James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  The cast he was referring to included Brando, Jimmy, Pier Angeli, Ursula Andress, Vic Damone, and starlet Pat Hardy, with whom Jimmy had co-starred in his final teleplay, The Unlighted Road.

  Brando dated both Andress and Angeli, both actresses also becoming involved with Jimmy. In fact, he once proclaimed Angeli as the love of his life.

  Pat Hardy was also dating singer Vic Damone, who started dating Angeli when she was also sleeping with both Brando and Jimmy (not at the same time). Eventually, she would drop both actors and marry Damone.

  Louella Parsons referred to it as “the love romp. Too bad I can’t print all the gory details.”

  ***

  Shortly after Jimmy’s death in 1955, Brando was offered two separate gigs; a film role in which he would impersonate Jimmy; and an offer to narrate a documentary about Jimmy’s life and career. Ultimately, he rejected both possibilities. But during the time he was debating how to play it, he confided in Truman Capote, saying, “This glorifying of Dean is all wrong…he wasn’t a hero. He was just a little lost boy trying to find himself. If a documentary ever got made, it should teach the truth about Dean so that his fans will stop worshipping him. I would cooperate in a film that told the truth, but neither of the scripts did that. They were a fantasy version of Dean. I see clearly what was happening. A cult was forming around the faux memory of this kid. He was not some mythical hero, just another pathetic figure wandering the sewers of Hollywood. At times, Dean was a madman with severe psychological problems. We should not glorify his insanity but expose it. In my view, Mr. James Dean should be placed in a back garage of long-abandoned vehicles.”

  Guess who? A notorious example of Photo-shopping that went through the internet to blogsites and commentators around the world. Many viewers thought it was authentic.

  Later, as the years went by, Brando named some other male stars of the time “who should join Jimmy Dean in the forgotten and dusty vaults of yesteryear: Robert Wagner, Tab Hunter, Jeffrey Hunter, Troy Donahue, Audie Murphy, George Hamilton, Peter Lawford, Sal Mineo, Ryan O’Neal, Robert Stack, Robert Hutton, Michael Wilding, and Gig Young, to name only a few. You might catch one of these jerks of yesterday on the late, late show if you’re very, very drunk.”

  Chapter Ten

  JIMMY TAKES MANHATTAN

  Enraged, He Denounces Everyone at the Actors Studio as a “Daisy Chain Faggot”

  JIMMY GETS DOWN WITH EARTHA KITT, TRUMAN CAPOTE, A MALE MUSICIAN IN HARLEM, “THE ONLY VIRGIN LEFT IN NYC,” AND MANY, MANY OTHERS

  Stopping Traffic, He Poses Nude as Adonis on a Manhattan Sidewalk

  Tennessee Williams claimed, “Long before [the noted stage and opera director] Frank Corsaro had to deal with the emotional demands of Bette Davis during the stage version of my play, The Night of the Iguana (1961), he was broken in by James Dean. Jimmy was a dynamo of human angst, and for a while, Corsaro was his mentor. Jimmy always created chaos on the dusty trail he left behind. In fact, if I ever write a play about him, I’ll call it Blossoms in the Dust. But maybe that’s too close to the title of an old Greer Garson movie…”

  In June of 1953, Corsaro would cast Jimmy in The Scarecrow. Before that, he prevailed on Jimmy to return for more lessons at the Actors Studio, despite his unhappy memories associated with Lee Strasberg’s savage attack on him, with the entire class watching, based on his interpretation of The Matador.

  For months, Corsaro had been closely connected to Jimmy, pouring cultural enlightenment into his animated dialogues with him. Often, they spent quiet evenings together reading from the masterpieces of world literature, talking, and playing recordings of classical music. “He liked me because I was Italian,” Corsaro said. “He told me I was very smart and a great director. We read poems together, listening to Italian opera. Those nights with me heightened his awareness. He was not well educated except for talking about The Little Prince. I think he’d read it fifty times. Sometimes, when reading a passage from it to me, he would burst into tears.”

