James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  A room service waiter reported that he found both men in bed together and presumably nude when he delivered their breakfast the subsequent morning in New York.

  Before leaving New York, Hudson promised that he’d hang out with McQueen when he made it to the coast, regardless of the outcome of the casting of Giant.

  “I have this gut instinct that we’re going to work together one day, and that each of us, in our own separate ways, is going to become the biggest box office attraction in the country.”

  In The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway performed what some critics called “The sexiest kiss in the history of cinema.”

  ***

  When Jimmy left New York to fly back to Los Angeles, both he and McQueen were filled with rosy visions of their future. When they kissed and embraced, it was for the last time.

  The next news McQueen heard about Jimmy came a few months later via television. His friend was dead in a car crash in California.

  “I’ll probably die in a machine, just like Jimmy,” McQueen told the actor, George Peppard. “I can see it now. Some lonely stretch of highway along some back road somewhere. Death will be instant. I’m sure my head will be severed like Jimmy’s. But what a way to go. Floor-boarding it and rushing head-on to meet death. If cars weren’t meant to go fast, they wouldn’t have been made to do so. Man craves speed. The only time I feel really alive is when I’m speeding and defying death. I understand Jimmy’s need.”

  Steve McQueen told a reporter that he and James Dean shared the same philosophy of life. “I live for myself and I answer to nobody. The last thing I want to do is to fall in love with some broad.”

  McQueen rather callously told Hudson and others one drunken night, “I’m glad Dean is dead. That eliminates my main competition.”

  When Jimmy passed on from this world in 1955, McQueen transferred his idolatry of the late star to another emerging star, Paul Newman. He also redirected the jealousy he’d felt about Jimmy onto Newman, who was getting starring roles before he did.

  Comparisons between the two stars became a part of the national consciousness, and widely publicized. In a discussion by feminist icon Erica Jong about the difficulties of achieving the “ultimate orgasm,” she wrote in Esquire: “Who has the bluest eyes, Newman or McQueen? It is difficult to say, but McQueen’s twinkle more. He makes me think of all those leathery-necked cowboys at remote truck stops in Nevada. Does he wear pointy boots? And does he take them off when he screws?”

  In the wake of Jimmy’s death, a writer cited McQueen as “The Next James Dean,” and a reporter for Movie World wrote: “Steve McQueen is the logical successor to James Dean. The clique that worships Dean has a new Messiah in McQueen. Luckily, he is living longer than Dean did, so the cult will have a long, long time to thrive.”

  When McQueen read that, he said, “Fuck it! I want to be the next Bogie.”

  Despite the forecast of Movie World’s columnist, Steve did not have that much longer to live. He died of a heart attack at the age of fifty in 1980.

  But before that, he evolved into a top-tier movie star, luring audiences to the box office throughout the 1960s and 70s with such hits as The Great Escape (1963), The Cincinnati Kid (1963), The Sand Pebbles (1966; it led to Steve’s nomination as Best Actor that year); Bullit (1968); The Magnificent Seven (1970), Papillon (1973), and The Towering Inferno (1974), within which he competed with Paul Newman for top billing.

  McQueen, Faye Dunaway, & Paul Newman in The Towering Inferno (1974)

  Chapter Seven

  JIMMY’S JAILBAIT. HIS AFFAIR & CORRESPONDENCE WITH

  BARBARA GLENN

  A Jewish Sweet Sixteen Wannabe Actress from Queens

  HE TAKES HER VIRGINITY, SLAPS HER AROUND, ACCEPTS MONEY FROM HER, SENDS HER PSYCHOTIC LOVE LETTERS, AND TALKS OF MARRIAGE

  Reckless Motorcycle Rides Through the Canyons of Manhattan

  The setting was Cromwell’s Pharmacy, within the NBC Building in Manhattan, as 1952 was drawing to a close. A just-turned sixteen-year-old wannabe actress, Barbara Glenn, who descended from a Jewish family in Queens, was sitting at a table sipping soda with her actor friends, Martin Landau, Rusty Slocum, and Carol Sinclair.

  Barbara Glenn with James Dean at the beach. He later described her as “my neurotic little shit.”

