James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  Years later, he even uttered a critique of Jimmy’s short run in The Immoralist. “I knew Dean only because he knew Tennessee, and he was always hanging out with him and other friends of mine. So I inevitably kept running into him. He was hoping that Tennessee would write a powerful role for him, like he did for Brando. Alas, that would never happen. He certainly wasn’t any good in the Gide play. To put it mildly, I never thought much of him as an actor. I don’t think he had star quality.”

  Tennessee later commented on the Jimmy vs. Capote feud: “Jimmy once said to me, ‘I want to ask you something. You, of all people, might know. Just who in hell invented Truman Capote?’”

  Jimmy Discovers Arlene Sachs

  “THE ONLY VIRGIN LEFT IN MANHATTAN”

  Into Jimmy’s life marched Arlene Sachs, a woman of some mystery who billed herself under different names depending on the era and venue she was publicizing. Her monikers included Tasha Martel, Arlene Martel, Arline Greta Sax, Arline Sax, and Arlene Sax.

  An attractive Jewish girl from the Bronx, she would in time have affairs with everyone from Jimmy to Cary Grant.

  At the age of seventeen, she was enrolled in Manhattan’s High School of the performing arts, dreaming of stardom as an actress.

  She’d seen Jimmy in the Kraft Television Theater’s presentation of A Long Time Till Dawn, and was captivated by his image.

  Somehow, she managed to get his phone number and used it to call him one evening. She explained that although she was a teenager, “I have a woman’s desires.” She also told him, “I’m very beautiful, and I want to be your girlfriend.”

  Arlene Sachs...betrayed by Jimmy’s cheating heart.

  Intrigued by her audacity, he agreed to meet her the following day for coffee at the rooftop café of the Museum of Modern Art.

  That very night, if reports are to be believed, he took her virginity at his studio. He admitted later that he didn’t believe she was a virgin—“They don’t exist in Manhattan”—until he saw blood on his sheets.

  “I found the sex painful, and not at all enjoyable, so I wondered why people were so obsessed with it,” she said. “But Jimmy was patient with me. I remembered he gave me my first orgasm, and then I began to feel what sex was all about. He broke me in. I started to enjoy it. He was very patient and considerate as a lover.”

  “Dining out for us often meant saving up for movie tickets and a bag of popcorn to share,” she said. “Perhaps a hot dog to divide, if we were loaded. We sat in the balcony of Times Square theaters where, if the seat in front was empty, Jimmy would throw his legs across the back of it.”

  “I remember one night, he fell asleep watching Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in His Kind of Woman. I had a hard time waking him up at the end of the picture. Then it was off to Jerry’s.”

  “Once I got over the initial penetration, and on subsequent nights, Jimmy glided in smoothly,” she wrote in an unpublished memoir. “I began to look forward to our rolls in the hay. I’m an Aries born in April, and he is an Aquarius born in February, so, as sexual partners, we were most compatible.”

  She later claimed that their subsequent dates were “boy-girl stuff,” including strolls through Central Park, followed by long nights at his studio, where he played the bongo drums for her. “Or else, he put on classical music or read passages from The Little Prince to me, neither one of which I adored.”

  “I wanted him for myself, but that was not to be,” she said. “One night I saw him at Jerry’s talking to this very pretty girl,” she said. “I followed him to his apartment. I stayed there looking up at his window. The lights went out after midnight. She had not left when I went home at three in the morning. I had to get up at seven to go to work. Not only that, but I heard from this guy I met on a casting call that Jimmy was also known for seducing other actors. So I learned painfully that he would never belong to me exclusively. Often, he would call me at three o’clock in the morning, since he suffered from insomnia and needed someone to pour out his feelings to. I was it. He’d talk for three or four hours.”

  Sachs had found a job as a hatcheck girl at Birdland, a venue for be-bop and jazz. She’d saved enough to rent an apartment for $35 a month.

  One night, she invited Jimmy over for a home-cooked dinner. He asked if he could bring a friend, and she reluctantly said yes.

  “He arrived with Barbara Glenn, who also wanted to be an actress,” Sachs said. “He told me he was working with her on a scene for an audition.”

