In his memoirs, Tab wrote: “More than once, I thought about bringing Lori home and introducing her to my mother, telling her that this is the girl I’m going to marry.”
At the time of these marriage dialogues, Tab was involved in a torrid affair with Ronald Robertson, the well-known (male) figure skater. Tab admitted to Dick Clayton, “I’m confused about my sexual orientation.”
Even though she probably knew better, Louella Parsons wrote about Tab’s so-called “burning romance” with Lori.
In lieu of her blurb about Hunter’s non-romance with Lori, Parsons would have preferred to run a different news item, preferably a “teaser” that might pique the interest of readers with hints about a possible marriage of Jimmy to any of the several starlets he was dating at the time.
In response to Parsons’ coy queries about his marital plans, or lack thereof, Jimmy answered, “Lady, I’m not contemplating marriage to anyone…ever. You may not understand this, and I don’t want you to print it, but the biggest affair I’m having is with myself. Call it a voyage of self-discovery.”
In 2005, Blood Moon Productions issued the world’s most comprehensive overview (center photo) of the Hollywood involvements of the eccentric billionaire aviator, Howard Hughes.
Chapter Twenty
WERE THEY REALLY STAR-CROSSED, LIKE ROMEO & JULIET?
JAMES DEAN & PIER ANGELI
Changing Partners With Ursula Andress
A TANGLED WEB OF HOLLYWOOD AFFAIRS
EVERYBODY SLEEPING WITH EVERYBODY ELSE’S LOVER
“In Pier Angeli, a nineteen-year-old Italian girl, Hollywood has found an actress who eludes the town’s traditional classifications and whose unvarnished beauty and instinctive talent have already caused her to be called ‘Little Garbo.’”
—Theodore Strass in Colliers, April, 1952
“It was fire & ice. She screwed half of Hollywood.”
—James Dean, describing his affair with Pier Angeli
“I’m the father of that bambino—not Vic Damone!”
—James Dean
The much ballyhooed romance of James Dean and Pier Angeli was a summer fling that began in the late spring of 1955 and lasted until the autumn leaves began to fall. Jimmy, of course, would die before the end of that year’s September.
James Dean with Pier Angeli...a sullen romance.
His friend, John Gilmore, had been with him when he met Pier on the Warner lot. He was shooting East of Eden, and she had a role in The Sliver Chalice, being filmed on a nearby stage.
One day, she walked into the Warner commissary with actor Jack Palance, who played the villain in The Sliver Chalice, which Jimmy referred to as “that fucking religious thing.” After Palance had turned down the lead role in favor of the villain’s, it had been assigned to Paul Newman, resulting in what he’d later define as “the most embarrassing flop of my life.”
As Gilmore remembered it, Pier’s first chat with Jimmy was awkward. He managed to say that he didn’t like living in Los Angeles and that he wanted to return to New York as soon as possible. After she left, Jimmy told Gilmore, “She’s one stuck-up lady. But she’s pretty.”
In spite of their lackluster first meeting, Jimmy, within days, was dating her. Warners was pleased with the consequent publicity because it would promote both of these new stars as well as their pictures.
“Perhaps now that I’m dating a respectable girl like Pier, maybe Sheilah Graham will quit busting my balls and give me a decent writeup for a change.”
“Jimmy pretended he hated publicity,” according to Gilmore, “but the son of a bitch loved it. As for Pier, she was publicity crazy. She devoured herself in print like a fat lady swallowing chocolate drops.”
When she wasn’t needed on her film set, Pier became a constant visitor to the set of East of Eden Director Elia Kazan had a dressing room next to Jimmy’s, one with thin walls. From what he heard, he thought it sounded “like Jimmy boy was giving this Italian gal multiple orgasms.”
Many other times, however, he heard bitter arguments, mostly about Pier’s domineering mother, Enrica Pierangeli, who did not want her daughter involved with “that rebel.”
“I have never been interested in a boy as young as Jimmy,” Pier told the press. “I have always liked older men, finding them more interesting. They can talk about something other than baseball and the jitterbug.”