  Jimmy’s friend, John (aka Jonathan) Gilmore claimed that Jimmy intensely disliked not only Strasberg but the entire board of directors at the Actors Studio. Jimmy denounced Strasberg as an ugly man who kept no mirrors in his apartment so he would not have to confront his own image. He also made the claim that his fellow actors “either fuck or suck off” the Actors Studio’s board members. “They don’t like me, and I don’t like them. Every time I hear Strasberg speak, nothing but shit comes out of his mouth. He’s full of stodgy platitudes, and he farts out smelly opinions about acting.”

  “Strasberg’s ideas are nothing more than ill-informed personal opinions,” Jimmy said. “To quote Nietzche: ‘It isn’t that they are true, but only they’re held up as being true.’ Mostly, they are just so much hot air.”

  Yet according to Gilmore, “Despite those negative opinions, on other occasions he would express high praise for Strasberg.”

  John Stix, the head of the Board of Directors at Actors Studio, heard that Jimmy was going around New York claiming that his fellow board members “were nothing but a bunch of daisy-chain faggots.”

  According to Stix, “Jimmy’s self-indulgence was not tolerated by Lee, even after his return to the studio. In class exercises, he did not allow Jimmy’s defenses to protect him against criticism that all actors face. Jimmy disliked everyone there, except Kim Stanley and Geraldine Page, who babied him. They allowed more margins for his self-indulgences than anyone else did.”

  Eventually, after days spent summoning his courage and building up his walls of defense, Jimmy returned to the Actors Studio. At first, from a seat in the back row, he watched the proceedings, looking sullen. Gradually, he emerged from his cocoon.

  In dialogues with Page and Kim Stanley, Strasberg said, “The Method, as you know, teaches an actor to utilize every emotion from his own life in creating a character on stage. Dean becomes confused about who he really is and the character he is playing. He approaches acting on a more personal level that the Method suggests. He tries to become in private the character he is portraying on stage.”

  Yet Page and Stanley recognized what Jimmy was trying to do, even if Strasberg didn’t. “Lee was still hung up on the Method’s emphasis on an actor relying on motivation and sense memory,” Stanley said. “That had one major drawback. It did not recognize the concept that an actor can build a performance, create a strong character by perfecting individual moments. Jimmy became a master at doing that.”

  In her biography, Lee Strasberg, The Imperfect Genius, columnist Cindy Adams wrote: “Lee was drawn to anyone with a tic, perhaps because neurotics seem to have heightened sensitiveness. He loved gifted freaks, highly gifted freaks. He loved that negative-positive level of genius in the crazily, desperately talented Kim Stanley, Geraldine Page, and Jimmy Dean.”

  Actually, Strasberg wasn’t as indifferent to Jimmy’s acting as some studio members thought. “Dean has a basic honesty in every performance,” Strasberg claimed. “Everything he does is commitment. When he pulls a hat down, it isn’t just a mannerism. It is a gesture of defiance that comes from deep within.”

  At one point, Strasberg suggested that Dean appear in a bedroom scene with Carroll Baker, another emerging actress. “Dean seemed bursting out of himself with this animal vitality,” Strasberg said. “Perhaps he was just horny. He demanded in his under-the-sheets scene with Baker that he actually penetrate her for greater sexual realism.”

  “I want to work her up to an actual climax, so the actors sitting out there cannot only see our movements up and down, but hear the sounds of our breathing and cries of joy.”

  “I turned him down,” Strasberg said, “and I never consulted Baker with such an outrageous idea. You can carry Method acting just so far. I told Jimmy that in a Broadway play, which had two matinées a week, on Wednesday and Saturday, he’d have less sexual drive in the evening performance, where tickets cost more. You’d be experiencing your greater sexual thrill for the matinée crowd, and that doesn’t seem fair for
the higher-paying audience.”

  “Of course, I was tongue-in-cheek.”

  Jimmy would tell The New York Times, “Strasberg is an incredible man, a walking encyclopedia of fantastic insight.” That was his public utterance. Privately he told friends such as William Bast and others, “Strasberg is a Jew cunt.”

  Once, during one of Marlon Brando’s rare appearances at the studio, he shared a cup of coffee with Jimmy in a cafeteria nearby. He told Jimmy, “Strasberg tries to commercialize on his connection to me to promote the Actors Studio. He does the same thing with Marilyn Monroe. If you make it in Hollywood, he’ll pull the same stunt with your name. I can just see the entrance a few years from now. Big blowups of MARLON BRANDO, MARILYN MONROE, and JAMES DEAN.”

