After weeks of traumatic rehearsals and endless conflicts with his fellow actors [for more on this, refer to chapter 14 of this biography], tryouts were in Philadelphia. From there, he wrote to her from his lodgings in the St. James Hotel, illustrating his letter with whimsical illustrations and doodles.
“I hate the god damn brown makeup I’m forced to wear. The play is full of shit. Stereophonic staging and 3-D actors. I’s so bad it will probably be a monstrous success since the theater-going public on Broadway is stupid, filled with bored housewives and insurance salesmen guaranteed to sleep through most of the play after a hard day’s work.”
“I bought a new magenta-colored gown for the opening night of The Immoralist, and thought I looked dazzling,” Glenn recalled. “I thought it was going to be a glorious night for Jimmy. His aunt, Ortense, and his uncle, Marcus Winslow, flew in from Indiana. I was not introduced to them, and I got the idea that Jimmy had told them I was going to be his bride.”
“I met Jimmy backstage in his dressing room, and he invited me to Sardi’s, where the cast would be headed after the show. But instead of dressing up, he put on a smelly T-shirt and a pair of ripped blue jeans.”
Of course, once at Sardi’s the doorman turned him away, and he had to go back to his apartment and put on a suit.
“When he did arrive, the tension was awful,” she said. “He immediately insulted Louis Jourdan, and also the director, Daniel Mann. He told them he didn’t want to be in their stupid play ‘written by that French faggot, André Gide.’ I couldn’t take his bitching any more, and I left quickly. He followed me onto the street, and we had this big blow-up fight there on the sidewalk.”
“Orson Welles was coming in the door with Janet Leigh, of all people. They stopped and witnessed our domestic violence. At one point, Jimmy slapped me, and I ran screaming down the street. We didn’t speak for days, but once again, we made up. I knew, though, that our relationship was doomed.”
***
When Jimmy went to Hollywood to film East of Eden, he wrote letters to Glenn in New York, telling her how miserable he was. [One of them is replicated, with its errors in spelling and grammar, immediately below.]
“I don’t know why people reject me. I don’t want to write this letter. It would be better to remain silent. Wow! Am I fucked up.
Got here on a Thursday went to the desert on Sat, week later to San Francisco. I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM. Rented a car for two weeks. It cost me $138.00. I WANT TO DIE. I have told the girls here to kiss my ass and what sterile, spineless, stupid prostitutes they were. I HAVEN’T BEEN TO BED WITH NO BODY. And won’t until after the picture and I am home safe in N.Y.C. (snuggly little town that it is) sounds unbelievable, but it’s the truth I swear. So hold everything stop breathing. Stop the town all of N.Y.C ., untill (should have trumpets here) James Dean returns.
I got no motorcycle I got no girl HONEY, shit writing in capitals doesn’t seem to help either. Haven’t found a place to live yet HONEY. Kazan sent me out here to get a tan. Haven’t seen the sun yet (fog and smog). Wanted me healthy looking. I look like a prune. Don’t run away from home at too early an age or you’ll have to take vitamens the rest of your life. Write me please. I’m sad most of the time. Awful lonely too. (I hope you’re dying) BECAUSE I AM.
Love,
Jim (Brando Clift) Dean
While he was in Hollywood, she wrote him with news that she’d gotten a job posing for a swimsuit photo layout. He wrote back, “Boy, that‘s selling out cheap.”
Years later, she remembered her feelings at the time: “He accused me of selling out cheap. A boy who had allegedly posed for nude pictures, perhaps even porno.”
Before the filming of East of Eden began, director Elia Kazan summoned all the principal actors, including Raymond Massey and Julie Harris, to rehearsals. Jimmy wrote to Glenn in New York with a description of how they were progressing. His reference to “Lennie” in his letter was about Jimmy’s good friend, Leonard Rosenman, who had been commissioned to compose music for the film.
