James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  In 1979, Kitt spent several months in Key West filming The Last Resort, based on Darwin Porter’s radically outrageous novel, Butterflies in Heat, wherein she played a character inspired by a transsexual prostitute. One morning, when she wasn’t needed on the set, she accepted an invitation to cruise aboard a private yacht along the Florida Keys with friends who included the co-author of this biography. During the hours spent at sea, she discussed her friendship with the doomed James Dean, often contradicting what she’d previously told the press.

  “In its way, it was a love affair, filled with detours and complications,” she claimed.

  “Our love for each other just happened. I became his confidante and I taught him about stage presence. We were like soul brother and sister. I’m from the South, so a little incest was thrown into the brew.”

  “Jamie, that’s what I called him, and I had a spiritual contact—rare in any relationship—whereby we could be with each other, just walking along the streets of New York, or in Central Park, without words being spoken between us for hours. But we knew what the other was thinking. Sometimes we could just look at each other and laugh at something we were sharing in our mental conversation.”

  In 1950, before Jimmy met her, Orson Welles had cast Kitt in her first starring role as Helen of Troy in Dr. Faustus. She achieved stardom after her Broadway exposure in New Faces of 1952.

  Two views of Eartha Kitt, Jimmy’s “soulmate.” Lower photo as Catwoman, the feline opponent of Batman.

  During her difficult childhood in South Carolina, because of her café au lait skin, Kitt had been mocked as “Yaller Gal.” She was of mixed blood, her mother being Cherokee and African, her father rumored to be a German.

  She had fled to New York in 1943. Within two years, she was in the Broadway production of Carib Song. By the time Jimmy met her in the early 1950s, she had had six top hits, including “I Want to Be Evil.”

  When she learned that Jimmy wanted to take dance classes, she introduced him to her friend and mentor, Katherine Dunham, hailed at the time as “The Matriarch and Queen Mother of Black Dance.”

  In her memoir, I’m Still Here, published in 1989, Kitt wrote: “There was never any desire for sex between Nat King Cole or James Dean and myself.” She later admitted, “At least half of that statement was true. Both Jimmy and I had a strong sex drive.” In her memoir, she also denied an affair with Welles, even though he claimed that he’d seduced her.

  When queried about these contradictions, Kitt said, “Who says a gal has to tell the truth about her affairs?”

  Kitt issued a warning to Jimmy about Dunham: “She’s the queen of her beehive. She is a tolerant person unless you try to take one of her men away from her. If you do that, watch out. She’s a grand lady. At some of her backers’ auditions, Doris Duke might show up, along with the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts. If you violate one of her rules, she’ll fine you five dollars. Of course, you don’t know what rule you violated, but you still have to pay the fine for some alleged wrong. I think she changes the rules daily.”

  Jimmy found Dunham intimidating. Born in Chicago in 1909, she was the daughter of a father descended from slaves from the Ivory Coast and Madagascar, and a French Canadian/Native American mother, who died when she was three. In Haiti, she had investigated Vodun rituals and later became a “Mabo,” or a sort of high priestess of that (occult) religion.

  In time, as a world-renowned expert on dance anthropology and African “ethnochoreography,” she would teach stage movements to Gregory Peck, José Ferrer, Jennifer Jones, Shelley Winters, Sidney Poitier, Shirley MacLaine and her brother, Warren Beatty, and to the billionaire tobacco heiress, Doris Duke. Marlon Brando had been one of her star pupils. “Sometimes, he didn’t dance, but played the bongo drums for my other dancers,” Denham told Jimmy.

  Dance anthropologist, “ethnochoreographer,” and modern dance visionary, Katherine Dunham barefoot and onstage.

  “I play the bongo drums myself,” Jimmy replied.

  Dunham was rich in experience and even richer in ego. After her Broadway debut in the 1930s, she’d become celebrated. In one revue, she had adorned herself with a birdcage on her head and a cigar in her mouth. One of her most famous roles was in the Broadway production of Cabin in the Sky, directed by George Balanchine and starring Ethel Waters with Dunham in the role of a temptress.

  Jimmy was eager to learn about her connection to Brando.

