James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  Like every other insider in Hollywood, Jimmy had already heard plenty of rumors, mostly about Grant’s long-enduring affair with Randolph Scott. Consequently Jimmy concluded that Grant must have been at least bisexual, based in part on Grant’s marital histories with Virginia Cherrill, Barbara Hutton, and Betsy Drake. Grant was also said to have maintained affairs with Howard Hughes, Gary Cooper, Noël Coward, Doris Duke, Cole Porter, Mae West, and Ginger Rogers. He was quoted as saying, “I think making love is the best form of exercise.”

  Over drinks, Jimmy and Grant did not get off on a good footing, partly because Grant insisted on delivering his opinions about one of his nemeses, Marlon Brando. He revealed that he had been one of the original “angels” who put up money for the Broadway version of A Streetcar Named Desire. “I was among the first on opening night to rush backstage to congratulate Marlon on his brilliant performance as Stanley Kowalski.”

  Randolph Scott (left) with Cary Grant. Both actors had lived together on or off for more than a decade of domestic bliss, interrupted by an occasional co-habitation with a woman.

  “I tried to be his friend,” Grant said. “Months later, when he was in L.A., I invited him to join me for a weekend at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. I thought we’d get to know each other better. I was more than generous, telling him that it was time for old guys like me to step aside and make way for younger upstarts such as himself and Montgomery Clift.”

  Jimmy later told Lance that he thought those words, although veiled, had been aimed directly at him, especially when Grant added, “and God knows what other actor jerks are waiting in the wings to take our places.”

  [From the subsequent gossip that emerged from that weekend at the Fairmont, it appeared that Grant made sexual advances to Brando and was rebuffed. That seemed to have contributed to some residue of bitterness in the older actor.]

  Grant continued: “I expect that in the 1950s, movie audiences will want a very different type of talent from what was appealing in the 1930s and wartime 40s—hands-on, down-to-earth men like Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Stewart, Bogie, Edward G. Robinson, and me. You didn’t have to be a pretty face back then. Now we have Tab Hunter. Need I go on?”

  “Are you including me in that roster?” Jimmy asked.

  “Since you brought it up, no, I am not,” he said. “You’re a different case. But I hope you don’t mind a veteran actor giving you some advice. You’re too much of a Brando clone, and that’s not good for your career. He’s better at playing Brando than you are. You really need to forge ahead and create your own identity on the screen. Like I did. I was an original, like Brando himself. I didn’t imitate anybody else. In fact, tons of actors now imitate me, and in some cases, publicly ridicule me—Tony Curtis, for example with all those damn impressions of me he does, and that damn ‘Judy, Judy, Judy.” [For more than fifty years, Grant impersonators attributed that repetition to Grant, since he was said to have uttered the line in one of his films.]

  “I’m sorry you have that opinion,” Jimmy said, rising up from the sofa in Grant’s suite. “I’ve decided I’m not hungry tonight.” Then he looked over at Lance. “Come on, let’s say good night. I have other plans for us.”

  “Don’t go, Lance,” Grant said.

  This time, Lance did not obey Grant. He walked out with Jimmy.

  ***

  Lance and Grant would later reconcile their differences, but Jimmy would never see Grant again.

  The next day, Grant got in touch with Lance and urged him to drop Jimmy. “I don’t know what you see in the lout. He’s a total shit. A bad influence on you. Please get rid of him. You’re too fine a person to hang out with riff-raff like that.”

  As Lance later said, “I didn’t have to give Jimmy up. I was with him until the bitter end. Life gave up on him. Whether we would have remained friends, much less lovers, will never be known now.”

  Grant’s hostility toward Brando and Jimmy once spilled over during an interview with a reporter: “I have no respect for this new breed of actors, especially those who pretend to be Method actors. What does that mean? A pair of dirty jeans, a lot of pot smoking, rampant sex, and a total lack of morals and decency.”

  “I hold these new idols of the screen in contempt. I detest their style of acting. Actually, it’s not acting, it’s posturing. That includes Brando and Monty Clift, and certainly that God awful James Dean. Under what haystack in Indiana did Jack Warner find that little devil?”

