***
The singer published her memoirs, Miss Peggy Lee, in 1989. She remembered Jimmy, relaying a rather vanilla description of their relationship. [She was not a “kiss-and-tell” kind of author.]
During his filming of East of Eden for Warners, he visited her several times on the set of Pete Kelly’s Blues (released in 1955). She played an alcoholic singer, a role that would lead to an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.
One afternoon, Jimmy watched her perform in a scene where she had to sing off-key and out of tempo. “That must have been hard for you to pull off,” he said. “You’re always on key.”
She introduced Jimmy to the stars of the film, including Edmond O’Brien, Lee Marvin, and a very flirtatious Janet Leigh. Martin Milner, another star in the film, was already known to Jimmy. In October of 1951, each of them had appeared in two separate teleplays. But whereas Milner had star roles, Jimmy was assigned small, uncredited parts. Milner eventually got together with Jimmy and recalled how they’d first met:
[In midtown Manhattan, at Cromwell’s Pharmacy, hanging out with other actors, Jimmy’s first TV role came from a pickup one afternoon when he was nursing a coke. It wasn’t from a gay producer or director, but from a fellow actor, Martin Milner.
Four years older than Jimmy, Milner still had a boyish quality to him that Jimmy found appealing. Jimmy knew who he was, having seen him in the 1947 film, Life With Father, where he’d played John Day, the red-haired son of William Powell, with Irene Dunne cast as his mother.
The film also starred a very young Elizabeth Taylor. Perhaps as a means of asserting his macho credentials, Jimmy boasted to Milner, “One day, I’m gonna fuck that gal.”
“Well, until she comes along, why not fuck me?” Milner asked.
"You sure get to the point, man,” Jimmy said.
“I’m from Detroit, but I was raised in California,” Milner said, as a sort of justification. “We move in fast when we’re horny.”
“Your timing is perfect,” Jimmy said. “I have the hots, too."
“Let’s go back to my hotel,” Milner said. Jimmy followed along.
After the sex, the two young actors discovered that they genuinely liked each other, and that they wanted to be friends. They retreated to a movie together and later shared dinner together.
Milner told him that Frank Woodruff, who functioned at the time as both producer and director of the teleplay T.K.O. (Technical Knock-Out), was going to film a teleplay for the Bigelow Theater. “I think I can get Frank to cast you in a part. It’s just a small role, but at least it’s work.”
The next day, he introduced Jimmy to Woodruff, who had been cast into one of the teleplay’s minor parts. In it, Milner played a teenager who becomes a boxer to raise money for his father’s expensive operation.
Jimmy’s role was so small, he later told friends, “It’s hardly worth mentioning.”
He and Milner continued to see each other “for sessions in anatomy.” Although they each asserted to the other that he wasn’t gay, neither seemed to see anything wrong with two heterosexual actors “having a little gay sex on the side.”
Milner liked Jimmy so much, he even got him another small role in a TV series that has virtually disappeared from Jimmy’s radar screen. No biography seems to mention it, although his film clip with Milner is sometimes included in latter-day anthologies of Dean’s early TV work.
Milner had signed to appear in two episodes of a popular TV series, The Trouble With Father, starring Stu Erwin as a bumbling dad. Jimmy was hired for a role. He appears with Milner, who played Drezel Potter, the boyfriend of Joyce, a high school student whose father is Erwin. In their respective roles, Milner speaks of his love for Joyce, and Jimmy worries that he’ll never find anyone to love him.]
Martin Milner, later best known for his steady roles as a staple in Route 66 (1960-64) and Adam-12 (1968-75). Jimmy found him “boyishly comforting with an adorable innocence.”
In her autobiography, Peggy Lee wrote: “Jimmy used to come over to visit me in my trailer while I was filming Pete Kelly’s Blues. He’d arrive like a friendly cat. We were two shy people in a little room being comfortable with each other. Jimmy was always speeding around in his car, and it worried me. He was to die in a crash in Paso Robles before he completed Giant, his last film. He was unusually quiet, an intense person, and he wanted to be friends with me. He was one of those people you could not forget. You could feel things simmering and sizzling inside him, and his silence was very loud.”
