James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  “On the darker side, Jimmy was a moocher. He tried to get as much from you as possible, and if he didn’t consider you worth anything to him, he immediately dropped you.”

  The editor of The Fairmount News, Al Terhune, later wrote: “Jimmy was a parasitic type of person. He hung around DeWeerd a lot, picked up his mannerisms, and absorbed all he could.”

  DeWeerd may not have been Jimmy’s only homosexual contact as a teenager in the process of discovering himself. Two years after Jimmy died, a fellow schoolmate from Fairmount spoke to a reporter who was researching the screen legend’s boyhood. Married and the father of two, the former athlete did not wish to be named. But he recalled seeing Jimmy behind the wheel of an emerald green- and cream-colored Chrysler New Yorker.

  At one point, the schoolboy was introduced to the owner of the car, Jimmy’s new friend, a master sergeant in the U.S. Air Force.

  Jimmy was said to have met him at a street fair in Marion. The schoolmate remembered the military man as good looking and well built, with a blonde crewcut. “He sure didn’t look queer to me. He was very masculine. He was frequently seen with jimmy, who was always behind the wheel driving the guy’s car around Fairmount. He visited Jimmy on many an occasion, but usually they drove off together to Marion, or so I was told. That town had a hotbed motel on the outskirts.”

  Jimmy later told Brackett and composer Alec Wilder that “some Air Force guy introduced me to sodomy. DeWeerd preferred lip service.”

  He also told Bast, “Penetration at first hurts like hell until you get to lie back and enjoy it—even demand it.”

  ***

  It appears at some point that Jimmy began to worry that he was a homosexual. He had shown little interest in girls before. “He wasn’t popular with the girls,” said Sheila Wilson. “He later looked great in the movies, but back then, we were drawn to Tab Hunter and later, to Robert Wagner. They were real cute. Jimmy wore heavy glasses and he was too short for me. When he peered at me, I felt like a mouse with a hoot owl in pursuit. Before he had major dental work done, he had unfortunate gaps between his upper front teeth, a big turn-off for me.”

  His most serious crush on a woman was rumored to have been with Elizabeth McPherson, who was eleven years his senior. She was a reasonably attractive art teacher who also taught physical education.

  He called her “Bette,” spelling it in a way inspired by the name of screen actress Bette Davis. “One night, he took her to dine at DeWeerd’s house, and they sat at an elegantly decorated table laden with fine china, silver, and candles. She later claimed that “the pastor fluttered around like a butterfly. When he entered the kitchen, Jimmy, a clever mimic, made fun of his movements and whispered to me that he was ‘DeQueer.’”

  McPherson lived in Marion and drove to Fairmount High School every day. Since she passed the Winslow farmhouse, she made it a point to pick up Jimmy as part of her morning routine and drop him off at school. Ortense didn’t like Jimmy being seen with this older woman, but apparently expressed no objection. McPherson’s husband was disabled, requiring the use of crutches to move around in the debilitating aftermath of polio.

  Sometimes, Jimmy shared his sketches with McPherson. She always remembered one in particular. “He was a victim being crushed by eyeballs, no doubt a representation of the probing eyes in Fairmount who disapproved of him.”

  McPherson had once been designated as the local high school’s chaperone for a group of graduating seniors on a field trip to Washington, D.C., where there were rumors that she sponsored a beerfest where all the teenagers, male and female, got drunk. She later denied that.

  Apparently, according to Jimmy, they became intimate during the trip. After his first night with her, he asked her to marry him. She turned him down for two reasons: She could not divorce her disabled husband, and there was a wide difference in their ages.

  As Jimmy later told Brackett, “I was still a teenager, but I came to realize that I was capable of performing sex with both men and women. I didn’t feel I had to make a choice, but could go back and forth between the sexes. Of course, because of the way men are built, they can provide that extra pleasure.”