  “Frankly, I loathe the man,” Brando said. “Always have. My times at the studio have been very limited. Mostly while Strasberg was ranting about acting, I was casing the joint, checking out the goodies, deciding which lucky boy or gal I was going to fuck later that day.”

  “Of course, if Monty Clift ever walked in, I’d be out of Dodge in a minute,” Brando said. “I can’t stand Princess Tiny Meat. I’m sure that before it’s all said and done, you in your memoirs will devote two chapters to me and perhaps a thin one to Clift.”

  Elia Kazan said, “Dean was scarcely at the Actors Studio. He came in only a few times. I remember him sitting in the front row, a surly mess. He never participated in anything.”

  Surely, Kazan knew that his remarks were not true. In both 1953 and 1954, preceding his Hollywood stardom, Jimmy appeared in several stage productions that were staffed, directed, and sponsored by the Actors Studio. Jack Garfein had already cast him in Calder Willingham’s End as a Man, starring Ben Gazzara.

  In May of 1953, Jimmy had also interpreted the small role of Konstantin Treplev in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. As Konstantin, Jimmy was cast as a playwright who tries to commit suicide, succeeding on the second attempt. Based on his work in The Seagull, Jimmy said he learned far more from working with actor Joseph Anthony than he did in any acting class.

  Born in 1912, Anthony had already starred on Broadway in The Country Girl, which was later made into a movie with Oscar-winning Grace Kelly, along with William Holden and Bing Crosby.

  In time, Anthony would become one of the more prolific directors in the history of the American Theater, eventually being nominated for Tony Awards for his steerage of The Most Happy Fella (1957); Gore Vidal’s The Best Man (1960); and 110 in the Shade (1964).

  Although The Seagull had been written in 1895, Jimmy said, “It still has meaning for modern audiences.” The program stated that Constantin Stanislavski had directed the play in 1898 for the Moscow Art Theatre where it was hailed “as one of the greatest events in the history of the Russian theater and one of the greatest new developments in the history of world drama.’”

  “Okay,” Jimmy said, after reading that. “That’s putting it on a little thick, but it’s still a god damn piece of good work.” He later told Corsaro that Strasberg had seen one of his performances, advising him “to play things closer to yourself.”

  “I got that advice from the master himself,” Jimmy said. “God has spoken. Perhaps you’ll tell me what in the fuck ‘closer to myself’ means?”

  Corsaro was quoted as saying, “I think Strasberg misread Jimmy. He was a new and innovative talent sending out his own message. When the phone rang with Jimmy’s message, Strasberg didn’t pick up the receiver. I think, however, that in time, he came to understand Jimmy’s unique talent better.”

  Jimmy Slits His Wrists

  RESCUE COMES IN THE FORM OF A BLONDE BOMBSHELL FROM BROOKLYN

  Broke, desolate, and insecure, Jimmy entered the Actors Studio—a high-ceilinged space at 432 West 44th Street, near Tenth Avenue. Originally conceived as a Greek Orthodox Church, it had been adapted into a theater with rehearsal space for acting exercises. Through its doors paraded what columnist Cindy Adams called “the chinchilla and caviar set,” including Rock Hudson, Eva Gabor, Grace Kelly, or Leslie Caron. It became a theatrical Elizabeth Arden’s.”

  Shelley Winters...Bitch Goddess

  Jimmy had agreed to participate in another acting exercise in front of the class, something he had not done since his The Matador skit.

  In the front row sat Lee Strasberg with a devoted supporter of the Actors Studio, Shelley Winters, that blonde bombshell from Brooklyn. At this point in her career, she was an established star, usually based in Los Angeles. She welcomed Jimmy back to the studio.

  In the first of her two memoirs, Winters had published a picture of Jimmy with a caption that identified him as a man “who often played with knives both on and off the screen.”

  She recalled their first meeting in which he’d come into the studio wearing a big old overcoat, obviously purchased secondhand, typical of the type homeless men wore on the streets of the Bowery.

  On stage for his performance, he removed the overcoat, revealing that he wore only a T-shirt and jeans. For his skit, he removed a switchblade knife from his pocket. As Winters noted, “Something reflected in his face revealed that he was reliving some horrible experience he’d had. He was acting out the role of a young man who had lost it all and wanted to get off the planet. He’d come to the end of his rainbow and found, not a pot of gold, but a stew of despair. His face seemed to signal that he did not have the strength to go on living.”

