James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  “Back at the airport, the boxes of cookies were retrieved from the back seat of a limousine,” Jimmy said. “Once they were on board, we took off again for Vegas. I was looking forward to a good time. Boy, was I disappointed.”

  Once in Vegas and within Hughes’ suite, Jimmy was subjected to eighteen solid hours of watching movies, reels of which had been sent over by Johnny Meyer. It is not known how many of these movies Jimmy slept through. Hughes had ordered him not to drink a lot, because he didn’t want him going to the toilet in the middle of a screening.

  Meyer had delivered such films as Hell’s Angels with Jean Harlow; and The Outlaw with busty Jane Russell and Jack Buetel cast as Billy the Kid. [Buetel became Hughes’ long-term lover.] Also shipped were The Front Page with Pat O’Brien; Scarface with Paul Muni; Double Dynamite with Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx, and Holiday Affair with Robert Mitchum and Janet Leigh.

  After many hours of film watching, Jimmy and Hughes retired to bed. “I thought that after that, he might want to read movie scripts. Guess what! The fucker read nothing but comic books. Dick Tracy was his favorite.”

  “He told me he never read any of the thousands of letters he received weekly unless they were from special friends. “I saw two of those special letters. One was from Elizabeth Taylor, the other from Cary Grant. Guess what? They were each annoying Hughes with requests for free rides on TWA planes. He told me he always allowed Ava Gardner to travel for free as well.”

  “There was one thing about Hughes that was a real turn-off,” Jimmy said. “I don’t think he bathed often, yet he was a fanatic about cleanliness. He had boxes of Kleenex around, wiping everything clean. And he’d never touch a doorknob himself—he always got someone else to open it. And in spite of his mania for hygiene, he sometimes smelled like an old goat.”

  During the days and nights Jimmy spent with Hughes, he learned how the mogul ran his empire. “I couldn’t believe it! Hughes would sit for four or five hours—I’m not joking—on a toilet set calling people all over America. He had a phone installed in every one of his bathrooms. Sometimes, he’d read on the stool. At other times he watched TV, also installed in every bathroom. I was surprised that he likes to watch soap operas. Until I met him, I thought only bored housewives liked soap operas.”

  During some of their dialogues, Hughes shared his plans for the future with Jimmy, including his dream of moving to Florida and opening a large aircraft factory in the West Palm Beach area.

  He continually urged Jimmy to transfer his interest in racing cars to airplanes.

  Jimmy confessed he had a fear of flying, and that when Elia Kazan had taken him on his first plane ride (from New York to Los Angeles) “it was a real nail biter for me. I almost kissed the ground when we got to California.”

  Even though Jimmy resisted, Hughes kept demanding that he had to teach Jimmy how to pilot an airplane. He had selected a Cessna-140 to break Jimmy in as a pilot, promising him that if he’d learn how to fly it properly, he might give it to him as a gift.

  “I never really got the hang of it,” Jimmy later told Haggart. “I wish he’d offered me a custom-made racing car instead. I felt nervous up in the clouds. For all I knew, I might have a head-on crash with a god damn flying saucer.”

  “On the days when Hughes was busy, he turned me over to this flight instructor of his. I forget his name…Ray something. He was an older guy. Hughes said that when he was much younger, he’d been one of the stunt pilots he’d hired during the dangerous filming of Hell’s Angels.”

  “Hughes would get impatient with me teaching me how to pilot a plane, but this Ray guy was most helpful. Whenever I made a mistake, he’d say, ‘Let’s try again.’”

  “I never read a book on aviation, and I never intend to,” Jimmy said. “But no one, not even Hughes or Ray, could explain to me what makes a plane stay up in the air.”

  “Hughes wanted me to try my hand at landing a plane,” Jimmy said. “I was terrified that I’d crash it. He’d gone over the instructions countless times, but all I could remember was him shouting at me, ‘Easy, easy, pull it back.’”

  “’Pull what back?’ I wanted to know.”

  “Easy does it, just a little bit more,” Hughes yelled at him.

  “It wasn’t exactly a smooth landing,” Jimmy said. “I hit the ground with a real bump and for a moment the plane jumped up in the air again, but I finally brought the fucker down. Anyone who thinks landing a plane is a piece of cake is crazy. Anything can go wrong. At least I brought the thing to a stop before we ran off the runway and into a nearby field.”

