Jimmy knew little about Tandy before meeting her. The London born-and-bred actress had already appeared on various stages with such luminaries as Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. She had been married to actor Jack Hawkins, but divorced him and later married Hume Cronyn, who was also in the cast of Glory in the Flower. In time, Tandy would go on to appear in some 100 stage productions and some 60 feature films.
What Jimmy really wanted to hear from her was a rundown of her experiences of working with Brando in Streetcar.
“Tennessee fell in love with Brando and sacrificed my role of Blanche from its original script,” Tandy charged, “and beefed up Brando’s part instead of mine—even though Brando said that he always detested the role of the brutish Stanley Kowalski. I came to hate Brando.”
That was music to Jimmy’s ears.
Tandy told him a story about the brutality of Elia Kazan as a director that he feared she had exaggerated beyond belief. He would remember it vividly when Kazan directed him in East of Eden.
“Kazan thought I was too strong to play a delicate moth like Blanche,” Tandy said. “He decided to break my spirit, and he did it in the most humiliating way, the worst experience I’ve ever had in the theater. He had one of the stagehands tie me up. Then he called in other actors like Karl Malden to attack me as a woman. You know—my ‘small tits, my pus-laden vagina, and even my cunty smell,’ in their hideous words. Of course, I was reduced first to tears, and then to hysteria. Then, for Kazan’s coup de grâce, he summoned Brando for my utter humiliation. He whipped out his penis and urinated on me.”
Jimmy listened to this with stunned disbelief.
“Brando detested me, and the feeling was mutual,” Tandy claimed. “In out-of-town tryouts, I never knew how he’d play Kowalski. One night, he acted the role like some campy homosexual queen. One night in the middle of a performance, he stormed off the stage, shouting, ‘My God, how can I play opposite this bitch? She thinks she’s Ophelia.’ In all, I think Brando is a selfish, psychotic bastard. There was no sexual magnetism between us on stage the way there was between Vivien and Brando in the movie.”
In their television performance together of Glory in the Flower, Jimmy’s most memorable scene with Tandy began when he forced his attentions onto her. “Dance with a real cat!” he yells at her. “Hey, this is the atomic age, man!”
Grabbing her, he whirls her away and after a step or two, she trips and goes sprawling onto the floor. Jimmy is horrified, protesting, “It’s not my fault. After all, I didn’t do it on purpose. You don’t have to blame me.” Later, he moans at the door to the men’s room, “Everybody blames me!”
Jimmy “pissed off” Cronyn, Tandy’s husband, who was portraying the bartender. The antagonism began when Jimmy asked him, “What is it like being married to a woman with far more talent than yourself?”
“Those are fighting words,” Cronyn said. “Need I remind you, punk, that I was a member of the 1932 Olympic boxing team?”
“Oh, yeah,” Jimmy said. “Listen old man. I was shitting my diapers that year.”
“Dean was completely unprofessional in every way,” Cronyn said. “At one point, I was supposed to search his pants to remove a bottle of whiskey, since he was too young to drink on my premises. A bottle was supposed to be in his hip pocket. I searched, finding nothing, although I virtually had to feel him up. There was one place I hadn’t touched, and that was his crotch. Of course, that’s where the bottle of whiskey was resting, bulging out from his pants like some monstrous erection.”
Hume Cronyn with Jessica Tandy. Did she really suffer through Marlon Brando’s “golden shower?”
Ed Binns, an actor from Philadelphia, had been cast as Bus Riley, the male lead. He would be a star of film, stage, and television, his career spanning four decades. In his most famous production, Twelve Angry Men (1957), he’d been directed by Sidney Lumet, who had previously helmed Jimmy in a teleplay. Binns would go on to star in such films as a police detective in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), starring Cary Grant.
At one point in the drama, Bronco tangles with Bus (Binns), who grabs Jimmy by the shirt and threatens him, calling him “a little goon” and slapping Jimmy’s face. Then, after Jimmy denounces Bus as phony, Bus knocks him down. From his position sprawled out on the floor, Jimmy cries out, defiantly, “No one’s gonna tell me what to do!” The bartender then orders that Jimmy be forcibly removed from the tavern.