  “I left them to rehearse their scene when I went out to shop for diner,” Sachs said. “When I got back with my pork chops and salad greens, I could almost smell the sex in the room. I knew he’d used our bed to fuck this girl. I stumbled into the kitchen with the groceries. My heart was broken. I wanted to vomit in the sink. Somehow, I managed to pull together a dinner, but I viewed his bringing Glenn here as an act of cruelty. I knew I could never trust him.”

  “In looking back, I believed he brought Glenn over to signal to me that our affair was over,” Sachs said. “This was his way of telling me that he had moved on. Believe it or not, our friendship survived our affair. We became friends, not lovers.”

  He learned that she’d soon found another boyfriend, an actor named Don Miele, who was in his thirties. He was considered very temperamental and known as a rebel like Jimmy.

  “One night, when I was entertaining Don, Jimmy phoned and wanted to come over,” Sachs said. “I was afraid both men would get into a fight and said no. As it happened, Jimmy came by anyway.”:

  Like Jimmy, Miele was a member of the Actors Studio, and also like Jimmy, he rebelled. In Miele’s case, the focus of his rage was Elia Kazan, who, from his niche at the Actors Studio, had delivered a verbal assault on Miele’s acting.

  To Sachs’ surprise, the two actors bonded. Miele said that after Kazan had viciously attacked his acting, “I told him, ‘You’re nothing but a bunch of whores.’”

  Kazan had responded, “You’re a genius. Stick around.”

  To that, Miele had replied, “I may be a genius, but you’re a second rate director.” Then he had stormed out.

  As the evening in Sachs’ apartment progressed, and a third bottle of wine was consumed, Miele turned to Jimmy and said, “I hear you’re a hot shot on Broadway, but that you had to give head to get there.”

  Sachs was amazed that Jimmy did not take offense. “If anything, they sat there on the sofa, laughing and talking like two lovers. I was afraid that Jimmy was going to steal my boyfriend.”

  The following night, Jimmy called to thank her and asked her for Miele’s phone number. She pretended that she’d lost it.

  “Are you really a homosexual?” she asked him.

  “I’m a man,” he answered, “but if the gay guys don’t let up on me soon, I will begin to doubt that very seriously. They won’t leave me alone. They bring me gifts. They offer me roles on television and in the theater.”

  One night, shortly after Sach’s 18th birthday, she called Jimmy over for a party. She had invited about a dozen wannabe actors in for liquor, which they’d brought themselves. It was a mixed crowd of men and women. “I told Jimmy we were having an orgy, and I wanted to know if he would like to come over.”

  “I’ll come over,” he said, emphasizing the word “come.”

  She decided to play a gag on him, and her guests agreed. The girls took off their tops, the men pulled off their shirts, and some of them stripped down to their underwear before they collectively crawled beneath a pair of blankets.

  The room was lit by candlelight, and Sachs left her door slightly ajar. Within twenty minutes, Jimmy entered and witnessed what he thought was an orgy in process.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Sachs said later. “Jimmy unzipped his jeans, took out his penis, and started to masturbate. I jumped up and turned on the lights and told Jimmy that it was all a joke. He didn’t look the least bit surprised. Even with the lights on, he continued to jerk off and exploded onto the blanket, hitting one or two girls
in the face. They screamed. I guess he had the last laugh that night.”

  Sometimes, even when they were dating, Jimmy could call this mysterious actor and make a date with him. One night he let her listen in. She heard a familiar voice tell Jimmy, “I want to cock you.” He was basically begging Jimmy to come over.

  “Who in hell was that?” Sachs asked after Jimmy put down the phone.

  “That was Van Johnson, ‘America’s Sweetheart,’ the idol of thousands of teenage girls.”

  [When he went to Hollywood, Jimmy would get far better acquainted with Johnson through their mutual friend, actor Kennan Wynn.]

  ***

  In time, Sachs would become a member of the Actors Studio. There, she developed “intense relationships” with Sidney Lumet and Anthony Quinn.

  She later claimed, “Tony was my first taste of a Mexican dick. He once was quoted as saying, ‘A man’s masculinity is never in his penis.’ I would disagree with that, and so would Tony’s many girlfriends: Ingrid Bergman, Rita Hayworth, Carole Lombard, Maureen O’Hara, Mae West, Shelley Winters, and even George Cukor.”