  “My suggestion is to put Clift, Dean, and Brando in the same movie, and let them itch, scratch, mumble, and duke it out. When they’ve finished killing each other off, bring back Jimmy Stewart, Spencer, and me to start making some real movies instead of the garbage they’re turning out now.”

  Whatever Happened to Lance Reventlow?

  Like his friend and lover, James Dean, Lance—who continued his pursuit of race-car driving—would also suffer a fiery, violent, and youthful death.

  In 1957, two years after Jimmy’s death, he flew to Europe, where he purchased a Maserati, which he crashed soon thereafter. Amazingly, he escaped unharmed from the tangled wreckage.

  Back in California, Lance established his own company, turning out Chevrolet-powered race cars, which he marketed as “Scarabs.” He told his chief engineer, Phil Remington, “If Jimmy had lived, he’d be working right with me, turning out Scarabs. That is, when he wasn’t making a great picture.”

  [During the lifetime of the company that produced them, four of the racecars were spectacular failures and four were astonishing successes. Reaching their greatest fame and exposure in 1958, each was the brainchild of Lance Reventlow, then in his early 20s and his chief engineer, Phil Remington, both of whom were committed to the concept of an All-American racecar whose technical specifications would surpass those of anything produced in Europe at the time. To that effect, from the premises of an auto shop in West Los Angeles, he combined a 301-cubic-inch “overbored” adaptation of a Chevrolet V-8 that channeled power through a Corvette’s four-speed gearbox. All of this, usually emblazoned in trademark colors of blue and white, were mounted onto a light aluminum chassis weighing only 127 pounds and sheathed with an aerodynamic and very expensive aluminum skin. Startup money for this dangerous, experimental, and horrendously expensive endeavor was almost certainly provided by Hutton. His mother had given him a $2 million trust fund, which he’d cashed in.]

  With his Scarab, Lance won the 1958 Governor’s Cup Race, and later a Grand Prix, using his low, shovel-nosed racer that outran Europe’s long dominant Maseratis, Jaguars, and Ferraris. It was the Reventlow Scarab that competed in the 252-mile Nassau Trophy Race.

  In 1960, perhaps to establish his heterosexual credentials, he asked the beautiful actress, Jill St. John, to marry him. When she accepted, he planted a spectacular ring—set with 100 diamonds—on her finger.

  The marriage lasted for three turbulent years.

  St. John was known for her high I.Q., but at her divorce hearing, she testified that Lance called her “stupid and incompetent” and insisted that she participate in dangerous sports.

  The following year, he married Cheryl Holdridge, a former Mouseketeer in the Walt Disney’s children’s TV series, The Mickey Mouse Club (1955-1959). He showered her with mink coats and diamonds, but told Grant that she was still “in love with Elvis Presley.”

  In 1962, Lance visited his mother at her Japanese-style mansion in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Her cousin, Jimmy Donahue was there. Lance was in a belligerent mood, wanting to confront her with her many failures as a mother. He also found it offensive that she was shacked up with Lloyd Franklin, a man younger than Lance. Looking for his mother, Lance asked Donahue: “where’s that drunken cunt of a mother of mine?”

  Gossipy Donahue immediately reported to her what her son had said. That afternoon Barbara instructed her lawyers to cut off Lance “without a cent.” That included his trust fund as well.

  With almost no money, he sold his California home and bought a small place in Benedict
Canyon. During this troubled time, Grant spent many a night just holding Lance in his arms to comfort him. As Grant later told Cukor, “It wasn’t about sex—it was about love.”

  Lance recovered from his mother’s belligerence. He told friends, “Regardless of what happens to me, Cary is always there for me.”

  In the last hour of his life, on July 24, 1972, Lance, who maintained a home in Aspen, set out with real estate brokers to examine the topography of a region of Colorado, near Aspen, that seemed ripe for the construction of a ski resort and hotel. He was a passenger, not the pilot, of a Cessna-206. The actual pilot was an inexperienced 27-year-old student pilot who flew into a blind canyon and stalled the aircraft. While trying to turn it around, the small plane plunged to the ground, killing Lance and the other men aboard.