  He took his knife and held the blade up to his left wrist. Slowly, he began to make an incision as blood appeared. In horror, Winters realized that this was not pretend, but the real thing. She looked at Strasberg, who appeared dispassionate. When Jimmy then began to make an incision into his other wrist, Winters screamed and jumped up, fearing he was going to cut deeper.

  “My God!” she later claimed. “He was actually committing suicide in front of the entire class. I could not believe it. I ran to the stage to stop him.”

  Confronting him, she struggled and forced him to drop the knife. Then she ripped off her scarf and applied it to his one of his wounded wrists. Finally, Strasberg got involved, handing her his large handkerchief, which she used to bind up the other wrist.

  In the dressing room to which they’d retreated, Winters saw that the wounds were only superficial, and that there was no apparent urgent need to take him to a hospital.

  At that point, Strasberg entered and scolded her. “Dean was portraying a boy who is unstable. He was obviously working through something as an actor. You may have stopped him from discovering the one thing within him that would have helped him in a future performance.”

  “Get the fuck out of here!” she screamed at him.

  Sharing the seat with him in front of a dressing table, Winters noticed that Jimmy had bled onto her sable, for which he apologized. “He was weeping, and I found myself crying, too,” she said. “He put an arm around me and kissed me consolingly.”

  He tried to explain why he’d attempted suicide on stage. “I want to fight this feeling I have of alienation because I feel nobody is for real. Perhaps it was a cry for help, for someone to come forward to save me.” He looked into her eyes. “You were that someone.”

  “I invited him for some coffee,” she said. “He put back on that awful overcoat and followed me. At table in a cafeteria, he appeared to be starving. He ordered three eggs with fried potatoes, toast, whatever.”

  “He seemed to have attached himself to me,” she said. “I remembered the ancient Chinese proverb that if you save someone’s life you are responsible for them.”

  She claimed that after breakfast, she could not shake him. He followed her out onto the street, where a limousine she’d rented for the day was waiting for her. In a few short hours, the chauffeur would take her to La Guardia for a flight to Los Angeles. “Even though I didn’t invite Jimmy, he crawled into the back seat with me.”

  “When we got to the Plaza Hotel, he followed me upstairs on the elevator to my suite. I still had almost three hours before I left for the airpor
t. One thing led to another. I felt he desperately wanted someone to love him. So it was more about loving him and holding him than it was about sex. Of course, there was that, too.”

  “Regrettably, he had to do most of the work, since I was in a back brace because of a recent car accident. Jimmy did not get the benefit of my usual gymnastic stunts.”

  At three o’clock that afternoon, he followed her downstairs, carrying his old airline bag with him. As she got into her limousine, he pleaded with her to take him along. “I said okay because his existence seemed so pointless and haphazard. No matter how much I quizzed him on the way to the airport, I never got a straight answer. He was obviously a very beautiful and gifted actor. In some way, he reminded me of Peter Pan, but without the joy, as if he had sprung directly from Never Never Land and would soon disappear back to it. He seemed to cling to me in some emotional way.”

  “I was so mixed up myself, I couldn’t have done anything about helping him if I could. At the airport, I gave him twenty dollars and kissed him goodbye, telling him to get a room at the Y,” she said. “I was afraid he wanted to get on the plane with me. I told the chauffeur to drive him back to Manhattan. As I left him, I saw tears forming in his eyes. When I looked back at him, it was one of the saddest, most forlorn faces I’d ever seen before.”

  [It almost came to be that Winters and Jimmy would work together. Briefly, George Stevens, who had directed her in A Place in the Sun, considered her for the minor role of Vashti Snythe in Giant, but decided to hire Jane Withers instead.]

  I Was the Mirror Image of a God Damn Scarecrow”

  —James Dean

  The friendship between Frank Corsaro and Jimmy continued to deepen, although it had its ups and downs. At times, they would have an argument and not speak to each other for two or three weeks, but they always came back together again. After a spat, they’d meet at Jerry’s Tavern for a spaghetti dinner, usually followed by an evening spent in the director’s apartment listening to classical music.