James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  Although tantalized by the money and fame of becoming a movie star, Newman cringed when he heard what was in store for him. “We at Warners think you can be groomed as a follow-up to Marlon Brando.”

  Later, that was changed to “the second James Dean.”

  ***

  During his casting of On the Waterfront (1954), Elia Kazan had considered both Newman and Joanne Woodward as the leading players.

  Now, a year later, although he remained secretive about the casting of East of Eden, he once again considered that pairing. But seemingly every other day, he thought Jimmy and Julie Harris would bring more sensitivity to the roles.

  Kazan was also considering Richard Davalos, a New York actor of Greek-American ancestry, for the lesser role of the brother Aron, with the understanding that either Jimmy or Newman would interpret the more prominent role of Cal Trask.

  In a bizarre move, Kazan decided to bring both Jimmy and Newman together for a joint screen test. He wanted to analyze whatever chemistry existed between the two actors if he cast them as brothers.

  When Newman received instructions to haul himself off to a sound stage in Brooklyn for his screen test, he thought that once again Monty Clift was looking after him, letting him have a chance at the bigger star’s “rejects.”

  Eager for the role of Cal, Newman was alarmed when he encountered Jimmy in the studio testing for the same picture. Newman was even more alarmed when he learned that his screen test would be configured jointly and in tandem with Jimmy’s.

  For the occasion Newman appeared neatly dressed in a white shirt with a spotted bowtie. To give himself more of a rogue-like appearance, he placed a cigarette behind his left ear.

  Wearing a casual blue sports shirt, Jimmy appeared more relaxed, with his glasses tucked into his shirt pocket.

  Kazan didn’t show up for the test, but delegated it to a young, inexperienced director. Part of its original sound track and film clips from that test remain today.

  In the background you can hear the off-camera director calling to the actors, “Hey, you two queens, look this way!”

  “I don’t want to look at him,” Newman says. “He’s a sourpuss.”

  “I don’t like him either,” Jimmy answers.

  The director then calls for the men to look directly into the camera. They each follow his instructions. Then the director calls out for them to look at each other. At this point, staring at each other face to face, they each break into laughter.

  Jimmy moved toward Newman and said, “Kiss me!”

  “Not here,” Newman shot back. Impulsively, he pinched Jimmy’s ass instead.

  Then as the camera rolled, the director called out to Newman. “Do you think Jimmy will appeal to bobbysoxers?”

  Newman appraised Jimmy from head to toe. “I don’t know. Is he going to be a sex symbol? I don’t usually go out with boys. With his looks, sure, I think they’ll flip for him.”

  Rivals by day, lovers by night, Paul Newman and James Dean test for roles in East of Eden. In the lower photo, James Dean appears on the left.

  The test had been completely unscripted. Writing about it years later, Jimmy’s biographer, David Dalton said:

  “What determined the winner was the face: Both Jimmy and Newman were nascent icons, with features that were to become as easily recognizable as Christ, Mao, or Mickey Mouse. But in this test, Jimmy’s entire countenance rippled with expression while the signals in Newman’s eyes and mouth were almost vaudevillian numbers restricted to isolated parts of his face. Newman’s expressions were typecast into smile, frown, and cool stare, but Jimmy’s face resisted and relaxed in alternating currents.”

  After it was over, Jimmy seemed to realize that the role of Cal was his. “Maybe we’ll be cast as brothers,” he told Newman. “It’s a lesser part, but Aron is a strong role.”

  As Jimmy and Newman headed back to Manhattan from Brooklyn that day, Jimmy turned to him and smiled. “The day is not completely lost. Let’s go to this brownstone where I’m living on West 68th Street. You can fuck me for the rest of the day. That’s gotta mean something.”

  En route to his brownstone, Jimmy told Newman, “I ran into Marlon the other day. He asked about you. I told him that on some days I’m in love with him. On other days I’m in love with you. But I claimed you and I never made it. Marlon told me that he’d never made it with you either. Both of us knew we were lying.”

  Two days later Kazan called Newman with the bad news. “I’ve decided to go with Jimmy for the part of Cal. He came out better in the screen test.”

  “But what, then, about me playing Aron?” Newman asked, barely concealing his disappointment.