  “I went to bed with Tony only three times, and then it was over,” Sachs said. “He told me that he had to move on because he wanted to impregnate every woman in the world.”

  Sachs never became a star, but she got a lot of work, appearing on Perry Mason dramas and even in an episode of Star Trek. She also played the evil witch on Bewitched and interpreted key roles in both Hogan’s Heroes and I Dream of Jeannie.

  At a Star Trek convention, she made an indiscreet comment, telling a fan, “I’ve known many men and three husbands. There’s no argument that my two most famous lovers were James Dean and Cary Grant, two deeply troubled men. I shouldn’t be saying this, but I had the feeling that, even though in bed with me, both of them would rather be getting screwed by some man.”

  During her courtship with Jimmy, Sachs escorted him to the studio of her friend, Ray Schatt, a photographer, with the suggestion that the budding actor might be a hot prospect for him to photograph.

  Although Schatt specialized in photos of newsworthy personalities in the performing arts, at first, he was not impressed with Jimmy. Sachs told Schatt that Jimmy was appearing on Broadway in The Immoralist and that he “does this fantastic dance with scissors, which you really should shoot.”

  Schatt recalled, “I was baffled by this boy. He looked like some young man on the lam that she’d picked up wandering homeless in the Bowery. However, he suddenly sprang to life and did this incredible dance for us. It was an amazing feat. He had a radiance about him, a kind of glow. I’m not making this up. How can I put it? Jimmy danced into my heart that afternoon.”

  “He was a squinty little schlump of a person,” Schatt later recalled. “I thought he was sort of ugly until he performed that dance around the room. He transitioned himself from a bum into an Adonis.”

  Beginning that afternoon, Jimmy and Schatt became close friends. Schatt eventually taught him some of the hands-on aspects of photography.

  After Dennis Stock, Schatt became the second most-famous photographer to turn his camera on Jimmy, eventually churning out many iconic shots of the actor.

  Even before his introduction to Jimmy, Schatt was a well-known photographer of theatrical personalities. His previous subjects had included Tennessee Williams, Geraldine Page, Rod Steiger, Patricia Neal, Elia Kazan, director Arthur Penn, Ben Gazzara, Paul Newman, Billie Holiday, Steve McQueen, and Marilyn Monroe.

  But his photographs of Jimmy became his crowning achievement. Schatt was eventually designated as the official photographer of the Actors Studio.

  He began snapping photos of Jimmy in February of 1954. Right from the beginning, he suspected that Jimmy was an exhibitionist. He would later find out just how much of an exhibitionist he was. “He told me that he worked out at a gym three or four times a week.”

  “I’m quite an attraction when I head for the showers,” Jimmy said. “I figured the boys want a show, so I produce an erection. After all, they couldn’t gauge the size of my dick if I kept it soft.”

  “Jimmy was a Method actor, and I soon recognized that theatrical instinct in him when I began to photograph him. I would direct and provoke scenes that became inspirational. But I knew my pictures must still be honest and interesting beyond the performance he was giving.”

  After their first meeting, Jimmy asked Schatt if he would follow him around and document his activities. “He also wanted to photograph me,” Schatt confessed, “so I became his teacher.”

  “I immediately found out that his concentration was not to be counted on, which meant that our classes were somewhat unpredictable and by necessity changeable in form. However, when he was interested in participating, his energy was powerful. He had that greatest of intellectual qualities—curiosity about everything.”

  “Jimmy was always ‘on,’” Schatt claimed. “I dubbed him Mr. Theater.”

  Soon, Jimmy was seen coming and going frequently from Schatt’s studio.

  “James Dean Is an Exhibitionist”

  CLAIMED RAY SCHATT, HIS “TORN SWEATER” PHOTOGRAPHER

  Schatt’s “Torn Sweater” photographic session with Jimmy remains one of the most celebrated and best set of photos of him ever snapped.

  On December 29, 1954, Jimmy showed up at Schatt’s studio wearing a yellow turtleneck sweater. He asked the photographer if he reminded him of Michelangelo’s statue of David in Florence.

