James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  While he was making The Silver Chalice, Newman received a letter from Jackie. She told him that she was leaving the New York area and taking his son and daughter back to Wisconsin to live with her parents. His reaction to that move has never been revealed. “He had James Dean,” Kazan said. “What did he need with a wife and kids? Newman was enjoying every moment of his bachelorhood, and wilder days were on the way when he moved over to the Château Marmont.”

  Sometimes Pier would defy her mother and ask Jimmy to take her to his favorite restaurant, the Villa Capri, a Los Angeles rendezvous for celebrities such as Frank Sinatra. Photographers and autograph seekers staked the place out.

  When Newman wasn’t needed on the set of The Silver Chalice, he strolled over to visit Jimmy on the East of Eden set. Increasingly, Jimmy was feuding with both Kazan and the co-star of the picture, the aging character actor Raymond Massey, who played his father.

  Newman feared that Jimmy was becoming more and more anti-social. One afternoon when Kazan was showing some VIPs from New York around the set, Jimmy pulled out his penis and relieved his bladder right on the floor in front of an audience. “He didn’t even bother to turn his back on us,” Newman later said.

  After urinating, Jimmy stormed off to his dressing room. When the VIPs had departed in shock from the set, Kazan walked over to Newman and put his arm around him.

  “I made a big mistake in not casting you for the lead in this picture,” Kazan said. “As a result, you’re filming that shit next door. I don’t know if I’m going to survive this film with Jimmy. And I thought Brando was difficult to work with. Jimmy is highly neurotic. Is psychotic the word? Yesterday it got so bad I kicked his ass. He won’t speak his lines clearly. He questions my direction. He may not even be an actor at all. I turn the camera on him and what I get is this obviously sick young man coming apart right on film. He is so stupid, so very stupid. His face is that of a poet, so very beautiful. It registers his pain and desolation. Maybe the Academy will take that for great acting and award him an Oscar.”

  ***

  If there were any jealousy over the mutual involvement with Pier Angeli, it didn’t manifest itself. In the weeks that followed Jimmy’s breakup with Pier, the two men grew even closer, the most intimate they would ever become during the short history of their friendship.

  With his $1,000-a-week paycheck, Newman could afford a motorcycle to match the one Jimmy rode up and down the southern coast of California.

  Laguna Beach was their favorite spot for overnighting. One of Jimmy’s favorite waterfront joints was called “The Point,” and the two of them could be seen there every weekend. Sometimes late at night Newman, at Jimmy’s urging, would strip naked and jump with him into the surf, where the waves crashed around them. After a midnight swim, Jimmy would make love to Newman on the moonlit sands.

  Perhaps in a sadistic mode, Jimmy liked to give Brackett a detailed account of his sexual adventures, either one-on-one encounters or else his participation in orgies. He knew this would hurt him, as he was very jealous.

  “Jimmy always felt he’d prostituted himself in front of me, and that I’d taken advantage of him when he was a struggling actor,” Brackett said. “He felt he had to pay me back for that. I thought that once he became a movie star and was financially independent, I’d seen the last of him. But he always came back. The reason is simple: Perhaps without Jimmy really realizing it, I’d become the father figure he never had.”

  Jimmy invited Newman to spend many “wild, wild” weekends with him in Tijuana. One of his favorite cafes had a Western name, The Last Chance Saloon. A battered neon sign outlining the figure of a cowboy in chartreuse flickered invitingly over the door.

  Instead of songs of Old Mexico, the café played country and western music. A long wooden bar ran the entire length of the saloon. On a small stage behind the bar, three nude women, each quite busty and overweight, performed lascivious dances.

  As the lead dancer gyrated her massive hips, Jimmy told Newman, “Look at her squeezing those jugs like maracas.” At the end of the number, the patrons, mostly men from California, shouted “OIA!” Pesos were thrown at the nude performers.

  The act was followed by the appearance of two brown-skinned twins who looked no more than fourteen years old. They didn’t dance but mostly rubbed their bodies together, rotating their pelvises, eventually leaning backwards as they rubbed their young vaginas together.

  When the pesos landed on the floor, each girl turned the coins’ edges, blocking them in some way from rolling along the floorboards. Straddling the money, they seemed to suck the coins into their bodies.