  “At first, I didn’t think Marlon wanted to learn dance,” Dunham said. “I thought he was drawn to my classes because they were filled with budding Lena Hornes in skimpy outfits that revealed everything. In time, he got around to fucking nearly every gal in my troupe, along with a few of the better hung boys. But mostly, he preferred my red hot mammas.”

  “In no time at all, Marlon learned the cakewalk and bebop dances, each of whose roots are from Africa,” Dunham said. “He told me he didn’t want to be a white boy dancer, but a black dancer, moving to the rhythms of drumbeats.”

  “That’s what I want for myself, too,” Jimmy said.

  “You’re lucky to be working with me,” Dunham told him in the presence of Kitt. “In Chicago, the press calls me the hottest thing to hit town since Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over that bucket that started the Chicago fire.”

  “Marlon had no inhibitions,” she said. “He was not one for false modesty. I teach my dancers they have to show off their bodies—a dancer can’t come onstage clad in an overcoat. I once dressed him in a Tarzan loincloth with instructions not to wear a jockstrap. Jockstraps are not known in African dances. He came out with his buttocks exposed except for a string. When he danced, his loincloth flew up and showed us everything he had.”

  After two weeks of classes, Dunham told Jimmy, “You don’t have enough nigger blood to be a real African dancer. By the way, I can say nigger but you can’t. If you do, I’ll cut off those little white balls of yours.”

  Later, she told Kitt, “Dean’s a nice kid, but definitely not from deepest Africa. He is no Brando. Unlike Marlon, Dean didn’t take a shine to me. He seems afraid to mess with a high-stepping black bitch like me. Frankly, I think I’m too much woman for him. He wouldn’t know how to handle me. It takes a Mandingo for me.”

  ***

  As the days and weeks went by, Jimmy’s friendship with Kitt deepened. “She became my tigress with a growl.”

  He told his newest friend, John Gilmore, that Kitt had mystical powers. “She’s like a witch doctor. She has magic in her soul. She knows the answers to the mysteries of the ages.”

  “Jimmy and I were practically a debating society,” she said. “He’d make some ridiculous statement just to hear me attack it. One time, he told me that he and I were descended from space invaders who arrived on earth thousands of years ago, fleeing from a soon-to-be extinct planet.”

  “You and I are different from most people because we are descended from those invaders,” he told her. “One day, a team of archeologists will find their space capsule somewhere in the Sahara.”

  Sometimes, he’d arrive at her place and spend hours with her, just listening to recorded music. “At times, he was off in space, perhaps in that former planet from which he claimed we’d descended. When I knew he was coming over, I always went to Harlem and bought a lot of barbecued ribs from Louis Armstrong’s favorite joint. Jimmy devoured them. Perhaps he did have some black blood in him after all, in spite of what Dunham claims.”

  Kitt was one of the few women with whom Jimmy felt free enough to discuss his sexuality, admitting to numerous affairs with men.

  She lent a sympathetic ear. “Both of us are from a class of rejected people. Neither of us fits into society. If society really knew us, they’d reject us even more than they already do. We’re oppressed, which leads to depression. Nothing in the world is more painful than rejection, and I’ve known my share of it—and I know you have, too. I’m straight, but I understand the gay impulse in men. Frankly, I think every man is a little bit gay, and that every
woman has a lesbian streak.”

  She convinced him he was in metamorphosis. Ironically, at the time, he was performing a reading of Franz Kafka’s drama Metamorphosis. “I won’t be able to go home again to Indiana because I am no longer the farmboy who left it. That James Dean is dead.”

  “Been there, done that,” she answered. “I’m not the little yaller gal who was raped by the white owner of the plantation where my mama and I worked in South Carolina. And of course, you’re no longer a farmboy. You’re an artist.” She giggled and laughed with that growling purr of hers. “And sometimes you’re the devil himself.”

  Eventually, Jimmy’s liaison with Kitt would be played out against the backdrop of Hollywood.

  ***

  Truman Capote once revealed to Stanley Haggart that he and their mutual friend, Tennessee Williams, had once seen Jimmy emoting on stage in a performance of Calder Willinghams’ End as a Man.

