James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  One day, he meets his biological father, James Barton, who is a drifter roaming the countryside with his guitar. When he learns that Jimmy is happy with his foster parents, he decides not to reveal his true identity.

  At the time, Barton was also appearing on Broadway in Paint Your Wagon. One day, he gave Jimmy some complimentary tickets to his show.

  The title, Foggy, Foggy Dew, derived from an 1815 English folk song. In the 1940s, Burl Ives popularized it in America, but was arrested in Utah by a local sheriff who interpreted it as too bawdy to be performed in public, in Utah, at the time.

  ***

  One Friday afternoon, Alec Wilder invited Jimmy and Dizzy Sheridan to the Algonquin for tea. He recalled that “she was a fine young woman.”

  Later, he told Jimmy, “She seems to have a good influence on you. You seem calm around her, less neurotic. She’ll keep you from wandering down too many dark alleys.”

  Two days later, on a Sunday afternoon, Wilder phoned Jimmy and invited him to drop by his suite late that afternoon at 6PM. “I have a surprise for you.”

  At the appointed time, Jimmy arrived and knocked on the door. It was not Wilder who answered, but Rogers Brackett.

  “Guess who has moved to New York?” he asked Jimmy, pulling him inside the apartment and pressing his mouth down on his.

  Chapter Five

  SEE THE JAGUAR

  THE PLAY’S A DUD, BUT JIMMY OPENS ON BROADWAY TO RAVE REVIEWS

  James Dean Blazes a Celebrity-Studded, Pants-Dropping Trail Through Manhattan in a Saga Starring Grace Kelly

  HIS FEUD WITH THE ACTORS STUDIO

  AFTER AUDITIONING AS “THE MATADOR,” LEE STRASBERG “GORES HIM IN THE GUT.”

  After Rogers Brackett wrapped up his advertising work in Chicago, he rode the Twentieth Century Limited to New York and his new Life. From afar, stating his intentions to Alec Wilder, he planned to “reclaim Jimmy.”

  The composer told Brackett that “Jimmy thinks he’s in love with this dancer, Dizzy Sheridan. There’s some vague talk of marriage. If anything will break them up, it’s their mutual poverty.”

  Since dancing gigs for The Sheridan Trio were few and infrequent, Dizzy had been forced to accept a low-paying, part time job as a photo researcher.

  After his reunion with Brackett in Wilder’s suite at the Algonquin, Jimmy’s “moment of truth,” to use Jimmy’s bullfight terminology, had arrived. He had to confess to Dizzy the details of his relationship to his mysterious mentor, Brackett.

  In lieu of full disclosure, he opted to present her with a limited, highly edited version, with the excuse that “when I was down and out in Hollywood, Brackett got me film and radio work.” He did not let her know that he’d lived more or less openly with Brackett as his male lover.

  “He’s now arrived in New York to find an apartment and establish himself,” Jimmy said. “I have to tell you the truth. Rogers is a little bit queer. He even came on to me, and you, of all people, know what a toro I am in bed. He wanted to suck my cock. I was broke and really desperate, so I gave in to him. Many out-of-work actors have to do that, as you know, ‘cause you’re in show business yourself. It’s all about the casting couch. In Hollywood, or so it seems to me, about as many guys as gals are forced to lie on that couch.”

  “When it was over, I felt really, really bad, like a male whore. I had done something distasteful, completely repugnant to my true nature. And I still haven’t come to terms with myself for doing it.”

  “As you know, both of us will soon be on the street unless we can raise more money. Brackett has volunteered to help me find work in New York. That guy knows fucking everybody in the industry.”

  “But what will you have to do for him?” she asked.

  “I gave into him just that one time,” he said. “I can hold him off.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “And of course, I’ll need to spend time with the queer.”

  “Some time?” she asked. “Exactly what does that mean?”

  She later wrote of her shock at hearing about his involvement with Brackett. “I felt physically ill. After all, we’d promised to be together forever. My stomach was churning. I was a wreck.” She finally told him, “I want to meet this Brackett creep. Perhaps when he sees that we’re a loving couple in a committed relationship, he’ll back off.”

  “That can be set up,” he said. “I want him to know that, too, so he’ll stop pursuing me.”