  Although she later saw Jimmy in Los Angeles after her dismissal from the high school in Fairmount, “It was more of a fun thing. I got together with his beatnik friends, and he hung out with two or three friends of mine. We had beer parties on the beach, and weekend drives to Lake Arrowhead. I think he brought up marriage once or twice, but we drifted apart, although I continued to write him letters, even on the set of Giant.”

  “I did a sentimental thing,” she recalled. “During that bus ride back to Indiana from Washington, I clipped off a lock of his hair while he was sleeping. I always carried it around with me.”

  A lock of hair was found in her handbag after she died in a car crash in 1990.

  ***

  In a journal kept during his final months in Fairmount, Jimmy wrote: “Athletics may be the heartbeat of every American boy, but I think my life will be dedicated to art and drama.”

  Jimmy’s speech and drama teacher, Adeline Brookshire (also known for a while as Adeline Nall), also had an enormous impact on Jimmy’s future career as an actor. In his sophomore year, he enrolled in her speech class.

  Teacher Adeline Nall...”Jimmy could work me around his little finger.”

  Jimmy found her diminutive, articulate, and energetic, and he later credited her with exposing him to the beauty of the English language. She was the first to interest him in acting, casting him in key roles in school plays.

  “Jimmy was both difficult and a gift,” she recalled years later to a reporter. “He could be moody and unpredictable. He liked to keep people off guard, and he was often rude to attract attention. One day, in the middle of class, he offered me a cigarette. I almost popped him one for that.”

  High school drama student James Dean as Frankenstein in Goon With the Wind

  “If he didn’t win some competition, he would pant and rant for days at a time. I recognized a natural talent in the boy. He had it. He knew he did, and I knew it, too.”

  “But he could not take criticism, which is bad for an actor. All actors face a lot of criticism, both from the press and from the public. He didn’t like to take direction from anyone. That was also bad for an actor who had to work under a director. There was another quality he had. He knew how to play people. He could work me around his little finger.”

  An Unlikely Movie Star...Jimmy at Fairmount High School, watching from the bleachers.

  In his sophomore year, Adeline revived that old chestnut, The Monkey’s Paw. Since 1902, it had been performed in high schools and colleges, a play with a moral that there’s nothing you might wish for that doesn’t carry bad luck with it. In this play, appealing to those with a penchant for the macabre, Jimmy was cast as Herbert White, a boy who was killed because of his mother’s foolish wish.

  The following year (1947), Jimmy appeared as John Mugford—a mad old man who had visions—in the weirdly named Mooncalf Mugford. Adeline later recalled that she had to restrain Jimmy in one scene in which he practically throttled a girl cast as his wife.

  That autumn, also in 1947, he appeared in the (autobiographical) play by Cornelia Otis Skinner, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, set in Paris of the 1920s. In it, Jimmy interpreted the role of the playwright’s father, the influential dramatic actor, Otis Skinner (1858-1942).

  There’s a famous photograph out there of Jimmy disguised as a Frankenstein monster in a Halloween production of Goon with the Wind. Jimmy was proud that, for his character as a monster, he had designed and applied his own makeup.

  That play was followed by You Can’t Take It With You, the famous Broadway hit written by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. [Opening on Broadway in 1936, it ran for 838 performances. In 1938 it was released as a film starring Lionel Barrymore, Jean Arthur, and James Stewart.]

  In his high school’s local production, Jimmy was cast as Boris Kalenkhov, a former ballet master. As
a reviewer noted, he was seen “booming about, exuberant, pirouetting.”

  Jimmy’s final performance in high school play, presented in April of 1949, was The Madman’s Manuscript. It had been adapted from The Pickwick Papers, written by the then-25-year-old Charles Dickens. It was the purported memoirs of a raving lunatic, with Jimmy portraying the madman, in a grand guignol style. His most dramatic line was, “the blood hissing and tingling through my veins till the cold dew of fear stood in large drops under my skin, and my knees knocked together with fright!”

  Presented before the National Forensic League [an organization whose name was later changed to The National Speech and Debate Association], he won first prize at the state level and placed sixth at the national level. He was very upset he’d lost at the national level, and blamed it on Adeline.