  “I’ve given the part to Richard Davalos,” Kazan said. “He’s ten years younger than you.”

  “Are you saying I’m too old for Aron?” Newman asked. “Then give me Adam, the father’s role. But, I’m warning you, you’ll have to age me. I’m not that old.”

  “You’re out of luck there too,” Kazan said. “I gave that part to Raymond Massey.”

  “Okay,” Newman said sarcastically, “then I’ll play Aron’s girlfriend in drag.”

  “Julie Harris has the part,” Kazan said. “Your girlfriend, Woodward, would have been terrific in it, but Harris will be great. By the way, I saw her yesterday at the Actors Studio. She said she adores you.”

  “She’s not my type,” Newman said, putting down the phone.

  ***

  Newman was up for another movie role in 1954 during the casting of Battle Cry, based on the Leon Uris novel about marines bonding in an esprit de corps during World War II. A key role was still available—that of a young soldier named Danny Forrester.

  Bill Orr, the son-in-law of Jack Warner, conducted a joint screen test with both Newman and Joanne Woodward.

  “They arrived with a preconceived idea of what they wanted to do in the scene,” Orr said. “First they rolled around on a mattress and on the floor, and then they jumped up and engaged in a boxing match. Then they rolled around on a blanket. It had to be the worst screen test in the history of motion pictures. I suggested to Jack that he give the role of Danny to James Dean. Dean could pull this one off. Newman came off as a jerk.”

  On hearing this, Newman said, “Losing out to Jimmy I understand. But the world must never know that I lost the role to Tab Hunter. How could I ever live that down at the Actors Studio? Another God damn humiliation from Hollywood. Too fucking bad. My baby blues in CinemaScope would have lit up the screen.”

  Based on her screen test, Woodward also lost the role of the love-hungry Navy wife, the part going to Dorothy Malone.

  After the bitter disappointment of losing out on three consecutive movie roles, Newman decided “to become another hired hand at Warner Brothers.” He signed a contract, even though Geraldine Page warned him, “Hollywood will destroy you.”

  In advance of his departure, during goodbyes to Eartha Kitt, Newman told her, “Something tells me I’ve got to be free as a bird in Hollywood. It’s not that I’m completely ducking my responsibilities. I told Jackie I’ll send her a generous portion of my earnings. After all, I’m going to be making one thousand big ones a week.”

  During his farewells to Rod Steiger, Newman told him, “I’m not sure I’m the type of guy who wants to come home to face an angry wife every night, especially one who wants to know what I was doing the night before. I like to come home when roosters are crowing. Do you know how many propositions I get in the course of one day, mostly from women, but a ton from men too? Some of them I can’t resist. Maybe I’m more like Marlon Brando than I thought. He told me he believes in sharing ‘my noble tool’ with the world.”

  Steiger later speculated that it was far more difficult for Newman to say goodbye to Joanne than it was to Jackie. “I don’t know what really happened on their final night together,” Steiger said. “But I bet the sheets caught on fire.”

  “On the way to Hollywood, I had anxieties about my age,” Newman later told Geraldine Page
. “Hell, Marlon made The Men (1950) before he was twenty-five, and Jimmy Dean, who’s in his early 20s, is on the dawn of a huge film career. I’m pushing thirty. I know how youth-obsessed America is, and here I am, ‘Daddy Newman,’ trying to become the next hot stud.”

  “Brando inspires me,” Newman said to Page. “Also Jimmy, to an extent. I want to be as wild as those rebels, Hollywood’s new bad boy. For the first time, I want to shake Shaker Heights out of my bloodstream. A man like me would be a sucker not to live to the fullest, wife or no wife. Jackie insisted on marriage. She pushed me into it before I was ready.”

  ***

  Arriving in Hollywood for the first time, Newman checked into a seedy hotel near the Warners lot. “It was filled with hustlers, hookers, and drug dealers,” he later recalled. “I didn’t get much sleep. There were knocks on my door all night with offers.”

  Newman with Angeli in The Silver Chalice...shining offscreen as well.

  On his first day at the studio, he was told he had to take a screen test before winning the role of a slave, Basil, in The Silver Chalice, a toga epic that Warners hoped would make as much money as did Quo Vadis? with Robert Taylor or The Robe with Richard Burton.

