James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  Gazzara later lobbied for the role of Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), which had originally been intended for Jimmy. But he lost the role to Paul Newman. “Fuck Newman!” Gazzara responded in anger. “Too bad he wasn’t in that Porsche with Dean.”

  Gazzara’s dislike of Newman increased after he was awarded the film role of Brick in the film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), a role that Gazzara had developed and performed so long and so successfully on Broadway.

  “Did you know that Newman and Dean were faggots?” Gazzara sometimes asked anyone willing to listen. He harbored a grudge against each of them throughout the rest of his life.

  Despite his negative views, Lee Strasberg perhaps maintained a sympathetic place in his heart for Jimmy. In 1955, in the immediate aftermath of Jimmy’s death, Gazzara encountered Strasberg at the Actors Studio, finding him crying.

  Later, Gazzara reflected on his own failed friendship with Jimmy. “It was sad that his ambition and pride got in the way of our friendship. When I heard the news of his death, I could think only of the days we’d spent struggling to get any kind of job. James Dean had his fantastic moment in the sun.”

  The Evil Within

  JIMMY AND THE MAD SCIENTIST

  Only twice did Jimmy perform in teleplays for ABC. The first came when director Don Medford cast him in the hit TV series, Tales of Tomorrow, an anthology of science fiction dramas and tales of the supernatural.

  Jimmy as an absent-minded, pencil-chewing lab assistant in The Evil Within.

  Written by Manya Starr, The Evil Within starred Rod Steiger and Margaret Phillips. Ironically, Steiger had made his film debut in Teresa (1951), co-starring Pier Angeli, who would later become “the love of my life” [Jimmy’s words].

  He had become friends with Steiger when—hoping for the lead role of Curly in Oklahoma!—he had auditioned with him. Whereas Steiger wound up in the cast, Jimmy did not.

  When he was cast with Jimmy in the teleplay The Evil Within, Steiger was on the dawn of stardom. It came the following year (1954), when he was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in On the Waterfront. [That same film would bring an Academy Award for Best Actor that year to Marlon Brando.]

  In The Evil Within, Steiger played an eccentric research scientist, who produces a serum that releases the evil that innately lies within the heart of a person. When the refrigerator in his laboratory breaks down, he brings his serum home and puts It in his own refrigerator, alongside his foodstuff.

  His wife (Phillips) accidentally spills the serum onto her apple pie, and the evil side of her personality emerges. Inevitably, ferocious conflicts soon emerge with her husband, as played by Steiger.

  Portraying Ralph, a laboratory assistant, Jimmy appears on screen for the first time wearing his glasses. He doesn’t have much to do in the role, except push back his spectacles or suck on his pencil.

  At the wrap, Jimmy told Medford, “That Steiger can play any role, except maybe that of a female burlesque dancer.”

  He didn’t live long enough to see how right his appraisal was. Versatile and volatile, Steiger was the centerpiece of a career that eventually encompassed portrayals of gangsters, police chiefs, a disturbed priest, a perhaps psychotic Army sergeant, a Mexican bandito, an embittered Jewish Holocaust survivor working as a pawnbroker, a ruthless Russian politician; and impersonations of Al Capone, Mussolini, and Napoléon.

  Something for an Empty Briefcase

  “A Sexually Ambiguous Jimmy”

  Director Don Medford once again cast Jimmy as the lead in a teleplay, this one for a Campbell Soundstage Production. Something for an Empty Briefcase was aired on July 17, 1953.

  Campbell’s Soundstage Productions Presents...

  Jimmy signed to play the young and foolish Joe Adams, a 22-year-old who has been released from prison on a charge of petty larceny. He asked Medford, “in a nutshell, what is this play about?”

  “A dancer tries to save a two-bit crook from a life of crime,” the director said. “She falls for a young punk, who is full of rage and passion.”

  “That’s me, all right,” Jimmy said, “but I don’t like the title. Why not Rage and Passion?”

  James Dean, playing an ex-con, with Susan Douglas, who falls in love with him after his failed attempt to mug her, in Something for an Empty Briefcase.

  “Forget it!” Medford said.

