James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  ***

  Marilyn detested the scripts being offered to her, dismissing many of them as “another dumb blonde role.”

  One night over pillow talk, Frank Sinatra asked her if she’d co-star with him in a script about show business entitled Pink Tights. From the title, she gathered what kind of role it would be. After reading the script, she called Sinatra: “I want to escape the image of just a sex queen, and I’d like a more substantial role. I’m not going to do the picture.”

  “Listen, doll, you may think you’re the only blonde in Hollywood, but they’re a dime a dozen out here.” Then he slammed down the phone on her.

  Marilyn had attended a performance of Kim Stanley in the Broadway version of William Inge’s Bus Stop, and was intrigued by the role of Cherie. For the dumb cowboy role of Bo, she thought first of Marlon Brando, although she’d heard that Elvis Presley also wanted the part. Again, she called Shelley Winters: “Isn’t Marlon from Nebraska?”

  “He sure is, babe,” Winters answered.

  “I hear Nebraska, or one of those states—maybe Montana—has a lot of cowboys,” she said. “I bet Marlon would jump at the chance to be Bo opposite my Cherie.”

  “Any bet on our unpredictable Marlon is a risk,” Winters said. “But why not give him a ring?”

  Consequently, Marilyn reached him by phone. After some inaugural pleasantries, she made her pitch, beginning with “I’m getting some 4,000 fan letters a week, and many of them suggest that you and I make a movie together.”

  “I’m getting some 6,000 fan letters a week, and I don’t recall any of them suggesting that. What makes you think our chemistry would work on screen?”

  “It might not in just any film,” she said, “but Bill Inge’s Bus Stop would be ideal for the two of us.”

  “Are you kidding?” he asked. “I’ve appeared in Shakespeare on the screen. Now you’re asking me to play a dumb cowboy chasing after a dumb blonde stripper?”

  “It’s a great part,” she said. “You’d wipe up the screen. I can see an Oscar in your performance, and that’s for sure.”

  “Okay, sugar,” he said. “Come over tonight and we’ll talk about it. At least I’ll get a good fuck out of it.”

  “Oh, Marlon, how you talk.”

  Over dinner that night, Brando told her he was getting at least one film offer a day. “That shitbag, Louis B. Mayer, is gone at MGM, and Dore Schary is far more appreciative of me. He just told his brass to let me play Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin if I want to. I think I’m going to settle for playing a Jap in Teahouse of the August Moon. That cowboy role in Bus Stop wouldn’t mean anything for me.”

  “I convinced Marilyn that her pitch was hopeless,” Brando later told his best friend, Carlo Fiore, when he reported on the incident. “But we made our own chemistry together in bed.”

  Brando bragged to Fiore that “I could take Marilyn from Arthur Miller in a minute if I wanted to. But my trouble is, I can’t love anyone. I just can’t. I know I should, but I don’t trust a woman enough to fall in love with her…or a man, either, for that matter.”

  He noted that while Marilyn was going around professing “all this love for Miller, she’s screwing both Jimmy Dean and me, plus god only knows how many others. She’s the Queen of the One-Night Stand.”

  The following night over spaghetti in a West Village tavern, Brando seemed jealous of Marilyn ‘s involvement with Jimmy. He spent much of the evening attacking him “for copying everything I do—the motorcycles, the jeans, the V-neck pullovers. As for those roles in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, you know I was offered each of those parts before Jimmy got to fuck them up.”

  “I’m not so hard on him,” Marilyn chimed in. “All of us begin by imitating someone. I used to go to any Lana Turner movie at noon and stay in the movie house until the midnight show. It’s just a phase we go through.”

  “Not me,” Brando said. “I’m an original.”

  “You’re an original who’s changing every actor’s style in America—except for Clifton Webb’s,” she said. “Miss Priss.”

  “Dean and I have only one thing in common—and not just our Midwestern origins. Both of us had fathers who claimed that all actors are ‘faggots and fairyboys.’”

  “Well, aren’t they?” Then she giggled provocatively.

  “I’m not as hard on Dean as I pretend to be,” Brando said. “Actually, he needs to be handled with loving care.”

