James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  As Hutton’s biographer, C. David Heymann, would write: “With Dean, Barbara felt oddly free, whimsical, aggressive yet feminine. His effect on her was agreeably bewildering.”

  As they talked, these two very different young man and middle-aged woman developed an amazing rapport. He seemed genuinely interested in her background, and for a while, she relished opening up and talking about her life, something she almost never did, even with close friends. As she’d later say, “Sometimes you can tell a stranger more than you can a close friend, who is more likely to judge you.”

  Heymann wrote; “Dean was blessed with a deep sense of curiosity. He seemed avidly interested in learning about Hutton’s celebrated past, her friends, her poetry, her travels.”

  He might also have added, “and her marriages.”

  “Dean listened for long periods,” Heymann claimed, “allowing her to develop her thoughts in an unhurried way.”

  At one point, Hutton quit talking about herself and asked him why he wanted to risk his life by riding a motorcycle so dangerously.

  “I feel exhilarated taking wild chances,” he said. “I’m pursuing what cyclists call the peak moment of intense excitement. Intense for its own sake, a dangerous thing that only men can feel, and can find only with each other.”

  “Are you a homosexual?” she asked.

  “You can decide that for yourself later tonight when I crawl into bed with you,” he said. “I have this philosophy of life. Real life means experience. That means experiencing everything without restrictions or moral restraints.”

  “That reminds me of this man I married in December and am planning to divorce in February,” she said. “Porfirio Rubirosa, the Dominican playboy. During our brief marriage, he spent most of his time in bed with Zsa Zsa Gabor. The first time I saw him naked, I screamed in horror. It was something that belonged on a donkey. I much prefer the more modest penis of another of my previous husbands, Cary Grant. It wasn’t too intimidating, and effective.”

  Jimmy Rejects Hutton’s Offer to Become Her Toy Boy

  Hutton recorded what happened next in her notebook, a document whose contents were later revealed to the press:

  “It was late and he was drunk, and I was drunk, so I asked him to stay. He removed his shirt and pants and climbed into bed with me. I snuggled up next to him. He made love and then we made love again: It seemed the right and natural thing to do, although I couldn’t help but wonder about his sexuality. He talked so fervently about men and adventure and masculinity. We talked and made love until long after the sun rose. In the morning, he ordered black coffee and scrambled eggs in the dining room.”

  What Hutton left out of her diary was that during breakfast, she made him an offer. With the understanding that she’d soon be divorcing Rubirosa, she wanted him to become a sort of toy boy. “My whole life, I had a dream that was not fulfilled, and that was to belong to someone and to some place,” she said. “You could be that someone. I loved the way we could relate to each other. With me, you could set out to explore the world, sampling the best it has to offer. We’d live in palaces, on yachts, and I’d buy you the finest racing cars in the world. We’d attend all the races together. Summers in Deauville. Winters in Palm Beach. A hideaway in Hawaii. You’d meet kings, princes, and princesses, more movie stars than you know already, prime ministers, dictators. Your wardrobe would make Cary Grant green with envy, and you’ve read what a dresser he is.”

  “Sorry, Barbara, but as tempting as the offer is, I must turn it down,” he said. “I’m the wrong guy for you. I can never belong to anybody, even myself. That’s right: At times, I feel a stranger to myself. I’ve got to live out my destiny. And that is to be a god damn fucking movie star. I know how silly and shallow that is, but that is who I am. You were married to Grant, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, so you must have some idea of what I am talking about. I’m hardly proud of my dream, but I’m heading out to fulfill it anyway. I’m ready to face all the heartbreak, disillusionment, the glitter, the glamour, the phoniness—all for a bit of celluloid.”

  Concealing her disappointment, and almost holding back tears, Hutton later recorded in her notebook: “I watched as Jimmy climbed onto his motor-cycle and disappeared around the bend. Forever.”

