James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  Born to a Swedish American family in Long Island, Nelson had worked with the Lunts, Katherine Cornell, and Leslie Howard. After the war, he returned to Broadway and, in the years to come, he would direct Cliff Robertson in Charly in 1968, which brought him a Best Actor Oscar. Nelson also directed such pictures as the comedy, Father Goose, with Cary Grant.

  “Jimmy turned a bit hostile the day he learned that Brando had made his Broadway debut as Nels,” Nelson said. “Perhaps he feared that some critics would remember Brando in the role and how great he’d been. Jimmy sensed that the Nels character on TV had been watered down to a more vanilla version. The part of the obedient son didn’t really appeal to Jimmy that much. He would have preferred to play a more rebellious character.”

  As it happened, Van Patten returned to the role. At his induction, and after a physical examination, he was classified as 4-F. Returning to the studio, he said, “I guess the Army doctor didn’t get turned on juggling my balls. I’m back.”

  Even though he didn’t really like the role, Jimmy was terribly disappointed. Yet he was proud to have been cast. He told Sheldon, “Even though I lost the part, I did get cast on talent alone. That’s a big difference between New York and Hollywood. In Tinseltown, I would have had to sleep with some jerk on the chance I might just get the role.”

  Had Jimmy stayed with the part of Nels, he might never have been the movie star James Dean. Mama as a TV series ran until 1957, and Van Patten went on to more acclaim when he appeared in an even more popular TV series, Eight is Enough (1977-1981).

  When Jimmy became famous, cast members of Mama remembered him. Rosemary Rice, cast at Katrin, the teenage daughter, recalled, “Dean was just too serious for the role. Dick, in contrast, played Nels with more humor, the way the part was written, He was much better than Dean, who was often dark and moody. I felt uncomfortable around him.”

  Even though Van Patten reclaimed his role, he and Jimmy became friends. “We hung out together. There were no hard feelings. I took him to poker games that actors played after the Broadway shows shut down for the night. They were held at the old Forrest Hotel on 49th Street. Jimmy never played, but just sat and watched. We’d send him out for beer and cigarettes.”

  “We’d often meet at the stage door of the Alvin Theater after I finished a performance. Sometimes, we’d go over to Jerry’s, where he was quite popular. One night, he shared the secret of his acting technique with me.”

  “Never learn your lines too well,” Jimmy said. “That way you can appear to be searching for what to say next. It’s more realistic that way. True to real life.”

  ***

  Jimmy didn’t have just a business relationship with Sheldon. It developed into an intimate friendship. Some biographers have suggested that they were once roommates and that they may have been involved with each other on a sexual level. But Sheldon told reporters over the years that their relationship was close but platonic. They did not live together. At the time that Jimmy met Sheldon, he was married and living with his wife at Gramercy Park South. Jimmy often came over for dinner.

  “I was a few years older than Jimmy, and he was still a bit green when I met him,” Sheldon said. “I certainly was better connected, and he seemed to take advantage of that. He took more than he gave, but was a good friend nevertheless. Whenever he was broke, he turned on that little boy lost charm, and I gave him a few bucks. In all, he was a very lovable guy.”

  Sheldon became a TV director, and even helmed Jimmy in two made-for-television movies, The Bells of Cockaigne and Harvest. Sheldon also would direct several episodes of McMillan & Wife, starring Rock Hudson, who by then had only bad memories of Jimmy.

  In time, Sheldon became a major TV director. One reporter claimed, “He practically wrote the book on how to direct a TV drama.” He would helm some 1,000 TV dramas or comedies, including everything from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. to Batman; from M*A*S*H* to The Dukes of Hazard.

  He is often credited with discovering James Dean, though others have cited that honor for themselves.

  “Jimmy was a very moody person who had a great smile and charm and loved to work,” Sheldon said. “That was his whole life. And he really cared about what he did. And he did it in his own way, which didn’t always conform to other people’s way of doing things. And that kind of quality was an original quality. It was his. Sometimes, he would sit there. Wouldn’t say a thing. And one moment, he’d be smiling and sparkling. And then he’d be aloof. I don’t think he was being rude. I think he was wrapped up in what he was doing.”