  “It’s getting late,” she said. “Why don’t we go back to your apartment, and let you do some loving care on me?.”

  “It’s a deal,” he said.

  Jimmy Misses His Bus Stop

  THE HORNY COWBOY VS. THE WASHED-UP STRIPPER

  At this point in her career, Marilyn had virtually abandoned her dream of ever making a movie with Brando. He had been disdainful, even contemptuous, of the idea of co-starring with her in Bus Stop, a film that was eventually released in 1956.

  However, in a call she placed to Inge, he told her he’d heard from Joshua Logan, the upcoming director of its film version, that “Brando must have changed his mind! He told Logan that he’d love to play Bo, and that it would be an unusual departure for him as an actor. Logan seems almost hysterically delighted to direct you and Brando.”

  “Marlon is such a bullshitter,” Marilyn told Inge. “There’s no way he’s going to play Bo to my Cherie. If you call him back, you’ll find he’s not going to do the picture.”

  Having slept with him on many an occasion, Marilyn had come to realize that Brando was a man of many moods. Indeed, within a few days, Brando formally rejected the role of Bo.

  For Marilyn, that meant that her second choice, James Dean, had suddenly morphed into her prime target. She called him and asked him over to where she was staying. She’d bought two copies of Inge’s play, with the intention of setting up a private rehearsal.

  She was so pleased at their reading that she told him, “You and I would be great together—you as a redneck clodhopper, far better than Brando could manage, even though he was born in Nebraska.”

  The next day, with Jimmy, Marilyn visited Inge at his apartment in an attempt to win his endorsement. Inge warned them that although he personally thought they’d be an ideal team, he had no say on who starred in the movie roles. He went on to admit that he had already discussed their candidacy for the roles with Tennessee, and that he had said they’d be wonderful together.

  Missing the Bus (Stop)

  Don Murray (in the “dumb cowboy role” that was almost given to Jimmy) embraces MM playing Cherie, the washed-up, out-of-tempo-with-the-music stripper in the film version of Bus Stop.

  Inge told them that Bus Stop had originated as a one-act play entitled People in the Wind, and that he had rewritten and expanded it.

  “I’ll be frank,” Marilyn told him. “When I first heard of it, I thought Cherie was going to be just another dumb blonde role. But I think she’s a wonderful character. I see her as a girl who has never known a day of happiness in her whole life. She’s been kicked around by men until this white knight arrives on a bus in the form of a rude, immature cowboy who’s really dumb. But his love is genuine. And that’s what wins Cherie’s heart in the end.”

  “I think I’d be hot as Bo,” Jimmy said. “An escape from ‘troubled youth’ associations.”

  After Marilyn and Jimmy’s interactions with Inge, she formed a more empathetic and lasting relationship with the playwright than Jimmy did.

  Ralph F. Voss, Inge’s biographer, wrote: “Inge and Monroe enjoyed a rapport that was probably based upon their mutual intelligence and his ability to sense the frustrations of a bright and spectacularly beautiful woman like Monroe and upon her realization that his interest and concern were genuine and not motivated by sexual desire. In years to come, their names were occasionally linked in the media as if they were romantically involved, but their relationship was no more than a friendship.”

  As for Jimmy, when he’d first contemplated the role of Bo, he h
ad just completed the filming of Giant, and didn’t want to rush into the portrayal of another western character. “I’m trying to escape the troubled youth image, but I don’t want to be stuck in cowboy roles, either.”

  Eventually, however, he was won over by the character of Bo. “I think I could have had a lot of fun with him. And he’s not at all like my Jett Rink character in Giant.”

  Marilyn agreed. And whereas she lived to deliver a memorable performance in Bus Stop, Jimmy did not. The role of Bo eventually went to Don Murray.

  ***

  During the filming of Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Jimmy learned that its director, Nicholas Ray, had been having an affair with Marilyn since the end of 1952. Ray had been telling her that he’d always wanted to direct her in a movie, and that he and his associates were making plans for its script, never written. Ray had inaugurated sexual advances toward her after meeting her on the set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

  Many of their sexual trysts transpired within Ray’s suite at the Château Marmont. “I was a little surprised to learn about Marilyn and Nick,” Jimmy told Stanley Haggart, who was spending time in Los Angeles producing TV commercials. “It seems that Marilyn and I are fucking the same dude.”