  ***

  Although Jimmy had rejected Hutton’s very generous offer, he became intrigued at the idea of meeting and getting to know her son, Lance Reventlow. He was not only closer to Jimmy in age, but shared his enthusiasm for car racing. Jimmy had seen his picture in the tabloids, and found him “sexy, attractive, and perhaps susceptible to the charm of ‘ol Jimmy Dean.”

  He’d heard plenty of stories about Lance. His home was dubbed “Camp Climax,” because of the notorious orgies and daisy chains staged there, both gay and straight. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons had written that “Lance Reventlow invented the swinging jet set.”

  Somehow, Jimmy wanted to get connected with his lifestyle.

  A few weeks after seducing his mother, Jimmy met Lance at a rally for racecar drivers, somewhere in the desert between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. The two handsome young men formed an instant attraction and friendship and went off to spend the weekend together at some remote little retreat on cactus-studded grounds.

  As Jimmy later confessed to Stanley Haggart at his second home in Laurel Canyon, “What was I do to when meeting Barbara Hutton and Lance Reventlow? What would any red-blooded American boy do in those circumstances? I fucked both of them.”

  The relationship he formed with Lance would last until the final hour of Jimmy’s life—literally that final hour. As Haggart recalled, “I’d known Jimmy for some time, both in New York and in Hollywood, but I’d never seen him take such interest in the backgrounds of anyone until he met Hutton and later, her son, Lance.”

  “They were so different from him, yet he bonded with them. He seemed to have the same curiosity about them that he’d have had if they’d been space aliens from Mars. He might have settled for a few hours of dialogue with Hutton, but, with Lance, he wanted to know everything. Out in the desert, Jimmy learned a lot about Lance’s life, including its tragedies.”

  Lance Reventlow was as much of a racing car enthusiast as James Dean

  As Jimmy later told Haggart, “I’m more sexually compatible with Lance than I have ever been with anyone. But that doesn’t mean we’re setting up housekeeping together. Far from it. We’re both too eager to have a lot of other experiences. Maybe when we’ve satisfied our curiosity elsewhere, we’ll ride off into the desert right before the sun sets, and I mean that literally and symbolically. We’ll become two old desert rats tearing up the desert in an old vehicle of some sort.”

  “Cary Grant Was More than My Stepfather.

  HE WAS MY LOVER, TOO.”

  —LANCE REVENTLOW TO JIMMY

  Unlike Jimmy, Lance Reventlow was born in 1936 in a London townhouse into a life of spectacular wealth and privilege. Hutton may have been a kind and protective mother, but his father was a sadistic Prussian-Danish count, Court Heinrich Eberhard Erdmann Georg von Haugwitz-Reventlow.

  Hutton had previously married (in 1933) a gold-digger, Alexis Mdivani, a self-styled Georgian prince whom she divorced in 1935, and who died that same year in a violent car accident

  [In reference to Mdivani’s death and the new man in Hutton’s life, international headlines blared—THE PRINCE IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE COUNT.]

  Her marriage to her aristocrat, Count Reventlow, was marked by violence and deep humiliations. In Paris at the Ritz Hotel, he raped her on the floor of their suite. In her diary, she later wrote, “When he finished with me, he dragged me by the hair into the bathroom. ‘You’ve always had an interest in scatology, Barbara. Now’s your big change to experience it.’ He forced me to sit on his lap while he excreted into the toilet. Then he locked me in the bathroom overnight.”

  Marriage to the Danish count would not only cost Hutton her U.S. citizenship, but a $4 million bundle. Their divorce was said to hav
e given England “its greatest sensations since King Edward VIII renounced the throne eighteen months ago for the love of Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson.” Their divorce decree wasn’t finalized until March 6, 1941 since King Christian of Denmark had to sign it.

  A supremely privileged childhood: Lance, 15 weeks old, after his christening.

  In the wake of the kidnapping of the Charles Lindbergh baby, Hutton hired security guards and a nanny to protect her son wherever he went. Almost monthly, she received ominous letters from deranged people threatening to kidnap Lance and hold him for ransom.