  “I had heard that a Cessna has been known to stall in mid-air, and I was afraid I might touch the wrong instrument, and we’d plunge to earth.”

  Hughes had told me that even if the plane caught fire, ‘not to panic.’ How in hell could I not panic? If anyone has the right to panic, it’s when he’s flying a plane and it catches on fire when you’re up in space halfway to the moon.”

  “Hughes was a reckless son of a bitch,” Jimmy said. “One afternoon, at some point after I’d been piloting for a while, never being any good at it, he wanted me to perform crazy things that only a stunt pilot with years of experience can pull off. I think the guy had a death wish. There was this thing about putting a plane into a tailspin—the less said about that, the better.”

  “Regardless of how rotten a pilot I was, Hughes never lost his cool. My god, even when he’s in danger, that guy is as cool as a cucumber on an August day. Nothing seems to phase him. He’d been in crashes before, or so I heard, and had obviously lived to tell about it.”

  “You might call me the white knuckled terror of the air,” he said.

  Jimmy told Haggart that his most memorable time in the air was aboard one of Hughes’ relatively large planes. “I didn’t know one plane from another, but this mother fucker was big, and Hughes and I were the only passengers. He had a pilot and even a co-pilot manning the controls.”

  “When we took off, we got a snack served by this cute little waitress I’d like to make. I wonder if Hughes had made her. Probably he had.”

  “Way up in the clouds, Hughes did the strangest thing. He actually picked me up in his arms. He was a tall guy with long legs, and I’m a shortie. He carried me into a closed compartment near the back and locked the door behind us.”

  “My God, it was a bedroom with this quilt made of mink. Needless to say, I landed on that quilt, and he slowly took off my clothes before stripping down himself. Let’s put it this way: It was my first airborne fuck. Before that afternoon, I’d never heard of such a thing as an airborne fuck. But it’s recommended to anyone who wants it. But only if you can do in on mink, in a private bedroom, high up in the clouds.”

  The Weird and Wanton Ways of a Demented Billionaire

  THE AMERICAN EMPEROR SHOWS JIMMY HIS HAREM

  As Jimmy became more deeply involved with Hughes, he learned more and more about his sexual habits. Joan Crawford once proclaimed, “Hughes would fuck a tree.”

  “That wasn’t exactly true,” Jimmy said. “Oral sex was his favorite thing, both giving and receiving it.”

  “Howard would have five or six girls a day,” said his former girlfriend Paulette Goddard, who was once married to Charlie Chaplin. “But it was kind of chaste because he did it only one way: Lip service.”

  Hughes told Jimmy that of all the movie star seductions he’d enjoyed in his life, Carole Lombard was the “Queen of Fellatio.”

  “Clark Gable was one lucky man during the time he got to be with her.”

  “Hughes claimed that he was a breast man,” Jimmy said. “That’s why he had cast Jane Russell in The Outlaw. He said she had ‘the most beautiful pair of knockers he’d ever seen in his life.”

  He told Jimmy that he preferred “intermammary intercourse”—that is, making love by positioning and then rubbing his penis between a woman’s breasts.

  As Hughes’ biographer Charles Higham wrote: “With men, he also preferred oral sex. He was a tho
ughtless, dispassionate lover, seeking only control. His sexual partners were not so much lovers as hostages, prisoners, or victims of his will. He had to dominate everything. His boyish, vulnerable charm, handsome, underfed, a lanky look, and an atmosphere of power and money captivated all of his sexual partners, but he left no echoes behind.”

  Higham also wrote: “Only his deafness, and a certain insecurity in his sexual performance, were blights on his existence. Yet he was impatient, restless, because there were people he couldn’t buy. He was tortured by paranoia that was by no means unfounded.”

  One night in a rare confidential mood during pillow talk, Hughes confessed to Jimmy that he’d lost his virginity at the age of fifteen when his paternal uncle, Rupert Hughes, had seduced him. “He taught me how to perform oral sex, and it’s been a favorite pastime of mine ever since, as you well know.”