  He called all his actors to a rehearsal. They included Don Hanmer, Robert Middleton, and a Viennese, Susan Douglas, whose original name was “Zuzka.” Together, they read through the script by S. Lee Pegostin.

  “Even on the first read-through, Dean was brilliant,” Medford said. “I kept him behind after letting everyone else go. I told him, ‘I want you to think what stimulated such a great performance from you so you’ll be able to do it again when it really counts.’ For him, every moment was for the first time. He didn’t retain anything from one rehearsal to the next. I tried, but failed to improve his retention.”

  Interpreting the role of the ex-con, Jimmy carries an empty briefcase, which seems to him to be a symbol of the white collar job he’d like to find. He desperately needs money, but has only $1.37 to his name.

  An old pal, Mickey (Hanmer) wants him to pull the proverbial “one last job” for the mob boss, Mr. Sloane (Middleton).

  Joe (Jimmy) decides to rob Noli (Douglas), who has arrived in New York to study dancing, but after their first encounter, they develop a relationship “all gooey and romantic.” At times, Jimmy speaks in his normal voice, but on occasion, he reverts to a Brando-esque mumble.

  One reviewer noted that Jimmy portrayed his character as “sexually ambiguous in a black pullover and tight-fitting trousers, looking as if he would have a better chance of becoming a chorus boy.”

  Ohio-born Middleton, known for his booming voice, large size, and beetle-brow, was virtually type cast as the mob boss. Middleton told Jimmy, “If a director wants a mountain bully, a corrupt mob boss, or the leader of a lynch mob, he sends for cigar-chomping me.”

  After his appearance with Jimmy, Middleton would star opposite Humphrey Bogart in The Desperate Hours (1955), one of Bogie’s last films. He would also co-star with Gary Cooper in Friendly Persuasion (1956), and with Elvis Presley in Love Me Tender (also 1956).

  Variety found the plot “something that belonged to the Dead End Kids’ school of literature. James Dean’s mugger and repetitive hand gesturing were on the ludicrous side, if their intent was to show the sensitivity and groping of the suddenly awakened thief.”

  Jimmy was devastated by the negative appraisal of his acting techniques.

  Sentence of Death

  BETSY PALMER’S “ASEXUAL LOVER”

  As the summer of 1953 moved inexorably toward autumn, Jimmy was given a key role in Sentence of Death, an episode on CBS’s Westinghouse Studio One summer theater series, to be aired on August 17. The director, Matt Harlib, cast Betsy Palmer and Gene Lyons as the other leads. Jimmy had met Lyons during that actor’s torrid affair with Grace Kelly.

  Lyons was in mourning over the loss of Grace. He told Jimmy that he’d fallen in love with her when they had co-starred together in a teleplay, The Rich Boy, based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  “My real life mirrored what the narrator of the teleplay said,” he told Jimmy. “’From the beginning, they were in love with each other,’ the narrator had said in its opening scene. “Just like Grace and me.”

  “In the play, our love turns sour, just as it did with Grace and me,” Lyons said. “As the rich boy, I had a drinking problem. Talk about type casting. At the end of the play, the boy and girl go their separate ways, as Grace and I did. Fiction repeats itself in real life.”

  At least during the teleplay, Lyons managed to control his drinking to get through the shoot. In Hollywood, Grace was beginning the most promiscuous period of her life, often in relations with big name movie stars.

  The cinematic pairing of these two Hoosiers, James
Dean and Betsy Palmer, in the 1953 television drama Sentence of Death, was noted in newspapers and entertainment columnists throughout Indiana.

  “I didn’t think Gene would ever recover from the loss of his blonde goddess,” Jimmy said.

  “I met her father,” Lyons told Jimmy. “He’s rich and thought I was shanty Irish. It’s true that I was born into poverty in Pittsburgh. Somewhere along the way, my goal and Grace’s goal changed. When we first met, both of us wanted to make it on the stage. But now, she’s gone Hollywood. Her aim is to become a movie star, bigger than Elizabeth Taylor. Not only did the father not like me, but neither did Grace’s mother, warning her never to marry an actor.”