Cast as a visiting salesman, Frank McHugh didn’t know what to make of Jimmy. The veteran actor represented Old Hollywood. “What was this Method acting shit?” he asked. “To me, acting was how to make a living. I came from a theatrical family in Pennsylvania. My folks never heard of acting technique. They just got out there before the headlights and strutted their stuff.”
McHugh had gone to Hollywood as a contract player in 1930 at the dawn of the Talkies. He was used mostly for comic relief, and became the best friend of James Cagney, performing in nearly a dozen of his films.
“I worked with the biggies,” McHugh told Jimmy. “Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly. Usually, I was a sidekick.”
“I told Dean I was heading to Hollywood to appear with Marilyn Monroe in There’s No Business Like Show Business, and he said ‘I plan to fuck her.’ I was surprised that he wanted to make it with a woman. Everybody in the cast told me that he was a homosexual.”
The reviews of Glory in the Flower were bad and particularly devastating to Inge. Variety was fairly kind, however, claiming that the play “made for a high class, varied hour-and-half of entertainment, with just an occasional bit of pretentiousness or archness creeping in.”
McCullough would survive directing Jimmy and would work with him again in the future. “He had a real talent, even holding his own against the formidable Miss Tandy. When not acting, he was often sullen and contemptuous of the young gals who buzzed around him, finding him sexy. I told him he’d be ideal for the movies since he did not have one single bad angle, unlike many film stars. I’d never worked with an actor who had such magnetism.”
In many ways, the role of Bronco Evans in the teleplay was a rehearsal for Jimmy’s part of the disaffected anti-hero, Jim Stark, in Rebel Without a Cause.
***
The telescript for Glory in the Flower was later rewritten considerably and turned into a screenplay for a feature film entitled Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965), starring Michael Parks and Ann-Margret. Inge was very unhappy with the final result. He asked that his name be removed, and that future writing credits be attributed to a pseudonym, “Walter Gage.”
On June 10, 1973, a bulletin came over television sets that the celebrated playwright, Bill Inge, author of Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, and Bus Stop had committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. He was sixty years old.
He last plays had attracted little notice or critical attention, and he’d fallen into a deep depression, convinced that he would never be able to write well again.
Years later, Inge’s teleplay, Glory in the Flower, was revived and presented in Toronto, where it did not fare well in the view of critic Kelly Kleiman: “This work should have been left to its obscurity. The characters are familiar—beaten-down salesmen, fighters who were never contenders, small town folks with pipe dreams, fraudulent big shots, disillusioned lovers. The title comes from the same line of Wordsworth that provided the name of Spendor in the Grass—perhaps Inge never read another poem.”
Keep Our Honor Bright
JIMMY HELPS SATIRIZE THE MCCARTHY HEARINGS
On October 14, 1953, NBC broadcast Keep Our Honor Bright for The Kraft Television Theater. Critics claimed that it was inspired by the communist witch hunt hearings led by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
Roy Cohn (left), with Joe McCarthy...on a communist witch hunt.
The comparison of a college student facing expulsion for cheating with the Senate hearings was a bit farfetched. At around the same time, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, produced on Broadway in 1953, put the e
xposé of the Senate hearings into better in focus.
Keep Your Honor Bright was written by George Roy Hill, a TV writer and actor before he became more famous as a director, helming Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and again in The Sting (1973), for which he won a Best Director Oscar. Hill not only wrote Keep Our Honor Bright, but appeared in it as a news broadcaster.
The teleplay was both produced and directed by Maury Holland, a regular who often labored in both of those functions on various episodes of The Kraft Television Theater. A native of Louisiana, Holland was a former vaudevillian and Broadway actor.
Hill liked Jimmy enough to take him flying in his private plane. He’d obtained his pilot’s license at the age of sixteen. On Jimmy’s first time up, Hill decided to play a practical joke on him, steering his plane into a simulated nose-dive, yelling and screaming that they were plunging to their deaths. How Jimmy handled this fake emergency is not known. Did he go into a panic or did he face death with bravery?
