my life forever by giving me a letter of introduction to [the famous director] Elia Kazan.