  And Tennessee had directly revealed to Haggart that he had once traveled to Philadelphia with the specific intention of seeing Jimmy in a tryout performance of See the Jaguar.

  Addressing Haggart directly, Capote asked, “Do you think he could be had?”

  Haggart answered, “Probably…Jimmy was a kept boy in Hollywood, sustained and paid for by my friend, Rogers Brackett. He was also a hustler, although he doesn’t seem to be doing that anymore. Rather, he seems to be giving it away these days, and often at my apartment.”

  “Well, I’m going after him,” Capote answered. “And, as you know, whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.”

  “You’ve got one advantage,” Haggart said. “He loves your novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, and he gives out copies of your short stories to people to read. He told Tennessee that you select words with the precision of a brain surgeon.”

  ***

  Two nights later, Capote returned to Haggart’s apartment for a drink and to gossip. “I’ve met with Dean at this dump called Jerry’s Tavern. He doesn’t believe in dressing up. But I worked my magic on him. By the way, do you mind if I use that garden apartment tomorrow night? Right now, I have a lover staying with me, and I don’t want him to think I have a cheating heart.”

  “Not you, Truman, never…” Haggart said. “But of course, you can. The back apartment is yours.”

  “I interpreted Dean as a rather sensitive boy,” Capote said. “Far more than Brando, but not as much as Monty. He’s full of anguish for reasons not known to me. One day he’ll probably be a character in one of my novels. I felt the same way about Dean that I did when I first met Monty. I sensed a blossoming artist in both men. Like Monty, Dean has all his sensibilities, but also all his flaws.”

  During the next month, Capote and Jimmy made use of Haggart’s garden apartment. Since Jimmy had his own key, he came and went without getting involved with Haggart’s frequent guests in the other rooms.

  “They were Back Street Lovers,” Haggart claimed.

  Sometimes, Jimmy would visit without Capote,” Haggart said. “The Little Prince remained his favorite movie, but Truman’s Other Voices, Other Rooms ran a close second.”

  That novel, reviewed at the time as both notorious and shocking, had been published by Random House in 1948. Capote, then the country’s most flagrant enfant terrible, had posed for a notorious portrait—photographed by Harold Halma—on the jacket’s back cover. Halma captured him lying seductively on a sofa, emphasizing his petulant mouth, his baby bangs, his come-hither gaze, and his suggested availability as “bait” for molestation by older admirers.

  The novel was the story of a precocious thirteen-year-old boy, Joel Knox, who is sent to live in a small hamlet in an Alabama backwater. Harper Lee later used Capote as the role model for Dill in her megaseller, To Kill a Mockingbird.

  Months later, Capote carried around reviews of the novel, which he collectively called “the good, the bad, the ugly, and the raves.” A reviewer at Time magazine claimed that the novel “made my flesh crawl.” Library Journal advised librarians not to stock it. The Nation viewed it as “an apology for homosexuality. The Chicago Tribune, however, found it “as dazzling a phenomenon that has burst onto the literary scene in the last few years.”

  Soem critics viewed Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms as a masterpiece. One attacker blasted it as “A fairy version of Huckleberry Finn.”

  Capote told Haggart, Jimmy, and others of his friends that he wrote the novel “to exorcise my demons.”

  When Capote wasn’t around, Jimmy told Haggart that he identified with the character of Joel. “In some ways, it mirrors my own sense of abandonment and my search for my father. I found aspects of myself in Joel, who seems to be going from an uncertain boyhood into a young man with a strong sense of himself and an acceptance of who he is, even his dark side. I think the book is about making peace with your own identity. At times, I want to stand up to the world and shout, ‘Hello, suckers, I’m James Dean. Take me or leave me. I don’t give a fuck.”

  One night over dinner with Haggart and Jimmy, Capote expressed how deeply he hated his mother. To toughen him up, she had enrolled him at St. John’s Military Academy.

  “From Day One, I knew I’d never be a functioning member of the U.S. military,” Capote confided. “But my life among future soldiers had its advantages. I shared a dormitory with twenty other guys. Here is where I learned about dicks, finding out that they come in all shapes and sizes, cut and uncut. Men at the academy were at their sexual peak, and the only relief they had, other than whacking off, was for me to crawl between their sheets at night. I had a gay old time. It wasn’t exactly what mother had in mind.”