“He’s a wonderful boy. He’ll soon be twenty-four, and I’m twenty-one. My mother lets me go out on dates. There’s a joke going around Hollywood that if a man dates me, he has to take my mother along as chaperone and also my twin sister, Marisa Pavan.”
Enrica’s control over her daughter has been exaggerated by many other biographers. Obviously, as later events would show, she was not subject to her mother’s total control. After her arrival in Hollywood, she’d had an affair with actor John Barrymore, Jr., and also with Eddie Fisher before Debbie Reynolds snatched him away.
At the time Jimmy began dating Pier, she was just coming down from a broken romance with Kirk Douglas, with whom she had filmed The Story of Three Loves (1953). The actor later said, “She had huge, dark eyes, and a refreshing innocence. She was virginal and had a beautiful body and an infectious laugh. I became enamored of her, this child that I could mold into the image I wanted, like Pygmalion.”
Their relationship lasted for eighteen months. On night in Paris, Douglas had walked her back to her hotel, the very posh George V. He kissed her on the cheek.
“Will I see you tomorrow?” she asked.
“No, he replied. “Domani è troppo tardi.” [That was the name of her first film, Tomorrow is Too Late (1950).]
Their romance ended at the entrance to the George V, leaving her heart-broken.
In Hollywood, she told a reporter, “I don’t want to grow up. I just want to be young and have fun. I’m greedy for life, romance, and emotion, and that doesn’t mean staying home every night and listening to my mother’s lectures on morality. With my father dead, I’m the chief breadwinner in the family, and I don’t intend to be pushed around.”
Writer Stewart Stern wrote the script for Pier’s first American film, Teresa, and was working on a screenplay for Jimmy’s next film, Rebel Without a Cause. He said, “Jimmy’s affair with Pier had to do with the child who resided in each of them. They played a game like a Hollywood fantasy.”
Pier told Stern, as he later relayed to Nicholas Ray, “One of my greatest problems with Jimmy is that when he has to urinate, he’ll do it anywhere regardless of where we are. He rarely bothers to make it all the way to a toilet.”
Cal York, a gossip columnist, reported on Jimmy’s romance with Pier:
“Woo-some Twosome: Some still say it’s a publicity romance, but Cal knows a secret! Pier quietly bought Jimmy a gold wrist watch, a gold identification bracelet, and a miniature gold frame with her picture in it. No, they don’t exactly go with his Levis and sweat shirt (the new school uniform!) but he was very pleased just the same. So help us, pretty Pier now wears a pearl ring on the second toe of her left foot! Cal tried to ask her if she was engaged—but the words just wouldn’t come out!”
Pier told York, “I’m seeing a great deal of ‘Jemmy,’” as she called him.
***
What Jimmy didn’t know, and what might have ended the romance before it had really begun, was that Pier, after Kirk Douglas dumped her, had also launched an affair with Paul Newman, her co-star in The Sliver Chalice.
As Deborra, she was Newman’s love interest in the film. According to Virginia Mayo, the star of the movie, “Pier looked radiant in Madonna blue with a gold circlet in her hair. Forgetting about his wife, or even his other girlfriend, Joanne Woodward, Paul fell hard for Pier. He told me she was virginal. Paul could be so innocent. She wasn’t virginal at all.”
She had told Mayo that when she was fifteen, she’d been raped by an American soldier. A year later, she accused Marlon Brando of forcibly “deflowering her.”
She had originally been
discovered in Italy, by the director and actor, Vittorio De Sica. That led to her casting as his co-star in her first film, Domani A troppo tardi. “The moment I saw her, I knew I wanted her as my co-star,” De Sica said. “That fragile body…That sensitive face...”
Their director was Leonide Moguy, who also cast her in her second picture, Domani Aun altro giorno (Tomorrow is another day).
De Sica wanted to make a film co-starring Marlon Brando and Pier. Brando was in Rome at the time. He brought them together, and Brando invited Pier, then known as Anna Maria Pierangeli, on a date. Details are sparse, but Pier always claimed that Brando raped her after they made a nighttime visit to the Roman Colosseum. He asked to see it from the grassy knoll above. There, he forced himself on her. Despite her resistance, she was no match for his brute force. In tears, she later reported the incident to Da Sica.
