Newman put down the phone.
***
Based on the flood of public emotion which followed in the wake of Jimmy’s death, Newman assumed that plans for the teleplay, The Battler, would be scrapped. But Fred Coe wanted it to be aired on schedule within three weeks of Jimmy’s fatal crash. And he wanted Newman to take over Jimmy’s role as the star of the teleplay.
Coe called Newman. “I have no one else who can learn the part at this late hour. It would be easy to get another actor to play the secondary role you were originally assigned, but at this point, only you can be the star. Let’s face it: You know Jimmy’s part better than he did.”
Newman didn’t want to change roles. “I can’t do it emotionally,” he told a mourning Eartha Kitt, who was suffering greatly at the loss of her soulmate. “If I accepted the lead, I’d be advancing my career at Jimmy’s expense. Both of us loved him dearly. I can’t—I won’t—fill his shoes. Coe and Penn will have to get someone else.”
Yet somehow, Eartha managed to convince Newman that filling in for their departed friend would be a way to honor his memory. “That heavy makeup that the role calls for will help everyone forget your reputation as a pretty boy.” she said. “You’ll have to survive purely on your acting skills, ‘cause their makeup artists will make you look like a battered pug.”
Newman, as a prize-fighter, performing as a last-minute shoe-in for a role originally envisioned for James Dean.
A.E. Hotchner, the teleplay’s author, felt he had to apologize to Hemingway for pushing Newman into the lead role at the last minute. In a letter to Hemingway, he wrote, “We were forced to fill the part by risking young Newman in the lead.” Papa Hemingway’s reaction to Newman’s performance that night in October is unknown.
“Suddenly, I agreed to play this punch drunk wreck of a man at fifty-five, a lean and hungry former champ,” Newman said. “Since I was at the height of my so-called male beauty, it took the makeup boys hours to disfigure me.”
In 1962 Newman would again portray The Battler when 20th Century Fox cast him in a big screen adaptation of that play, retitling it Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man.
Newman, in a remake of The Battler, released in 1962 as Ernest Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man. The critics hated it.
After the telecast, Coe took Newman out for a drink to congratulate him on his fine performance. A drunk in the bar had just seen Newman’s TV portrayal of a boxer and challenged him to a fight. At first Newman tried to shrug him off, but the drunk was persistent. A brawl erupted, and Newman ended up with a black eye.
Two other industry insiders were watching the TV debut of Newman’s telecast. One was the director, Robert Wise, the other a producer, Charles Schnee. These two men had recently received an agreement from Jimmy to star as Rocky Graziano in his life story, Somebody Up There Likes Me. Both Wise and Schnee were devastated by the death of their potential star. But after watching Newman in The Battler, both the director and producer decided that Newman would be ideal in the role of Graziano.
Wise called Newman and arranged a meeting. Newman showed up with his black eye. “You didn’t have to get makeup to give you a boxer’s black eye,” Schnee said.
“By the way,” Wise said, “that’s the best black eye I’ve ever seen the makeup department create.”
“That’s no black eye makeup,” Newman said. “That’s the real thing. I got into a bar fight.”
“With that shiner, you’ve almost got the role,” Wise said. “We know you can act. All we want you to do at this point is strip down and try these on.” He held up a pair of scarlet boxing trunks with large gold bands on the sides. “We want to see how you’re built,” Wise said.
Hesitant to strip down to his underwear, Newman eyed Wise skeptically. “You’re not gay, are you? I don’t have to put out to get this part, do I?”
“I’m a pussy man myself,” Wise said. “So is Schnee here.”
Newman stripped down, and both Wise and Schnee found his physique well defined.
“You could be beefier, so go to the gym and puff yourself up every day,” Wise said. “You’ve got the part, though.”
“It’ll make you a star,” Schnee promised.
“We’ve also got great news for you,” Wise said. “We’ve cast Pier Angeli as the girl. I heard you used to bang her before Jimmy took her away.”
“Something like that,” Newman muttered. He had reservations about Pier entering his life again.