  Actress Lee Grant had been Lyons’ former lover. She voiced her opinion of what had gone wrong between Grace and Lyons: “He loves Old Bushmills. He was a really great, attractive Irishman, very complex and poetic. He loved saloons and his foot on the bar. He was wonderful company, and had an enormous talent. But it was the Irish whiskey that ruined his affair. He had a very quick slide down after Grace left him for the green, green pastures of Hollywood.”

  Jimmy told his co-star, Betsy Palmer, “I would like to have appeared in that teleplay with Grace. It could have been called Fire and Ice. By the end, I as Fire would have melted Ice.”

  “Stop it” Palmer said. “You’re making me jealous. As a blonde, I can’t compete with Grace Kelly, much less with Marilyn Monroe. And I want you for myself.”

  “If you mean that, you’re on,” he said. As they rehearsed A Sentence of Death, Jimmy began to date Palmer. His regular girlfriend, Barbara Glenn, was out of town.

  Matt Harlib was a New Yorker, who had originally joined CBS as the first director of Arthur Godfrey’s live radio show before switching to helming teleplays. He’d been told that Jimmy was a difficult actor to direct. “Bring him on,” Harlib told the teleplay’s producer, John Haggott.

  Adrian Spies had written a script about a young man, Joe Palica, wrongly accused of murder, and then tried and sentenced to death. Harlib had nothing but praise for Jimmy’s performance as the doomed young man headed for the electric chair. “Dean could combine both grief and fear on his face. He would utter a sob, take a quick intake of air to express his desperation, and stifle back tears. His fate was reflected in his eyes.”

  Palmer was cast as Ellen Morrison, the mink-clad “Dizzy Darling of the Tabloids,” and noted for her promiscuity. As an outrageous flirt, she stumbles into a mom-and-pop drugstore to make a phone call and order a turkey sandwich. There, she witnesses the owner of the store (Fred Scollay) being shot. Mrs. Sawyer (Virginia Vincent) also witnesses the slaying of her husband, and Morrison gets a good look at the killer.

  In a police lineup, the widow singles out Jimmy as the killer, but Palmer’s character does not agree, claiming that the murderer was tall and dark.

  Later, after Jimmy is sentenced to death, Palmer is sitting in a bar when she spots the real killer. Lyons was cast as the sympathetic policeman, Paul Cochran, who believes Palmer and works to free Jimmy from the electric chair. Eventually, the killer is apprehended. He turns out to be the lover of the widow, who wanted her husband killed. In the aftermath, the innocent man is set free.

  During and after the teleplay’s filming, Jimmy began spending his nights in Palmer’s apartment, where he got to know her. A fellow Hoosier, she was five years older, the daughter of a chemist who had emigrated from Czechoslovakia. She had gotten her first acting job in New York in 1951 and had become a lifetime member of Actors Studio.

  By 1958, she’d become a household name when she replaced Faye Emerson as a panelist on the quiz show, I’ve Got a Secret, remaining as a player with the show until its finale in 1967.

  “In my little kitchen, I cooked budget meals for James,” she said. “I used his real name, as I didn’t like nicknames. We didn’t have much money, so we had a lot of meatless pasta that summer. Our dating consisted mostly of strolling the streets and occasionally taking in a movie. We had sex but often, we didn’t. On most nights, we sat and talked or else listened to music, perhaps both. I began to think James was asexual.”

  “Walking down the street with him was an adventure in itself,” she said. “Suddenly, he might defy death by jumping in front of a car, causing the driver to panic and slam on the brakes.”

  “He told me he had once been a bullfighter in Mexico and that he was used to defying death,” she said. “I was horrified at such reckless behavior. Even if he weren’t killed, he might have been crippled for life.”

  “To me, James was the little boy lost,” she said. “The lamb who strayed from the flock. He didn’t really know where he was going, but wanted to get there fast. He was like a comet shooting across the sky. I wanted to tell him to slow down, because at the pace he was going, he would drop before he reached the finish line.”

  Death Is My Neighbor

  THE PSYCHO JANITOR AND THE BEAUTIFUL COVER GIRL

  For an August 25 telecast, Jimmy once again returned to The Hangar TV series on CBS, this time to star in a script by Frank Gregory, Death is My Neighbor. Director John Preyser reunited with his girlfriend, Betsy Palmer.

