An hour later, he was inside Swift’s apartment. “You started this thing about me being in the escort business. I need some fancy duds.”
“I have three tuxedos,” Swift said. “If you can’t fit into one of mine, I’ll rent you one from a place nearby.”
At exactly five o’clock, Jimmy called Bast “I have the tux. I’ve tried it on. I look like a million dollars.”
“I knew you in Hollywood when you had only one pair of jeans.”
“Jimmy is coming up in the world,” he said.
“I hear Gary Cooper (they call him ‘the Montana Mule’) is a tough act to follow,” Bast said.
“Whatever I lack, I’ll make up for with youth, beauty, and stamina. I hear Grace is going to become the Queen of Hollywood. Guess who’ll be her Prince Consort?”’
***
Inside her penthouse, as hostess at her dinner party, Lady Sarah welcomed Grace and Jimmy warmly. “Come in, dear hearts,” she said, “and let the butler get you a drink. I’ve had a few libations already.”
To Jimmy, that was obvious.
As he would later tell Stanley Haggart, “I was the only nobody there.”
Sarah introduced him around. First, he met the French star, Louis Jourdan, who had been recently voted the most handsome man in the world. Shortly thereafter (in 1956), he’d be making a movie with Grace (The Swan), in which he’d be cast as a tutor in love with a princess-to-be, a bit of real life casting. Ironically, Jimmy, too, would soon be co-starring with Jourdan in the Broadway play, The Immoralist.
To Jimmy’s surprise, Jourdan’s escort for the evening was a most unlikely choice—Danny Kaye, the red-haired, highly excitable comedian who always seemed to be cavorting hilariously on screen.
Later, the tipsy Sarah whispered into Jimmy’s ear: “Louis and Danny are lovers—that is, when Danny isn’t having to fuck Larry Olivier.”
Looking as elegant and serene as Grace herself, another (slightly older) blonde goddess, Joan Fontaine, arrived at the party with an obviously gay escort. Jimmy had previously met her at Sardi’s.
Cecil Beaton arrived with Roddy McDowall, but whereas Roddy hugged and kissed Jimmy like an old friend, Beaton pretended to be meeting him for the first time. Memories of staging that sexual exhibition for Beaton and his British friends came rushing through Jimmy’s brain. He was tempted to say to him in front of the other guests, “Cecil, I haven’t seen you since you last sucked my dick,” but discretion won out.
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was another guest. He was the most elegantly dressed of all the male guests. His date was the formidable Marlene Dietrich, his old flame from the 1930s. After Sarah introduced her to Jimmy, she eyed him skeptically.
Months later, columnist Hedda Hopper asked Jimmy if he’d like to meet Dietrich. He didn’t tell her he already had. “I don’t know if I would,” he said. “She’s such a figment of my imagination. I go whoop in the stomach when you ask me if I’d like to meet her. Too much woman. You look at her and you think, ‘I’d like to have that.’” [Jimmy’s quote about Dietrich appeared in Hopper’s book, The Whole Truth and Nothing But.]
After his death, Dietrich shared her opinion of Jimmy to Hopper. “He was small, ugly, hunchbacked with a potbelly, and bow-legged. If he’d lived, he’d have a larger potbelly, wear a wig, and have died of AIDS.”
Fairbanks was more charming than Dietrich, announcing to anyone within earshot, “I saw Bette Davis the other night,” he said. “She recalled our first meeting at a party. I was married to Joan Crawford at the time. We chatted politely until I suddenly thrust my hand into her bra. I felt her tits—rather large. I recommended that she use ice on her nipples like my wife did. Bette later said she found my behavior appalling. Imagine saying such a thing about a gentleman like me.”
“Sarah told me that Noël Coward will be arriving soon,” Fairbanks said to Jimmy. “Watch out for that one. He had such a crush on me back in the 1930s. Did you know that he wrote that hit song about me, ‘Mad About the Boy?’”
Fairbanks had no sooner uttered that revelation than in walked Noël Coward himself, with Judy Garland on his arm.
Garland hugged and kissed Jimmy like a long-lost lover. “Darling,” she said, in reference to their drunken three-way long ago back in Los Angeles. “You took French leave. You didn’t even stick around for breakfast with John [Carlyle] and me.”