  At this time in his life, James Dean made almost daily visits to this actors’ hangout, with its bank of pay phones where hopefuls were always phoning their agents to see if any acting gigs had come through.

  “Who’s that attractive man?” Glenn asked, as she stared at Jimmy, who stood about twelve feet away. He had already signaled a greeting to his friend Landau.

  “I know him,” Landau said. “I’ll bring him over and introduce you to him.” Then he walked over to alert Jimmy that he had an admirer.

  From a distance, Jimmy appraised her. “Looks like jailbait to me.” Nonetheless, he came over and greeted her, although he didn’t have much to say.

  At least she learned that he was set to open that night on Broadway in See the Jaguar, a play starring Arthur Kennedy.

  Glenn later shared her impressions of that afternoon. “Martin told me that Jimmy thought I was ‘magnificently gorgeous.’ Jimmy seemed rather shy, and didn’t talk much, but I found him appealing, but not devastatingly so. He was different from the people I knew, not that I knew many. He was so very young. Actually, I thought he was my age until I learned otherwise. I felt he might be boyfriend material. He was good looking enough, but I sensed something beneath his surface. There was an aura of danger about him, but not enough to scare me off. I wished him luck on his opening night and agreed to meet him at Cromwell’s the following afternoon to hear about it.”

  At table with Glenn, Slocum, a late teenager wannabe actor, observed her flirtation with Jimmy. “I didn’t think much would come of it, just another of Jimmy’s passing fancies. He’d hook up with some girl in the afternoon. When you’d see him later that night at Jerry’s, that girl would be someone else. The afternoon brunette had been replaced by the night’s blonde or redhead.”

  “Jimmy had this technique when talking to you of making you feel you were uttering words of wisdom and you were the most fabulous person he’d ever met,” Slocum said. “I saw him pull that stunt on the very young and impressionable Barbara Glenn. All of us at the time were just the little girlfriends or little boyfriends of Jimmy’s. We came and we went, like the hamburgers served at Cromwell’s.”

  The next day, Jimmy met Glenn at Cromwell’s for a soda, telling her that See the Jaguar had won raves for his performance, but that the play itself had been critically denounced. “I’ll probably be back knocking on the doors of casting agents in a few days.”

  She remembered he brought her a short story to read, “A Tree of Night” by Truman Capote. It was the tale of a college girl traveling on a crowded train. On board, she encounters two grotesques, a zombie-like man and a mysterious woman with an oversized head. He told her it was an allegory about a sane person who can succumb to the terror hidden within one’s darkest soul.

  Then he leaned over the table and told her, “You remind me of my mother, Mildred. She deserted me long ago. I mean, she up and died on me. She wasn’t even thirty.”

  As Glenn later recalled, “No sixteen-year-old girl wants to hear a prospective boyfriend tell her she reminds him of his mother, but our relationship survived that disaster.”

  “I felt sorry for him. His mother died even before America entered World War II, but he still hadn’t recovered from her loss. He also told me that his father, Winton, had also abandoned him when he was just a boy. When he discussed his parents, he reminded me of a nine-year-old, a little boy lost.”

  “Soon, we were dating,” she recalled. The two of them could be seen speeding through the canyons of Manhattan on his motorcycle, with Glenn holding onto Jimmy for dear life. “He was a terrible cyclist, weaving dangerously in and out of traffic.”

  “When I survived yet another
ride on that motorcycle, we used to sit and talk quietly on a bench in Central Park,” she said. “I had to walk on eggshells when chatting with him. The slightest remark could make him furious.”

  “I was always fearful of his motorcycle riding,” Glenn claimed. “I consider his machine an instrument of death. I remember half of my time with Jimmy involved waiting for him to show up, because he was always late, and I was always wondering if he was going to make it. I always had the feeling that somehow, some way, some day, he was not going to show up. He did crash his motorcycle on one occasion. Fortunately, he wasn’t badly hurt. But what about the next crash, or even the crash after that?”

  “I can never get along without my little cycle,” he claimed. “I guess I’ll never sell it. It’s like a brother to me. Of course, there is danger. I’m reminded that an actor with only half a face is no actor at all.”

