Orr was very disappointed when his father-in-law, Jack Warner, rejected the idea of involving Jimmy in the film. “I couldn’t believe it,” Orr said. “Dean was fantastic in his test, but Jack decided to go for a name actor. At the time, Tab Hunter had a bit of a box office following, especially among teenage girls, even though he was gay as a goose. Warners lost out on a big opportunity in not casting Dean.”
***
After they lost their respective roles in Battle Cry, Jimmy would have a final encounter with Ruda Michelle.
One afternoon in Hollywood, she spotted him coming toward her. He was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt. He was accompanied by two beautiful teenage girls, each clad in a bathing suit, positioned on either side of him. Approaching her, he said, “Ruda, what are you doing here?”
“Hanging out looking for a job when not beaching it,” she said.
He reached for her arm. “Come with me,” he said, before telling those clinging girls to get lost.
She quickly wrapped her beach towel around her nearly nude body and wandered off with him. He seated her beside him in a yellow convertible and drove over to Warners. There, a secretary allowed them into William Orr’s office.
Barging in, Jimmy said, “Bill, you darling man, I’ve found the perfect actress to play Judy in Rebel Without a Cause. You’d better give the part to her or else I might walk.”
“Needless to say, I didn’t get the role, which went to Natalie Wood,” Michelle said. “And, before I forget, Jimmy changed his mind, forgave Orr, and indeed starred in the picture, as everybody in the world knows.”
***
In Hollywood, Jimmy visited the set of Battle Cry, ostensibly for a reunion with James Whitmore, his former acting teacher. Whitmore welcomed him, though he told some of the cast that he suspected that Jimmy was really showing up just to see how Tab Hunter was doing in the role of Danny.
“There was a definite jealousy,” Whitmore said. “All actors have it. I was so jealous of Spencer Tracy, I detested him.”
In his memoir, The Making of a Movie Star, Hunter wrote, “Jimmy visited my dressing room several times during the making of Battle Cry. We’d also hang out on the steps outside talking between shots.”
Tab Hunter, weary from the rigors of war, in Battle Cry.
“I have no proof,” Whitmore said, “but both the cast and crew gossiped about Jimmy and Tab. Tab was definitely gay, and Jimmy was bi, to say the least, so we assumed that when Jimmy disappeared into Tab’s dressing room, it wasn’t just to apply his makeup.”
Motivated by dreams of becoming a Hollywood star, Jimmy took note of his competition, the so-called “Pretty Boy Pack.” Led by Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis and Robert Wagner were “hot on my ass,” as Jimmy so colorfully phrased it.
In the second tier of this cabal of young male actors was Tab himself, trailed by John Kerr, John Ericson, Steve Forrest, Jeffrey Hunter, and the doomed Robert Francis, who appeared in only four Hollywood films, all with military themes, before he died at the age of 25 in the crash of an airplane he was piloting.
Both Jimmy and Tab arrived in Hollywood just as the studios were getting rid of their contract players. During these tectonic shifts in the landscapes of Hollywood, even such stalwart Golden Age survivors as Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable were sent out to pasture. Natalie Wood, Tab, and Jimmy were the last actors to be placed under contract to Warners.
James Dean (left) with Tab Hunter, each a heartthrob of the 1950s, were rivals on the screen and with other lovers, too. But the question that’s never been answered is, “Did they or didn’t they do it?”
Jimmy rejected a seven-year contract, and agreed to only a three-picture deal. As he told Tab, “I want to be a free agent, kiddo.”
In contrast, Tab preferred the security of a long-term contract.
During one of Jimmy’s visits to the set, a studio publicity photographer spotted the two of them chatting, and snapped pictures of the handsome young men together. “We were the polar opposites of America’s youth culture captured together,” Tab wrote.
Although Tab was called to the set, the photographer wanted to get more pictures of them together. In response, “Jimmy flipped the bird at him,” Tab said. “I knew that my friend, Dick Clayton, Jimmy’s agent, had his hands full with him because he was unconventional and unpredictable. But he believed in Jimmy and thought he was well worth the trouble.”