***
During his first days in Manhattan, Jimmy admitted, “I was overwhelmed by the city. It’s a frightening place. I rarely left the area around Times Square.”
Eventually, he began to branch out, getting up early one morning and walking all the way to the Battery [Manhattan’s southernmost tip] where he rode the ferry to Staten Island. Once he rode the subway to Brooklyn, continuing all the way to Coney Island, where he ordered a hot dog.
He had arrived in New York with about five hundred dollars in his pocket. He later said, perhaps in exaggeration, that “I spent at least three-fourths of that watching movies to escape from my isolation, loneliness, and depression.”
He knew the time had come for him to move out of Alec Wilder’s suite and into cheaper lodgings. As he later claimed, “Alec was falling in love with me, and I could not reciprocate. I no longer paraded nude in front of him. I didn’t want to throw temptation at him. The last couple of times he tried to make love to me, I was as limp as a dishrag. It was all so embarrassing.”
When he informed Wilder that he planned to move out, the composer recommended the Iroquois Hotel, almost immediately next door, also on East 44th Street. It was clean and decent, but much cheaper. Dating from 1899, the Iroquois was one of the most historic in New York City.
During his first night there, he met the actress Barbara Baxley in the lobby. Born in California, Baxley, a life member of Actors Studio, was one of Tennessee Williams’ favorite actresses. She appeared in the Broadway production of his comedy, Period of Adjustment.
In Key West during the filming of a movie based on Darwin Porter’s bestselling novel, Butterflies in Heat, Porter invited both Baxley and another star of the movie, Eartha Kitt, for dinner at a popular local restaurant, The Pier House. Over drinks, both women discussed their emotional and sexual involvements with Jimmy. But whereas Kitt had developed a deep friendship with the actor, Baxley said that she never really got to know him. Ironically, she would eventually be cast as the malevolent nursemaid in East of Eden.
“When we first met at the Iroquois, I didn’t know who he was, and he sure as hell didn’t know who I was either,” Baxley said. “We spent a weekend together. He was very frank, telling me he needed to reassert his manhood ‘after having to service so many faggots.’ Those were his words—not mine.”
Barbara Baxley...An affinity for gay men
Baxley found him amazingly candid when speaking about himself. He told her, “I’m serious minded, an intense little devil, terribly gauche and so tense I don’t see how people stay in the same room with me. I know I wouldn’t tolerate myself, if I had a choice.”
He also told her, “I know the best is yet to come for me in my career. But I also know that when stardom arrives, it will be one hell of a disappointment.”
Baxley also confessed that she wanted the relationship to last “at least through a season,” but I knew I could never hold onto him. He wanted to wander, and there was no way in hell I could change his mind.”
“I didn’t find out about all the gay stuff until later. I was used to homosexuals, having been surrounded by them all my life. I never criticized a gay person.”
Sleepless, Jimmy Wanders the Lonely Streets of the City That Never Sleeps
Installed at last in his new, and private, lodgings, Jimmy seemed to adopt as his own the rhythms of New York—a city that never sleeps. He became an insomniac, roaming the streets after dark, stopping in at late-night cafés and taverns
, nursing a drink in one dive after another for many hours at a time. In California, he’d been tanned and healthy-looking, but he soon took on that New York pallor, and even developed bags under his eyes based on the cigarettes, coffee, and liquor he consumed late at night.
Even though he lived only a few doors away, Jimmy could be seen on most days sitting on the bellhops’ bench at the Algonquin, watching well-heeled guests come and go.
Sometimes, Wilder joined him there, later recalling that he was brilliant at impressions. “He could imitate everybody from Cary Grant to Jerry Lewis. But his best were Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara.”
As Wilder remembered it, Jimmy constantly bragged about himself.
“I have always lived the life of an artist,” he told Wilder. “I studied the violin. I learned to tap dance better than Eleanor Powell. I gave standing room only concerts. In a play, I won first prize in Indiana. Most of all, I like to create art such as sculpture and paintings. If I fail as an actor, and I don’t expect to, I’m sure I could become one of the world’s greatest matadors.”