He called Eartha and told her the news. “I think people are going to stop calling me the second Brando. Now they’ll be calling me the second Jimmy. When will I ever become Paul Newman?”
“Don’t worry, sweetcakes,” Eartha said. “You’ll need to worry only when some younger stud is billed as the second Paul Newman.”
***
Newman once again came together with Pier Angeli, but their love affair, launched on the set of The Silver Chalice, had grown cold. She was distant, yet very kind and respectful of him. “We both loved James Dean, and we both lost him,” she said to him privately. “Now I have Vic Damone and you have Joanne Woodward.” He couldn’t help but notice that she’d failed to mention his wife Jackie.
Both of them found it ironic that he was Jewish playing an Italian-American in the movie, and she, a bona fide Italian, was playing his Jewish girlfriend.
When he first encountered her, Pier was suffering from a broken ankle but mending quickly. She’d fallen down the stairs at her house. Until she recovered, he carried her in his arms to lunch and back. It was somewhere along the way that she seemed to fall in love with him again.
Their passion was rekindled when Wise flew them to New York to film scenes together on the East Side. “I’d never seen New York this cold before,” Wise said. “In only a day or two, Newman was warming Pier’s bed. Her plaster cast had been removed.”
***
Mineo revealed to the Hollywood biographer, Lawrence J. Quirk, that during the making of Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), he transferred the romantic attraction he’d developed for Jimmy onto Newman.
“I fell head over heels for the lug,” he admitted years later. “Paul was not only manly, but kind and understanding. We used to talk about Jimmy a lot. Paul felt that Jimmy’s death was a real loss, and we both missed him in different ways.”
During his time appearing onstage in the radical play about prison life, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Sal Mineo confessed, “Both Paul and I knew what it was like to have Jimmy Dean make love to us. I can still feel his kisses on my body.”
***
Long after Newman established his own film credits, and was no longer cites as “the next James Dean,” so many other actors of the 1950s and beyond tried to take the title, each of them unsuccessfully. The list included Nick Adams, Edd Byrnes, Dennis Hopper, Dewey Martin, Rod McKuen, Sal Mineo, Don Murray, Tony Perkins, Philip Pine, Cliff Robertson, Dean Stockwell, and Elvis Presley.
Biographer Randall Riese wrote: “If Donald Turnupseed hadn’t turned left on September 30, 1955, James Dean would have grown older and become Paul Newman—with a bit more edge and perhaps more passion. Likewise, if Dean had lived, Newman might not have become the Newman we know today. He might not have had the opportunity.”
Chapter Fourteen
THE IMMORALIST
James Dean Opens on Broadway as an Arab “He-Slut” With a Hundred Bitchy Tricks, Including Blackmail
HATRED BACKSTAGE, AS LOUIS JOURDAN & JIMMY EXCHANGE VENOM
“Working with this monster boy was my worst experience ever with an actor.”
—Playwright Ruth Goetz, co-author of The Immoralist
“The Role Calls for a Feygele”
—Billy Rose
Billy Rose, the famous impresario and theatrical showman, was set to bring André Gides’s The Immoralist to Broadway. It was daring and avant-garde for its era, relaying the tale of a long-suffering wife married to a homosexual who gets embroiled in a blackmail scheme after a sexual liaison with a
scheming Arab boy.
The controversial French intellectual, ex-con, and commentator on sexuality and colonialism, André Gide.
Rose met with his director, Herman Shumlin. They had already agreed that Geraldine Page, Jimmy’s friend, would play the lead role of the anguished wife of the closeted husband. The Arab boy was yet to be cast.
“For the husband, we’ll need one of the famous feygele—you know, faggots such as Brando, Monty Clift, or perhaps Tyrone Power. Perhaps a bisexual like Richard Burton.”
About the last person one might ever have expected Gide or his work to ever be linked to was the flamboyant Broadway impresario, Billy Rose, depicted above
...But as industry veterans have often said, “THAT’S SHOW BIZ!”