  His test with Virginia Mayo, a former Samuel Goldwyn leading lady, and the star of the picture, was a disaster. Although Newman photographed beautifully, his acting was wooden.

  When his screen test was shown to cigar-chomping executives at Warners, he was ordered to report to the studio’s Hairdressing Department. “Mr. Kenneth,” in charge of operations, already had his instructions in the form of a memo. “Make his hair blonder—not exactly Marilyn Monroe, but a cross between Alan Ladd and Tab Hunter.”

  [Kenneth Battelle (1927-2013) remained a leading celebrity hairdresser until his death. Tending to the public images, through their coiffures, of Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Brooke Astor, and Happy Rockefeller, he garnered high profile fame for creating Jacqueline Kennedy's bouffant in 1961.]

  Mr. Kenneth was a gossip, and he informed Newman, who was embarrassed when he heard it, that Jimmy had been Warner Brothers’ first choice to play the young Greek sculptor, Basil. “Jimmy said he told Jack Warner that The Silver Chalice was a piece of shit and turned it down. That was certainly a wise choice. He’s supposed to be terrific in East of Eden.”

  Studio chieftains asked Virginia Mayo to work seven days a week with Newman to prepare him for another attempt at a screen test.

  “Paul was off on that rocky road to becoming a movie star,” Mayo said, “and I warned him about some of the pitfalls. Frankly, I misjudged him. I thought he’d end up on that long list of pretty boys who emerged in the 50s never to be heard of again. Working with him during his first picture gave me no clue that he’d become such a big star—and a legendary one at that.”

  “This is religioso shit,” Newman wrote to Woodward back in New York. “I was horrified, traumatized appearing before the camera in a cocktail dress to show off my skinny legs.”

  This dull, confused, and muddled film was shot against cheesy sets with the actors clad in bargain-basement wardrobes. Its plot, as conceived by Thomas B. Costain, had first been the framework of a bestselling novel. But Newman felt that Lester Samuels, writing the screenplay, had been inept.

  Newman as an early Christian studmuffin, mauled by virtually every female in “this dud turkey of a script,” The Silver Chalice. Above, his inamorata is the otherwise engaging Virginia Mayo.

  [“How can I recite such laughable dialogue?” he asked Virginia. He quoted a typical line to her: “Helena, is it really you? What a Joy!”]

  Mayo was outfitted with vampiric eyebrows as Helena, Newman’s inamorata.

  Pier Angeli, as Deborra, was his other love interest. Also dyed blonde, Natalie Wood, with whom Newman would become involved in the future, played Helena as a child.

  Nothing Newman did seemed to please Victor Saville. The director later said that, “Newman was just one of those troublemakers, anarchists, and eccentrics being shipped over like cattle from New York.”

  “Saville was a difficult bastard to put up with,” Newman said.

  “I introduced Newman to his co-star, Pier Angeli, at ten o’clock one morning on the Warners lot,” Saville said. “By three o’clock that afternoon, I think he was hopelessly in love. As for Pier, I think she was still in love with Kirk Douglas, or perhaps Marlon Brando.”

  Frail, tiny, and undeniably lovely, this Italian actress—called “The Little Garbo”—had appeared in a pair of films in her native Italy before gaining prominence as a war bride in Teresa in 1951. The tabloids created a ballyhoo of a big romance between Pier and Kirk Douglas during their time together in 1952 shooting The Story of Three Loves with an all-star cast.

  Unlike the hardened, career-driven “bitches” he’d met on Broadway and at the Actors Studio, Newman was enchanted by Pier’s infectious laugh. He called her “virginal” and referred to her “refreshing innocence.”

  Actually she was anything but virginal. The Italian director, Vittorio De Sica, had introduced Pier—then known as Anna Maria Pierangeli—to Brando, hoping to cast them as a duo in his upcoming movie. Pier had confided to Mayo that she’d fallen in love with Brando, and that he’d “deflowered” her on a grassy knoll near Rome’s Colosseum. “Then he went back to America and dumped me,” Pier said.