“Have been very dejected and extremely moody last two weeks. Have been telling everybody to fuck off and that’s no good. I could never make them believe I was working on my part. Poor Julie Harris doesn’t know what to do. Everyone turns into an idiot out here. I have only one friend, one guy that I can talk to and be understood. I hope Lennie comes out here. I need someone from New York. Cause I’m mean and I’m really kind and gentle. Things get mixed up all the time. I see a person I would like to be very close to (everybody), then I think it would just be the same as before and they don’t give a shit for me. Then I say something nasty or nothing at all and walk away. The poor person doesn’t know what happened. He doesn’t realize that I have decided I don’t like him. What’s wrong with people. Idiots. (I won’t fail please.)”
In May of 1954, from Hollywood, he wrote this to Glenn:
“Pleased to hear from you. That’s putting it mildly. Gadge [Elia Kazan] and Tenn [Tennessee Williams] are nice but I wouldn’t trust the sons-a-bitches far’s I could throw them. They can take advantage of you like nobody else.
“HONEY!!! I’m still a Calif, virgin, remarkable no. I’m saving it—H-bomb Dean.
“A new addition has been added to the Dean family. I got a red ’53 MG (milled head, etc. hot engine). My sex pours itself into fat curves, broadslides, and broodings, drags, etc. You have plenty of competition. My motorcycle, my MG, and my girl. I have been sleeping with my MG. We make it together, honey.”
In yet another letter to Glenn, he wrote:
“I haven’t written because I’ve fallen in love. It had to happen sooner or later. Enclosed is not a very good picture of him. That’s Cisco the Kid, the new member of the family. He gives me confidence. He makes my hands strong. May use him in a movie.” [Jimmy was referring to his latest acquisition, a thoroughbred palomino horse.]
It was during his filming of East of Eden that Glenn wrote Jimmy a “Dear John” letter, informing him that she’d met someone new, the love of her life, and that she had agreed to marry him.
Jimmy accepted the news good-naturedly Actually, it wasn’t that painful to him, because he was dating Pier Angeli, the Italian actress.
After mailing her “Dear John” letter, Glenn’s affair with her new love came to an abrupt end when she discovered that her husband-to-be was simultaneously engaged to another young actress. She broke up with him, but a few weeks later, fell madly in love once again—this time with the man she would eventually marry.
When he returned to New York, she confronted Jimmy with news about the changes in her life, telling him she could no longer be his girlfriend. “This time I mean it,” she told him. “This man really loves me and doesn’t have a cheating heart like some men I’ve known.”
Jimmy realized that that reference included him.
To her surprise, he asked to meet her husband-to-be. She reluctantly agreed, fearing he would make a scene. However, their dinner went pleasantly enough, although the two rivals in love had little to say to each other.
Jimmy later told William Bast, “When he got up to go to the men’s room—men don’t call it powdering their noses, do they?—I followed him. There were three urinals. I stood beside him and looked down. His piss was white, not yellow. If she didn’t already know it, I should have warned Barbara that she wouldn’t be getting ‘Long John.’”
After dinner, Jimmy insisted on seeing her alone for a final farewell and, to the surprise and dismay of her new lover, she returned with Jimmy, alone, to his apartment on West 68th Street.
There, he shocked her by pleading with her to marry him, not her intended fiancé.
She noticed a small suitcase on his bed. It was filled with cash. “This looks like a lot of money,” she said.
“Now that you have money yourself, are you trying to pay me back? From the looks of things, I never lent you all this much.”
“You can’t leave me, Barbara, please!.” He was pleading, beseeching her. “If you leav
e me, I’ll kill myself. My death will be on your hands. Do you want that?”
“Of course I don’t, and you’re not going to kill yourself,” she said. “You and I wouldn’t last in a marriage for more than two weeks, and in your heart, you know that I’m getting married to the man you met tonight. And that’s final. I’m leaving. Goodbye forever, Jimmy. Don’t ever call or write to me again.”
As she headed out the door to the stairwell, he ran after her, carrying the suitcase of money. Impulsively, he threw some of the cash after her, the bills cascading down upon her.
She did not look back. All she remembered was his calling out to her. But instead of “Barbara,” it was “STELLA! STELLA! STELLA!” He had lapsed into a re-enactment of the famous scene where Brando screams with primal anguish for his wife in A Streetcar Named Desire.