“But where in the fuck are we going to get some kid to play the little Arab queer, that blackmailing, insolent, thieving, pervert who rents his ass to soldiers at the local barracks?”
“The kid has to be good looking,” Shumlin said. “Enough for the soldier to want to fuck him. He could be slightly effeminate, but not too much so, since he is also athletic. Perhaps a swimmer’s build. I’ve seen this one kid perform before. He’s the only boy I know who can pull it off.”
“Who is this God’s gift to the stage?” Rose asked.
“His body is lilywhite but it can be darkened with makeup,” Shumlin answered. “We don’t want him too dark. We don’t want to get into any interracial protests here. But from what I hear, the kid can take it up the ass and he’s a Method actor, so he can use his personal experience to add authenticity to the role.”
“Okay, okay,” Rose said, impatiently. “Just who is this little queer?”
“His name is James Dean,” Shumlin said.
“Never heard of the little fart.”
“You will,” Shumlin predicted.
***
Playwrights Ruth and Augustus Goetz had scored a hit when they adapted Henry James’ novella, Washington Sqare into a play, The Heiress, which opened on Broadway in 1947. [It was later adapted into a film, a box office hit, with triumphant acting by Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift]
A few years later, the playwrights decided to tackle a dramatization of André Gide’s controversial novel, The Immoralist. The great and defiantly homosexual avant-garde French writer had based his work in part on his own unconsummated marriage to Madeleine Rondeaux.
Set in French colonial Algeria at the turn of the 20th Century, the story is that of complex marital problems a young archeologist faces in the wake of his marriage to the most respectable woman in the Norman village where they lived. She cannot understand his coldness to her until he explains that he is a homosexual, with past scandals that return from time to time to haunt him. That revelation leads to his wife’s descent into alcohol abuse, insanity, and death.
Homosexuality was a daring subject to dramatize, or even discuss, during the homophobic Eisenhower era. Many unsophisticated critics would refer to it in odious terms, one of them defining it as “the abominable crime,” another labeling it as “an affliction.
Nonetheless, plays with homosexual themes had already begun creeping into mainstream Broadway venues. The New York-born theatrical showman Billy Rose had been impressed with the box office success of Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy (1953), whose theme involved a schoolboy falsely accused of homosexuality and the (supposedly successful) efforts of an older woman to alleviate his anxieties. Its male ingenu protagonist had been brilliantly portrayed by John Kerr, Jimmy’s former lover. Perhaps with that in mind, Rose decided to apply his skills, as a producer, to a Broadway release of The Immoralist.
[Billy Rose was deep into a flamboyantly successful career. Once married (1929-1938) to Fanny Brice, he was also a lyricist credited with such famous songs as “Me and My Shadow” (1927), and “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (1933). Controversy had surrounded his staging of other plays he’d produced, including Clifford Odets’ Clash by Night (1941), adapted eleven years later into a movie with Barbara Stanwyck and Marilyn Monroe; and Carmen Jones (1943), featuring George Bizet’s opera score orchestrated for Broadway with performances by an all black cast.]
Actors who were considered for The Immoralist’s lead character, Michael [Michel in the original novel], included Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Tyrone Power. After each of them rejected it, it was assigned to Louis Jourdan.
Born in Marseille, he had made his American film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947) opposite Gregory Peck. Jourdan had also scored a hit in Max Ophüls Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), appearing opposite Joan Fontaine.
The Immoralist’s role of the morally upright, long-suffering wife was assigned to Geraldine Page, Jimmy’s friend from the Actors Studio, who had previously scored a huge hit as Alma, the lonely spinster, in Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke (1948).
As director, Rose selected Herman Shumlin, one of the most respected names on Broadway. He was already known for his direction of plays which included Watch on the Rhine (1941), and Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1939).
Rose fully understood that the role of the thieving teenaged pervert, Bachir, would be hard to cast. A blackmailing schemer, he rents out his body for sodomy to the (French) soldiers at the local barracks. He’s also on the lookout for rich tourists he can ensnare in his web. Immediately, he recognizes Michael as a closeted homosexual and sets out to seduce him.