During World War II, Hill had been a cargo pilot in the South Pacific and was very skilled. During the filming of the Butch Cassidy film, Newman was also subjected to Hill’s “nose dive.”
“If you showed up late for a shot, he would teach you a lesson,” Newman said. “He’d take you up in that not trustworthy plane of his and scare the be-jesus out of you.”
In the plot, Jimmy was cast as Jim Cooper, who, as a senior at the university, is caught cheating on his final exams. In retribution, he is summoned before a kangaroo court of fraternity brothers.
In the script, Jimmy readily admits his guilt, claiming, “I don’t know why I did it. It just happened. I don’t like to beg. I’m begging now. Please don’t expel me!”
Despite his pleas, the brothers decide that he has brought them dishonor and that he should be expelled.
Later, he swallows an overdose of sleeping pills, but his suicide attempt fails.
To save his own skin, Jimmy’s character is ready to expose forty other students who also cheated on their exams. This was an obvious reference to Hollywood actors and directors—one of whom was Elia Kazan—who had exposed (“ratted on”) colleagues who had shown sympathy for claims and beliefs of the communist party.
In the teleplay, Jimmy appeared with a cast of some thirty players, but the only one he remembered was Bradford Dillman. A native of San Francisco, he was about Jimmy’s age and equally good looking. Like Jimmy, he had studied at the Actors Studio and would later marry Suzy Parker, one of the most famous models in America at the time.
Jimmy sized up Dillman to Hill: “Tomorrow’s competition.”
Life Sentence
JIMMY PLAYS AN EX-CON CONFRONTING HIS MASTURBATORY FANTASY
Once again at NBC, Jimmy starred in Life Sentence, an episode in the series of Campbell Soundstage Dramas that was aired on October 16. It was written by S. Lee Progostin and directed by Garry Simpson.
Jimmy, playing a horny, just-released ex-con, manhandling the object of his suppressed desires, as played by Georgann Johnson.
Jimmy was cast as a convict, Hank Bradon, perhaps psychotic. The object of his fascination was a beautiful blonde, Jean Ryder (Georgann Johnson), who fights with her husband (Nicholas Saunders) and fatally shoots him. She later tries to blame the shooting on a convict from the prison that adjoins her property.
Johnson was a tall, statuesque blonde, born in Iowa, who would go on to appear in such films as Midnight Cowboy (1969), but is better known as the mother of the title character in Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, a TV series that ran from 1993-1998.
Jimmy’s character works in the prison garden, where he can spy from afar on Johnson on her front porch. When he finishes his time in prison, he arrives on her doorstep, begging her to go away with him. She threatens to call the police, but he warns her, “If you do, I’ll bash your skull in.”
He tells her he has had a masturbatory fantasy of her wearing a sunflower yellow bathing suit. “I dreamed of you on a surf board swimming across the white fluffy waves.” He grabs for her and she protests, “You’re hurting me.”
Sexually excited by her, he says, “That’s the first time I’ve touched a woman in five years.”
In general, viewers found Jimmy’s performance creditable, based on emotions which swung from sentimental to psychotic within minutes.
Critic Robert Tanitch wrote: “It was a pity that the director should have allowed Dean to go right over the top at the end of the threatened rape scene and rip open the top of his shirt in an unnecessary and embarrassing theatrical gesture in which he seemed to be reaching out for a Marlon Brando-like climax and missing it.”
The Bells of Cockaigne:
IRISH BLARNEY ENHANCED WITH JIMMY’S TELEVISED “STRIPTEASE”
Jimmy followed Life Sentence with a return to NBC to film The Bells of Cockaigne, a teleplay for the series, Armstrong’s Circle Theater. Aired on November 17, it was written by George Lowther and directed by Jimmy’s close friend, James Sheldon. Its star was Gene Lockhart, cast as a janitor, who had worked with Jimmy before during his first major production, the religious drama, Hill Number One.
Jimmy (with his anonymous benefactor, Gene Lockhart), in Bells of Cockaigne. Impersonating a stevedore laboring on the docks, he remained shirtless throughout most of the teleplay.
