At the time Jimmy met Lumet, he was married to the actress Rita Gam, a close friend of Grace Kelly’s. He would later marry the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt and, after that, Gail Jones, the daughter of singer Lena Horne.
He told Jimmy that he had selected Cronkite as the anchor man “because the premise of many of our shows is so silly, and so outrageous, that we need somebody who is very believable, very homespun, very American.”
Into the role of Jesse James, Lumet cast the handsome and rising young actor, John Kerr, with Jimmy playing his assassin, Bob Ford. Until Kerr arrived on the set, Jimmy was eager to learn as much as he could from Lumet, perhaps hoping he would cast him in future productions, either on TV or on the big screen.
In the teleplay by Leslie Slate, Jimmy and Kerr each appear near the end. The beginning of the script focuses on events leading up to the fatal shooting of Jesse James. The notorious outlaw enters a saloon for a drink, during which time, he stands on a chair to straighten a picture. Ford, as played by Jimmy, shoots him in the back, opting to collect a reward of $10,000, although the governor later gives him only $500.
[Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck would deliver a far more detailed version of the shooting in a 2007 movie, The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford.]
It was a memorable day for Jimmy when Kerr walked into his life. A New Yorker born to a British father, he was a graduate of Harvard and had worked in summer stock in New England. While taking a class in Serbo-Croatian language and literature at Harvard, he had met a fellow student, Priscilla Smith, and had married her in 1952. The union would last for twenty years and produce three children before they divorced.
Jimmy was fascinated by Kerr. “I figured that by then, the honeymoon was over and John Boy might want some other kind of action,” Jimmy confided to Lumet. The director had a front-row seat to watch Jimmy’s seduction of Kerr, a tale he’d later relate to other actors such as Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Anthony Perkins, and Anne Bancroft.
John Kerr...Jimmy opens the door to his closet. Lower photo: Kerr with France Nuyen in South Pacific (1958).
“I think Jimmy realized that Kerr was a closeted bisexual before the actor admitted it to himself,” Lumet later said. “From the day they met, Jimmy had his radar out. He moved in on Kerr. When he talked to him—and he chatted a lot—he stood only inches from him, their lips almost touching. It was as if Jimmy were breathing down Kerr’s neck. When he wanted to, Jimmy’s voice sounded like soft music to the ear.”
“How far was Kerr willing to go when confronted with this charming young conquistador?” Lumet was asked.
“All the way, I was certain. Once, Kerr had limbered up with some exercises. He sat down in a chair and was sweating. Jimmy came over with a tissue to mop his brow. When Kerr looked up at Jimmy, his throat seemed to tighten with tangled emotions. Jimmy looked into his watery eyes with a face of angelic purity and innocence that was actually a mask of the devil in disguise out to snare this tender boy.”
John Kerr (playing a sexually ambivalent student) with Deborah Kerr (the empathetic wife of the director of his prep school) in Tea and Sympathy (1956).
Jimmy could have been mouthing Deborah Kerr’s famous line when she appeared in the film version of Tea and Sympathy, in which she starred with Kerr [to whom she was not related, despite the similarity of their family names]. “Years from now, when you talk of this, please be kind.”
“I think the prelude to the actual seduction began with a ham sandwich on rye,” Lumet said. “Both boys were having lunch on the set. At one point, Jimmy reached over and just took Kerr’s sandwich from him, had a big bite of it, then handed it back. It was a very symbolic gesture, as Jimmy obviously wanted to take a bite out of Kerr. After work, the two wandered off together, and I was certain about what those two boys would be doing within an hour or so.”
“But by the next morning, a new scenario played out before my eyes,” Lumet said. “Jimmy was no longer catering to Kerr. Instead, Kerr was catering to Jimmy, who seemed in complete control of the relationship. He even brought Jimmy a cup of coffee at around ten o’clock and then later, went out and got him a package of cigarettes when he ran out. He also brought Jimmy his lunch that day. Something inside Kerr had been liberated, perhaps his darkest secret, which he had concealed since he was a boy.”
