James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  Despite what he revealed to a handful of close friends, Brando had little to say to interviewers about Marilyn and even less to reveal about Jimmy. In one interview, however, he admitted: “Marilyn was a sensitive, misunderstood person,” he said, “and much more perceptive than was generally assumed. She had been beaten down, but had a strong intelligence—a keen intuition for the feelings of others, the most refined type of intelligence.”

  Marilyn herself made few public comments about Brando, but told Jimmy that she found him “very sweet and tender, not at all Stanley Kowalski, although he can on occasion be a brute.”

  To both Brando and Marilyn, Jimmy voiced his fear of getting permanently stuck with a youth image. “Something like that is dangerous for an actor. Youth, after all, is a passing thing. If you get stereotyped, there’s nowhere to go but down. Take Shirley Temple, for example. The public didn’t want to see her in grown-up roles. I don’t want to be thirty-five, wearing extra-heavy makeup and still playing a troubled youth.”

  “Marilyn Is Too Old to Play a Baby Doll.”

  —Elia Kazan

  After he’d directed Jimmy in East of Eden, Elia Kazan by chance encountered him one afternoon in Hollywood, and invited him for a drink. As they talked, he provocatively said, “I hear you’ve been chasing after my puta.”

  “Exactly who is your puta?” Jimmy asked.

  “Marilyn, on that rare occasion when she isn’t screwing such august figures as Senator John Kennedy—or Frank Sinatra, Natasha Lytess [her drama coach], Brando, Sammy Davis, Jr., or George Jessel. Do you have all day? I can keep going till the last dog dies.”

  “With Marilyn and me, It’s just a casual thing,” Jimmy said.

  “Who’s a better fuck? Kazan asked, continuing his provocation. “Brando, Newman, or Marilyn?”

  “Each has his or her own specialty,” Jimmy said.

  “You know, Joe Schenck, that old potentate at 20th Century Fox, was also her lover,” Kazan said. “I can figure out the kind of love-making that went on between Marilyn and Joe. He told me he can’t cut the mustard any more, but I guess his tongue can still devour a taste treat. He did give her some good advice, telling her, ‘Don’t be a scalp on some man’s belt. Don’t be a cuspidor. Don’t be a damn garbage dump.’”

  “I think she’s both a baby and a woman,” Jimmy said. “I don’t know whether to bounce her on my knee or make love to her. Both of us aren’t well educated, but she grabs bits and pieces of knowledge, yet has no real idea how to fit these tidbits of information into anything coherent. She’s also an actress both on and off camera. When I do something that displeases her, she almost, but not quite, sheds a tear. She also makes her lips tremble. Then, after she’s pulled that stunt, you give in to her.”

  “She does crazy little things,” he continued. “One night at her place, a huge bouquet of flowers arrived from some admirer. She didn’t have a vase for them, so she rested them in the water in her toilet bowl. When I had to take a wicked piss, I really watered them. The smell of urine and roses…absolutely intoxicating.”

  “For me, Marilyn is too obsessed with her body,” Kazan said. “Johnny Hyde, a short little midget of a guy, was one of her first lovers. He’s dead now, but one night, he told her she has a nigger’s ass. That devastated her, and she’s spent half of her life since then staring at her naked buttocks in the mirror.”

  “That’s strange,” Jimmy said. “She told me one night that she has black blood flowing through her veins. Actually, that turned me on. I’m not prejudiced.”

  “Don’t you believe that,” Kazan said. “She’s no more octoroon than I am. She invents stuff about herself, especially her biography. She’s of Norwegian descent, and people in that country are whiter than the Pillsbury dough boy.”

  “I was surprised she has so little money,” Jimmy said. “Fox pays her starvation wages.”

  “I thought Hyde would leave her something in his will,” Kazan said. “His estate came to $650,000. She got not a penny. She told me he left her six bath towels and sheets, but only three pillowcases. That’s her reward for being his love goddess.”

  “About this love goddess shit,” Jimmy said. “Marilyn and I are not ideally suited in bed. She has difficulty ‘coming’ with me. I don’t have that problem with a lot of other guys and dolls.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kazan said. “Don’t feel less a man. She has that trouble with nearly all of her lovers. She says she works hard to climax, but most of the time, her plumbing doesn’t cooperate. I don’t give a fuck. I’m more interested in getting my rocks off. I did find a way to work her up to a climax. I spank that ass of hers real hard. Somehow that unclogs her plumbing.”