  “We want those two,” Jimmy instructed the manager. Then he turned to Newman. “We’re gonna rent a room upstairs for an hour or two.”

  “Don’t you think they’re a bit young?”

  “Nothing is too young for this cowpoke.”

  On another tequila-soaked weekend, Newman attended an orgy with Dean, at least according to the accounts told to Brackett. Smoke from marijuana competed with incense in a candlelit upstairs room painted a garish purple.

  There must have been eighteen people at the orgy, almost equally divided between men and women. Four of the visitors were German tourists. “It was a night of gliding hands, shifting bodies,” Jimmy relayed to Brackett. “If there was an empty orifice, something was plunged into it. Paul and I were the star attractions. Everybody had us that night.”

  “What a hot, pornographic movie that would have made,” Brackett said, masking his pain.

  En route back to Los Angeles, the actors stopped at a café for beer. “We don’t have to go down to Tijuana for an orgy. You can always find one going on at the Château Marmont in Hollywood. I’ll help you move there this week-end.”

  Years later, in summing up his own experiences with Jimmy, Newman left out the graphic details. “Brando was originally offered the lead in Rebel Without a Cause,” he said, “but Jimmy was the true rebel. Brando could be outrageous in his behavior, but Dean was beyond outrageous. He was in orbit. As he entered the final months of his life, his amusements and diversions became more and more bizarre. Ordinary sexual diversions no longer held his attention. He began to move toward a dangerous new sexual frontier for his excitement. It was as if he knew he was going to die, and he wanted to squeeze decades of life into his final precious months.”

  ***

  After time in New York, Newman flew back to Los Angeles. There, he had a rendezvous with Jimmy on the set of Rebel Without a Cause, finding him more reckless and irresponsible than ever.

  Appearing on the set to see him work, Newman encountered Natalie Wood, whom he hadn’t seen since they’d appeared together in the ill-fated The Silver Chalice. Back then, he’d found the teenager had a “marvelous sense of mystery.”

  On the set of Rebel, she appeared far more sophisticated than her years. “I have ambitions to don a frilly gown by Don Loper and a silver blue mink and embrace Cary Grant in my arms before the camera,” she said. “I desperately feel I’m ready to play sexy parts. Instead I wound up playing the younger version of Virginia Mayo in Chalice. In Rebel, I’m a teenager.”

  “And indeed you are,” he told her, “but growing up very fast in front of my eyes.” She seemed flirtatious with him. Later, he learned from Jimmy that he was not only seducing Natalie, but so was the film’s director, Nicholas Ray.

  On the way to see Jimmy, Newman met Ray who introduced him to Sal Mineo, the former delinquent youth from the Bronx who in 1951 had costarred with Yul Brynner on Broadway in The King and I.

  In a phone call to Newman, Jimmy told him that “Sal is a very sexy young man, very pretty, and mature for his age.”

  Years later in an apartment in Chelsea, in New York City, Mineo said, “at the time I met Newman, I was crazy in love with Jimmy, very sexually confused. I hardly paid attention to Newman that day, although I couldn’t help but notice what a beautiful man he was. I heard he was married but dating Joanne Woodward. I naïvely assumed tha
t Newman was hopelessly straight. How wrong I was. Frankly, I didn’t think I would ever run into him again. But, wow, what an important role he’d play in my future.”

  According to Eartha Kitt, once Newman made it to Jimmy’s dressing room, “those two guys picked up right where they left off. I’d bet my right nipple that Jamie had Newman’s pants off in less than ten minutes. He told me that his passion for Newman was still as strong as before.”

  “But Jamie also told me that he was being pulled in a million different directions sexually,” Eartha claimed. “He had his regular affairs at the time, especially with a young actor named Jack Simmons, for whom Jamie had gotten a small part in Rebel.”

  “Even so, he was still out on many a night searching for something new and different,” Eartha said. “While shooting Rebel, his behavior became even more bizarre. On one occasion, he met this very sexy hustler who had only one arm. They were seen driving away in Jamie’s new Porsche Speedster.”

  Somehow, when he wasn’t sleeping with Wood, Mineo, Ray, or Simmons, Jimmy managed to fit Newman into his schedule.