  After divorcing her count, Hutton married Cary Grant at Lake Arrowhead, California, on July 8, 1942, during one of the darkest years of World War II. News of the event immediately redefined them, after Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as the most famous couple in America. Almost immediately, the press nicknamed the couple “Cash ‘n’ Cary.”

  Lance was just six years old at the time his mother took another husband. Instead of resenting his stepfather, as many boys do in such circumstances, it was “love at first sight” between Lance and the handsome actor.

  Lance, terrified, in 1939, after being spirited away from a crowd.

  Guests at Hutton’s mansion were astonished to see Lance running to greet Grant after his return from a hard day at the studio. The boy would plant a kiss on Grant’s lips that “seemed to linger forever—much too long,” in the opinion of one of Hutton’s guests. He immediately wrote the count about this indiscretion, claiming that “I suspect something is going on here.”

  Hutton with Grant as newlyweds...suffering and anguish lay in their futures.

  That opinion was reinforced when Grant would disappear upstairs with Lance for a long, leisurely bath that often stretched out for an hour or so. Hutton would be furious when Grant would not even show up for dinner to join her fellow guests.

  By his seventh year, Lance was calling Grant “General,” and demanding that his mother’s seamstress sew the words, “Lance Grant,” into all his clothing. Under Grant’s protective wing, Lance blossomed, telling the General all his secrets.

  In the summer of 1944, Lance was sent to New York to live in an apartment with his father. It was a time of dreadful loneliness for the boy, who claimed his father would beat him so severely that he couldn’t walk for a day.

  Back in Hollywood, Grant told Elsa Maxwell: “Strange how the little chap has gotten under my skin. When he’s away from us, I can never get him out of my mind.”

  Under threat of brutal beatings, the count forced the boy to reveal the most intimate details going on in the Grant/Hutton household. Breaking down in tears, Lance confessed to his father that Grant had “touched me down there.” The count was well aware of Grant’s homosexual lifestyle, whose details had been especially visible during the 1930s when Grant had lived openly with his gay lover, Randolph Scott. The couple had done little to conceal their romantic involvement with each other, even posing together for revealing pictures.

  Infuriated, the count decided to take legal action. He was about to embark on what would become one of the most bitter custody battles in the history of café society.

  In his dossier, the count charged that Grant had consistently used “foul language” around his son. Even more damaging, the count charged that Lance had told him that the movie star had “fondled my son in an inappropriate way.” Reventlow lawyers eventually persuaded the count not to press that charge of child abuse, which would have made headlines around the world and possibly damaged Grant’s stellar career for all time, as similar charges would have that effect upon Michael Jackson in the 90s. But the count demanded nonetheless that his son be prevented from speaking to Grant.

  Fearful of a court ruling that could go against him, the count “kidnapped” his son and expatriated him to Canada. Eventually, lawyers persuaded the count to drop his charges and return Lance to Hutton and Grant, providing the heiress parted with $500,000. Back in Hollywood, Grant confessed to Elsa Maxwell, “Lance is the only thing holding this marriage together.”

  In 1945, after Hutton was reunited with her son, she launched divorce proceedings against Grant. After it was finalized, the couple agreed to be friends, and she asked Grant if he would continue his role as Lance’s unofficial guardian. The actor readily agreed.

  Lance discovered the world of Grand Prix motor racing at the age of 12, when Hutton, in 1947, married Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, who’d won the Targa Florio (a hysterical, haphazardly organized series of automobile races across the public roads of southern Italy) that year. From that moment on, car racing would dominate Lance’s life until one day he suddenly abandoned it.

  At the dawn of the 50s, Lance was growing up and becoming an attractive and sought-after young man. He stood six feet, had light brown hair, and an athletic build. Grant would often get angry at him if he chose to spend his weekends away from him.

  As such, Grant would develop a bitter resentment of James Dean.

  “Living Well Is the Best Revenge”

  —Barbara Hutton

  “I am earthbound,” Lance told Jimmy one weekend in Tijuana, where they had gone to watch the bullfights. “Barbara lives among the pink clouds. I will never understand her—the spending binges, her love affairs, many with guys younger than me, her disastrous marriages, her incessant globe-trotting, never finding a place she likes.”