  After his high school graduation with the class of ’49, Jimmy ranked 20th in a class of some fifty students. DeWeerd delivered the commencement address.

  Jimmy told his friends and fellow seniors that he was heading for California for a reunion with his father, and that after that, he would enroll in some college on the West Coast.

  His fellow seniors threw him a farewell party, at which they sang “California, Here I Come,” followed by “Back Home Again in Indiana.”

  Early the next morning, with Jimmy aboard, a Greyhound bus pulled out of Fairmount. It would cross the plains of America until it reached Los Angeles. It was June of 1949. The war had ended—victoriously for the U.S. and its allies—only four years before, and young men by the thousands had flooded out of the military and into California seeking fame and fortune. Jimmy was included among those hopeful hordes.

  His Indiana years had come to an end.

  ***

  In July of 1955, Jimmy spoke flippantly about Adeline, his former teacher: “One of my teachers was a frustrated actor,” he told a reporter from Photoplay. “Of course, this chick only provided the incident. A neurotic person has the necessity to express himself, and my neuroticism manifests itself in the dramatic.”

  As for Adeline, in the aftermath of Jimmy’s death, she went on to become the most celebrated high school teacher of a movie star in recent memory. She made a string of media appearances, and was featured in documentaries which included The First American Teenager (1976). She has also toured the country, lecturing and meeting fans of her former pupil and sharing stories of his first acting roles in high school dramas.

  ***

  During his return visit to Fairmount, with his benefactor, Rogers Brackett, still conveniently far away in Chicago, Jimmy shared a reunion with Adeline Nall, his former drama coach.

  As part of that venue, he addressed Fairmount High School’s small student body, talking about the Pepsi Cola commercial that had launched his career, as well as the films he’d been in, including Fixed Bayonets! and Sailor Beware. He also named and described the famous people he’d met, including Lana Turner and Joan Crawford.

  He followed his short speech about breaking into the movies with the impersonation of a matador in a bullfighting ring. Donning Sidney Franklin’s blood-soaked cape, he delivered a performance that included the participation of a volunteer (a graduating senior) from the audience, who acted out the role of the bull. The show included some flashy pre-choreographed moves with Franklin’s cape which delighted the young audience.

  After his speech, Jimmy played basketball with the school athletics team before heading for the showers.

  After a family dinner with his aunt (Ortense Winslow) and uncle (Marcus Winslow), he headed for a reunion with the Reverend DeWeerd, which evolved into a night of sex.

  The following day, at Adeline’s request, he directed the school’s drama students in a play, Men Are Like Streetcars, repeating, sometimes verbatim, the acting tips taught to him in Los Angeles by James Whitmore.

  A senior drama student, Jill Corn, interpreted the role of a girl who had to be spanked. Jimmy didn’t like the way a young actor was spanking her, so he showed the class how it “was done.” He spanked Jill so hard he made her cry, and Adeline had to pull him off her.

  Although Jimmy’s visit to Fairmount was short, a notification about his departure appeared in The Fairmount News: “James Dean and the Rev. James DeWeerd left Saturday morning (October 20) for Chicago, where they will transact business for a few days. Mr. Dean spent five days with his Fairmount relatives, Marcus and Ortense Winslow.”

  Jimmy stayed four nights in Chicago in a B&B where he slept in a double bed with DeWeerd. He didn’t call Brackett at the Ambassador East until DeWeerd was out of town. Before the pastor left, he gave Jimmy two one-hundred dollar bills to help defray his upcoming expenses in New York.

  Once back with Brackett in Chicago, Jimmy remained only four days with him before he grew restless and bored. Reacting to this, Brackett gave him a hundred dollars and a ticket to Manhattan aboard the Twentieth Century Limited.

  Brackett also telephoned his composer friend, Alec Wilder, telling him to “look after Jimmy—and I don’t mean in that way!”

  Stern, but urbane and kindly. Two views of composer Alec Wilder.

  Wilder was a closeted homosexual, who liked young men as much as Brackett, but rarely did anything about it.