  “A first, I thought that meant he wanted me to photograph him buck-ass naked,” Schatt said. “But that wasn’t the case. I shot him in this turtleneck. Only after I developed the pictures did I realize there was a tear in one of the sweater’s shoulders. I hadn’t spotted it before.”

  Life magazine rejected the pictures. In their editorial office, Frank D. Campion wanted “Shots that are more manly, not some actor impersonating Audrey Hepburn.”

  Despite the delay in their release, Schatt’s “Torn Sweater” photos became among the most popular of all photographs of James Dean. In 1982, Delilah Books published James Dean: A Portrait, which included them. “He was still in that searching and scratching period of his life,” Schatt said.

  His photographs had great influence on how the world came to view James Dean.

  “I came to love Jimmy as a friend,” Schatt said. “But he was a crazy mother-fucker. Once, he took a chair from my studio and carried it downstairs. When I looked out my studio window, the lunatic was sitting on it, right in the middle of the avenue, almost daring cars to dodge him. That is, until he saw a cop coming, and then he hurried inside, leaving my chair.”

  “I wanted to spark up dull old New York today,” Jimmy said. “Don’t you sometimes get bored out of your mind and yearn for some action? I thought I might bring some life to the street, sitting out there casually smoking a cigarette, letting the cars brake to avoid killing me. I know I might have caused a death, maybe my own.”

  According to Schatt, “He also carried around a revolver, which he said had been a gift from Lynn Bari, a B-actress who was often cast as a gun moll in a lot of 1940s movies.”

  Jimmy told Schatt that he’d met Bari when he played a bit part in Hollywood on the film, Has Anybody Seen My Gal? He said he had only one bullet in the gun, which he planned to use to commit suicide should life prove too difficult for him.

  “I don’t think Jimmy was ever himself,” Schatt said. “He was always impersonating someone. “One day, I had a party at my studio and invited such guests as his friend, Bill Gunn. At one point, after a few glasses of wine, Jimmy took out his two front teeth and passed them around. ‘Wanna buy thum gold, man?’ he asked my guests. ‘I teed thum thoup.’ [translation: “Do you want to buy some gold? I need some soup.”] Then he launched into a bongo drum concert so loud no one could hear themselves talk. His desire to be noticed was almost pathological.”

  “He wanted to go just to restaurants patronized by people in the theater who were more likely to recognize him,” Schatt claimed,
“If nobody recognized him, he got pissed off.”

  “I know this sounds like a contradiction, but Jimmy was a loner who sought attention,” Schatt said. “We used to eat at Louie’s, this joint in the Village. But the lights were dim, and nobody recognized Jimmy, so he stopped going there.”

  “Even when we went to places where other actors gathered, he told me he still felt uncomfortable, because he was working and they were not,” Schatt said.

  “Jimmy wasn’t afraid to strip down,” Schatt said. “One day, I opened my door. He was standing there stark naked. Later, I heard that when he was making East of Eden, he came out of his dressing room without a stitch on and paraded around in front of cast and crew. The only other actor I’d heard who did that was Errol Flynn.”

  “There were also rumors that Jimmy would stand nude in the open doorway of his apartment while he was being sodomized,” Schatt also revealed. “But that sounds just too far-fetched.”

  “Jimmy would do the damndest things,” Schatt said. “One day he pulled off all his clothes in my studio and paraded out the door onto the sidewalk. I looked down from my window, and there he was, standing naked right on the sidewalk as cars slowed down to take a look and passers-by stopped to stare. He wasn’t totally nude. He had on this porkpie hat that he wore for several weeks. I rushed down to the street with a blanket and wrapped it around him and brought him back upstairs. The next day, he walked the streets in a fruity Carmen Miranda headdress he’d picked up from somewhere.”

  “One day, Jimmy stripped down and wanted me to take some pictures,” Schatt said. “He stretched out like one of those paintings that hung over the bar in a Gary Cooper Western movie—you know, of some nude woman. In this case, Jimmy placed his hand over his crotch and was giggling like a virgin as he pursed his lips and fluttered his eyes.”