“Catch me next time.”
“I didn’t realize you knew this divine boy, Judy,” Coward said.
“He was my lover,” she said. “As you well know, I can’t rely on the unreliable dicks of the jerks I’ve married.”
Throughout the remainder of the evening, Coward and Sarah—although giving the impression that they were the best of friends—shared some long sequences of rather cutting banter.
“Noël, darling,” Sarah said. “Opinions about you vary so. Lord Louis Mountbatten once told me that no one could prick the bloom of pomposity quite like you. On the other hand, Rex Harrison claims that in so many ways, you’re a terrible cunt.”
“I admit to both charges,” Coward responded.
At one point, Coward joined Jimmy on the sofa during a moment when Grace was away. Then he very bluntly asked him, “Are you gay, dear boy?”
“I can take it or leave it,” Jimmy said.
“I can take it, but not with a woman,” Coward said. “All that open plumbing revolts me. I imagine doing it with a woman is like feeling the skin of a rattlesnake. Perhaps you and I will get together during my time in New York. As Mae West might say, ‘Come up and see me sometime.’ The sooner the better. How about tomorrow night in my suite at the Waldorf Astoria? I’ll leave clearance for you at the desk.”
“I’ll count the hours,” Jimmy promised.
Based on Coward’s influence in the theater and his “celebrity quotient,” Jimmy had every intention of keeping that date. But the following morning, something came up.
After the party at Lady Sarah’s, Jimmy had escorted Grace back to the Plaza. She had kissed him good night in the lobby, but had not invited him upstairs.
She telephoned him at eleven the next morning. It seemed that Gene Lyons had still not recovered, and that he had accused her of cheating on him. In the aftermath of the fight that ensued, they had canceled their plans for a rendezvous that night.
Into her end of the phone, Grace said to Jimmy, “I had planned this lovely dinner for him in my suite,” she said. “And I hate to dine alone. I even purchased a lovely new gown from Oleg Cassini, and I’m dying to show it off. Would you be a doll and fill in for Gene one more time? At eight o’clock tonight?”
“Would I ever!”
Bubbling over with excitement, Jimmy phoned Stanley Haggart. “Can you believe it? Two dazzling invitations at the same time tonight—one to Noël Coward’s suite, another to Grace Kelly’s. What to do? I’m not really suited to Coward’s comedies or musicals. I’d do better as Grace’s co-star in her future movies. She’s going to be big. She told me she’s returning to Hollywood. MGM wants to cast her in a jungle movie with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner.”
“Well, it looks like Coward’s loss will be Grace’s good fortune,” Haggart responded.
***
The question remains unanswered. Did Jimmy seduce Grace Kelly that night in her suite at the Plaza? Or, phrased another way, did she seduce him?
When Haggart was asked about this, he said, “Frankly, I don’t know. He never described to me how the evening went.”
“A guy has to keep some secrets,” Jimmy had said.
“And I was too polite to ask,” Haggart said. “But based on their reputation—and I mean, both of their reputations—I can be almost 90% certain that they did the dirty deed. And why not?”
***
As preposterous as it sounded at the time, Jimmy’s dream of co-starring with Grace Kelly almost came to be. After she left New York for Hollywood, she did not disappear from his life completely. They would meet again when George Stevens wanted to cast them t
ogether as co-stars in Giant with Rock Hudson.
In the meantime, his agent, Jane Deacy, called, saying, “My phone’s been ringing off the wall. NBC, CBS, and ABC each want you to star in teleplays. You’re hot, kid. You’re going bigtime.”
Chapter Six
JIMMY’S AFFAIR WITH
STEVE McQUEEN
Competition Onscreen and After Dark
HOW MCQUEEN’S IDOL WORSHIP OF JIMMY WAS LATER TRANSFERRED TO PAUL NEWMAN
In the early 1950s, three young actors in New York—James Dean, Paul Newman, and Steve McQueen—frequently arrived for the same casting calls. Mostly, the auditions involved teleplays, but in some cases they were for an aggressively sought-after role on Broadway.