  Then Kazan slammed down his drink. “Hell, let’s stop talking this man-to-man crap. All I can say is that Marilyn needs a strong hand, so to speak. And both of you guys need a strong director.”

  “As for body parts, she has a complaint against me,” Kazan said. “Ever since Joe DiMaggio, she’s preferred uncut meat, which rule out all Jewish lovers and a lot of other men, too. Yes, Arthur Miller!”

  [As regards Marilyn’s opinion of Kazan, she once told Jimmy, “Gadge told me that I was great fun, but that I wasn’t cut out to be anybody’s wife. He had a wife and children back in New York, but he was seen out in public with me in Hollywood. We could always claim, if asked, that we were discussing a future film project. He told me that he had a European concept of fidelity within a marriage. In Europe, he said that most men were expected to have a mistress on the side, providing that they take good care of their wife and kids at home.]

  Ordering another round of drinks, Kazan asked, “Do you think one day you’ll become one of Marilyn’s husbands?” Kazan asked.

  Jimmy was very emphatic. “Never! We’ve talked about it. But it will never happen. Deep down, both of us know we are petulant children, even though at times we can act grown-up. We’re desperate souls looking for that home we never found—just a pair of tumbling tumbleweeds.”

  “I don’t know about Marilyn as a wife,” Jimmy continued, “but I do know that she has this uncanny ability to bring out the finest qualities in a man. She’s convinced me that by the time I reach my thirties, I’ll be a great movie actor. She says I might be small in stature, but big in talent. ‘You’re a little guy,’ she told me, ‘but a big man under your skin.’”

  “I haven’t seen Marilyn lately,” Kazan said. “What’s cooking?”

  “I suspect you’ll be hearing from her any day now,” Jimmy said. “She’s heard that you’re going to direct Tennessee’s Baby Doll. She wants to be the doll.”

  He frowned. “She’s too old. Baby Doll can be no more than nineteen, even younger. Besides, although I love her dearly, I don’t think I could survive directing Marilyn in a film. I hear that Lee Strasberg arranges for his wife Paula to be a sort of co-director behind the scenes, for which she gets $2,500 a week. After every take, this cunt signals to Marilyn that it was okay—or else she has to reshoot it. I’d stand for that crap for about an hour.”

  “Another thing,” Kazan said. “Marilyn has a time bomb inside her waiting to go off. Ignite her and she’ll explode. I’d heard the horror stories. Fucking her is one thing, directing her is quite another. She wants approval more than anything, but she rarely gets it, except from her fans. She needs constant reassurance of her own worth. Yet she respects men who hold her in contempt because their estimate of her is similar to her own self-loathing.”

  ***

  During the course of Charles Feldman’s affair with Marilyn Monroe, at a party the producer had hosted at his home, he had introduced her to Tennessee Williams. Feldman had played a key role in the production of The Glass Menagerie.

  Ever on the lookout for her next gig, Marilyn had asked Tennessee, “Do you write plays with characters that I could play? You know, the dumb blonde?”

  “I’m afraid not,” he answered. “I was once hired by MGM to write what I called a ‘celluloid brassiere’ for Lana T
urner, but I failed miserably. I fear I’d do the same for you. As regards the anguish I suffered trying to create a role for Miss Turner, I felt like an obstetrician delivering a mastodon from a beaver.”

  “With me it would be different,” she cooed. “I once told Frank Sinatra that one day I’d like to star as Blanche DuBois in a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. He mocked me.”

  “Oh, my dear, Miss DuBois was over the hill, and you look like you’ve merely begun to climb that hill.”

  “You just wait and see, Mr. Tennessee,” she said. “One day, I’ll be a very dramatic actress.”

  “May your dreams never die,” he answered, as Feldman interrupted their chat.

  “Jane Wyman is here, and she’s asking for you,” Feldman told Tennessee.

  [Jane Wyman, the former Mrs. Ronald Reagan, was awarded a starring role in the film version of Tennessee’s The Glass Menagerie (1950).]