  ***

  The most important thing Sheldon did for Jimmy involved introducing him to a theatrical booking agent, Jane Deacy. Ironically, although her name and contact information had already been supplied to Jimmy in Hollywood by Dick Clayton (who would become his future agent), he didn’t initiate any contact with her until Sheldon arranged it.

  At the time, Deacy worked for the Louis Shurr Agency, where she’d begun her career as a switchboard operator.

  Deacy would play a major role in Jimmy’s career. The moment he entered her office, she intuitively sensed that she’d encountered an actor of unique talent.

  “Jane and Jimmy really hit it off from the first,” Sheldon said. “Of course, like all of Jimmy’s friendships, it was a love-hate relationship depending on his mood du jour.”

  In time, he was calling her “Mom,” and indeed she did mother him. “More than anyone else, Deacy helped make Jimmy a star,” claimed Alec Wilder. “She was more than his agent. Actually, a friend and unofficially, a parent.”

  When she moved out of the Louis Shurr Agency and established her own agency at 60 East 42nd Street, he went with her. In time, she built an impressive list of other clients, including Marge and Gower Champion, Martin Landau (who became a friend of Jimmy’s), Larry Hagman, Pat Hingle, and George C. Scott.

  Deacy’s first job for Dean was on the Saturday night CBS TV show, Beat the Clock, produced by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman and hosted by Bud Collyer. Jimmy’s first gig was not on camera; rather, he was hired to teach contestants how to act out, spontaneously, various sight-and-situation gags.

  Cover art for James Sheldon’s memoir, several pages of which were devoted to his memories of directing James Dean in TV dramas.

  He was told to rehearse the contestants for their funny tidbits, and he turned out to be an expert coach. “His sense of the absurd, not to say the silly, was highly developed,” said Venable Herndon, a playwright. “He could open himself up to the zaniest nonsense and act it into reality without the slightest embarrassment.”

  For this coaching, Jimmy was paid five dollars a day. A TV producer at CBS later claimed that “Jimmy got the sack because he was just too good and showed up the contestants. Any stunt you came up with, he could pull off. He performed like a professional and the premise of the show was that contestants needed to be awkward amateurs.”

  [The producers of Beat The Clock, Goodson and Todman, would go on to produce some of the longest-running game shows in TV history, including The Price is Right, Family Feud, To Tell The Truth, I’ve Got a Secret, and What’s My Line?]

  “Jimmy really needed someone—a mother-like figure—and that was Jane,” Sheldon said. “She got behind him and pushed and shoved him into greatness. From the beginning, she knew she had something hot to handle, and she set out to get him work. Boy, did she come through. He did an amazing number of TV shows, some with big names like Ronald Reagan, Anne Jackson, Jessica Tandy, John Forsythe, John Carradine, Rod Steiger, and Betsy Palmer.”

  Sometimes, Jimmy would disappear for hours at a time, and Deacy could not reach him. When asked where he’d been, he told her he’d been sitting on a park bench in Central Park. “The greenery reminds me of my boyhood growing up in Indiana.”

  TV Director and “Unstable Homosexual,” Robert Stevens

  JIMMY HOOKS UP WITH “THE DRACULA OF MANHATTAN”

  After Jimmy failed in his attempt to join the TV cast of I Remember Mama, his frien
d, James Sheldon, continued to solicit roles for him in teleplays. One friend he sent him to was Robert Stevens, a producer/director who from 1948 to 1952 helmed 102 episodes of Suspense Theater for TV.

  Born in New York, Stevens was eleven years older than Jimmy, but the two men, with completely different backgrounds, bonded almost immediately. Each of them seemed to have met a kindred spirit.

  When the set and stage designer Stanley Haggart once asked Jimmy about his relationship with Stevens—he’d heard rumors at his TV studio—Jimmy was not forthcoming. He merely called Stevens “My Dracula of the Underground.”

  In a candid moment years later in Hollywood, Stevens discussed Jimmy with director Alfred Hitchcock and some of his associates. “Both Jimmy and I had a fire raging within us that mere missionary position type sex could not put out the flames.”

