James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  Jimmy to Dizzy Sheridan:

  “SHALL WE INVITE QUEEN ELIZABETH TO OUR WEDDING?”

  One afternoon at a “cattle call” for CBS, Jimmy met a pretty young 22-year-old wannabe actress, Jane Wright. Based on the audition, neither of them got any job offers. When it was over, he walked with her to the Rehearsal Club, at West 53rd Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Adapted from the architectural interconnection of two brownstones, it functioned as a residence for women. Living there were actresses, singers, and dancers staying for room and board at modest prices. Jimmy was invited in for a meal after telling Wright that he hadn’t eaten in two days.

  He never saw her again, as she checked out two days later to return to her home in Greensboro, North Carolina. She told Jimmy that she’d been turned down at least fifty times for show-biz jobs and that she had run out of money.

  He felt comfortable in the public rooms of this women’s residence, where young men sometimes waited for their dates. No men were allowed upstairs. Sometimes, one of the performers would give him half of her sandwich or perhaps a coke. He would sit there for hours.

  One day, he was caught in a rainstorm and entered the lobby dripping wet. He sat down and put his wet boots on top of a coffee table. Had the supervisor been around she probably would have evicted him from the building. He sat there wearing a wet and undersized camel’s hair coat that a young woman had given him. She’d worn it in college.

  At that time of day (late afternoon,) the lobby was empty except for an attractive, rather tall woman who sat across from him. She struck him as a sensuous brunette, and he found her most appealing.

  They talked casually. He learned that her name was Elizabeth Sheridan, but that most people used her nickname, “Dizzy.” She told him she was a dancer, and the namesake within “The Sheridan Trio” which included her two partners: Fabio Diaz, who evoked a Mexican bandit, and Tony Marcello, son of an Italian butcher. Muscular, and perhaps with a nod to his father’s profession, he was usually described as “beefy.”

  Dizzy would wait until 2000 to publish a memoir of her affair with Jimmy, entitling it Dizzy and Jimmy. In it, she recalled their first meeting early in 1952. “He was wet, and he was blonde. And his glasses were all wet. And he was a bit shorter than I was. He looked small and blonde and wet. And lovely. I just remember that he was terribly intense. And we intensely spoke about intense things.”

  The theme of their dialogue included the struggle of an artist trying to break into the performing arts in New York City. As they continued talking, it turned out that they each shared an interest in bullfighting. He hadn’t expected that from her.

  To eke out a living, she worked as an usher at the Paris Cinema on 58th Street at Fifth Avenue, near the deluxe Plaza Hotel. In time, he would visit her there. She slipped him in and fed him free popcorn and candy bars.

  In the lobby of her residence, he told her that he needed to walk somewhere, but that the rain didn’t seem to be letting up any time soon. “If you’ll let me borrow your umbrella, I’ll return it tomorrow afternoon.” Somehow, she believed him, and went upstairs to fetch it.

  At the exit, he smiled shyly at her and looked into her eyes. “You are the most interesting girl,” he said, before opening the umbrella and heading off into the storm.

  She didn’t really expect to see him again, but nevertheless, she sat for three subsequent hours in the lobby of her building, waiting for him to return. The next day, just as she was about retire to her room, he entered the lobby with her umbrella.

  He invited her over to Jerry’s telling her it was his favorite hangout. Since both of them were on a tight budget, they agreed to share a hamburger. He ordered a beer and she asked for a Champale. “Can I have a taste of your drink?” he asked. She agreed, and then excused herself. When she returned, she noticed two white objects floating on the bottom of her glass. “What’s that?”

  “Do you mind fishing out my two front teeth?” he asked.

  He had dropped his removable caps into her glass. Actually, she found him rather cute “with his toothless idiot grin.”

  “My father works with teeth. You found a sample of his work floating in your Champale. My mother, dead now, was an Indian squaw.”

  They soon began to date, and he learned that her father, Frank Sheridan, now divorced from her mother, a singer, was a distinguished classical pianist.