Clayton recalled going with Tab to deliver a contract to Jimmy on the set of Rebel Without a Cause. “It was being shot that night in the spooky mansion that had been the abode of Norma Desmond [as portrayed by Gloria Swanson] in Sunset Blvd. Jimmy and I hung out waiting for the crew to go through another setup.”
In the months to come, Tab and Jimmy often dated the same rising starlets, including Natalie Wood, Terry Moore, and Lori Nelson. As a gay man, Tab did it for the sake of publicity, using the beautiful starlets as “arm candy.” Hollywood insiders joked, “NATALIE WOULD BUT TAB WOULDN’T.”
Both men doubled up on Tony Perkins, Jimmy having only a fling with him, Tab a fully blossomed romance that was whispered about all over Hollywood and later acknowledged by Tab in his memoirs.
Rumors were also rampant about the alleged affair of Tab and Jimmy, but so far as it is known, Tab never admitted to that.
Jimmy, however, did boast to a number of friends that, upon his arrival in Hollywood, “one of my goals is to fuck that pretty blonde to show him who’s boss.”
***
Battle Cry, which was released in 1955 to a disappointing box office, wasn’t the only role that both Tab and Jimmy would compete for. That same year, a baseball-themed Broadway musical opened called Damn Yankees, the plot involving a Faustian bargain. [The hero, Joe Hardy has offered to sell his soul to the devil if his team, the Washington Senators, can beat the New York Yankees.] Stephen Douglass starred in the lead role of Joe Hardy. Warners acquired the film rights to the stage play, and briefly considered Jimmy for the romantic lead of the baseball hero, Joe Hardy.
Tab Hunter, Gwen Verdon, in Damn Yankees. Jimmy was considered for Tab’s role.
At the last minute, however, they opted for Tab Hunter instead, backed up by Gwen Verdon, Satan’s (reluctant) temptress, who demonstrates her seductive charms with “Whatever Lola Wants.” After the characters team up to thwart the devil’s schemes, everything ends happily in the end.
Tab had just granted an interview to Liberty magazine in which he revealed, “I rebel against playing the teen-aged baby-faced ‘boy next door’ in my films. I’m twenty-six, and I’d rather play a murderer. So, guess what? I land my biggest ‘boy next door’ character to date, the role of naïve baseball hero, Joe Hardy.”
In the movie roles he was assigned, Tab didn’t always emerge the winner. Warners considered casting him, along with Debbie Reynolds, as the star of Rebel Without a Cause, a choice that would have “tamed” that picture considerably. Prompted by Jack Warner, Rebel’s director Nicholas Ray evaluated the potential of those other actors: “Debbie and Tab are too anemic.”
[Of course, the leads eventually went to Jimmy and Natalie Wood, but before Jimmy was cast as Jim Stark, both Robert Wagner and John Kerr were considered for the role.]
On the night Jimmy died, Dick Clayton, his agent, phoned Tab with the news: “Oh, my God!” Clayton shouted into the phone. “Jimmy’s dead. He died in a car crash.”
Tab later wrote, “Dick could hardly speak. He was devastated. Within days, he would suffer a bout of psychosomatic blindness caused by the trauma over Jimmy’s death. His sight would return, but, frankly, I don’t think he ever completely recovered from the shock, or the loss.”
In the late 1950s, Clayton and Tab built a small house together in Palm Desert, California, near Palm Springs. Although they went on to other lovers, they remained friends for life. Clayton died of congestive heart failure in 2008 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety-three.
Jimmy Gets Musical
WITH THE AVANT-GARDE COMPOSER, DAVID DIAMOND
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“Jimmy had this thing for composers,” Alec Wilder said. “Not for me, necessarily, but for other composers who were friends of mine. He must have been in love with David Diamond’s music, certainly not that ugly mug of his.”
“I knew David from our younger days in Rochester, New York. He’d won three Guggenheim Fellowships and became one of the pre-eminent composers of our generation. Rounds, released as a composition for strings in 1944, was his most popular piece, but he also wrote nearly a dozen symphonies.”