  “He also revealed that his alltime sexual fantasy would involve having Elizabeth Taylor and her fellow Britisher, Jean Simmons, in bed with him at the same time. After a session with them, I would then like Stewart Granger to enter the room and strip down, so I could have him too. But the bastard is threatening to kill me if I don’t stop pursuing Jean. They’re married, you know.”

  Reviews for Hughes in the boudoir were mixed. Gambler “Jimmy the Greek” said, “In his heyday, Hughes boasted of deflowering two hundred virgins in Hollywood. He must have got them all.”

  But William Heller, the pioneer Hollywood publicist, claimed, “Two of Hughes’ girlfriends told me he wasn’t worth a dime as a lover. He was just no good in the sack. They said all he wanted to do was to look and fondle. He liked recently divorced women. For some odd reason, he referred to them as ‘wet decks.’”

  “I find that sex is so much better, so much more intense, with a new divorcée,” he told Jimmy.

  Hughes had installed each of his current mistresses in rented lodgings, and one night, he invited Jimmy on a tour through some of them. Collectively, he referred to this bevy of starlets as “my harem.” He had within his employ about a half-dozen chauffeurs too. In addition to reporting back to Hughes details about the harem’s betrayals or indiscretions, their duties included driving the women around on errands, such as shopping trips, during the course of their days.

  “I hire only homosexuals as my drivers,” Hughes said. “Once or twice I’ve been fooled. I recall one chauffeur who told me he was gay, but then he was caught fucking one of my starlets. I fired him instantly. Today, when I hire a chauffeur, I insist that he blow me. You can always tell the difference between a totally straight guy blowing you and a gay one.”

  Members of his harem were forbidden to go out with other men, although they sometimes managed to slip out for a date or two without Hughes’ knowledge. Eventually, though, he caught them. He told Jimmy that his technique involved arriving unexpectedly at unpredictable times of the day or night.

  On the night he included Jimmy on a tour of his harem, Hughes preferred to be his own driver.

  “Within a period of about two and a half hours, we visited the homes of three really beautiful and sexy gals,” Jimmy later told Haggart. “I was offered a drink at each house. Hughes drank nothing—not even a glass of water. We chatted briefly with a puta, and then moved on.”

  “I figured that at some point, Hughes would want to spend the night and perhaps engage me for a three-way. Nothing like that. After I finished my drink, he rose to his feet, told the starlet good night, and we were off to our next house.”

  “That left me and the gal unsatisfied, although I thought all of them would be willing to go to bed with me. I told Hughes that if he just wanted to watch, he could see me in action with a woman, but he turned down the idea.”

  Jimmy learned that Hughes insisted that every member of his harem be inspected by his personal doctor. Before he’d even touch one of them, Hughes checked their fingernails, insisting that they receive frequent manicures. He also controlled the diets of these women, creating menus heavy on carrots and broccoli, vegetables he insisted that they eat for both lunch and dinner.

  On yet another night spent touring his harem, Hughes, with Jimmy, arrived at the home of a starlet who was in the process of entertaining a male guest. It was 2AM. Perhaps she had assumed that it was safe to slip a man into her bedroom at that hour.

  “I don’t remember the name of this girl,” Jimmy said, “but she came to the door looking like she’d had a rough night. Like a bird dog, Hughes instantly sensed something and headed straight for her bedroom. I followed him. He yanked back the covers to expose a nude Nicky Hilton. Based on all that newspaper publicity during his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, I recognized his face at once.”

  James Dean was not the only actor on whom Howard Hughes lavished money and obsessive attention. Another was Jimmy’s competitor, the rising star known as Robert Francis.

  Heavily promoted and publicized as a romantic heartthrob until his tragic early death in an airplane crash, Francis was the focal point of the poster depicted above. Its fine print reads like this:

  “THE NEW STARS SHINE BRIGHT AT COLUMBIA: Remember the job this youngster did in THE CAINE? Well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! He’s also sock in John Ford’s The Long Grey Line and a long line of hits to come!”

  “Hughes was furious,” Jimmy said. “He dragged Nicky out of the bed and through the living room, kicking him out the door, even though he was jaybird naked. Even in this agitated state, I was impressed with the hotel heir. He had a horse dick on him.”