  Stevens immediately cast Jimmy in one of the TV episodes of his long-running series, Suspense Theater, appearing opposite actor William Redfield. In 1959, Stevens would recall that casting decision to a reporter. “Dean seemed to me to be very intense and ambitious, and he didn’t strike me as being a very good actor. That proves how wrong I was.”

  Stevens might not have been that impressed with Jimmy as an actor, but he was powerfully attracted to him both as a dark lover between the sheets and as an ideal companion to accompany him on his nightly prowls through underground New York in the wee dark hours of the night.

  In spite of drawing mixed reviews from his co-workers, Stevens had a long career spanning four decades as both a film director and producer. Hitchcock hired him for some episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and even Bob Hope used him to helm Bob Hope Presents Chrysler Theater. Stevens also worked with Ronald Reagan, the host of General Electric Theater, and he also directed the pilot film for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. He also directed dozens of plays for The United States Steel Hour, Playhouse 90, and The Armstrong Circle Theater, plus various individual episodes of many other TV series.

  Partly because of his erratic personality, his work fell off in the 1970s, but before that, he also directed some big screen features, including Never Love a Stranger (1958), featuring a relatively unknown Steve McQueen along with John Drew Barrymore. Based on a Harold Robbins novel, Never Love a Stranger featured a miscast McQueen in the role of a Jewish lawyer.

  Stevens later told his gay friends, “I once visited McQueen and Barrymore when they shared a hotel room. I found both of them buck naked wandering about and stoned. I patted both of their asses and gave each of them a blowjob.”

  He also directed a young Jane Fonda in In the Cool of the Day (1963), which was nothing more than a glorified soap opera set against the lush backdrop of Greece.

  Producer Franklin Heller learned of Stevens’ link to Jimmy. He had hired Jimmy before, having offered him a starring role in his teleplay, Death Is My Neighbor. “Stevens was definitely from The Twilight Zone, for which he’d created the pilot. Yet he was exceptionally talented in the days when TV was in its infancy and anything could go wrong, especially during live broadcasts. He brought imagination to the medium and his own kind of brilliance. Management tolerated his erratic behavior in spite of all the rumors circulating about his personal life. He held onto his job mainly because he was so god damn good at it.”

  John Peyser, another director at CBS, had helmed Jimmy in Death Is My Neighbor. He was called to fill in for Stevens when he didn’t show up for work. “The guy would often blow his cork,” Peyser said. “I’d be called in at the last minute to direct a script I hadn’t even read. Rumors were circulating that Dean and Stevens were up to no good. Stevens was known at the studio as an unstable homosexual.”

  Any good-looking actor in New York at the time soon became aware that starring in a teleplay by Stevens usually involved a workout on his casting couch. By the dozens, actors—even those who were ostensibly straight—surrendered to his demands. The doorman at Stevens’ apartment house once reported that on a Saturday afternoon and night, at least nine actors came and went from his apartment, usually spending less than an hour per visit.

  Sheldon did not mention Stevens in his memoirs, but did tell a reporter than on a chance encounter in 1987, two years before Stevens’ death, he saw him on the street. Stevens, living in retirement, invited him to lunch, during which time he revealed that he and Jimmy had been sexually intimate.

  A sophisticated man, Sheldon was aware of Jimmy’s penchant for associations with strange bedfellows. “He hooks up with the castigated, those whose lives are on the fringe. Point out someone as a mainstream reject, and Jimmy immediately gravitates to them. He was especially attracted to those who had been badly wounded and had a very negative attitude toward life—a creep, really. Jimmy would go out of his way to get close to such a person. You never knew who he would show up with next.”

  Hired by Stevens, actor William Redfield appeared with Jimmy in an episode of Suspense, and would always remember what a horrendous experience it had been. This New Yorker, born in 1927, was close to Jimmy in age, but what he’d experienced was wider and more varied in its range. As a boy, he had appeared on Broadway in the 1938 production of Our Town. Later, he would star in such prestigious Broadway plays as A Man for All Seasons, Hamlet, and Barefoot Boy with Cheek.

  [Redfield’s best known film role involved an appearance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), starring Jack Nicholson. It was during its filming that his doctors diagnosed him with leukemia, which caused his early death at the age of 49 on August 17, 1976.]