To the folks back home in Indiana, he wrote: “I’ve discovered a whole new world in New York. A new way of thinking. This town is the end. It’s talent that counts here. You’ve got to stay with it or get lost. I like it. New York’s a fertile, generous city if you can accept the violence and the decadence.”
As he grew more confident, he took longer and longer walks, at one time claiming that he strolled the entire north-to-south length (approximately 13 miles) of Manhattan’s Broadway. Once, he walked to the Battery and rode the ferryboat over to Staten Island, where he walked along the decaying waterfront, a reminder of the borough’s rich maritime heyday in the 19th Century.
Back in the Times Square neighborhood, he looked at all the big names appearing on the marquees of Broadway theaters, wondering if his own name would ever be up in lights like Marlon Brando’s was when he starred as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.
In Greenwich Village, he adopted the Minetta Tavern [113 MacDougal Street], in existence since 1937, his favorite hangout. One night, or so it was reported, Jimmy was seen there in an intimate dialogue with Jack Kerouac. The wannabe actor and the future author of On the Road were seen leaving the tavern together.
Later, after Jimmy became famous, the Chelsea Hotel’s night manager claimed that Jimmy had spent the night in Kerouac’s bedroom.
He wrote to Rogers Brackett, who was still in Chicago, that the money he’d brought to New York soon dwindled to $44.16. “I counted every penny,” he wrote. “That’s all I’ve got left. I’m leaving the Iroquois today and checking into the YMCA on West 63rd Street. That’s right near Central Park, where I can sit on a park bench and dream about my glorious future on Broadway. Please send $1,200 to Alec at the Algonquin. I’ll go by every day to see if you’ve sent the big bucks.”
Brackett did not send any money. Nor did he answer the letter. Jimmy was forced to accept a job washing dishes in a seedy tavern on West 45th Street, patronized by drug addicts, hustlers dressed as midnight cowboys, female hookers past their prime, and pimps peddling “drugs and pussy,” as Jimmy put it. “I didn’t last long. The manager said that the dishes looked even dirtier after I washed them.”
He was frequently seen at Cromwell’s Pharmacy at Rockefeller Plaza. In those days, it was known as “The Poor Man’s Sardi’s.”
“It reminded me of Schwab’s on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood,” Jimmy said. Management let actors spend hours sitting there, waiting for job offers or making calls to their agents. There was a bank of pay phones for that purpose.
Jerry’s Bar on 53rd Street at Sixth Avenue became one of Jimmy’s favorite hangouts. He was frequently seen there, often in the company of struggling out-of-work actors, each trying to get by, wondering where their next meal would come from. Jerry Lucci, who owned the tavern, would occasionally feed Jimmy when he had no money—a bowl of soup, a hamburger with French fries. Sometimes, Jimmy stole the packets of catsup placed on every table. Later, back at the YMCA, he’d squeeze the catsup from its foil containers into cupful of hot water, thereby creating an ersatz form of tomato soup. Sometimes, he’d wander into a cafeteria, where he could usually make off with some rolls from the baskets of bread and crackers left there for paying customers.
Once, Lucci invited Jimmy into the kitchen and taught him how to make a spaghetti dinner. “It’s cheap and it’s good!” he told Jimmy.
“For months, Jimmy wore the same jacket and slacks he’d brought with him from Hollywood,” Wilder said. “His clothes always looked like they needed a date with a dry cleaner. I didn’t want to start lending him money, but I took pity on him and often gave him a few dollars for food. He also ran up a bill at the barbershop in the Iroquois. I paid the tab there because he needed to look well-groomed for auditions.”
Bryan Lewis, an out-of-work actor who never seemed to find a job, met Jimmy at Jerry’s Bar. “A lot of actors—at least the better-looking ones, hustled, often having sex with middle aged married men who wanted a quickie before heading back home to the wifey and kids. I made extra bucks that way, too.”
“At first, I didn’t think Jimmy was a hustler. But one day, when he was desperate for money, he showed up in a transparent fishnet shirt that was sort of mauve.”