  That Saturday night, she invited him to a big nightclub in Harlem, where The Sheridan Trio was appearing as one of the acts. Flanked by two partners, Dizzy performed the Apache dance, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.”

  Dizzy Sheridan...a show-biz future as Jerry Seinfeld’s mother.

  Jimmy later admitted, “I fell in love with Dizzy watching her get thrown around the stage by those guys. Of course, love is such a fleeting emotion. After the show, I took her to Jerry’s, where she fell in love with me because of my clever napkin doodles.”

  That night, she remembered their first kiss, comparing it to two puppies cleaning each other.

  ***

  After some time had passed, the loving couple were ready to mate, and each seemed willing to embark on a sexual encounter with the other. Neither, alas, had any place to go for privacy. An opportunity arose when Mrs. Sheridan, her mother, invited them for Sunday dinner at her home in Larchmont. Their house opened onto a view of Long Island Sound.

  Between them, they’d saved about a hundred dollars. Dizzy suggested that on the day before they were expected at her mother’s house for dinner, they travel together by train to Larchmont, and on that Saturday night, they register at a local hotel together as newlyweds. Consequently, defining themselves as “Mr. and Mrs. James Dean,” they checked into the Bevan Inn, adjacent to the Horseshoe Harbor Yacht Club.

  Locked away together for the first time, Dizzy said in her memoirs that they made love, both of them “exploding too quickly” while still clad in their underwear.

  After a joint bubblebath, they indulged in another round. She later defined his entering her as “thrilling. I rose up and then cried out. He was moving deep within me, touching places I had never known before, secret even from myself.”

  Playfully, the next morning over breakfast, they smeared jam on each other’s faces, then licked it off.

  Arriving a few hours later for Sunday dinner at her mother’s house, Jimmy was treated to his favorite dish, pot roast. He told Mrs. Sheridan that it was even better than the pot roast his aunt, Ortense Winslow, made for him every Sunday back in Indiana. Mrs. Sheridan was charmed by his politeness and good manners.

  Back in New York, Jimmy saw Dizzy almost every day; if not, they talked on the phone four or five times a day. “Ours was a very private relationship. During the time we were together, we saw very few people. It was the way both of us wanted it.”

  She claimed that there was talk of marriage. They even went so far as to compose a guest list for their possible upcoming marriage. The guest of honor would be Queen Elizabeth. The others would include Noël Coward, Albert Einstein, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy. Of course, Dizzy was completely unaware that Jimmy had already “tricked” with Tracy in Hollywood.

  Ultimately, he resisted marriage. “I won’t marry unless I can take care of a gal in a way she should be cared for, and I’m in no position to do that. Hell, I can’t even look after myself.”

  According to Dizzy, “Most of the time he was quiet, sensitive, and intelligent. Sometimes, he would, after a long silence, look up at me and grin. That smile could warm a girl’s heart.”

  “What nice girls didn’t do, I did,” Dizzy said. “We developed an intimate sexual relationship. For more than a year, we lived in a sheltered dream created out of our hopes for the future and our passion for each other.”

  On February 8, 1952, Jimmy turned twenty-one, and celebrated, with Dizzy, his official transition into adulthood.

  Alec Wilder later revealed that Jimmy didn’t like turning twenty-one, evaluating the event with, “I should have made it by now.
I would have if the fucking directors and producers weren’t so stupid. They’re nothing but jerks.”

  “Jimmy came to see me only when he was depressed,” Wilder said. “That was most of the time when he didn’t get an acting job. He grew increasingly bitter after his birthday.”

  “One night he called me at two o’clock in the morning, telling me he was about to die. He said he wanted to bid me a final farewell. I told him to come over right away so we could talk. But he wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t even tell me where he was staying. When I insisted, he hung up. An hour later, he called to tell me he was all right.”

  “I merely dreamed I was dying,” he told Wilder. “I’m not really dying.”

  When he put down the phone, Wilder later wrote in his journal. “There is one thing I have noticed about Mr. James Dean, boy actor. He can run through an entire gamut of emotions in just twenty-four hours, or even less.”