  Stanley Haggart met Redfield on the opening night of Midgie Purvis (1961), a Mary Chase play starring Tallulah Bankhead. She had dedicated the play to Haggart. Over a late-night dinner at Sardi’s, Haggart, Tallulah, and Redfield talked about Jimmy. Tallulah and Redfield, of course, had had very different experiences with him.

  “In our teleplay for Suspense, I was to throw Dean a knock-out punch,” Redfield said. “I had done a bit of boxing at the YMCA, but I was no Rocky Graciano. I was going to give him a theatrical punch, however, during rehearsal, I missed his face by at least two inches.”

  Jimmy looked at him with disappointment. “Come on, Billy boy,” he said. “You can do better than that. Hit me like you mean it, mother-fucker!”

  “Are you kidding?” Redfield asked. “I’d bloody your nose.”

  “That’s what I want you to do,” Jimmy said. “When we go on the air, I want you to leave me a bloody mess.” Then he asked a bizarre question. “Would you make lemonade without any lemons? On the show, strike me like you’re Jack Dempsey and some whore had cut off your dick in the middle of the night when you were asleep. Didn’t the Actors Studio teach you about realism?”

  “Against my instincts, I did hit Dean during the telecast,” Redfield claimed. “A really powerful punch. Like he requested, he was a bloody mess when he hit the floor. It was not stage blood, but the real thing. At least, the critics praised our realistic acting.”

  After the broadcast, Redfield went to Jimmy’s dressing room, where he found him trying to stop his nosebleed. “I apologized profusely. I saw that his jaw had started to swell. ‘I’ll never forgive myself,’ I told him. He finally stopped bleeding and looked up at me—not with hatred, but with love in his expressive eyes.”

  “If there’s anything I can do for you, name it,” Redfield continued. “Anything to make it up to you.”

  “You can do something, as a matter of fact,” Jimmy said. “That K.O. from you really turned me on.”

  ”Then he grabbed me and kissed me passionately, feeding me his tongue.”

  “The boy had fed me his tongue as well,” Tallulah chimed in that night at Sardi’s. “In fact, he stuck more than his tongue in my mouth, Dah-ling.”

  Jimmy Gets Kinky

  AT LATE, LATE SHOWS IN NEW YORK’S SEXUAL UNDERGROUND

  Jimmy’s nocturnal prowls with Robert Stevens are mired in mystery. The main source of information about them come from two very different sources, one of whom was Bill Gunn, Jimm
y’s African American friend, a playwright, novelist, actor, and film director, a virtual Renaissance man.

  Their descriptive details originated from Mark Ducus, a close friend of Stevens. Ducus tried to peddle salacious details about Jimmy’s nocturnal adventures to Robert Harrison, publisher of Confidential Magazine, but Stevens threatened to retaliate with a multi-million dollar lawsuit for libel. Likewise, also under threats of a lawsuit, Stevens discouraged many other Dean biographers from writing about his relationship with Jimmy.

  On several occasions, Ducus accompanied Jimmy and Stevens during their explorations of New York’s sexual underground. Ducas told Jimmy that he and Stevens “used to be lovers, but now we’re just sisters on the prowl for male flesh.”

  “Most of the places we visited would have been shut down by the cops if they knew of their existence,” Ducus claimed. “Maybe they’d been bribed. When Dean ventured into these scenes from the sexual fringe, he seemed fascinated by how New York’s denizens of the deep lived out their fantasies.”

  “Homosexuality in the early 1950s was known as ‘the love that dared not speak its name,’” Ducas said. “The world that Stevens presented to Dean had nothing to do with love, and everything to do with sex. At the time, millions of New Yorkers were unaware of this bizarre twilight world, at least some of it happening within buildings in their immediate neighborhoods.”

  “One secret club back in the 50s was the Bull Pit, and it operated in Queens in what looked like a ballroom, perhaps from the Gay 1890s, so to speak,” Ducus claimed. “It was still gay, but with a different meaning. Entrance cost $25—if the bouncer approved of you. Maybe a lot more if the entertainment was special that night.”

  “The owners hired as many as twenty well-built hustlers, each of whom performed really dirty strip acts. When they’d finished, they assembled and lay down in the center of the room. They were on their backs and spread-eagled, positioned into what the promoters called “a wheel of lust.”