  Later, Jimmy learned that one of the reasons Hughes detested Nicky was based on his affair—during the course of his marriage to Taylor—with Terry Moore.

  “I never found out how a naked Nicky got home,” Jimmy said. “But with that can of Budweiser between his legs, and those dangling balls, I’m sure he managed to hitch a ride in gay Beverly Hills.”

  ***

  Both Jimmy and the Aviator were men of changing moods. Hughes flew into Jimmy’s life, and one day just flew out. He was later seen giving flying lessons to Robert Francis, the handsome, blonde-haired star who had captured a lifelong corps of fans after his appearance in The Caine Mutiny (1954) with Humphrey Bogart.

  Rising star Francis was voted one of the most promising actors of 1954. His life would be cut short, violently and tragically, at the age of 25 on July 31, 1955 in the crash of the small airplane he was piloting.

  Katy Jurado...from Gary Cooper to James Dean, and hugely famous as a movie star throughout Latin America.

  ***

  During the peak of his involvement with Hughes, Jimmy, began to appear in public with some carefully arranged “studio dates.” Most of them were harmless, ending with a fast good night and perhaps a kiss on the cheek.

  Even if a date led to a seduction, there was rarely any lasting involvement.

  One of Jimmy’s most unlikely couplings was with the Mexican film star Katy Jurado, who was about seven years older than Jimmy. Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, she managed to launch herself—usually playing steamy femmes fatales—beginning in 1943, into both the Mexican and U.S. film industries.

  In 1951, Budd Boetticher cast her in her first Hollywood film, The Bullfighter and the Lady. Other producers became intrigued by her exotic beauty, and she soon followed in the footsteps of Dolores del Rio and Lupe Velez, two other Mexican actresses who played significant roles in Hollywood.

  Jurado became the first Latin American actress nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for her work in 1954’s The Broken Lance. Today, she is best remembered for her role in the Gary Cooper classic, High Noon (1952), which she’d filmed around the time when Jimmy dated her two or three times.

  Nicholas Ray asked Jimmy if he had gotten lucky.

  “Maybe,” he answered, enigmatically. “But I’ll tell you one thing: The Montana Mule is a tough act to follow,” a reference, of course, to his friend, “Coop.”

  ***

  Around the same time, another of Jimmy’s foreign-born liaisons resulting from
a “studio date” was with the French ingénue, Leslie Caron. She waltzed into and quickly out of his life after her appearance in her best-known film, An American in Paris (1951) opposite Gene Kelly. In time, she’d dance onscreen with Fred Astaire, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Rudolf Nureyev.

  Her emotional involvement with Jimmy was minor and fleeting, so it came as a surprise when she talked to the press the day after Jimmy died in 1955.

  Lori Nelson...Romantically linked by the tabloids to both James Dean and Tab Hunter, who supposedly competed for her attention.

  “I will never dance again,” she vowed.

  It was a vow expressed during her emotion of the moment, not a promise to be kept.

  Even though her affair with him amounted to no more than a brief dalliance, she seemed emotionally shattered at news of his death. However, she recovered quickly.

  ***

  As a studio date, actress/model and starlet Lori Nelson, who had emerged from Santa Fe, presented a context that was complicated at the time because she had been widely publicized by the Hollywood press as “Tab Hunter’s girlfriend.” In fact, her romantic involvement with Tab was more serious and long-lived than the brief encounter she had with Jimmy.

  Jimmy’s agent, Dick Clayton, arranged for Jimmy to escort her to a premiere.

  Later she expressed nothing but compliments for him. “Jimmy was thoughtful about little things that count to a girl. You never had to open a car door—he did it for you. And you could count on other attentions which meant a lot.”

  Lori never explained what those “other attentions” were.

  She had made her film debut in the 1952 Western, Bend of the River, and later appeared as “Rosie Kettle” in the film comedy, Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair.

  Lori admitted to Jimmy that her early life had been dominated by a series of beauty pageants and talent contests, the cumulative effects of which resulted, in 1950, in a seven-year contract with Universal when she was only seventeen. Although Tab was also dating Debbie Reynolds at the time, he and Lori became a hot item in the gossip columns. Reportedly, they were engaged to be married.