Pier Angeli with Paul Newman in a publicity shot for Somebody Up There Likes Me.
***
Even though she’d made off with Eddie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds had become Pier’s best friend and confidante. One afternoon, Pier phoned her: “Can you just imagine what is happening to me? I’m doing a balancing act, dating Jimmy Dean and Paul Newman, the two handsomest men in Hollywood.”
“Lucky you,” Reynolds reportedly said. “And I’m stuck with this Fisher guy, who seems to spend more time with Mike Todd than with me.”
Pier invited Newman to her home for Sunday dinner, where he met the formidable Enrica, who quickly ascertained that he was not a Catholic. Even worse, “Jew blood flows in his veins. I forbid you to see him again except for on the movie set.”
Two views of Marisa Pavan in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo. Top photo: With Ben Cooper, and lower photo, a “mother/daughter” shot with La Lupa, Anna Magnani.
Competition and rivalries for both romance and acting roles with her sister, Pier Angeli, was intense.
“Paul’s romance with Pier was relatively harmless,” Mayo said. “Just two kids having fun. He soon returned to reality. After all, he had a wife and kids back on the East Coast, and was talking about getting a divorce so he could marry Joanne Woodward. Actually, I think he was relieved that Jimmy came onto the scene to take Pier away from him. And, since this is crazy Hollywood, the picture, of course, got more complicated. He was also slipping around and seeing Dean on the side.”
The first time Jimmy had lunch alone with Pier, he invited Newman to join them, but he declined.
“I was shocked,” Jimmy said. “Pier ordered a raw hamburger and two raw eggs. For her drink of choice, a glass filled with water. No wonder she was so little and petite. I’m short, but I towered over her. I don’t think she was more than five feet, if that.”
That night, Jimmy was introduced to Pier’s twin, Marisa Pavan, who was also an actress. “There was strong sibling rivalry there,” he said. “I mean, both of them were beautiful, had the same look, though not identical twins. Ironically, at the time, Marisa was dating Vic Damone, who would, within weeks, marry Pier.”
Pavan’s breakthrough role came in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo (1955), in which she was cast as Anna Magnani’s daughter. The role had first been offered to Pier, who was not available.
Pavan later received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress, but lost to Jo Van Fleet, who had played Jimmy’s whorish mother in East of Eden.
[In 1956, a year after Jimmy died, Pavan married the French actor, Jean-Pierre Aumont, the former lover of Grace Kelly. (As Jimmy himself admitted from personal experience, “Grace Kelly is a tough act to follow.”) Pavan was still married to Aumont at the time of his death in 2001.]
Pavan was not charmed by Jimmy’s braggadocio, as she phrased it. “He was rude to our mother. He’d just walk into our home without saying anything and put on our record player, playing the music really loud. When I pointed out the weakness of his film, East of Eden he took grave offense. He couldn’t stand criticism, and he screamed at me, calling me names.”
Jean-Pierre Aumont in The Cross of Lorraine (1943) an MGM wartime film about the escape of French fighters from a Nazi prison camp.
As the days went by, the press wrote more and more about Jimmy’s romance with Pier, which was still flourishing, even though both her sister and mother detested him.
“Jimmy is different,” Pier told a reporter. “He loves music. He loves it from the heart the way I do. We have much to talk about. “It’s wonderful to know such an understanding man.”
Most of Jimmy’s discarded gay lovers viewed the romance cynically. John Kerr told friends, “I’m sure their relationship is platonic, knowing Jimmy as I once did. He’s dating Pier just to cover up his homosexuality.”
Reporters continued to besiege Jimmy with questions about his possible engagement. He shrugged off such queries. “Who knows? Nothing complicated, just a nice girl for a change. I mean, you know, I can talk to her. She understands. Nothing messy. Just an easy kind of friendly thing. I respect her. She’s untouchable. We’re members of totally different castes. She’s the kind of girl you put on the shelf and look at. Anyway, her old lady doesn’t like me. Can’t say I blame her.”