  Jimmy learned about the Ray/Monroe liaison from Confidential magazine, which had published a lurid exposé of their affair, claiming that Marilyn had been caught “balling” Ray in the back seat of a limousine.

  Ray threatened to sue. He complained about it to Leonard Rosenman, who was composing the music for Rebel Without a Cause.

  “But this isn’t bad publicity for you,” Rosenman said. “Thirty million guys in America want to plow Marilyn like you’re doing, and at least some of them want to do Jimmy, too.”

  “I’ll sue the sons of bitches,” Ray said again. Then he paused. “But now that you’ve said all that, perhaps not.”

  For a while, Haggart’s friend, Gore Vidal, was living at the Château Marmont near the bungalow rented by Ray. “You cannot imagine Ray’s carnal adventures,” he told Haggart. “On any given night, he might be seducing Dean, Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood, Jayne Mansfield, Dennis Hopper, or even Judy Holliday when she’s not muff diving.”

  “As for me, I want to meet his son, Tony,” Vidal said. “He must be something else. Ray caught him in bed fucking his wife, Gloria Grahame. The kid had just turned thirteen. What a guy!”

  One of the genuinely historic hotels of Hollywood

  ***

  Early one morning, Jimmy was still in bed in Ray’s bungalow. They’d spent the night together. Ray had left early for the studio, but Jimmy wasn’t needed until the next day. There came a knock on the door. Hung over, in his underwear, he staggered over to answer the door.

  He was surprised to find Marilyn standing there in a fur and an evening gown. She’d obviously come directly from a night of partying at clubs along the Sunset Strip. She carried a bottle of chilled champagne with her. “I planned to drop in on Nick, but you’ll do,” she said to Jimmy. “I’m in need of a good fuck.”

  She walked into the room as if it were her second home.

  As he’d later relay to Haggart when he went for a swim at his home in Laurel Canyon, “Whenever I finished with that succulent mouth of hers, Marilyn could always put me to sleep with that soothing voice she has. It’s such a seductive tool. More than that of any woman I’ve met. Sound engineers capture its erotic whispers. She makes a man feel he’s got big balls.”

  “She’s got her flaws,” Jimmy said. “Like me, she’s too short, and her stomach is slightly pudgy from too much champagne. She shares her problems with me, her secret desires. I do the same with her. Otherwise, I tell people to fuck off when they ask too many personal questions.”

  “We had sex in Nick’s bed, and he came home early that afternoon and caught us together.”

  “Did he threaten to fire you from Rebel?” Haggart asked.

  “Not at all,” Jimmy answered. “He pulled off his clothes and joined us in bed.”

  “Elizabeth Taylor Is a Hairy Ape”

  —Marilyn Monroe

  During the making of Giant, Jimmy saw very little of Marilyn, although they talked on the phone, usually late at night. She had as many troubles as he did.

  She was particularly interested in any behind-the-scenes gossip from the set of Giant, especially if it concerned Elizabeth Taylor.

  “I think Marilyn resents my making a movie with her,” Jimmy told George Stevens. “She’s very jealous of Elizabeth.”

  One night, Marilyn said, “I guess I should ask the $100,000 questions. Which one of you, Elizabeth or yourself, got to fuck Rock Hudson first?”

  He laughed. “With Rock and me, it’s been there, done that, long before Giant. But to answer your question, let me put it this way: Rock and I were assigned to live in the same house in Marfa, Texas. I got him first. But it wasn’t a match made in heaven. Elizabeth finally got him, too. Sometimes, Rock is forced into delivering what he calls a few duty fucks.”

  “They’re both big stars, as you know,” Marilyn said, “and I hear that after Giant you’re going to be right up there with them. I’ve been famously quoted as saying, ‘I’ve sucked a lot of cock to get where I am today.’ I don’t know if I ever said that, but it’s true. I’m sure you’ve been on many a casting couch, but for both of us, we won’t have to do that anymore.”