  When Dizzy and Jimmy saved up enough money, they decided to rent a studio at the Hargrave Hotel. It had two large windows overlooking Columbus Avenue at 71st Street. Jimmy compared it to the size of a broom closet, containing a double bed and an old-fashioned bathtub with “lion’s claws” for feet.

  Dizzy recalled that both of them stood nude in front of a full-length mirror, admiring the contours of their bodies. “We retired to the bed, where we stroked each other’s bodies. By the time he entered me, we were ready to explode together.”

  She recalled candlelit dinners where they often shared a bowl of shredded wheat while he dreamed of eating a big, juicy steak. They sometimes strolled through Central Park, holding hands and avoiding the muggers. “Mostly, we sat and talked for hours about our lives and what we wanted to do with them. He just hung on to me, knowing I was lonely at the time, too. We became inseparable.”

  ***

  Although he’d been fired from his job at CBS’s Beat the Clock, Jimmy returned to the studio to play a key role in the CBS Television Workshop Series, a segment entitled Into the Valley. Directed by Curt Conway, it was a jungle warfare drama. Jimmy was cast as one of the “dogfaces,” the role similar to his brief part in Hollywood when he appeared in the movie Fixed Bayonets!.

  The scenario for Into the Valley was based on an account of the brutal battle between the Japanese and American soldiers on Guadalcanal, as written by the novelist and war correspondent, John Hersey.

  Jimmy became intrigued after reading Hersey’s story and wanted to learn more about his work. He went to the New York Public Library, where in one sitting, he read a sort of masterpiece by him, a story about survivors from the ruins of Hiroshima, which had been destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945. These characters included everyone from a widowed seamstress to “a man of God.”

  He was even more fascinated by Hersey’s novel, A Bell for Adano, the tale of the Allied occupation of a Sicilian village during the closing months of World War II. Later, it won a Pulitzer Prize for Hersey and was adapted into a movie starring Gene Tierney and John Hodiak.

  Jimmy was cast as a “dogface” in a teleplay based on a drama inspired by the writing of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and journalist, John Hersey (above). His account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was judged as the finest piece of American journalism of the 20th Century by a 36-member panel associated with New York University’s Journalism Department.

  Jimmy’s next assignment—also for CBS—was a part within The Web, a series whose episodes focused on ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations rife with danger and intrigues.

  “Dean was a young man seeking to solve the murder of his brother,” said Franklin Heller, its producer. “We needed a strange, eccentric character, and Dean sure fitted that bill.” Heller cast two major stars, E.G. Marshall and Anne Jackson, into the lead roles. At the time, she was married to another distinguished actor, Eli Wallach.

  Heller would go on to direct What’s My Line?, the longest-running TV quiz show in that medium’s history. “Before I could do that, I had to survive James Dean,” he recalled. “He was the most difficult actor I ever worked with, rude and hostile. I wanted to fire him, but Marshall and Anne insisted I keep him on.”

  “Dean was an absolute horror until we went on the air, and then he performed with perfection,” Heller said. “But he was very moody during rehearsals, always wanting to know what his god damn motivation was. I found him a pain in the ass. Finally, I told him his fucking motivation was to earn a paycheck.”

  Most actors merely walked through rehearsals, saving their real stuff to strut before the camera,” Heller said. “Dean wanted all his rehearsals to be blood, sweat, and gore. In one scene, an actor was supposed to strike him. Dean ordered the actor to hit him hard. He did. Dean ended up bloody on the floor, but he took it like a man and didn’t complain at all. We suspected he might be a masochist and that he got a sexual thrill by having the stud beat him up.”

  Jackson claimed she liked Jimmy, even though he monopolized Heller so much he didn’t have time to direct any other members of the cast. “I thought that with the right training and direction, he might become another Brando. Incidentally, in case you weren’t around in 1952 to see the drama, I was revealed as the person who murdered Jimmy’s brother.”

  Jimmy had several long talks with Marshall, who, along with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, as well as Julie Harris and Kim Stanley, made up the original coven who founded Actors Studio. Jimmy had great respect for Marshall, who had starred on Broadway in such plays as The Skin of Our Teeth and The Iceman Cometh.