“Jimmy had this amazing power to bind another human being, male or female, to him,” Lumet said. “Kerr became his willing victim. Sexual drive, creative drive. Perhaps it’s a wild thing to speculate, but I felt than in time, Jimmy’s liberation of Kerr made him a better actor, especially in Tea and Sympathy. Kerr fell in love with Jimmy, but I don’t think Jimmy ever loved anyone but himself.”
“I remembered the last afternoon, when I saw them walking off together,” Lumet said. “Both of them looked so handsome, so full of life, so in love. They were perfectly matched. But I knew storm clouds were on the way. After all, Kerr was married. He was also in love with a man. How was he going to solve that dilemma? It would take Hamlet himself to ponder it.”
“I learned that both of them would be co-starring in another teleplay at the end of the summer,” Lumet said. “I was certain their romance would last the summer. Of course, Frank Sinatra sang about how romances go with the summer winds.”
No Room
SAFECRACKER JIMMY IS SAVED FROM A LIFE OF CRIME
Jimmy’s next teleplay was not memorable at all. Weeks after finishing it, he had almost forgotten it. CBS cast him in No Room, an episode within its popular Danger series that focused on tales of suspense, murder mysteries, and psychological dramas.
The script had been written by Mary Stern, who created a role for Jimmy of a would-be safecracker, who is saved from committing a burglary that might have landed him in prison. He wasn’t impressed with his part, but the producers of Danger were, and as the series progressed, they’d hire him to perform in three more episodes.
If he had a regret at all, it involved the fact that this particular episode would not be broadcast in Fairmount, Indiana, thereby ensuring that his relatives, Ortense and Marcus Winslow, would not get to see it.
During the shoot, he related to the female co-star, Irene Vernon, since she was a fellow Hoosier born in Mishawaka, Indiana. Her movie career in Hollywood had gone nowhere, and she was trying to establish herself as a television actress. About a decade later, her most memorable role became that of Louise Tate on the hit TV series, Bewitched (1964-1972).
Born and reared in Brooklyn, one of Jimmy’s colleagues, Martin Kingsley, had worked in radio, TV, and on the stage. A Hungarian, he once brought a container of goulash to Jimmy for his lunch “so you can taste the real thing. It was from Mama Gabor’s own kitchen.” He was referring to Jolie Gabor, the mother of three famous and glamorous daughters, Zsa Zsa, Eva, and Magda.
“There was a saying at the time that Brando changed the way actors acted,” Kingsley later said. “That may be so, but James Dean changed the way actors lived. No one like him had come before, and no one like him has emerged since.”
The Case of the Sawed-Off Shotgun
DEFYING JOSEPH MCCARTHY’S COMMUNIST BLACKLIST
In April of 1953, Jimmy returned to NBC to film another episode for the hit series, Treasury Men in Action, based on a true story from the files of the U.S. Customs and Treasury Departments. Ironically, he’d be working with a blacklisted director, Donald Pressman, and he’d make a friend, Ben Gazzara, who would later emerge as a rival for procurement of the same roles.
Jimmy’s rival: young Ben Gazzara
Jimmy was cast in the teleplay as a hoodlum, Arbie Feris, a name he hated. “It sounds like a fag,” he told its writer, Albert Aley. Arbie, recently released from reform school, is plotting a career as a gangster.
Gazzara was cast as “the good boy” trying to persuade Jimmy to be a “clean-cutter,” and urging him to attend meetings of the local Boys’ Club to learn about decent living and honor.
A native of Tiblisi, Georgia, then part
of the Soviet Union, Pressman had arrived in the United States with his family when he was nine years old. His parents were musicians formerly associated with the Russian Grand Opera Company.
Pressman’s left-wing politics fascinated Jimmy. Pressman told him that he’d joined the communist Party in the 1930s, based on its alleged support of integration, civil rights, and socialized medicine. During World War II, he served as a solider in the U.S. Army, during which time he’d won two Purple Hearts.
After the war, he’d studied acting in Manhattan with Sanford Meisner, and later became an acting coach himself, teaching such students as Gregory Peck, Tony Randall, and Eli Wallach.
Pressman became one of the first major directors associated with the emerging medium of television. At Studio One in Hollywood, he’d directed Grace Kelly in Molnar’s The Swan for television. She would later appear in the same role on the big screen, opposite Louis Jourdan, Jimmy’s upcoming co-star in the Broadway play, The Immoralist.