“He was very gay and didn’t give a damn who knew it,” Wilder continued. “He later blamed homophobia and anti-Semitism for stalling his career. In time, he was shoved aside to some extent, eventually relegated to the forgotten generation of great American symphonists.”
Composer David Diamond in the 1950s.
“A lot of Diamond’s problems may have stemmed from what people called his difficult personality,” Wilder said. “The New York Times quoted him as saying, ‘I was a highly emotional young man, very honest in my behavior. I would say things in public that would cause a scene between me and, for instance, a conductor.’”
Diamond met Jimmy the night Wilder invited him to a Broadway rendition of See the Jaguar. Wilder had composed the music for the play.
In his diary, Diamond wrote, “Alec lured me to see what he called ‘this wonderful boy you’ll just love.’ How true that was. This handsome young actor had to be seen to be believed. The play was a mess, like Brando in Truckline Café. But what this charming boy did really worked. He looked about fifteen and had a lot of Brando’s mannerisms but with a wholly different sensibility. At curtain call, I had fallen madly in love with him. I had to have him.”
In Diamond’s diary appeared this entry from February 22, 1953: “My friend, Alec Wilder, introduced me to this charming young man. I think he has been studying at the Actors Studio with Elia Kazan. Very handsome, short, muscular. Has a provocative way of looking at you, then suddenly smiling. Said he loved my Rounds; that he plays it on his recorder. Works in TV. Now what was his name? Can’t remember. His eyes are magnetic so he wears glasses, perhaps to hide the allure of his eyes.”
Imagine Diamond’s surprise three days later, when he discovered that he lived next door to this nameless youth at the Hotel Iroquois.
On their first date, Diamond took Jimmy to see Charlie Chaplin in his dramatic comedy, Limelight (1952). “I couldn’t believe it: Chaplin made Jimmy weep. I realized he was a very sensitive boy.”
At the time, Diamond was teaching at the Juilliard School of Music, to which he escorted Jimmy and introduced him to his students. Jimmy told them he was the world’s most expert bongo drum player.
On another occasion, Diamond introduced him to his friend and fellow composer, Leonard Bernstein. “Lennie, who had already seduced Brando, grabbed Jimmy, embraced him, and stuck his tongue down his throat. Later, I told Jimmy that he shouldn’t get a swelled head. ‘Lennie does that to every handsome young boy he meets.’”
“That afternoon, I introduced Jimmy to this emerging playwright I knew, Edward Albee, in the lobby of the Algonquin. Jimmy also met Albee’s companion, Bill Flanagan.”
In his diary, Diamond wrote: “Jimmy feels more lonely than anything else. He seems to think I am famous and wants to get to know me, perhaps thinking I will advance his career in some way. I can’t interpret his seductive signals. He hopes to get a break in the theater, so I guess he has to use every well-connected person he can. I’d bet a million on him if I had it. Only Marlon Brando has made me feel this way about an actor. Tonight, Jimmy has invited me to his room, ostensibly to listen to music. But I suspect he is going to offer his body to me.”
For the first two hours, Jimmy lay on his bed as Diamond sat in a chair while they listened to the composer’s music. Finally, Diamond told him that if he removed all his clothing, he could enjoy the music better.
“He looked at me with that seductive smile, then took off every piece of his clothing and lay down again for me to enjoy every inch of him. After a few minutes, he looked over at me and said, ‘Take what you want.’”
“I approached him like a hungry puppy who had not been fed in three days.”
Diamond later [inaccurately] stated to an interviewer that his relationship with Jimmy was platonic, “a sort of father-son thing. Jimmy is just not my type.”
But he presented a different version to Wilder: “His pubic hair is a natural blonde, not like that of Marilyn Monroe. But I suspect you already know that, having lived for a while with him at the Algonquin. He likes for me to come over in the afternoon and help him with his bath, giving him a massage later. He lets me use my mouth during the massage.”
“You are one lucky son of a bitch,” Wilder said.
As Diamond described to Wilder: “Jimmy’s breath is like a whiff from the gods, his tongue having the taste of nectar. Even his semen tastes sweet, as if it had a tablespoon of sugar in it. With his body spread out before me, it was a feast. He is Adonis reincarnate.”