  Before leaving Chicago, Jimmy, in the arms of Brackett, told him, “I feel I’ll meet my destiny in New York.”

  ***

  In Chicago, Brackett escorted Jimmy to the La Salle Street Station, where he caught the 5PM train to New York, scheduled to arrive there sixteen hours later. Wilder had agreed to “take your boy under my wing and look out for him until you move here yourself.”

  He had been a longtime resident of the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street. This had been the gathering place of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table that attracted writers, critics, and actors including Tallulah Bankhead, Edna Ferber (Jimmy would star in the adaptation of her novel, Giant), Harpo Marx, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross (editor of The New Yorker), and the acerbic critic and journalist, Alexander Woollcott.

  Wilder was working on a musical composition when the call from Jimmy came in from Grand Central Station. “Hi,” he said. “The Little Prince has arrived in Manhattan!”

  Fortunately, Wilder was a well-read man, and he understood the literary reference. “Take a taxi to the Algonquin. You’re welcome to live with me here until you settle in.”

  Jimmy didn’t really know who Wilder was, but he had agreed to live with this stranger based on Brackett’s recommendation.

  Born in Rochester, New York, Wilder—as a composer—was mostly self-taught. Some of America’s favorite singers, including Tony Bennett, had recorded his songs. His “While We’re Young,” had been recorded by Peggy Lee; “Where Do You Go?” had been recorded by Frank Sinatra; and “I’ll be Around” had been recorded by the Mills Brothers. Other popular songs written by Wilder eventually included “Blackberry Winter” and “It’s Peaceful in the Country.”

  Over dinner in The Algonquin’s restaurant, Jimmy was blunt in questioning Wilder. “How did you meet Rogers? Were you guys lovers?”

  “Friends, never lovers,” Wilder answered. “He’s a chicken hawk. I was born in 1907. One afternoon, as I was walking through the lobby here, I heard this bellowing laugh. It rang out true and honest. I felt I just had to introduce myself to this man who seemed so full of life.”

  “I soon discovered that Rogers had been born in Culver City (California) and that he knew half the people who had ever walked across Hollywood Boulevard. He also knew the darkest secrets of the stars—the exact size of Charlie Chaplin’s dick; that Barbara Stanwyck was a dyke who had had affairs with Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich; that Cary Grant had fallen in love with his wife’s son [a reference to Barbara Hutton and Lance Reventlow]; and that the favorite erotic snack for Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power, and Monty Woolley usually included some variation of human feces.”

  Beginning with Wilder, his first-ever contact in New York City, Jimmy starte
d to fabricate heroic stories about his past.

  According to Wilder, “I was this stranger, and he revealed to me just what a wild young man he was. One story he told me was about how he rushed into a burning building in Chicago and saved two children from being burned alive. I decided he wasn’t very bright. He wasn’t really mentally developed for a twenty-one year old. Many of the people I introduced him to swallowed his tales hook, line, and sinker. I never did.”

  After his first day and night with Jimmy, Wilder wrote Brackett saying, “I’m happy to oblige your request, and I’ll look after the boy. He’s certainly not the shy type. He parades nude around my suite. I will tell you what you already know: This is a very neurotic boy, a really mixed-up kid. He tries to con everybody. There isn’t an ounce of maturity in him. I suspect there never will be. He’s also reckless, running out in front of moving traffic with this god damn matador cape, treating cars like they’re oncoming bulls in the ring. Rogers, you can’t be serious about this kid.”

  Wilder continued: “The spilled blood of the matador seems to hold endless fascination for him. One night, I found him sticking safety pins into himself. He told me he wanted to increase his tolerance for pain.”

  During the previous two days, Jimmy continuing an ongoing rant about bullfighting, making the claim to Wilder that in Mexico, “I actually danced with the most ferocious bulls in the arena.

  He claimed that he was going to use the rhythmic movements of the matador as part of his stage work,” Wilder said. “He then gave me what he called ‘the look.’ That was when he put his head down with his eyes looking up. He then stared at me like I was the bull about to die. I thought he was crazy.”