Right after helming Gazzara and Jimmy, based on his having been blacklisted, Pressman would be banned from television. He would return later to direct such “unknowns” as Al Pacino.
Based on the script of Sawed-Off Shotgun, Jimmy, cast as Arbie, steals a gun from a bootlegger, Blackie Bowman (Joseph Downing). In a failed robbery attempt at a filling station, he leaves the gun behind, giving Federal agents the clue they needed to track him down. Blackie plans to kill Jimmy, but he’s arrested and sent to prison. Arbie gets off with probation.
Jimmy enjoyed working with Downing, a New Yorker who had appeared in major Hollywood gangster movies that included Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), a James Cagney film, and Johnny Eager (1941), starring Robert Taylor and Lana Turner.
“I never got around to fucking Lana,” Jimmy claimed, “but I met her in Hollywood.”
“I didn’t screw her either,” Downing said. “But Taylor sure did, although I heard he preferred men.”
At the time Jimmy started hanging out with Gazzara, he was working as an elevator operator in The New York Times building.
Jimmy was intrigued with Gazzara, rightly assuming he might emerge as future competition for acting roles. The Italian American had grown up in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan. “I was a street kid,” he told Jimmy. “My love of acting saved me from a life of crime.”
Jimmy never really became Gazzara’s friend, but he tricked him into thinking he was. He would later tell Shelley Winters, “What was really going on in our relationship—strictly non-sexual—was my sizing up tomorrow’s competition. The word is out that Gazzara is ‘the next Marlon Brando.’”
“To hell with that,” Winters said. “This year alone, I’ve met at least a dozen actors who have been called ‘the next Marlon Brando.’ I’m tired of hearing that. I know Marlon. He’s fucked me. You had better develop your own style, your own technique. There’s only one Stanley Kowalski. When Tennessee wrote A Streetcar Named Desire, he pictured Stanley as having a big dick. Marlon doesn’t. But on stage, he acted like he had a big dick, and for an actor, it’s illusion that counts.”
End as a Man
JIMMY VS. BEN GAZZARA (AKA “JOCKO”)
Within a month of working in a teleplay with Ben Gazzara, Jimmy would end up on the stage with him in May at an Actors Studio production that was staged at the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village.
End as a Man, with its homosexual undertones, was a play based on Calder Willingham’s shocking novel about the brutality of life in a Southern military academy. The lead role of “Jocko de Paris” would be brilliantly portrayed by Gazarra. Its director was Jack Garfein, who would marry Carroll Baker, later to co-star with Jimmy in Giant.
In its search for “angels” (financial backers), three in-house performances were staged during May and June of 1953.
Ben Gazzara playing a sadistic military cadet (Jocko) in a homoerotic scene from Calder Willingham’s End as a Man (aka The Strange One)
In addition to Gazzara, three actors in the play would go on to become famous: Pat Hingle, Anthony Franciosa, and Albert Salmi.
Jimmy had wanted to play Jocko, but Garfein thought that Gazzara would be better-suited for the role. In the play, Jimmy’s part “practically amounted to shit” [his words]. He appeared in the third act as a cadet officer at a court trial, wearing a dress military uniform with gold braid and a red sash. “I was just window dressing,” he said. “Gazzara ate up the scenery with his sadistic Jocko. I was just this prissy little cadet wearing a butt plug.”
Born in what used to be Czechoslovakia in 1930, Garfein was a survivor of Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp, a horrifying venue liberated by the Allied armies in 1945.
“I loved Jimmy,” Garfein later recalled, “and we were close for a while. But he didn’t always have the best manners. One night in Hollywood, I was dining with him when Hedda Hopper walked in. He just got up and left our table and spent about an hour talking to this bitchy columnist, even though I knew he despised her. I just sat alone at our table nursing a drink and waiting for the wandering boy to return.”