  One of the most distinguished of American actresses, Anne Jackson, born in 1926, was still working in 2016 in cameo roles. She married actor Eli Wallach in 1948 and was still married to him upon his death in 2014. SHe was one of the first of the big stars in New York to see the potential of James Dean, predicting a great future for him.

  Jackson would later appear with Jimmy in the Off-Broadway play, The Scarecrow. Even though Heller had feuded with Jimmy, he later hired him again for the 1953 TV drama, Death Is My Neighbor.

  Some producers at NBC saw Jimmy perform and were impressed. In those days, one studio was always trying to steal the best actors from their rivals. Jimmy was called over to NBC where he was offered a role in the production of Martin Kane, Private Eye.

  After the first two days, the directed wanted to fire James Dean from the teleplay in which he was performing with its star, E.G. Marshall. But the veteran actor took up for him and demanded that he stay.

  Marshall recognized talent when he saw it. As a founding member of the Actors Studio, he knew Marlon Brando and Monty Clift. He told Jimmy, “Maybe not today, but at least by tomorrow, you’re going to be every bit as good as those two...maybe even better!”

  Agent Archer King said the director at NBC, “found Jimmy impossible to work with, and unlike Heller, simply wasn’t patient enough to continue nurturing Jimmy. After three days, he was fired.”

  His agent, Jane Deacy, reassured Jimmy. “You’re every bit as good as you think you are. But it’s going to take a long time and a lot of patience on your part to convince others of that.”

  “Time is something I don’t have,” he told her.

  ***

  Still at CBS, Jimmy complained that his next role was too small, defining it as one of those “if you blink you’ll miss me” parts. For Westinghouse Studio One, he signed on to appear as a bellhop in the drama Ten Thousand Horses Singing. It aired on March 3, 1952.

  Directed by John Paul Nickell, the teleplay starred John Forsythe, Catherine McLeod, and Vaughn Taylor. Worthington Manor, who both wrote and produced the episode, eventually evolved into one of the most prolific and creative voices of the Golden Age of television in the 1950s. Jimmy spoke to him only briefly. The producer told him, “My aim is to develop a national audience for TV drama without lowering artistic standards.”

  “I guess I was in the minority in that I just didn’t see what James Dean had,” said actor John Forsythe, depicted above
in 1958. “I was in the first class of students when Actors Studio was founded, and I thought I recognized talent when I saw it, but in his case, I guess I was wrong.”

  Forsythe went on to star in a trio of TV series, spanning four decades: Bachelor Father, Charlie’s Angels, and Dynasty, the latter running for most of the 1980s.

  “Good luck, sir,” Jimmy said. “I’m with you.”

  Nickell helmed Jimmy in his scene. A Kentuckian, he would go on to direct such hit series as Ben Casey, Bonanza, Lassie, and The Virginian. Years later, he didn’t remember directing Jimmy in this little drama.

  In it, as a bellhop, Jimmy rides the elevator to the tenth floor, carrying the baggage for a quarreling couple. At their destination, a woman (McLeod) is abused by her companion (Taylor). Forsythe comes to her rescue. Taylor takes off his glasses and punches Forsythe in the jaw. Jimmy is seen reacting to the violence. During the course of the scene, he uttered only one line, “Ten, please,” delivered when he first stepped onto the elevator.

  Born in 1910, Taylor would star with Jimmy in two other teleplays, Harvest and The Bells of Cockaigne. Later, Taylor would appear with Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock (1957); Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).

  ***

  Later that March in 1952, Jimmy was assigned his first starring role. It was within the 30-minute drama The Foggy, Foggy Dew, produced for CBS’s Lux Video Theater. An actor and director, Richard Goode, cast Jimmy in the role of a happy teenager, an unusual part for him.

  In the plot, he is seen leading a well-adjusted life with his foster parents, played by Richard Bishop and Muriel Kirkland. The young boy thinks those are his real parents.