  Grant later told friends, “It was the single darkest day of my life.” He experienced something akin to a nervous breakdown, but pulled himself together to fly to Aspen for the memorial service which had been organized by his widow, Cheryl.

  The next few months were very hard on Grant, who entered a deep, dark depression that he tried—rather successfully—to conceal. Close friends said he was almost suicidal.

  “He was my son,” he told friends. “Don’t even use the word ‘step’ in my presence. I will love that boy until the day I die. If I’ve known any joy in my life, it is the hours, days, and weeks I’ve spent with Lance. Just the two of us. If there is a God, he got jealous of such a bond—and had to take Lance from me. God succeeded in doing what James Dean failed to do.”

  The saddest picture Hutton ever saw was the wreckage of that Cessna-206 that had crashed onto that bleak mountainside outside Aspen, taking her only child, who died, estranged from her, at the age of thirty-six.

  She later said, “Lance surrendered the greatest gift a young man can, an unfulfilled life. I wish I could have been a better mother to him. I will never smile again.”

  For the rest of her life, she obsessed over his death, somehow blaming herself for the accident. “I bear more guilt because of my cruelty to him than the pilot of that plane.”

  “After Lance’s death, Barbara walked down a stairway to a dark gulf from which she never came back,” Grant said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE BEAUTY AND THE BILLIONAIRE: JAMES DEAN “AVIATES” WITH

  HOWARD HUGHES

  & TERRY MOORE

  Her “Alligator Love Call” Lures Jimmy

  In and Out of Bed With “The American Emperor”

  AMERICA’S RICHEST ECCENTRIC DEMONSTRATES WHAT UNLIMITED MONEY CAN DO IN HOLLYWOOD

  As a new Hollywood agent, Dick Clayton was placing his hopes on what he called “my two stars of tomorrow. James Dean and Terry Moore are ‘key race horses’ in my stable of actors.”

  Terry Moore... tickling Jimmy’s nose.

  When Jimmy heard that, with a grin, he asked Clayton, “Am I a stud stallion or a pony?”

  “What do you think?” Clayton answered.

  Those two future stars met for the first time in Clayton’s office early in 1954. At the time, Terry—an actress formed and nurtured by the entertainment industry since childhood—was farther along with her film career than Jimmy.

  [The petite, occasionally potty-mouthed Terry had been born in Los Angeles two years before Jimmy. As a child model, she had made her film debut in 1940 in Maryland, in which she was billed under her real name of Helen Koford. The part called for a child actress who could stand up on a moving, barebacked horse, not fall off, and deliver lines convincingly as Walter Brennan’s granddaughter.

  Later, with a new name, Judy Ford, she played a younger version of Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (1944).

  Her really big break had come as “Terry Moore” when she’d co-starred with Glenn Ford in the Columbia comedy, The Return of October (1948). In that film, her character had to convey the belief that her kindly, recently deceased uncle had been reincarnated as a horse.

  It was this movie that brought her to the attention of the billionaire aviator and movie mogul, Howard Hughes. He would radically change and influence her life for all time.

  Her first dramatic success had already happened before she’d met Jimmy. In 1952, she’d been cast as the young boarder whose shapeliness obsesses Burt Lancaster in Come Back Little Sheba, based on a script by William Inge. The role earned her an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.

  Ultimately, it wasn’t Terry, but Sheba’s star, Shirley Booth, who walked off with an Oscar (for Best Actress). Booth’s performance as an ill-bred but good-natured housewife was reviewed as “plump, loveable, and possessed of a distinctively New York accent.”]

  On that bright sunny day in 1954 in Clayton’s office, slovenly dressed Jimmy was asleep on a window seat. Terry walked over to him and slightly tickled his nose with the cord of a Venetian blind.

  He jumped up and, then, to her surprise, he tackled her. Clayton’s secretary was shocked to see them rolling over and over together on the floor. At first, she thought Jimmy was raping Terry, until she heard them giggling like schoolchildren.

  Finally, he helped her to her feet, introducing himself as James Dean. “I know you,” he said to her. “Elia Kazan directed me in East of Eden, and he told me all about you when he directed Man on a Tightrope (1953) with you in Germany.”