  Later that morning he left the apartment without telling her where he was going. He didn’t come back until well after midnight when he staggered in drunk, collapsing onto the bed.

  Another blow, this one to both of them, occurred at around 10AM the following morning. The building manager pounded on their door. Groggy, Jimmy buried his head under the pillow as Dizzy answered the knock. Bluntly, the manager informed her that because of their mounting and unpaid back rent, the owner of the building had ordered them out no later than the following morning.

  After she left, Dizzy turned her anger onto Jimmy, accusing him of spending the previous day with Brackett. “I think he’s a queer. So are you!” She screamed the words at him at peak lung capacity.

  “I thought you’d understand,” he said. “I thought you were different. But you’re just another stupid cunt!”

  “How dare you call me a cunt, you little prick,” she yelled at him.

  He rushed about the apartment, ripping Sidney Franklin’s matador cape from the wall and stuffing his meager clothing into a battered suitcase.

  As he stormed out, heading down the steps, she yelled down at him, “Olé!, you bastard!”

  After searching throughout most of the day, hoping to find a cheap place to live, Dizzy, through a contact, located a little basement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen between the Hudson Piers and 9th Avenue. The rent was only eight dollars a week. She took it.

  Having no way of getting in touch with Jimmy, she went to Jerry’s Tavern that night, hoping he’d show up. She found him there looking desolate. He apologized for his outburst that morning, and she did the same. They reconciled, and he followed her back to her tiny (new) rental, which looked so small he labeled it “the bird’s nest.”

  The following evening, he agreed to escort her to Brackett’s new apartment, explaining that, “This old queer can help me a lot if he’ll just stop hitting on me.”

  She later wrote that she interpreted Brackett as “a sexual predator, a well-connected old queen who took advantage of a star-struck impressionable kid.”

  Upon entering Brackett’s building, Jimmy paused in the lobby, assuring her, “You’re worth a hundred Bracketts.”

  Introduced to the producer, she found him “a vision in beige—beige hair, beige clothing, beige shoes, beige carpeting, and beige furnishings.” A flickering fireplace provided a welcome touch of flame.

  As she sat with Jimmy on Brackett’s beige sofa, he possessively held her hand as if to signal to Brackett, “I’m not queer. I’m in love with a female.”

  An hour progressed awkwardly, punctuated with a bit of name dropping and an unspoken one-upmanship as to who was more familiar with Jimmy’s taste in food, drink, and interests.

  Brackett had heard of Dizzy’s father, the classical pianist, who was, coincidentally, acquainted with Alec Wilder.

  She didn’t like Brackett, and he didn’t like her, although both of them tried to conceal their resentment of each other. She finally made an excuse to leave, hoping that Jimmy would go with her. In the hallway, he promised that he’d catch up with her later at Jerry’s. He claimed he had some urgent matter to discuss with his producer friend. “It’s work related,” he assured her. “No funny business.”

  As Brackett later revealed, the business that then ensued wasn’t funny at all. After Dizzy departed, he demanded that Jimmy take him to bed—“and fuck me real hard, like you really mean it. It’ll be your atonement for bringing that possessive little creature here.”

  The next day, he didn’t re
turn to her cramped little apartment, but went instead to live with Brackett in his elegant apartment on 38th Street, just off Fifth Avenue near the site where a young Jacqueline Kennedy, married at the time to a senator from Massachusetts, shopped when she was in New York, Lord & Taylor.

  During their first week together, Brackett tried to reassert his dominance over Jimmy. “I plan to keep you drained of all your honey so you won’t have anything left for that silly bitch.”

  In the days ahead, Jimmy saw Dizzy whenever he could. Their relationship continued, but certainly not with the same intensity it had in the beginning. For a time, she left Manhattan for a gig in New Jersey.

  On most evenings, he was seen out on the town with Brackett “and his queer friends,” as Jimmy called them. Mostly, they were gay men who worked in advertising or in television. Jimmy went with Brackett to concerts, the ballet, Broadway opening nights, and to such restaurants as “21” or Sardi’s, where they often sat at tables with celebrated stars such as Bette Davis or Joan Fontaine. Late one afternoon, as Wilder was moving through the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, he spotted Jimmy and Brackett talking with a drunken novelist, William Faulkner.