***
After hearing about Jimmy’s death in 1955, Glenn told a reporter: “He was a terribly destructive person. Our relationship was destructive. I knew he would destroy himself in the end, and that’s why his death did not come as a surprise. It was as if my reaction to it happened so long ago.”
Chapter Eight
JIMMY EMERGES AS A STAR IN THE EARLY DAYS OF
TELEVISION
Projected across America Through “Little Black Boxes,” He Emotes Onscreen with Blanche DuBois, Scarlett O’Hara’s Mother, & Sweet Sixteen-er, Natalie Wood
HE MAKES LOVE TO THE ACTOR PLAYING JESSE JAMES, THEN PLAYS A PUNK WHO THREATENS TO ASSASSINATE RONALD REAGAN
Splendor, Not In the Grass, But on the Casting Couch of Playwright Bill Inge
JIMMY SIZES UP HIS RIVALS: BEN (“JOCKO”) GAZZARA AND JOHN (“TEA & SYMPATHY”) KERR
James Dean’s debut appearance on television was in a Pepsi Cola commercial. From there, he went on to a somewhat amazing career starring in teleplays during the early 1950s’ Golden Age of television. The general public today know him for only three movies, East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant. But his diehard fans are aware of his many star turns on television, sometimes as part of live tele-dramas.
James Dean, The Lost Television Legacy
Often, he appeared in a single episode of a prolonged series whose names—once household words—included Kraft Television Theater, Robert Montgomery Presents, Danger, and General Electric Theater. Many of these episodes have disappeared forever; others believed to have been lost have been recovered during the 21st Century, based to some degree on the legend of James Dean as it gains new aficionados.
On the 60th anniversary of his death in 1955, many of Dean’s teleplays were digitalized and rediscovered, including several premieres which were broadcast on Turner Movie Classics. Fans can also buy a boxed set: James Dean: The Lost Television Legacy, featuring nineteen full episodes, each meticulously remastered.
Most of these teleplays were filmed in his “black box” banner year of 1953, just before he migrated to Hollywood for a starring role in East of Eden. Two of his best-known television roles include his appearance in the You Are There series in which, as “the coward,” Bob Ford, he shoots Jesse James. Later, in an episode of General Electric Theater, Jimmy points a revolver at the head of Ronald Reagan, cast as a doctor, threatening to shoot him if he doesn’t remove a bullet from his (wounded) pal.
Many of his co-stars in these teleplays have faded into the dusty archives of early television, but Jimmy also appeared with some names that endure, including Dorothy Gish, the legendary star of the silent screen. Other first-rate actors included John Carradine, Cloris Leachman, Rod Steiger, Walter Hampden, Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, James Kerr, Ed Begley, Betsy Palmer, Natalie Wood, Mary Astor, and Paul Lukas. In real life, he would seduce three of these co-stars, one male and two females.
During the course of his brief glory days in television, he would appear in a wide range of roles. Characters he’d portray on the “small screen” included a wrongly accused victim being sent to the electric chair; an ex-convict struggling to start a new life; the restless son of a farming couple; a lovestruck stable boy with dreams of glory; a “hepcat killer, and a young French aristocrat accused of stealing his stepfather’s money.
The chapter that follows describes many of the television roles he portrayed, along with his interactions (successful, unsuccessful, and sometimes abysmal) with directors, producers, other actors, and his romantic peers.
The Hound of Heaven
AT THE GATES OF HELL
Early in 1953, Jimmy was cast in The Hound of Heaven, an episode on The Kate Smith Hour that was aired on NBC on January 15.
During rehearsals, he met the star of the show, John Carradine, who was known mostly for his Western and horror films, despite his status as a famous Shakespearean actor and a former member of the stock companies of both Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford. He told Jimmy that he’d tested for the title roles in both Dracula and Frankenstein, “but Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff beat my ass.”
James Dean as a goofy hillbilly angel in The Hound of Heaven.
Jimmy had seen only one of his films, The Grapes of Wrath (1940) starring Henry Fonda, in which Carradine had played the doomed preacher, Casey. His deep, resonant voice had earned him the nickname “The Voice.” During the course of his career, Carradine claimed that he had appeared in some 450 movies, the earliest ones uncredited. During rehearsals of The Hound of Heaven, Carradine walked around the set reciting Shakespeare soliloquies.