  “I hope he didn’t tell you all about me,” Terry said, half-jokingly, “at least not anything about when he tried to seduce me. He crawled in on my right, but within a few minutes, my mother—seemingly emerging from nowhere—crawled in on the other side.”

  “Oh no, such a sordid tale!” he said.

  She would later remember her first impression of Jimmy in a memoir:

  “As he hurried toward his destiny, he had to do everything now. Heaven could wait. Only it didn’t. He had a devastating smile and a perky nose. His eyes, which peered out from behind thick glasses, sparkled when he laughed. His head appeared too large for his body and was emphasized by his springy hair that waved in all directions. His clothes were unkempt, as were his scarred motorcycle boots.”

  That night, she invited him to her home for a family dinner, announcing to her mother, “Look what I found under a rock!” Jimmy didn’t evoke any of Terry’s previous pretty boy dates.

  She was dating Hughes at the time, but he was away in Las Vegas. Jimmy ate heartily of the home-cooked meal. Then, sliding his chair back, he unfastened and partially unzipped his pants and let out a big belch. “I think that if my father hadn’t been so stunned, he would have thrown him out the window,” she said.

  The next night, he accompanied Terry to a movie house screening Man on a Tightrope. The other stars included Fredric March, Gloria Grahame, and Adolphe Menjou. It was the story of a seedy traveling circus fleeing from Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia to freedom in Bavaria. In several scenes, Terry had to ride circus horses and even an elephant. She had fallen off one of them, and—unable to rise from her position, prone on the ground—had to be rushed to a hospital in an ambulance. Prior to her fall, she’d been dizzy, and prone to early-morning nausea.

  Two hours after her arrival at the hospital, she gave birth, prematurely, to a baby girl. All she remembered was the sound of a baby crying before she passed out. When she awakened, the baby was dead. The girl had lived for twelve hours, dying of septicemia.

  After their first date, Jimmy more or less became Terry’s shadow. He accompanied her to the Goldwyn Studios, where she did ballet stretches and barre work. Since he’d already trained with Katherine Dunham in New York, he joined her in the exercises.

  Terry was a Mormon, and Jimmy put on his one blue suit, and even a tie, and escorted her to church. “He had a suit on, but he still wore those stinking old boots,” she said.

  She later said that Jimmy was sensitive about comparisons to Brando, a label that had haunted him since his days in New York. Before introducing him to her speech coach, Marie Stoddard, he warned her, “I don’t want her to give me any shit about how I remind her o
f Brando. We dress as we please, and we ride motorcycles. Otherwise, the comparison ends there. Besides, my cock is longer than his.”

  He didn’t reveal how he knew Brando’s penile measurements.

  Terry said to a friend that she saw through his act—“All that brooding, staring into his coffee at Googie’s, mumbling if he spoke at all, acting strange, even hostile. Personally, I think all that posturing is premeditated. He’s putting on an act to attract attention—that’s all it is.”

  Early in his relationship with Terry, he wrote about her to Barbara Glenn, the girl he’d left waiting behind in New York.

  “I like her, but she’s a real bimbo. She’s involved in this weird relationship with Howard Hughes. I don’t get it. I can’t imagine what the two of them do together, and I’m too afraid to ask. I’m told he screws both boys and girls. At least that’s the poop running along the Hollywood grapevine.”

  Kazan remembered Terry in his memoirs, calling her “a gutsy little thing. She let it be known that she was the mistress of Howard Hughes, that plutocrat and scientific genius who made such a notable contribution to our war effort by designing the great, six-motored plywood seaplane, The Spruce Goose .”

  [Of course, Kazan was being sarcastic. Hughes’s monstrous plane was an abject and very expensive failure, later widely ridiculed as his “folly.” Cost overruns later led to Hughes’ investigation by a Senate subcommittee.]

  Kazan also wrote, “Hughes had been paying Terry’s household bills, so she’d be available to him whenever he needed her.”

  When Hughes finally returned from Las Vegas, he took Terry out on his first night back. She told him about Jimmy. “That will serve you right for picking up strays. You might catch something. Who knows? You might not be able to get rid of it.”