  The star of the drama was one of America’s most distinguished actors, Walter Hampden. Born in Brooklyn in 1879, he was especially well-noted for his portrayals of famous Shakespearean characters such as Richard III, Shylock, or Macbeth. He was even more famously associated with his starring role as Cyrano de Bergerac.

  Jimmy paired once again, this time as a psychotic janitor, with his friend, Betsy Palmer, a fashion model, in the CBS telecast of Death is My Neighbor.

  Jimmy had seen him in only one movie, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), in which he’d been cast as the good Archbishop of Paris, with hideously grotesque Charles Laughton as the deformed Quasimodo.

  When Jimmy met Hampden, he was preparing to fly to Hollywood for the filming of Sabrina (1954), with Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, and Audrey Hepburn.

  Had Jimmy gone to Hollywood to star in The Silver Chalice (1954), he would have worked with Hampden in his role as Joseph of Arimathea. When he turned down that role in the film, it went to Paul Newman.

  Producer Franklin Heller recalled how, at the first read-through, Jimmy had thrown the script on the floor, denouncing it as “a piece of shit.”

  “I threatened to fire him,” Heller said, “and would have had not Hampden intervened and pleaded with me to keep the little punk on.”

  “I’ve seen this young man on television before, and he’s very talented,” Hampden had said. “As a matter of fact, I think he’s going to be a big star. Let him play the part, I beg you. I’ll work with him.”

  Heller complied with Hampden’s request.

  “I’d been told that Jimmy treated his directors like real assholes,” Peyser said. “But I hadn’t met an actor I couldn’t handle, and that includes Rod Steiger. I took Jimmy on. He challenged me time and time again, but I showed him I was boss. The result was terrific.”

  Peyser said that Hampden was getting old, and he would either flub his lines, or forget them completely. “I asked Jimmy to be kind and to help him out. He heard my appeal and quit mumbling and spoke lines clearly enough for Hampden to hear them.”

  In Hampden’s big scene, he summoned all his juices, including tears coming down his cheeks—and this was only a rehearsal,” Peyser said. “But the old guy impressed Dean because he was giving so much. After that, Dean was most courteous to Hampden, bringing him coffee, even finding a chair for him to sit on and rest between takes.”

  “At the end of the shoot, Hampden even invited Dean and his girlfriend, Betsy, to the Players Club, of which he had been president for twenty-seven years.”

  “When I saw the final show, I was impressed with Dean’s work in this routine meller [melodrama],” Peyser said. “Dean was magnetic.”

  “A lot of viewers thought Dean was inspired by Brando’s performance as Stanley Kowalski,” Peyser said. “To some extent, that was true. But Dean made the r
ole his own.”

  “To be a fine actor,” Peyser had told Jimmy, “you must remember two things: Concentration and unlimited imagination. With those, there is no limit as to what you can do.”

  Palmer weighed in with her opinion. “I think Jimmy has intense concentration, but that’s because he’s nearsighted.”

  In Death Is My Neighbor, Jimmy was cast as “JB,” a psychotic young janitor who is replacing an aging caretaker (Hampden), who is about to be fired.

  A glamorous model and cover girl, Netta (as portrayed by Jimmy’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Betsy Palmer) moves in, attracting Jimmy’s lustful eye. She rejects his advances. Thwarted and vengeful, he plots her murder, with the intention of blaming it on Hampden.

  In jeans and bare-armed, in a form-fitting polo shirt, Jimmy made one sexy janitor. In one scene, he dances “crotch-to-crotch” with Palmer. He later told Peyser, “Betsy gave me a hard-on.”

  “Save it until you get back to her apartment,” Peyser said. “It’s television, for god’s sake.”

  Eventually, the police learn of JB’s plot. They arrest him and he’s entrapped into a confession before he is sent blubbering off to prison.

  A player in television during its infancy, Peyser would go on to become one of the medium’s greatest directors, helming such series as The Untouchables, Bonanza, Perry Mason, and Hawaii-5-0.

  “Although James could pull himself together, he was basically a slob,” Palmer claimed. “I don’t mean he was dirty, but he often wore dirty clothes. He would take a bath before going on camera, however. Mostly, his hair was unkempt, his scalp flaked with dandruff. “