  Jimmy was also dating starlets, on orders of the studio. “There’s a homosexual panic going on out here,” he told Eartha and Newman. “Homosexual stars are being exposed. Rock Hudson is definitely not careful. He’s getting too blatant. Word is reaching Jack Warner about my private life. Warner is insisting that I be seen out with girlfriends. Not just seen, but photographed.”

  “I can cum just so many times a day,” Jimmy said. “Half of Hollywood wants my juice. They’re sucking me dry out here. These blow-job artists make it hard for me to save up enough sperm for fucking.”

  “But you manage, don’t you?” Newman said, smiling.

  Jimmy flashed his own wicked grin. “You know me too well, man.”

  ***

  It was ironic that in the weeks right before his death, Jimmy was rehearsing during the day with Newman and making love to him at night. At long last their dream of co-starring together had come true. Both of them had been cast in The Battler, a teleplay based on an Ernest Hemingway story.

  Producer Fred Coe, who rose out of the depths of Alligator, Mississippi, to become a prolific television, theater, and film producer, came up with the idea of casting them in the same teleplay. Coe was one of the major players in the Golden Age of television, having begun his career in 1945 when virtually no one had a TV set. He often relied on literary classics as a starting point for his teleplays.

  Coe had been impressed with the dramatic potential of Ernest Hemingway’s autobiographical “Nick Adams” stories, and his best friend, A.E. Hotchner, had agreed to write the teleplay for one of those stories, The Battler. In another touch of irony, Hotchner became Newman’s best friend long after “Papa” had committed suicide.

  The Battler was set to be aired on October 18, 1955 as part of NBC’s Playwright ’56 series. Coe hired Arthur Penn as the director. He’d been a member of Joshua Logan’s stage company and had attended the Los Angeles branch of Actors Studio. In time, Penn would direct eight different actors in Oscar-nominated performances, including Anne Bancroft, Warren Beatty, and Faye Dunaway.

  Newman looked forward to working with Penn, although he soon realized that the director was not a sycophantic admirer of Lee Strasberg. “That guy ruined an entire generation of actors with that sense memory crap of his,” Penn told Newman.

  With his horn-rimmed glasses and a cigar perpetually in hand, Penn showed great sensitivity in working with Jimmy and Newman. “He knew how to handle an actor,” Newman said. “He was not just a director, but a philosopher and an artist. He knew how to let whatever limited talent I had breathe and develop at its own pace. He wasn’t a dictator like Otto Preminger with whom I’d regrettably work in the future.”

  Newman was set to play Hemingway’s Nick Adams as a young man. The character was Hemingway’s literary alter ego. Jimmy was miscast as an aging boxer with a damaged eye and that inevitable cauliflower ear.

  One night around three o’clock in the morning, Jimmy woke Newman up. “What’s the matter?” Newman asked, groggy with sleep.

  “I just had a golden dream,” Jimmy said, jumping out of the bed and dancing around the room. “It was great! I dreamed that you and I are about to become the two hottest shits ever to hit Tinseltown. James Dean and Paul Newman. We’re going to win more Oscars, make bigger pictures, than all the farts who came before us. Years from now when everyone’s forgotten Bogie as the fag in Casablanca, the world will be talking about James Dean and Paul Newman.”

  “Come back to bed,” Newman said.

  ***

  Marlon Brando did not seek out the press and did not like to talk to reporters. But when he did, his remarks were invariably controversial. He was particularly incensed when some critic, after seeing East of Eden called Jimmy “not just another Elia Kazan actor, but one with far more depth and sensitivity than Brando himself.”

  Speaking on record, Brando said, “Dean has a certain talent. However, in East of Eden, he seems to be wearing my last year’s wardrobe and using my last year’s talent.”

  Jimmy’s ego was weak and vulnerable, and his sense of self-esteem was always shaky and so fragile he could collapse emotionally at only the slightest provocation.

  Such was the case when Brando’s remarks were relayed to him. Working with Jimmy in rehearsals for the Hemingway teleplay, The Battler, Newman claimed that “Jimmy practically had a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t concentrate in rehearsals. At one point, he was shaking like a leaf in the wind. Marlon was a very bad boy. He must have known how devastating his remarks about Jimmy’s talent would be. Maybe Marlon was trying to get back at some dumb critic and didn’t consider how much Jimmy worshipped him.”