Alice Denham, the Playboy Centerfold
WHO SLEPT WITH THE LITERATI AND WITH JAMES DEAN
During the autumn of 1952, a strikingly beautiful, aspirant writer and model—Alice Denham—entered Jimmy’s life. Unlike most of the “star-fuckers” who pursued movie actors, Denham’s preference was for leading members of the literati. She had previously been involved in dalliances with both Norman Mailer and Philip Roth.
In time, she would sustain an affair with Hugh Hefner, who would eventually designate her as Playboy’s Playmate of the Month.
“NY in the 50s was like Paris in the 30s,” said Alice Denham, who configured herself as a kiss-and-tell “groupie” to the literary hotties of the Beat Generation
The issue that featured her as its nude centerfold also included one of her short stories.
In 2006, she’d write a juicy tell-all entitled Sleeping With the Bad Boys, detailing her affairs in and out of the beds of the literary elite of the 1950s.
[Publishers Weekly reviewed Sleeping With the Bad Bays like this: “Denham, an essayist, television writer and the only woman whose fiction and breasts have appeared in the same issue of Playboy, offers up a fast-paced memoir that chronicles how a pretty girl from suburban Washington ended up on a bar stool at the storied Lion’s Head. Run-ins with notorious figures—Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Marlon Brando, Hugh Hefner—pepper nearly every page, though readers interested in the hot dirt promised by the flap copy will be disappointed, as the “bad boys” here come off as little more than horny juveniles, and Denham skimps on the steam when she sacks with, say, James Dean. Most of the narrative is consumed with her slow-out-of-the-gate literary career that limps along; as her peers became icons, Denham modeled until the gigs dried up, and then wrote freelance. Though Denham reveals little that isn’t widely known (Roth is a perv, Mailer is a freak), the sheer number of names dropped and follies recounted make for a fast and fun read.”]
Denham’s friends included Christine White, with whom Jimmy had auditioned months before for the Actors Studio. In her memoirs, Denham surmised that they had had an affair, but what Denham didn’t tell Jimmy was that White harbored “this powerful crush on Marlon Brando, his rival.”
Jimmy eventually escorted Denham to a Broadway theater for a performance of The Immoralist, even after he’d dropped out of the show. [Jimmy’s disastrous involvement in that production is more fully explored in a later chapter of this book.]
Denham remembered that after the show, she climbed the steps to his studio on the top floor of a brownstone on West 68th Street. After a discussion about bullfighting and Carson McCullers’ novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the two of them tumbled between his yellowing sheets.
Claiming that he was a tit man and that he liked to nuzzle, she later wrote:
“Jimmy had smooth, baby-smelling rosy white skin with very little hair except for a blondish brown patch around his privates. He was lightly muscled, and he smelled of vanilla. We fingered and t
ugged. Then went to the core of the plot, the confrontation that twisted with escalating tension to the gory, grinding climax. Me first. He was skilled. Satisfied, we folded together. Jimmy was tender and considerate…We were lusty; we fit. His dimensions were neither disappointing nor thrilling. He was average, perhaps the only thing about him that was.”
They arranged a final meeting in New York after his completion of Rebel Without a Cause. He was planning to rush to Texas for the filming of Giant.
“He bounced up the steps to my apartment. He seemed due for an appointment and told me he had ‘No time now. Gotta run.’ He kissed me lightly on the lips and rushed back down the stairs.”
“So long, star,” she called after him.
That was the last time she ever saw him.
Eartha Kitt
AFTER LESSONS WITH “DANCE EMPRESS” KATHERINE DUNHAM, JIMMY TANGOES WITH “THE MOST EXCITING WOMAN IN THE WORLD”
Orson Welles defined singer Eartha Kitt as “the most exciting woman in the world.” From the cotton fields of South Carolina, she rose to become an international “voice artist, cabaret entertainer, dancer, and political activist. Around the time she developed “a special relationship with James Dean,” she became famous for her recording of “C’est si bon,” released in 1953, which became a worldwide hit.
James Dean Page 47