Slowly, Jimmy began to introduce Pier to his friends, including Gene Owen. She had taught acting when he was enrolled in Santa Monica College. “One Sunday, Jimmy and Pier arrived at our house as my husband and I were packing to go to Europe. Pier urged us to include Italy in our itinerary. As soon as possible, she wanted to show Italy to Jimmy. She seemed to be deeply in love with him and he with her. I thought it was a solid romance.”
Pier often spoke to him about her homeland and the deprivations her family had known in Rome after moving there from her native Sardinia. In Italy, she’d been known as Anna Maria Pierangeli.
De Sica introduced her to producer Fred Zinnemann, who had cast her in her first American film, Teresa (1951), with John Ericson and Rod Steiger, Jimmy’s friend.
The screenwriter was Steward Stern, who would soon become a friend of Jimmy’s on the set of Rebel Without a Cause He was a tall, dark, and sensitive man, a young cousin of Arthur M. Loew, Sr., president of Loew’s International, the parent company of MGM.
In time, Stern also introduced the cinema heir, Arthur Loew, Jr., to both Marisa and Pier. “My relative was a real swinger, and I didn’t want him to corrupt either of these girls.”
As Sheilah Graham would later say, but couldn’t put in her column, “Only in Hollywood, kids. After young Arthur had this widely publicized affair with Elizabeth Taylor, he took up with Pier Angeli. When Pier was out of the country, Marisa Pavan started to date him. He then got involved with the singer Eartha Kitt, but his family objected to the interracial aspects of that liaison. Guess what became unbelievable? After Arthur dumped Eartha, he shacked up with Jimmy Dean. As I said, ‘Only in Hollywood, kids.’”
Meeting his friend, William Bast, Jimmy was asked, “Just what is going on here between you and Pier? I hear so many conflicting stories.”
“You read too many gossip columns,” Jimmy said. “Nothing is going on, absolutely nothing. What have you become? A stringer for Hedda Hopper? OK, if you must know, Pier and I are just fooling around. Nothing serious.”
He did say, “She has the face of a Madonna in a Florentine fresco, not that I’ve ever seen a Florentine fresco except in a book. She dresses like an Italian princess. Her eagle-eyed mother detests me. She thinks I’m scruffy, a non-Catholic, and too crude for her immaculate daughter.”
Jimmy might have accused Bast of reading too many gossip columns, but he read a few of them himself. “I learned more about Pier in the gossip columns that I did from her. As a protective mother, Enrica failed completely. Pier’s been linked to too many men. Only the other day, I read she’d had this thing, perhaps a one-night stand, with Prince Mahmud Pahlavi, the brother of the Shah of Iran.”
Helena Sorell, Pier’s close friend, had been skeptical of the Angeli/Dean coupling since its debut. “Pier would flirt outrageously with any man in sight, even the wa
iter. If all the attention was not on Jimmy, he would pout worse than a small child.”
One day on the Warner lot, Pier encountered Humphrey Bogart, who’d heard that she was dating Jimmy. “Why don’t you suggest to your boyfriend that he take a bath once in a blue moon?” He then walked on.
During the filming of East of Eden Jimmy told his co-star, Richard Davalos, “For better or worse, I intend to spend the rest of my life with Pier. We’re going to buy a mansion in Beverly Hills and fill it with ten bambini. We’ll have our honeymoon in Rome, where Pier claims she can arrange a visit with the pope. She wants me to become a Catholic.”
On one occasion, he took Pier to meet his father, Winton, and his step-mother. For about an hour, the quartet sat together in the Dean living room, mostly in awkward and painful silence, although Winton asked his son how his front teeth were holding up.
When the deadly stillness of that hot summer afternoon in California became overbearing, Jimmy reached for Pier’s hand. After a quick goodbye, he headed out the door, never to return.
A few weeks before her own death, Pier delivered a statement to the National Enquirer about that summer’s involvement with Jimmy:
“We used to go to the California coast and stay there secretly in a cottage on a beach far away from all the prying eyes. We'd spend much of our time on the beach, sitting there or fooling around just like college kids. We would talk about ourselves and our problems, about the movies and acting, about life and life after death... We had a complete understanding of each other...Sometimes, we would just drive along and stop at a hamburger stand for a meal or go to a drive-in movie. It was all so innocent and so emphatic.”
James Dean Page 72