  “Marlon wanted both Jimmy and me to be our own men, our own style of actor,” Newman said. “Maybe this was the way he had of cutting the umbilical cord with Jimmy. After all, Jimmy had been pursuing Marlon for years. Thank God Marlon didn’t spill his bile over my body. I was too weak and vulnerable back then. An attack from Marlon on my own acting abilities would have shattered me.”

  “I must say Marlon always treated me with a certain respect, something he didn’t always show Jimmy or another one of his rivals, Monty Clift,” Newman claimed. “Even though they called me ‘the second Brando,’ and this must have pissed him off, he never made me the butt of his practical jokes. I also never became the victim of his sadism.”

  Meeting with Jimmy at Googies in Hollywood, Eartha Kitt and Newman had never seen him so bitter about Hollywood, “Giant is my last picture,” he proclaimed. “I’ve decided this incestuous cesspool called Hollywood is not for me. Marilyn Monroe is the perfect personification of Hollywood. All false glamour. There is no reality to her. A man can go crazy here.”

  “Fuck Hollywood!” Jimmy said in a voice loud enough to be overheard at the next tables. “Fuck Jack Warner and his studio. So he made movies with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Big fucking deal. Who are they anyway? Davis was all about overacting and exaggerated mannerisms and Crawford is nothing but a self-created illusion. My greatest thrill in life would be to tie Warner down in a desert and crap over his face. Then I’d leave him to die in the desert, food for ravenous wolves.”

  “The best thing that could happen to Southern California is for an earthquake to come along and topple the whole fucking place into the Pacific Ocean like the lost continent of Atlantis,” he said. “The whole town is filled with nothing but cocksuckers. I’ve stuffed my pecker into the mouths of some of the biggest producers and directors in Hollywood before those fuckers went home to give their wives and kids a big sloppy wet kiss. Those losers probably still had my semen in their rotten mouths.”

  “Rock Hudson couldn’t get enough of my ass,” he claimed, “when we started filming Giant. “He fucked me so much I thought his dick was going to fall off. Then he turned on me. Hudson is nothing but a piece of shit. There’s nothing real about him. Like Marilyn, he’s the perfect example of a Hollywood p
roduct. If Hollywood did not exist, Hudson would have been a truck driver getting blow-jobs at seedy truck stops.”

  That night Jimmy invited Newman to go with him for a midnight ride in the Hollywood Hills in his souped-up Porsche. He had another date and turned him down, but Eartha volunteered to go.

  The next day she called Newman. “I wish I hadn’t accepted Jamie’s invitation. It was the nightmare ride of my life. I felt that he was committing suicide and trying to take me with him.”

  After she’d escaped from that death trap, she stood on the sidewalk, warning Jimmy. “This Porsche is going to be your coffin. I just feel it.”

  That was the last time she ever spoke to him or saw him again.

  On September 30, 1955, Eartha called Newman. She’d just heard over the radio that Jimmy had died in a car crash. “That Porsche did indeed prove to be his coffin,” she said sadly. “I’ll never forgive Jamie for cheating me out of his presence in my life. No one else in the world understands me.” She put down the phone.

  Almost immediately another call came in. Still in shock, Newman picked up the phone. At first he thought it might be Eartha calling back, as she’d ended the call rather abruptly.

  It was someone from Warner Brothers. Years later he tried to recall that phone call, but couldn’t remember the name of the person calling. He thought it might have been Jack Warner himself, but he wasn’t sure. “I was out of my mind at the time.”

  “Jimmy’s gone but you’re here, kid,” the voice said. “Some actor has to fill his shoes. You probably didn’t know this, but Jimmy was about to sign to do nine pictures in a row with us. All of those movies could star you. You’d be perfect. Here’s the chance of a lifetime. It’s a sad fact that Jimmy is dead, but we the living have to go on. Fuck all that talk about you being ‘the second Brando.’ If you’re smart and play all the angles, and if you lick enough asses, you could be the next James Dean.”