  Their motorcycle rides often came to a stop in front of Figaro’s, their hangout in Greenwich Village at the corner of MacDougal and Bleeker Streets.

  When he introduced her one night to Arthur Kennedy, backstage at one of See the Jaguar’s few performances, he warned the older actor, “Barbara’s neuroticism is the equal of my own, and that’s saying a lot. But her eighteen-inch waist and thirty-six inch bust go a long way.”

  As one of Glenn’s girlfriends later reported, “Every sixteen-year-old girl supposedly has to lose her virginity. Although I wasn’t there, I just assumed that Barbara eventually lost hers to this Jimmy Dean, who apparently liked to deflower virgins.”

  William Bast wanted to know who this new woman—or girl—was in Jimmy’s life. During a telephone call, he described her as, “She’s good looking, as busty as Marilyn Monroe, tall, very, very young, rather thin, as hyperactive and combustible as I am. We have lots of fights, tons of makeup sessions. We both have the temperament of Mount Vesuvius.”

  During the spring of 1953, the two of them often engaged in epic battles, but would eventually come together and be seen on his motorcycle again.

  “Sometimes, I would scream at him and pound his chest,” she said. “People who knew us compared us to a fighting cat and dog.”

  At times, he was worried that he might accidentally get her pregnant. “I hate using a rubber,” he told his friend, Stanley Haggart. “It dulls the sensation for me. I like skin meeting skin, like rubber hitting the road in a car.”

  With summer approaching, Barbara managed to get a gig at the Cragsmoor Playhouse in the Catskills. When Jimmy heard the news, he exploded in anger.

  Friends of her were giving her a farewell party, to which she invited him. “He showed up in a real foul mood, ignoring everybody, even me,” Glenn said. “It was a horrible night. He finally stormed out the door without even a goodbye.”

  Devastated, she left her own party to find him, figuring he might have gone over to Jerry’s Tavern, where he often spent his evenings. He wasn’t there. She sat alone at a table, not managing to hold back her tears. About an hour later, he showed up.

  “He didn’t apologize for his outrageous behavior,” she said. “That was not his style. He just held my hand and looked deeply into my teary eyes. Without saying a word, we made up and later spent the night together.”

  He wrote to her in the Catskills, complaining that except for some teleplays that spring, “the pickings are slim here. Television has gone into the summer doldrums. Jane Deacy has lined up only two or three teleplays for me, each of which pays starvation wages.”

  He told her he was going to perform two dramatic readings, one of which was from Metamorphosis, a stage play adapted from the novel by Franz Kafka. “It was really Kafka’s nightmare,” he wrote. “I play a man who wakes up one morning to discover that overnight, he’s been transformed into this hideous giant insect. My reading is set for August at the Village Theatre. Definitely off-Broadway.”

  The second reading was of Jonathan Bates’ play, The Fell Swoop, presented on June 23 at the Palm Gardens in the New Dramatists’ headquarters on West 52nd Street.

  During the summer of 1953, Jimmy lived in Bates’ apartment during periods when he was out of town. Rather cherubic looking, Bates was Irish and worked as a purser for Trans World Airlines. He had three dogs, and, in exchange for free lodging, Jimmy agreed to feed and walk his animals whenever Bates was away tending to business abroad.

  “Jimmy was an animal lover,” Glenn said. “But he complained about having to walk them, and he also said that the dogs kept him up at night.”

  Glenn often visited him in Bates’ apartment, which was above the Brown Derby Restaurant at 40 West 52nd Street. “I remember its cabaret sign flashing all night, lighting up the living room with its neon glow.”

  Jimmy told Glenn that he’d lost a few pounds. “Meals are few and far between unless I bum a few.”

  “That drew a response from her, and she sent him a check for a hundred dollars, with a note: “For seventy-five cents, you can get a huge plate of spaghetti and meatballs on Thompson Street in The Village.

  During her months with him, Glenn would often supply Jimmy with enough cash to tide him over between work assignments in teleplays.

  For some reason, he eventually wrote to Glenn in the Catskills, describing the nighttime scene in Manhattan, a venue with which she was already familiar.