  ***

  Months later, Marilyn heard of a role in a Tennessee Williams play that she felt was tailor made for her. It was that of the title character in Baby Doll, the story of a child bride, bartered and sold by her corrupt father to a lecherous suitor, who spent her days curled up half-dressed in a crib, sucking her thumb, a Lolita-like virgin.

  Denied sexual access to her, based on the terms of her contract, her frustrated new husband spies on her through a peephole drilled through the wall.

  “If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s suck,” Marilyn told Feldman.

  There was another strong role available: That of a Sicilian-American owner of a cotton gin that is taking business away from her husband’s rival gin mill. Marilyn told Feldman that in her opinion, that role should be offered first to Brando, then to James Dean.

  Lobbying for the role, Marilyn called Kazan and set up a rendezvous. Afterwards, describing it to Winters, she said, “Our roll in the hay went okay, but I didn’t do as well during the post-coital huddle. He didn’t think I’d be suitable as Baby Doll.”

  What Kazan had told her was, “Do you really believe that the public will accept you as a virginal child-bride?”

  “I’m an actress. Watch me go.”

  “Oh, please! No one will ever believe that Marilyn Monroe was a virgin…ever.”

  Furious at that remark, she had stormed out the door.

  On the chance that Brando might be assigned the role of the Sicilian, she tried to enroll him in a scheme whereby he’d endorse her for the role of Baby Doll. And when that didn’t work, she began to maneuver toward the source of the screenplay himself, Tennessee Williams, hoping that he might recognize her potential.

  “After all,” she told Winters. “We’re not talking about me playing Blanche DuBois. We’re talking about a sexy little baby doll. The whole world knows I’m America’s baby doll.”

  Winters had reminded her that Tennessee “has the hots for Jimmy Dean,” so Marilyn decided to include him in her meeting with the playwright. Fortunately, Jimmy was in New York at the time and available, especially when she told him that he might be considered for the choice role of Silva Baccaro, the competing Sicilian who tries to steal the sex kitten from her possessive husband.

  In her scheme, Marilyn deliberately misled Jimmy by telling him that Brando wanted the role, but that the word was that Tennessee thought that “the two of us would make a better screen team.”

  Before their arrival at Tennessee’s apartment, she described to Jimmy a sexy scene, perhaps as part of their audition process, they could play out under a blanket together. “It gets cold in Mississippi in winter. We’re sitting on the front porch in a double wooden swing with a blanket over us. There’s a lot of movement going on under the blanket. Our faces reveal all from the initial tongue-sucking kiss to the final climax reflected in the total ecstasy in our faces.”

  “I could go for that,” he said. “We could make it one of the sexiest scenes ever put into a feature film, and we can do that without ever showing our asses.”

  She told him that Feldman had seen what the chief script reader at Warners had already said in his report. “Baby Doll has the potential of becoming the dirtiest feature film in the history of Warner Brothers. It is imbued with priapean detail that would have embarrassed Boccaccio.”

  “I don’t know what ‘priapean’ means,” he said.

  “I didn’t either, but I looked it up in the dictionary. Priapus was the Greek god of procreation, the personification of the erect penis.”

  “This film is sounding more and more like it’s got the name of James Dean written all over it.”

  Since Kazan had objected, insisting that she was appropriate for the role, Tennessee remained her last hope. Jimmy later told Stanley Haggart, a friend of Tennessee, that he didn’t know at the time that Marilyn had manipulated him. “I’m not blaming her,” he said. “My whole life has been spent manipulating people.”

  “After our first drink at Tennessee’s apartment, I could tell that Marilyn was not his conception of his baby doll. However, he did assure us that we would one day become known as the ‘dynamic duo’ of the screen.”

  Tennessee described to them his original concept for Baby Doll: “I saw her as an overweight bundle of horror, with fat arms, bulging calves, and thick ankles. But in my rewrite, she’s beautiful and sexy, very blonde. It’s not a part for Grace Kelly—in terms of breeding, Baby Doll is about as genteel as Paddy’s Pig. She is touching but comic, a grotesquely witless creation, about as deep as a kitty-cat’s pee.”

  Before the end of their interview, Tennessee had promised he’d use whatever influence he had to try to get the roles for them. Nonetheless, he felt that each of them might find it more rewarding to pursue the parts of Cherie and Bo in William Inge’s upcoming film adaptation of Bus Stop, whose roles in the Broadway play had gone to Kim Stanley and Albert Salmi.