Jimmy’s agent, Jane Deacy, was quoted as saying: “That trio of good-looking men came to be viewed by directors as the same “type.” If Jimmy were right for a role, it was also deemed suitable for either Newman or McQueen. Later, film directors in Hollywood more or less had the same view, too. Jimmy was set to star in Somebody Up There Likes Me, in which McQueen would play a small role. After Jimmy died, Newman was cast as the lead. McQueen also thought he’d be a more ideal choice to have played Jimmy’s role in his three big feature films, especially Giant.”
Deacy’s remarks were later confirmed by Shelley Winters. “Steve told me he’d have been better than Dean in East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and in Giant, too.
She quoted McQueen as saying, “The role of Jett Rink in Giant had my name written all over it. The scene where Dean got drenched from the oil gushing out of the well seemed ripped from a page of my own life. When I was a kid in Corpus Christi, I was hired as a roughneck, a job that used to be called a roustabout. I worked at drilling sites and, on many an occasion, I was bathed in oil.”
“At night, I hung out in seedy taverns with wildcatters. That trade is full of men with empty pockets and big dreams.”
“If I’d been in Giant, I would have fucked Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and Sal Mineo.”
Author David Dalton collectively referred to Newman, McQueen, and Dean as “a cluster of types. A new kind of hero was coming into being, and it was inevitable that a lot of people shared the same idea. In the beginning of their careers, their personas were just drawing boundaries, and they were sensitive about being compared to each other.”
MANFLESH AND GRIST FOR THE HOLLYWOOD MILLS
Three ferociously competitive young actors emerged during the 1950s, each auditioning for the same types of roles. Each of them studied, and in some cases, mimicked the others’ styles. Above, left to right: Steve McQueen, James Dean, and Paul Newman.
In the beginning, Jimmy bonded with his fellow actors, even becoming intimate with them. A bisexual streak prevailed among all three men. Specifics about the bonding between Jimmy and McQueen has never been fully explored, because many of the details are missing. But in the wake of Jimmy’s death, some eyewitness accounts surfaced, although still remaining sketchy.
In The Mutant King, a biography of James Dean, Dalton wrote that McQueen one night at a Hollywood party encountered Martin Landau, a good friend of Jimmy’s. McQueen told Landau, “We’ve met before.” He reminded him that he had first seen him when he’d driven his car into a garage on West 69th Street in Manhattan. A few minutes later, Jimmy roared in on his motorcycle. “Work had to be done on both vehicles, and I was the mechanic on duty,” McQueen said.
What eventually evolved from that happenstance meeting in the garage was provided by Rogers Brackett, who was supporting Jimmy at the time and living with him in his apartment. “Perhaps to make me jealous, Jimmy confessed to me how he’d initially met McQueen and how he hooked up with him later. At the time, I had never heard of him. That day at the garage, after Landau went away, Jimmy slipped McQueen a slip of paper that said ‘CALL ME.’ The number he gave him happened to be my number, because Jimmy was living with me at the time.”
Young Steve, as a Marine (both photos above). Like Jimmy, it took some conscious effort for him to develop and evolve his style as an actor.
As was so often the case with Jimmy, he provided an entirely different account of what happened that afternoon in the garage to author Michael Munn. At the time, McQueen had not been able to snag an acting gig, so he took a job as a mechanic instead. “I figured my acting career was over,” he told Munn. “No offers. But then one day in comes James Dean, and I serviced his car.” [Actually, it was a motorcycle.] “I felt humiliated because I knew I should have been making money acting, and now I was servicing Dean’s fucking car.”
Brackett claimed that Jimmy’s seduction of McQueen first took place in his apartment during a time when he was away in Chicago shooting a commercial. “Those guys used my bed. Jimmy later told me all about it. He claimed that McQueen was not a great lay and just lay there with him doing all the work. And from the things I heard among show-biz pros, McQueen was and continued to be willing to drop his shorts for career advances. So was Jimmy, for that matter.”
Jimmy presented yet a different version of his sexual link to McQueen to Stanley Haggart. “I know why girls and some men grow crazy over Steve as a lover. He has great technique: He tongues you all over and gets you so worked up you’re hot as a firecracker. Then he comes on like gangbusters. We’re equally matched in sexual equipment. We could be brothers. That is, if brothers commit incest.”