  “In the pensiveness of night, the cheap, monotonous, shrill, symbolic sensual beat of suggestive drums tattoos orgyistic images on my brain. The smell of gin and 90% beer, entwine with the sometimes suspenseful, slow, sometimes labored static, sometimes motionless, sometimes painfully rigid, till finally, the long-waited for jerks and convulsions that fill the now thick chewing gum haze with a mist of sweat, fling the patrons into a fit of suppressed joy. The fated 7 days a week bestial virgin bows with the poise of a drunken pavlova. Rivulets of stale perspiration glide from and between her once well-formed anatomy to the anxious, welcoming front-row celebrities who lap it up with infamous glee. The Aura of Horror. I live above it and below it…It is my Divine Comedy. The Dante of 52nd Street. There is no peace in our world. I love you. I would like to write about nice things, or fiction, but we shouldn’t avoid reality should we? The things I have just written are the truth. They are very hard to write about. I am lonely. Forgive me. I am lonely. Love, Jim.“

  In a letter he wrote to her in August, shortly before her return to New York, he said:

  “I am very lonely for you. I am alone. Thoughts are sweet, then wicked, then perverse, then penitent, then sweet. The moon is not blue. It hangs there in the sky no more. Forgive me for such a sloppy letter. I’m a little drunk. I drink a bit lately. You see, I don’t know what’s going on. Remarkable lot, human beings. In an antiphonal azure swing, souls drone their unfinished melody. When did we live and when did we not? In my drunken stupor, I said a gem. Great actors are often time pretentious livers. The pretentious actor, a great liver. God Damnit! I miss you!”

  When Glenn returned to New York, she resumed her relationship with him. She didn’t ask him if he’d dated other girls while she was away. But he did say, “You must have met a lot of handsome guys this summer, chasing you up and down those Catskill mountains.”

  “He was physically as gorgeous as ever,” she said. “Still, with that lost boy quality. He obviously hadn’t found himself since I left him. When I did ask him a direct question, he mumbled an answer. I came to suspect he was leading a double or triple life, one with me, and two or three with other lovers. He seemed to have a lot of needs to satisfy, and I suspected I couldn’t fulfill all of them. Yet he talked of marriage, but didn’t give me a direct proposal, much less an engagement ring, not that he could afford one.”

  As 1953 progressed through autumn and winter, he would disappear from her life for two or three days at a time without calling. Once, he was gone for two weeks and returned without apologies or explanations.

  His friend, Stanley Haggart, was aware of at least two affairs he was having, one with the actor John Kerr, and another with Betsy Palmer. He�
�d appeared in teleplays with each of them.

  “There were a few others along the way,” Haggart recalled. “I vaguely remember a woman named Arlene Sachs. Jimmy told me some wild stories. All this was going on before he left for Hollywood to work with Elia Kazan. I don’t think Barbara Glenn knew half of what Jimmy was up to. Perhaps I’m wrong.”

  His love affair with his old motorcycle ended when he saved up enough money to purchase a better one. Even though it was deep in winter, he told Glenn that he planned to ride his motorcycle back to Fairmount.

  “Please, if you’re going to die, why not stay in New York?” she asked him.

  “No,” he said. “I’m heading home to Indiana, all eight hundred miles, and on my new motorcycle. I’ve got to try it. It’s great…don’t worry.”

  “It’s your life,” she said, almost wanting to give up on him and stop worrying about his safety.

  “Soon, he was presumably in Indiana,” she said, “or else dead on the highway somewhere. I didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks. When he came back to Manhattan, he told me horrendous stories of snow and ice that would make Greenland look like a tropic zone.”

  “There were times I practically froze to death,” he claimed, “but I drove all the way there and all the way back without one accident, except that time on an icy road when I crashed into a snowbank. But I emerged without a scratch, except I hurt my balls. But they’re in working order once again.”

  At long last, Jane Deacy got him another role on Broadway, this time for an appearance as a blackmailing homosexual Arab boy, tangling with French actor Louis Jourdan and co-starring Geraldine Page, in the stage adaptation of André Gide’s autobiographical novel, The Immoralist.