  “I studied Tennessee carefully,” Jimmy told Haggart. “Sometimes, when he had been giving me a blow-job, and if I had gotten overly excited, I had run my fingers through his hair. It was like feeling a nest of small, wet serpents. As he bid Marilyn goodbye, having invited me for a sleepover, he had that fat cat smile of deception, you know the one when the cat tells the mouse he’s not going to be eaten. Marilyn believed his promise. I did not. He might be planning to recommend me for the role, but I think he had already agreed with Kazan that Marilyn was too old and not virginal enough for the part of Baby Doll.”

  ***

  Weeks later, Kazan still had not cast all of the actors he needed for Baby Doll, opting to delay his final choice until after he’d seen the early rushes of Jimmy’s last film, Giant. To his surprise, he became fascinated by the performance of Carroll Baker, whom he knew, but only casually, from their time together at the Actors Studio.

  He envisioned her as the perfect choice for the character of Baby Doll. Five years younger than Marilyn, she was twenty-four at the time.

  In New York, Kazan arranged for an audition that included Baker alongside Karl Malden. He had already cast him as Baby Doll’s lecherous and ferociously jealous husband.

  Lee Strasberg, it is believed, tipped Marilyn off about what was about to happen.

  She didn’t want to make an appearance at the Studio alone, so she called Jimmy. She had already learned that the role he’d wanted, that of the Sicilian cotton gin owner, would probably be going to Eli Wallach.

  A few moments before the beginning of her tryout, Baker learned that Marilyn had entered the studio and that she’d be watching from the audience. “I wish my breasts were as big as hers,” Baker lamented.

  Jimmy preferred to take a seat out front, and not accompany Marilyn onto the stage, where she greeted the other cast members, including Malden.

  Marilyn’s arrival was deeply unnerving: Baker’s husband, Jack Garfein, had loudly predicted that if his wife did not succeed in the tryout, the role of Baby Doll would, based on box office clout and studio politics, almost certainly go to Marilyn as a last resort.

  Karl Malden, pursuing carnal knowledge
of “Baby Doll,” Carroll Baker

  Baker remembered the Hollywood blonde goddess arriving, clad in a patterned scarf, a pink Angora sweater, and oversized sunglasses. “Her thin cotton pants might have been grafted onto her flesh. All eyes were on her. She pursed her lips and said. ‘Hello Jack.’ I was so jealous of her I could have killed her. She made the word ‘Jack’ sound positively obscene.”

  Baker later described Marilyn’s mannerisms: “She was like a perpetual motion gel. If her hips weren’t gyrating, she was winching with her shoulders, or else making that sucking fish-pucker mouth. Everything about her said, ‘I’m yours.’ I thought I smelled the fruity aroma of sex.”

  After having greeted all the key figures on the stage, Marilyn joined Jimmy in the third row of the audience to watch Baker emote with Malden. She sat motionless throughout their sketch, her face betraying no emotion. Jimmy kept glancing at her for a reaction, but got none.

  At the end of the sketch, Tennessee, from a seat in the rear, jumped to his feet and came running toward the stage, bypassing Jimmy and Marilyn, as if they weren’t there. “Baby,” he gushed, rushing up to Baker. “You are my Baby Doll!”

  Marilyn grabbed and then gripped Jimmy’s hand He noticed she was on the verge of tears. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” she hissed.

  Outside on the street, a wind was blowing, and drops of rain were starting to fall. Marilyn got a cinder in her eye and reached into her purse for a handkerchief to help remove it.

  After the cinder came out, Jimmy kissed her gently on the lips and took her arm. “Let’s go. It’s you and me, kid, against the wind.”

  ***

  Barbara Leaming, a respected Marilyn biographer, wrote: “Had she been directed by Kazan at that stage in her career, she probably would not have become as dependent on Strasberg. What need would there have been for him if it had been Kazan who enabled her to do her first important dramatic role? What need would there have been for Paula Strasberg, her acting coach? Had Marilyn done well in a film written by Tennessee Williams, quite possibly she would have been treated differently by the public, and even by the industry. And who could say what would have happened to Marilyn’s relationship with Arthur Miller had she gone to Mississippi in November of 1955 with Kazan?”