  On evenings when he was free, and Dizzy was in town, Jimmy often ate a plate of food with her at Jerry’s, which was still a favorite hangout. They seemed to hold out some vision of their future together, although those hopes grew less intense and less realistic as time went by.

  Other romantic involvements, both male and female, would loom in Jimmy’s future, especially after he became involved in the Actors Studio.

  ***

  April of 1952 had been a month without work for Jimmy, but after Brackett’s return to New York, and because of his intervention, small roles emerged for him in a trio of teleplays scheduled to be aired in May or, in one instance, on June 2. The first was a teleplay about young Abraham Lincoln; the second was an episode set at the end of the Civil War featuring then-President Lincoln.

  Instead of working at CBS, Jimmy found himself at NBC, playing the role of young Lincoln’s friend, “Denny,” in a telecast entitled Prologue to Glory, a presentation of Kraft Television Theater.

  The play from which it had been adapted had been written by E.F. Conkle and had opened on Broadway in 1938. In the TV version sponsored by Kraft, Conkle was also the producer and director.

  The teleplay focused on Lincoln’s romance with Ann Rutledge and his grief over her untimely death. Cast as Lincoln was Thomas Coley, who had previously starred on Broadway in such plays as The Taming of the Shrew and Harvey. Pat Breslin, a New Yorker and the daughter of a judge, played Rutledge.

  Up until then, the young actresses Jimmy met tended to aspire to stardom in Hollywood films. Breslin, however, was part of a new breed of actress that emerged in the 1950s. Her ambition involved starring in dramas and comedies configured specifically for television. She’d later achieve success with Jackie Cooper, appearing as his girlfriend (later, his wife) in the NBC sitcom, The People’s Choice (1955-1958). She would also co-star with Nick Adams, Jimmy’s former Hollywood lover, in TV’s The Rebel.

  After finishing Prologue to Glory, Jimmy returned to CBS to appear in another teleplay, Abraham Lincoln, as produced for Westinghouse Studio One. Its director, John Paul Nickell, cast him as a tragic young soldier, William Scott. [In a previous teleplay, Nickell had hired him as a bellhop in Ten Thousand Horses Singing.]

  Following a script written by the British playwright, John Drinkwater, Abraham Lincoln had first been performed in London in 1918 and later in New York. It followed the life of Lincoln beginning with his presidential nomination in May of 1860 and ending with his assassination in 1865. Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater was not depicted in the telecast. “I want the viewer to imagine it,” Nickell said

  The role of the soldier, a Vermont farm boy who had lived and worked with his mother before being drafted into the Union Army, was Jimmy’s most memorable and sympathetic to date. In the drama, he has been court-martialed and sentenced to be executed by a firing squad at daybreak. The action takes place on the eve of the battle that ended the Civil War.

  The President learns of the youth’s impending death, and orders that the soldier be brought before him. He also learns that the young man had just completed a 23-mile march and had volunteered for double guard duty as a favor to a sick friend and fellow soldier. Based on his portrayal of the wide-eyed and frightened soldier facing death in the morning, Jimmy wins the empathy of the President, who drafts a letter, pardoning him from the firing squad and ordering him to return to his regiment. In gratitude, Jimmy salutes Lincoln for sparing his life.

  Lincoln was portrayed by Robert Pastene, who later said, “Young James Dean was perfect for the role. He looked like one of the soldiers in a photograph by Matthew Brady, who captured on his early camera all those marvelous pictures of soldiers during the Civil War.”

  Born in 1918 in Massachusetts, Pastene was a successful character actor, who predicted “great things for Jimmy’s future as an actor. He had an exceptional talent, and I liked it off camera when he called me Abe. I found him most endearing.”

  Judith Evelyn, cast as Mary Lincoln, originally arrived in New York from South Dakota with the intention of working on Broadway. She is remembered today, if at all, as the lonely alcoholic spied on by James Stewart from across the courtyard in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Jimmy would later have a reunion with her when she played Nancy Lynnton in Giant.

  In a conversation with her, he learned that she and her boyfriend, the Canadian radio producer Andrews Allan, had miraculously survived the sinking of the British transatlantic liner, the SS Athenia, at the outbreak of World War II.