Willingham, originally linked to his birthplace in Atlanta, watched with trepidation as his play evolved upon the stage. He had spoken to Jimmy, expressing his insights and various interpretations of its lines, and describing his drama as an indictment of the macho culture of a military academy, which he deplored. With its hints of homosexuality, his writing would lead to a conflict with the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which unsuccessfully brought obscenity charges against the publisher, Vanguard Press, which had printed End As a Man.
After seeing the Actors Studio production of his play, Willingham hosted a party for the players at his apartment on West 28th Street. “Dean had an almost nothing role to play,” the novelist recalled, “but at my party he—not Gazzara—was the star. Dean dominated the gathering. He told jokes. He did this hilarious impression of Marlon Brando. He even performed a dance he’d learned from Eartha Kitt. He leaped across the living room like Anna Pavlova. He slobbered. He farted. He goosed the girls and pinched Tony Franciosa’s butt and asked him if he’d like to get fucked. He bit Pat Hingle’s tit and grabbed Salmi’s crotch. After releasing Salmi’s balls, he announced, ‘Now I know why Paul Newman likes this guy so much.’”
“He not only was the life of the party, but at the end of the evening, he made off with a potential angel, Claire Heller,” Willingham said. “She was the daughter of a rich San Francisco banker. Or is banker and rich redundant?”
The cast saw Heller and Jimmy wander off into the night together, and every actor hoped she’d back the show, or else get her father to put up the money.
Since Jimmy’s regular girlfriend at the time, Barbara Glenn, was away in the Catskills, he started seeing Heller on a regular basis. “They became an item that summer,” according to Terry Parks, a waiter at Jerry’s tavern. “Jimmy was either with John Kerr or with Heller when he came in.”
When End as a Man went to Broadway, Pat Hingle was one of the stars at the Vanderbilt Theater. Later, on Broadway, he would star in the role of Gooper in the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which would cast Gazzara as Brick, the repressed homosexual married in the play to Barbara Bel Geddes, “Maggie the Cat.”
Hingle said, “If Jimmy had been available, you know he would have convinced Tennessee to give him the role that went to Gazzara and later to Paul Newman in the movie with Elizabeth Taylor. She probably would have lobbied for Jimmy, too.”
Carroll Baker remembered seeing Heller and Jimmy together on occasion during that summer, although they did not go out much. “From what I was told, they were happy to spend quiet evenings listening to classical music, often baroque. Claire told me that Jimmy liked the attention he got from girls, but pretended that it annoyed him. At parties, he preferred to sit in the corner with his bongo drums instead of mingling.”
“Most of their affair seemed to have been conducted within her apartmen
t at 45 Tudor City Place. He confided in her, and she was careful not to betray his trust. His attitude toward her was somewhat cavalier and at times almost rude. Claire, on the other hand, was refined, gentle, and understanding. More than anyone else, she understood the troubled rebel within him.”
When they were seeing each other, as struggling actors, Gazzara had praise for Jimmy. “He was short but with presence.” He later wrote, “He had movie star good looks, blonde hair, and blue eyes. What a combination! You didn’t have to be an expert cameraman to know that Jimmy would photo graph well.”
When End as a Man finally made it to Broadway, Jimmy was not available to appear in his minor role. He had just landed a key role in William Inge’s teleplay, Glory in the Flower, and had to bow out.
In February of 1954, when the stars of the Broadway production of End as a Man went on strike for more money, Jimmy met secretly with Garfein. Perceiving that Garfein and his team might opt to break the strike by firing the existing cast and hiring an all-new one, he offered to take over Gazzara’s role of Jocko. Jimmy was unhappy with his role of the Arab boy in The Immoralist and wanted to move on. The strike, however, was quickly settled, so his offer was never accepted.
Still imagining Jimmy as a friend, Gazzara soon learned of Jimmy’s “behind-my-back betrayal.”
His alleged betrayal of Gazzara escalated. Later, after Hollywood’s major-league producer Sam Spiegel expressed interest in adapting the Broadway version of End As a Man into a film, Jimmy phoned him, saying, “I’d be far better in the role of Jocko than Gazzara.”
Gazzara later said, “Garfein, also the film’s director, stood behind me even though Jimmy at the time was a hot commodity. By the time End as a Man was filmed—retitled The Strange One (1957)—Jimmy was no longer around.”
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