A Canadian, Lockhart was strictly a professional who always showed up on time and was letter-perfect in his lines. He’d made his debut in the theater at the age of sixteen, appearing on stage in comedy sketches with Beatrice Lillie. From 1922 onward, he would be cast in some 300 films, including Miracle on 34th Street (1947), starring Maureen O’Hara.
Sheldon had learned how eccentric Jimmy could be as an actor, showing up late and spontaneously rewriting his lines without warning. Lockhart complained to Sheldon about him: “He’s always late, always wrapped up in himself and not accommodating at all to his fellow actors.”
Sheldon said, “I think Jimmy is unaware of other people’s worlds. He was doing his thing his way, and it works well for him but it often leaves the other actors without anything to play off.”
Also in the cast was veteran actor Vaughn Taylor, with whom Jimmy would soon work again.
As the stevedore, Joey, Jimmy appears as a heavy duty laborer, and is shirtless throughout most of the teleplay. As he told Sheldon, “I bet I turned on the homos and women, too, by showing off my lilywhite body and suckable tits.”
He is struggling to support his wife and their asthmatic young son, who is in dire need of medical treatments that Jimmy can’t afford. In this production, Jimmy appears rather skinny and looks undernourished as he works with a corps of beefy, muscled stevedores.
To escape from poverty, and to aid his son, Jimmy as Joey joins a gambling ring of other stevedores and blows his entire paycheck.
In the meantime, Lockhart as the janitor tells Taylor that he wants to win a $500 lottery prize, which he plans to spend on a trip back to his native Ireland. His dream comes true, and he wins the lottery.
“When you get something which you’ve been waiting for a long time, you hear the Bells of Cockaigne,” Lockhart remarks.
[Cockaigne is a reference to an imaginary fantasy island where one lives in luxurious comfort, freed of worldly problems.]
When Lockhart as the kindly janitor learns that Jimmy had lost his paycheck to the other stevedores, he pulls off a ruse. He claims that Jimmy had the winning $500 lottery ticket, and he relinquishes his prize money to him as a means of paying for his boy’s medical expenses. Of course, the inevitable happens: Lockhart hears the bells of Cockaigne ringing as the play, dripping with sentimentality, ends.
A reviewer wrote, “The Bells of Cockaigne may have been true, but it plays like a bit of Irish blarney.”
A Long Time Till Dawn
EMULATING DEATH IN THE STYLE OF JAMES CAGNEY
Jimmy was in such demand during November of 1953 that he was cast as the star of another teleplay, A Long Time Till Dawn, set to be ai
red on November 11 as an episode on the popular Kraft Television Theater.
The drama had been written by Rod Serling, perhaps the most brilliant writer of television’s Golden Age in the 1950s. Serling was not only a screenwriter, but a playwright, producer, and narrator, best known for his science fiction anthology, The Twilight Zone. Called “the angry young man of television,” he was at constant war with TV executives and sponsors about such issues as censorship, racism, and war.
James Dean as a remorseful gangster in A Long Time Till Dawn.
The teleplay was both produced and directed by Dick Dunlap, one of the most prolific directors in the history of television, helming some 1,000 teleplays before the end of his career.
“He was one of the few queer directors who didn’t try to get into my pants,” Jimmy alleged. “My God, the man was a pro. He got his start at the age of five working in silent pictures.”
In addition to Jimmy, he would go on to direct such stars as Frank Sinatra, Robert Preston, Eva LaGallienne, Eva Marie Saint, Melvyn Douglas, Lee Remick, Peter Ustinov, Jason Robards, Helen Hayes, José Ferrer, John Gielgud, and Elvis Presley.
“I thought Jimmy might become a star, at least in some B pictures about juvenile delinquents with Mamie Van Doren or Jayne Mansfield. But a legend like Marilyn Monroe? Never!”
Once again, Jimmy was cast as a convict, this time named Joe Harris, who is both a poet and a gangster. Serling described the character as a young man with “violence and big blue eyes, a strange boy, a sensitive kid, but without remorse or conscience. He’s got brains, but his logic is like a little boy’s.”
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