  [Built in Glasgow in 1923, the SS Athenia was a British steam turbine passenger liner that was torpedoed by a Nazi submarine in September of 1939 off the Atlantic coast of Canada. It was the first U.K. ship to be sunk by Germany during World War II, killing 128 civilian passengers (28 of them U.S. citizens) and crew members.

  The act was immediately condemned as a war crime, yet did not immediately provoke the entry of the U.S. into the then mostly European conflict. At the time, Nazi authorities denied that one of their vessels had sunk the ship, delaying admission of any connection to the act until January of 1946.]

  Jimmy’s final teleplay that spring season, introduced by Sarah Churchill, was The Forgotten Children, an episode within the Hallmark Hall of Fame series.

  It starred the very talented Cloris Leachman portraying Martha Berry (1866-1942), the American philanthropist who advocated teaching reading and writing to impoverished children in the remote hill regions of the Deep South.

  In an unusual departure from his norm, Jimmy had been cast as a Southern dandy in frilly formalwear, sitting on the white-pillared porch of the Berry mansion in 1887. His role was that of “Bradford,” an insensitive Southern aristocrat who does not think women, specifically Martha, should enter the workplace.

  When Martha assures him that she is an emancipated woman, Jimmy sneers, “The only emancipated woman I ever knew lived in a side street of Memphis.” The character he’s portraying is then chastised for his reference to a prostitute in the presence of genteel southern ladies.

  Later, Jimmy (as Bradford) again shows how insensitive he is in a confrontation with a trespassing hillbilly girl whom he calls “a little savage” and “trash.”

  Iowa-born Leachman was one of the most talented actresses Jimmy had ever met. He was surprised she had gotten her start through a beauty pageant in Chicago. “You’re one good-looking woman,” he told her, “but you don’t look like the kind of gal who enters beauty contests.”

  “All of us have to start somewhere,” she assured him. She would go on to win eight Emmys and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her memorable role in The Last Picture Show (1971).

  The director and producer of The Forgotten Children, William Corrigan of North Dakota, became one of the leading directors of television’s Golden Age. Among his many achie
vements, he would helm a total of 91 episodes for The Armstrong Circle Theater, and would also make adaptations for television of such big screen staples as The Strawberry Blonde and The Miracle on 34th Street.

  Over lunch he talked to Jimmy about his future, advising him against a return to Hollywood with the hopes of becoming a movie star.

  “Television drama is the coming thing,” he claimed, “especially for a lot of young actors in their twenties. The big studios like Fox and MGM won’t let their stars under contract perform on television, Also, top talent on Broadway has utter disdain for television. Yet TV will provide a means to learn and to make a name for young actors like you in their twenties.”

  [After Jimmy’s death, Corrigan said, “If he had taken my advice, and obviously, if he had lived, I would have cast him as the star in many of the teleplays I directed. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.”]

  Jimmy’s Sexual Liaison with Sarah Churchill,

  THE REBELLIOUS DAUGHTER OF SIR WINSTON

  As Jimmy confided to Alec Wilder, “I’ve had this incredible luck of hooking up, however temporarily, with some famous people—first Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, Walt Disney, and Cole Porter on the West Coast; and Tallulah Bankhead and Peggy Lee in New York City. But about the last person on the planet I expected to ever become intimate with was Sarah Churchill.”

  Their introduction came through Brackett, who, as an employee of Foote, Cone, & Belding, was the advertising agent linked to promoting the hit TV series, The Hallmark Hall of Fame.

  Through a connection, he arranged a (minor) job for Jimmy on the show. Only his hand was shown on camera, appearing at the end of the teleplay, writing the credits on a blackboard. Sarah had been hired as the series’ well-spoken, upper-crust hostess—in effect, the figurehead and very posh symbol of the entire Hallmark series.

  Brackett had known Sarah ever since she signed on for an appearance with his summer stock company in Marblehead, Massachusetts. When Jimmy met her, she was living in a luxurious penthouse on Manhattan’s Central Park South. She became so close to Brackett that she entrusted him with the keys to her apartment, with the request that he look after it whenever she was out of town.