  During his private moments with Jimmy, Lance often talked so frequently about his mother that he seemed obsessed with her. “What chance did she have? Her mother committed suicide, and Barbara found the body. She was just seven years old when she became the richest girl in the world.”

  “As she grew up, and as those counter assistants toiled at Woolworth outlets ten hours a day, Barbara went shopping for husbands. She longed to be high born, so she set her sights on marrying a man with a title—hence, my father.”

  “Lance might think his mother strange, but he has a few weird moments, too,” Jimmy told Stanley Haggart. “One night, he threw a hugely expensive drag party for some gay friends. All of us dressed up like gals. Lance, who dressed like Marie Antoinette, was showing off some necklace that had once belonged to her.”

  [Presented to Hutton as a wedding gift on the occasion of her (disastrous) first marriage in 1933, it was a necklace of 53 pearls that had been worn by Queen Marie Antoinette of France. Described in the press as “one of the rarest pieces of jewelry ever sold by Cartier,” it was said to mark the beginning of her obsessive passion for pearls.]

  “Barbara drives me up the wall,” Lance said. “I get god damn tired of the fawning parasites around her. She collects a prince her, a sheik there, a military general, some English peers, a few tennis bums, and a lot of broken-down Hollywood rotters. She loves European titles. As for cash, no matter how much people hate her for it, she believes that if you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

  “One of her lovers told me that she was incapable of being satisfied. She demanded more and more. And a man can only give so much in a day and one long, hardworking night.”

  It is believed that Cary Grant learned about Lance’s affair with Jimmy before Hutton did. He may have been the one who tipped her off, as both of them occasionally talked on the phone, mostly about their concerns for Lance.

  When she heard about her son’s affair with Jimmy, Hutton did not fly into the jealous rage that Grant had experienced. She’d been surrounded by homosexuals all her life, and had affairs with a few of them.

  She had been far more shocked when she discovered a love letter that Lance had written to Grant. Even in her world of flamboyantly loose morals, she had deemed it inappropriate for her son to be sexually involved with her former husband.

  Initially, though, she had raised no objections, telling he friend, the tobacco heiress Doris Duke, “If Lance must be with a man, let it be Cary and not some of those hangers-on and race car bums he associates with.”

  As for Lance’s sexual and emotional involvement with Jimmy, the hero of a distant one-night stand with
her, she seemed tolerant: “Lance has transferred his crush on Cary onto James Dean. I understand that, and in a way, it’s an improvement. He’s closer to Jimmy’s own age. The relationship doesn’t include anything bordering on incest with his stepfather. Another thing, and I should know: Jimmy Dean is easy to love, and I think Lance will enjoy him.”

  By then, Hutton fully understood who James Dean, the movie star, was.

  Was It Incestuous?

  FEROCIOUSLY JEALOUS, CARY GRANT RESENTS JIMMY’S INFLUENCE ON “MY SON”

  Cary Grant was adored by millions. For those who knew him, however, his glamorous facade concealed the tortured, closeted homosexual who lived behind that shield. The most revelatory statement about him was made by the actor himself. “There was no such thing as a Cary Grant until I invented him.”

  It seemed inevitable that Jimmy would meet Grant, and inevitable that Grant would want to “size up the competition.”

  As such, when all of them were involved in separate venues in or near Palm Springs (Grant was recuperating, alone, from Hollywood stress, and Lance and Jimmy were working one of the racecar rallies in the desert nearby), the older star asked Lance “to bring Jimmy by for a private dinner.”

  It was never firmly established, but Grant might have seen Jimmy, without actually meeting him, before that dinner. With Roddy McDowall, long before he became famous, Jimmy had once been a porn performer at a raucous all-male party at the rented home of Cecil Beaton in Los Angeles. It had been attended mostly by British expatriates, including Noël Coward. Grant was rumored to have been among the spectators that drunken night, watching Jimmy perform.