  One morning after Capote left for an appointment at Random House, Jimmy, still in his briefs, had one of Haggart’s home-cooked, farm-style breakfasts. “Don’t get the idea that I’m sexually turned on by Capote,” he said. “About five inches of pink meat is not my fantasy. I’m having sex with him because: One, I admire his writing, and Two, he’s working on a novel that could be adapted into a screenplay with a leading role in it for me.”

  “Its main character is a café society hooker, Holly Golightly. She gets involved with this writer—played by me—who lives upstairs and who hasn’t had anything published in five years. He’s a kept boy, supported by this rich older woman.”

  “It sounds like it has possibilities,” Haggart said.

  “And do I ever know how to play a kept boy, thanks to your friend, Rogers,” Jimmy said. “When I’m fucking Capote, I have to ask him to shut his trap. That babylike voice of his is such a turnoff. It sounds artificial to me, like some fourth grader whose voice never changed. It reminds me of a little boy trapped in a man’s body.”

  “Don’t be deceived by Truman’s physicality,” Haggart said. “He’s stronger than he looks. When filming Beat the Devil, in Italy with Humphrey Bogart, he beat Bogie fair and square in an arm wrestling contest, and then, according to the terms of their agreement, Bogie had to submit to a blow-job because he’d lost. As for that ‘unfinished novel,’ don’t assume that he’s actually writing it. He often lies about such things.”

  “But he’s told me events associated with every page of the novel,” Jimmy said. “What I mean is, it’s already written, at least in the fucker’s head. But he doesn’t have a title for it yet.”

  “That probably won’t be a problem for him,” Haggart said. “Tennessee and Truman are masters at churning out bizarre titles.”

  ***

  One night at a raucous and irreverent party in Key West, a drunken Capote showed up at the home of the designer, Danny Stirrup. “I’ve sucked off bigtime movie stars,” he said later in the evening. “Errol Flynn, John Garfield…and did I name Rory Calhoun? I’ve also screwed around with Denham Fouts, the most famous male whore in the world, the favorite of the King of Greece. But despite all that, my greatest thrill (there was meat there for the poor) came from an air-conditioner repairman I met in Palm Springs.”

  “And ironically, my two major sexual disappointments were Gore Vida
l and James Dean.”

  “It’s too bad I don’t like to go to bed with women,” Capote replied. “I could have had any woman on the planet. Dietrich. Garbo. But I can’t understand why anyone would want to go to bed with a woman. Boring. Just like Dean and Vidal.”

  Haggart, who was at the party, later said that he knew why Capote had turned on Jimmy. “Our friend just got tired of all the promises Capote kept making. He began to fear he wasn’t going to carry through on a single one of them and was just stringing him along. He rejected further sexual advances from Truman. Jimmy had been handsome, charming, a great lover to Truman. Almost overnight, he went from that to the dullest lay of all time.”

  Capote had one final encounter with Jimmy at a party in Hollywood. He had just seen a screening of East of Eden when he approached Jimmy, who seemingly had been trying to avoid him. “I saw your picture, my dear,” he said with a sneer of contempt, as if he’d just swallowed a bad oyster. “I fear you’ve been cast into the Brando mold. Of course, with just one picture under your belt, it’s a little too early to rush to judgment. We’ll have to see what you do in the future. You have a small but limited appeal that emerges now and then from all that Brando overlay. Don’t you ever worry that he might sue you for impersonation? It’s wrong to steal another actor’s voice, his mannerisms, and his style. Perhaps in your next picture, you’ll try to act like James Dean and not like Brando.”

  Truman Capote...Ostentatiously vicious (including during his interchanges with Jimmy) and, in the end, tragic.

  Jimmy glared at him. “Fuck off, faggot!” he said before moving quickly to the other side of the room, where he was surrounded by admirers.

  Capote never forgave Jimmy for his blunt sexual rejection of him. Even after Jimmy’s death, he continued with his critiques. After seeing the knife fight in Rebel Without a Cause, he told The New Yorker, “Jimmy is the symbol of hot-headed youth, with a switchblade approach to life’s little problems.”