  Cast as Deborra, the Christian girl Newman marries in The Silver Chalice, Pier “looked radiant in Madonna blue with a gold circlet in her hair,” in the words of her biographer Jane Allen. Forgetting about his wife or even Joanne, Newman fell hard for Pier, at least according to Mayo.

  Although the singer, Vic Damone, was still a presence in Pier’s life, she began to date Newman secretly. She even invited him to her family’s home for an Italian Sunday dinner.

  Newman at first enchanted Pier’s ferociously protective mother, Enrica Pierangeli. But the day turned sour when Enrica learned that Newman “is not a Catholic. Not only that, but he has the Jew’s blood in his veins.” That night Enrica forbade her daughter ever to see him again, except on the set of The Silver Chalice.

  After that, Newman was never seen in public with Pier outside the movie lot. Mayo noted that Pier spent long hours in Newman’s dressing room, and “I could only assume they were having sex. Brando had already ‘broken in’ this angelic-looking little creature.”

  “I don’t think there was any great love affair going on between them,” Mayo claimed. “I know that seems to contradict what I said earlier about Newman falling hopelessly in love with Pier. Perhaps he did, but I think that the spell she cast over him lasted for only a few days. Newman was a very sensible young man, and he soon returned to reality.”

  “For the rest of the shoot, their romance was relatively harmless in spite of the sex,” Mayo said. “She always seemed to have the giggles around him, and he was always playing tricks on her. Of course, there was the inevitable touching. They couldn’t seem to keep their hands off each other. But I think even these two little lovesick puppies knew that theirs was an affair only of the moment. Nothing serious would come of it.”

  To further complicate matters, Jimmy, who was shooting East of Eden on a neighboring set on the Warners lot, strolled over to see Newman work. He introduced Jimmy to Pier. “We met the other day,” Jimmy said.

  “A romantic Romeo and Juliet legend was born that day between James Dean and Pier Angeli,” Mayo said. “From what I observed, Pier and Jimmy were smitten with each other for a few weeks. The press and all those Dean biographers made far too much of this romance. If James Dean was in love with anybody on the set of The Silver Chalice, it was with Paul Newman.”

  ***

  If Newman ever resented Jimmy taking Pier from him, he apparently never revealed this to anyone. “What could he say anyway?” Mayo asked. “He was a married man with two kids back in the East somewhere.”

  Actually, during the shooting of East of Eden, Jimmy saw a lot more of Newman than he did of Pier. Whereas Enrica found Newman obj
ectionable, she came to loathe Jimmy, who was rude and even downright hostile to her. “My daughter forced that horrible young man upon us until I put my foot down and ordered him out of our house forever,” Enrica said. “But he was head over heels in love with my Anna Maria, although I began to hear stories about a wild homosexual streak in him.”

  Many biographers have suggested that the romance between Jimmy and Pier was platonic. Elia Kazan, the director of East of Eden, disagreed. “My bungalow was next to theirs. I could actually hear them making love through the thin walls. Jimmy was very vocal. Not a sound could be heard from Pier. The sex would usually end in a big argument. After one of these blow-ups, Jimmy always got drunk. I don’t know how I ever finished the picture with him.”

  For his dates with Newman, Jimmy preferred some hamburger joint near a beach. He might be photographed in a tuxedo with Pier, but when he was with Newman he wore casual tight-fitting jeans, a T-shirt, and a black leather jacket, evocative of Brando’s appearance in The Wild One.

  A Sunday afternoon in Hollywood might find Newman and Jimmy riding horses in Griffin Park. At one point, Jimmy purchased matching gold friendship rings, and offered one to Newman. According to Rogers Brackett, Newman wore the ring for only a few days, before putting it away somewhere.

  “When Hollywood wasn’t gossiping about Pier and Jimmy, they were even more secretively gossiping about the strange friendship between Jimmy and Newman,” Elia Kazan said. “I’m sure word got back to Joanne in New York. Even more devastating, I was told that word had also gotten back to Newman’s wife, Jackie, and that she’d threatened to leave him and take his children if he didn’t end his friendship with Jimmy.”

  “Newman refused to end the friendship, and the marriage puttered on,” Kazan said. “But the bells were tolling, signaling the end of that marriage. Even so, it took a long time to die. I think the marriage ended long before the divorce finally came.”