“I always thought that Jimmy was more gay than straight,” Brackett said. “But from what I later heard, McQueen was more the ladies’ man. That didn’t mean he hadn’t done a lot of hustling like Jimmy himself. He had had some affairs with men on the side. It was later revealed that he’d played in some porn movies in Cuba. Let’s write him up as bisexual. When stars like Monty Clift or Brando rang up McQueen, he always seemed ready, willing, and able to show up at their doorstep.”
“Jimmy, indeed, had an affair with McQueen,” Brackett claimed, “But at the same time, he was carrying on with other actors and had a girl or two on the side. And he took care of me. Boy, did he have stamina. He was one busy boy.”
Paul Darlow, a friend of Jimmy’s, told author Christopher Sandford about an encounter he’d witnessed between Jimmy and McQueen at Jerry’s Tavern. Darlow was sitting with them.
Jimmy suddenly ordered McQueen, “Do my hair.”
“McQueen rose from the table and obliged,” Darlow said. “He patiently back-combed Dean’s soon-to-be famous hair, making it thick and shiny as a mink’s. McQueen was breathing and lightly chuckling down the back of Jimmy’s neck.”
By this point in his career, Jimmy had started to carry around a hairbrush. His agent and a few directors had complained about his unruly hair. Darlow later speculated, “Perhaps Jimmy was getting made up for his next casting call, with the understanding that he’d be competing with well-groomed actors.”
After he’d applied the finishing touches to Jimmy’s hair, McQueen asked him, “Would you do mine?”
“Drop dead,” said Jimmy.
“Come on, JD, don’t you dig my fur?”
“No,” Jimmy said. “It always looks so Dago to me.”
Despite the putdowns, Jimmy was still seen coming and going from McQueen’s shabby little apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement building on East 10th Street, where the rent was twenty-five dollars a month. Its bathtub was in the kitchen, directly adjacent to his gas-burning stove. When the bathtub wasn’t being used, McQueen covered it with a lid and used its surface as a countertop.
The veteran actress, Uta Hagen, once invited McQueen and Jimmy to a student performance at the HB Studio. It was understood that when it was over, members of the audience would deliver their critiques. Karl Malden was also invited. Jimmy had met him at the Actors Studio and had also seen his performance in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) with Brando and Vivien Leigh.
“Critics accused me of imitating the acting style of James Dean in that stinker, The Blob,” McQueen said. “Maybe I did. But from now on, I’m going to be Steve McQueen,
an original.”
“I arrived late and sat in the back row,” Malden later said. “McQueen and Dean were about twelve feet away. They weren’t watching the play—Ibsen, I believe—but were into each other. They engaged in what we used to call a necking session. Dean giggled, but McQueen was more the silent type. A lot of actors back then, if you could imagine such a thing, called those two ‘swishes,’ but in my view, both young men were too macho for that label. I didn’t condemn their sexual behavior, but there was a time and place for everything. They had been invited to watch the play and to take it seriously. Their commando act could wait for later.”
“At the end of the play, I stood up and advised those two lovebirds to get a room.”
The bonding between Jimmy and McQueen flourished, but only for a while. According to claims from other actors, “McQueen came to idolize Jimmy. In his auditions, he began to sound like Dean.” Those words came from James Sheldon, one of Jimmy’s mentors.
McQueen told Sheldon, “Jimmy is the greatest actor in New York, much better than Clift and Brando. If he’s influenced me, so what? I don’t want to sound like a mushmouth like Brando.”
Five years after Jimmy’s death, in reference to McQueen’s performance in The Blob (1958), critics claimed that in it, “He stole the persona of James Dean, adapting it for his own acting style. James Dean is not dead! He lives on in Steve McQueen.”
Biographer Penina Spiegel explained why McQueen was called “The Shadow” by certain actors who knew both Jimmy and him. “He seemed to stalk Dean,” she wrote. “They shared a certain sulky arrogance, a self-absorbed moodiness, and an intense sexual appeal. Yet while Dean went on to collect film roles, McQueen was still struggling, still going nowhere.”
Not just Spiegel, but others, noted how McQueen followed Jimmy around “like a puppy dog trailing its master.” Ironically, the same charge was being made about Jimmy stalking Brando.
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