Jimmy’s theatrical agent, Jane Deacy, had read the script and thought he would be ideal in the role. She arranged for him to show up at a reading before the play’s director (Shumlin) and its co-author (Ruth Goetz).
Ruth recalled her first encounter with Jimmy. “He appeared in a ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots, a bright green vest, and jeans—he looked like a little Irishman, hardly ideal for playing an Arab boy. Then he read, and he was instinctively right, charming, but with a nasty, suggestive sexual undercurrent.”
Shumlin agreed. “Dean was absolutely perfect for the role, once we applied some brown makeup and darkened his blonde hair. He perfectly combined the quality of pretend sweetness with a sinister kind of evil under his skin.”
For $300 a week, he was offered the role with a run-of-the-play contract.
Rehearsals were at the old Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan, where Jimmy reunited with Page.
Paul Hubner, one of the cast members, said, “We thought they were lovers. They were always hugging and kissing.”
Jimmy denied it: “She’s like a mother to me, very supportive. Would you fuck your mother? Wouldn’t that make you a mother-fucker?”
Louis Jourdan with Leslie Caron in Gigi (1958).
Page seemed delighted with her role. “As an actress, it is a dream part for me. I get drunk. I go mad. And I die!”
“Louis and Jimmy hated each other on sight,” Page said. “They had met before at Sarah Churchill’s party, where Jourdan had appeared with his sometimes lover, Danny Kaye. Louis was a classically trained actor, and he detested Jimmy’s Method approach. His style of acting was not really the Method, but it was Jimmy’s way, which Louis—to his utmost frustration—could never really decipher.”
During rehearsals, Page was the only player who understood Jimmy’s way of approaching a role. “He had to work himself into the character, during which time he was slowly committing the script to memory. He would mutter and mumble, filling in the blank spaces with words not in the script.”
After he saw this photo of himself, French actor Louis Jourdan said, “I was voted the handsomest man in the world, but I should also have been voted the sexiest.”
Furious, Jourdan complained to Shumlin about this: “The jerk is uttering obscenities. He whimpers, he cries, he curses.”
According to Page, “Jimmy is like a cat that jumps a great distance without the need to know how far he was to jump. I assured Louis that Jimmy would be perfect on opening night.”
“Working with Dean, this monster boy, was the worst experience I ever had with an actor,” Ruth
Goetz said. “He was slovenly, always late, unspeakably detestable.”
Alert to the eccentricities of artistic talent, Shumlin granted Jimmy free rein, letting him improvise wildly until he worked himself into the character. After a few days, he evolved into a sort of father figure for Jimmy. During a break in rehearsals, Jimmy was sometimes spotted resting his head on the director’s shoulder.
***
Cast and crew eventually headed to Philadelphia for a week of tryouts at the Forrest Theater.
“I don’t know from fairies,” Rose told Ruth. “But I hear Jimmy’s one, and the play is about fairies. So I’ll sit through it and tell you what I think.”
Consequently, Rose rode the train from New York to Philadelphia, and watched one of The Immoralist’s dress rehearsals. Then, after conferring with Ruth and Augustus Goetz, he decided to fire Shumlin.
Although he was both respected and talented, and had directed many Alist stars, Shumlin had seemed reticent, even embarrassed, by the homosexual overtones of the play. In Rose’s view, Shumlin was “skirting the issues associated with love that dare not speak its name.”
Shumlin was dismissed immediately. As his replacement, Rose appointed Daniel Mann, another well-known director.
In front of Mann, before commuting back to New York, Rose articulated his opinion of Jimmy: “The kid has all these adolescent notions about being a man. He carries a switchblade and rides a motorcycle. A big fucking man, that one! I think he’s mentally disturbed.”
It can be argued that Daniel Mann (aka, Daniel Chugerman, depicted above) suffered more than any other director because of James Dean.
James Dean Page 58