”He wore the tightest jeans ever seen on a human body. He’d bleached the crotch, and his genitals were clearly visible, completely outlined. He might as well have been nude. I saw him walk out with two older queens who always came in looking for fresh meat.”
Jimmy did make some friends his own age. A native of the Boston area, Richard Gearin had served as a soldier in Korea. His post-war job was at the Greyhound Bus Station near Times Square on 50th Street. He remembered meeting Jimmy, who was carrying a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
“When Jimmy ran out of money and couldn’t pay for a room at the YMCA, he crashed at my pad.” Gearin lived way up at 110th Street at Amsterdam Avenue.
Gearin also said that Jimmy developed a pastime. He liked to go ice skating at Rockefeller Center. “He was no Sonja Henie, the Norwegian champ, but he became quite an expert. Once, he discussed the possibility that he might become a professional ice skater.”
His new friend also went with Jimmy to the opening of two movies in which he’d briefly appeared: Fixed Bayonets! at the Rivoli Theatre and Sailor Beware at the Mayfair. [These films opened, respectively, in November of 1951 and in January of 1952.]
Around 1985, Gearin still retained the fondest memories of Jimmy. For a while, in 1985, he actually lived for a while on the Winslow farm in Fairmount as the guest of Marcus Winslow, Jr. and Mary Lou Winslow, Jimmy’s relatives.
***
The time had come for Jimmy to move ahead with his career in the theater or on television. After all, that’s why he had come to New York. Before leaving Hollywood, he’d been provided with the contact number of James Sheldon, who at the time was working for Young & Rubicam, the Manhattan-based advertising agency.
Back in Hollywood, the director for CBS, Ralph Levy, had told him that Sheldon was well connected and that he might send him out for some tryouts for acting gigs. Subsequently, Levy had called Sheldon with news that Jimmy was on his way to New York, asking if he could do something to help him get launched.
“Ralph was directing and sometimes producing shows for Jack Benny, Gracie Allen, and George Burns, and was a good friend of mine,” Sheldon said. “I promised to do what I could, and said I’d give Jimmy a helping hand in Manhattan. Actually, I soon forgot about my promise until one afternoon quite a bit later. Jimmy called my office. I wasn’t too interested, but I didn’t want to go back on my promise to Ralph, so I invited him to my office the following afternoon. I was yet to become a director, so I didn’t know if I’d be able to help him.”
“Right on time, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Jimmy walked into my office,” Sheldon said. “He was poorly dressed, a little shy,
and wore glasses. I didn’t immediately see that he was going to set Broadway on fire like Brando did. Reviewers referred to Brando as ‘a walking streak of sex.’ Jimmy was more like an Indiana farmboy, but there was something there. If he took off the glasses, dressed more provocatively, he might look sexy. He had a pretty face.”
“I asked him to do a reading for me from the comedy-drama series Mama. He was very good. I smelled a whiff of Brando, and a whole spray of Monty Clift, yet he was different from those guys. There was something unique about him. It wouldn’t have hurt if he’d grown a few inches taller back in Indiana.”
“I had friends who were producing a TV show, Mama. The role of Nels had been played by Dick Van Patten, but he’d gotten an induction notice from the Army. I called over there and got Jimmy an audition.”
He confessed that he hated auditions. “It’s like having to strip down jaybird naked while an asshole appraises your stuff. But I’m game.”
Mama, the TV drama/comedy, had been inspired by the Broadway hit, I Remember Mama, a 1944 play written by John Van Druten based on a Norwegian immigrant family in San Francisco during the early 20th Century. Marlon Brando had made his Broadway debut in the key role of Nels, the part now up for grabs within the play’s adaptation into a TV series.
Jimmy met with Doris Quinlain, the assistant producer, and she was impressed with his audition. She arranged for another audition with the director, Ralph Nelson, the following afternoon.
Nelson, too, was impressed. He later recalled, “Jimmy was with us for about two weeks. He got along at first. He’d learned that I, too, had been an actor before going off to war.”
Depicted above is the original cast of the 1950s TV series Mama. Dick Van Patten, seated on the lower left, played Nels. Jimmy almost got the role. Irene Dunne starred in the screen version.
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