He confided in Jimmy that his dream had involved being the partriarch of an extended Carradine family. He’d married Ardanelle Cosner, who gave him two sons (Bruce and David), but she’d thwarted his plan for having more children by self-inflicting “coat hanger abortions” without his knowledge.
He asked Jimmy if he’d like to settle down and have “a brood of little Jimmy Deans.”
“Like hell I would,” Jimmy responded, sarcastically. “Anything but that. I want to be the one and only James Dean.”
The script for The Hound of Heaven had been written by Earl Hammer, Jr., who later became known for the hit TV series, The Waltons, and for Falcon Crest. He created the famous line, “Good night, John Boy.”
In Hammer’s plot for The Hound of Heaven, Carradine was cast as Hyder Simpson, a roughneck Appalachian man whose faithful companion is a dog named Rip. He and his hound die and go to what Hyder thinks is the gate to Heaven. The gatekeeper there informs him that he can enter, but no dogs are allowed.
Suddenly, “Angel” (Jimmy) appears, warning him that he is not at the pearly gates of Heaven, but at the gates to Hell, where fire and brimstone await him. Whereas the man was willing to walk into a horrible fate, Rip was too smart for that and knew, instinctively, that they were facing not salvation, but doom.
The Case of the Watchful Dog
MOONSHINE & SOUPED-UP HOTRODS
Jimmy’s next teleplay was with minor actors (they included Graham Denton and Dorothy Elder) in The Case of the Watchful Dog, broadcast on NBC on January 29. Director Daniel Petrie cast Jimmy in the role of a gun-toting juvenile delinquent, the son of a moonshiner, who drives a souped-up hotrod that hauls illegal booze to an undercover distribution center.
The drama was part of a TV series, Treasury Men in Action, whose episodes focused on real crime dramas inspired by the case files of the U.S. Customs and Treasury Departments. Federal agents in the series battle tax evaders, moonshiners, gun-runners, smugglers, and counterfeiters.
Jimmy starred as Randy Meeker, who breaks with his father, Clay, after he shoots Randy’s beloved hound because his barking might draw revenue agents to his illicit still. As it happens, the revenue agents are able to trace the location of the still through the license plate on Jimmy’s hotrod. After it aired, the show was soon forgotten.
Although Jimmy would become known as “the terror of directors,” he worked smoothly with Petrie, who would later make such signature films as A Raisin in the Sun (1961). He would also direct Laurence Olivier in The Betsy (1978) and would go on to win many Emmy and Directors Guild awards.
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Jimmy Kills the Character Known as Jesse James on Screen
BUT OFF SCREEN, MAKES LOVE TO THE ACTOR WHO PORTRAYED HIM
Very different scenarios played out—both on the TV screen and behind the camera—in Jimmy’s next teleplay. At CBS, he was cast in The Killing of Jesse James as part of the You Are There series, an anthology of major historical events hosted by Walter Cronkite. Although the series had originated on radio, it made a smooth transition to television. The show that immediately preceded Jimmy’s debut in the series had been a re-enactment of the Hindenburg disaster in New Jersey—a fiery inferno of a hydrogen-filled blimp that was played out before the world.
Its director was Sidney Lumet, a native of Philadelphia, who would segue from helming TV programmers to being nominated for Best Director by the Academy Awards for such feature films as Twelve Angry Men (1957); Dog Day Afternoon (1975); and Network (1976).
In time, Lumet would direct Ralph Richardson, Richard Burton, Katharine Hepburn, James Mason, Henry Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and Albert Finney, among many others. He won praise from all of these stars, including from Jimmy himself, who called him, “an actor’s dream.”
“If I had any problem with him,” Jimmy said, “it was his praise of the acting of Marlon Brando. Although he was straight, he seemed to have the hots for Stanley Kowalski.”
[In 1959, Lumet would direct Brando with Anna Magnani in Tennessee Williams’ The Fugitive Kind.]
“Lumet was electric, bubbling over with energy, a hard-boiled straight shooter,” Jimmy said. “He taught me a lot.”
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