  “We’ll be able to pick and choose who we fuck, and ain’t that grand?,” he said. “In New York, I used to let guys blow me in the subway toilets for a dollar or two so I could buy a milkshake for some energy.”

  “On Santa Monica Boulevard, I’d give it away for just a hearty breakfast, which would last me for at least a day and a half before starvation set in,” she answered.

  George Stevens, who had directed Elizabeth in A Place in the Sun (1951), told Jimmy that “Marilyn resents Elizabeth’s fame, beauty, and prestige. Their feud began when Elizabeth found out that Marilyn was fucking Nicky Hilton, her first husband. Frankly, I don’t know what Marilyn saw in this jerk, except he’s got money and a big dick. He was drunk most of the time he was married to Elizabeth. He used to beat her.”

  In a phone call one night, Marilyn seemed to have grown angry with Jimmy, because she’d read in the press that he had become extremely friendly with Elizabeth during the filming of Giant.

  “I’m not surprised she went after you,” Marilyn said. “Let’s face it: She’s got a voracious sexual appetite and the morals of a truck driver. Or else an alleycat. Sexually, she’s supposed to be every man’s dream, but I hear that unless she shaves constantly, she’s hairy. One of her former lovers told me she even has hair growing between her breasts. Instead of her being mother’s little dividend, she’s mother’s hairy ape. Did you know that she was born with hair all over her face?”

  “Throughout her life, she’s had everything handed to her. You and I had nothing. We had to fight every step of the way and make compromises. People have always taken advantage of us. She was virtually handed a career and everything else.”

  “Two nights later, Marilyn called Jimmy again and launched another barrage of attacks on Elizabeth.

  “Did you know her eyebrows had to be reshaped into what is now called the Taylor arch?” Marilyn said. “Louis B. Mayer thought her nose was too thick at the bottom and ordered her to take care of it. How do I know all this? I must confess, I’ve had very private dealings with the source of this information. The same doctor who operated on her worked on my own nose and also gave me a chin implant.”

  “Well, dear one, beauty is, after all, an illusion,” he answered. “As for me, I was born perfect.”

  “Yeah, right, except you need a surgeon who knowns how to make you a foot and a half taller.”

  “I resent that!” he yelled at her.

  During the last phone call that he’d ever receive from Elia Kazan, the director said, “I can’t believe it. You and Marilyn Monroe. A little Indiana farm boy who’s also bedding the great Elizabeth Taylor. She’s a s
tory for another day. As far as Marilyn is concerned, to me, she’s just a simple, decent-hearted gal that Hollywood keeps fucking over. Legs apart copulation has always been her way of saying thank you to anyone who ever gave her a break. But what in hell, kid, is Monroe doing with you?”

  “Both of these ladies think I’m hot shit,” Jimmy answered. “So eat your heart out, Gadge, ol’ boy!”

  ***

  Because of Jimmy’s tragic car crash in September of 1955, the cinematic pairing of Jimmy with Marilyn, regrettably, remained a figment of their imaginations and never became a reality.

  Ironically, they became closely linked in death as contemporaneous screen icons. Bars in remote outposts, sometimes as far away as Nigeria, still display images of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe.

  During her third week of counseling with the psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, she confessed that she planned, one day, to commit suicide. “I want to go out like James Dean, while I’m still young and beautiful. I want everything at my funeral to be white, very Mae Westy. All white satin in my coffin. White flowers. I want to be buried in a white négligée that’s virtually see-through. Of course, I’ll have my makeup man and my hairdresser make me camera ready. I want to leave a lasting memory to those who view my body. I want them to say, ‘Marilyn Monroe was more beautiful in death than she was in life. Too bad they couldn’t say that about poor Jimmy. I hear his body was mangled beyond recognition.”

  As Dean’s biographer, Donald Spoto, put it: “At the end of the century, it is not outrageous to say that Dean and Monroe—even to those who have a low estimation of them—remain the most royal of deified Americans, if only because of the brilliant marketing strategies of their celebrity.”