Nicholas Ray, director of Rebel Without a Cause, was fully aware of Jimmy’s involvement with Pier. He said, “He is intensely determined not to love or be loved. He was fascinated, absorbed at times, with anything new—be it beautiful, bizarre, perverted or not so perverted, whatever. If a woman thought she was the only one in his life, she soon found out differently. He also had many men and women fall in love with him, including one of the most notorious homosexuals in Hollywood.”
Ray refused to name the culprit, but actress Betsy Palmer, who once had a brief fling with Jimmy, thought she knew the answer.
“It was Liberace. I was with Jimmy one night when a call came in from Liberace in Las Vegas. He offered to give Jimmy $1,000 plus a round-trip, first-class ticket if he’d fly to join him in Las Vegas. He told Jimmy he’d already seduced Rock Hudson, and that he wanted him to be next. Later, Jimmy told me that Liberace wanted to go to bed with him even more than he wanted to go to bed with Brando, and that he then claimed, ‘I’ll get that one, too.’”
It is assumed that Jimmy never accepted Liberace’s offer. Perhaps he would have back during his hustling days.
In a memoir, John Gilmore quoted one of Jimmy’s observations about Pier. “She’d corner me with her dumb preoccupations because we’d just fucked. I thought I’d chase her away with what she said was my ‘volcano of need,’ but I’ll tell you this—Miss Pizza’s the one you can call a volcano—but there’s no hot lava shooting out of her.”
At the time that he was supposed to be having this torrid love affair with Pier, Jimmy showed up in Palm Desert at the vacation home shared by Tab Hunter and Jimmy’s agent, Dick Clayton.
“Jimmy arrived in his new Porsche Spyder,” Gilmore said. “He had this blonde pinup with him, some foreign starlet. He told everybody he didn’t plan to spend the night.”
“We don’t have anything to talk about,” Jimmy said, in reference to the starlet, “but she gives a great blowjob. My cock can go all the way into her empty head.”
Some of the gossips who had promoted the so-called passionate romance of “Romeo and Juliet” began to have their doubts. It was even suggested that the “lovebirds” had an open relationship.
Pier was spotted showing up, alone, at the opening of singer Tony Martin at Ciro’s, in Los Angeles. Before the evening was over, she was sitting and holding hands with another singer, Dean Martin, who, for some reason, had also arrived alone.
At seven o’clock the following morning, a doorman at Martin’s hotel spotted Pier leaving his suite.
When she arrived back at her home, Enrica accepted her explanation that she’d been overly tired and had fallen asleep in her dressing room.
The following Saturday night, she went out with Jimmy, who did not return her until 4AM. Enrica was waiting with fury at the door, where she denounced Jimmy. “No decent Italian boyfriend would bring home a young girl at this hour.”
“When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” Jimmy told her. “Welcome to Hollywood. Here, we’re lucky to bring a girl home before the sun comes up.”
He later told Elia Kazan, “Nothing tastes better than forbidden fruit. Didn’t Eve offer Adam some kind of fruit? An apple, I heard? But more likely it was a pomegranate, the ripest fruit growing in the Garden of Eden. It’s juicier than an apple.”
That afternoon, Enrica demanded and was granted an audience with Jack Warner. Not only had Jimmy brought her daughter home right before dawn, but during their long date, she had discovered a diaphragm in her daughter’s bedroom.
“Pier is going to be a big star, and I don’t want her life ruined by this Dean fellow. I want you to demand that he never see Pier again.”
The following morning, Jimmy was summoned into Warner’s office. “I want you to stop fucking that Italian broad or else I’ll fire you from East of Eden I even heard you’re thinking of marrying her.”
“Don’t worry your pretty head about that,” Jimmy told the studio mogul. “Signora Pierangeli wouldn’t let me marry her precious daughter even if I were the pope.”
For the next four days, Pier did not see Jimmy. During that interim, she was spotted at the Captain’s Table, a Hollywood restaurant, dining with Donald O’Connor, who had recently made Singin' in the Rain (1952) with Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds.
Columnist Mike Connolly spotted the odd couple, and wrote, “O’Connor was very quiet and very attentive to Angeli at a table in the darkest corner of the restaurant.”
Hedda Hopper also spotted them yet another of their outings: “I have rarely seen a cuter couple than Donald O’Connor and Pier Angeli,” she wrote in her column.
As it turned out, Jimmy was not alone during his exile from Pier. He was seen dating this curvy redhead, an extra from the set of The Silver Chalice. She had been “servicing” Paul Newman, who, wanting to get rid of her, had passed her on to Jimmy.
“Jane Doe [not her real name, of course, but she didn't want her identity revealed] said, “How many gals can say that they’ve been fucked by both Paul Newman and James Dean? Perhaps a few—Marilyn Monroe, for instance.”
“Having had shack-ups with Scott Brady and Fernando Lamas,” she continued, “I’ve known better-endowed men. But Newman and Dean were more than adequate for the job. But on that same set, I met my future husband, a cameraman. He’s got them all beat, and we have three sons to prove it. I named them Paul, James, and Scott.”
When Jimmy reunited with Pier, he said, “It was more exciting than ever because we had to slip around and see each other in offbeat joints. It became a joke with us, a sort of game, exciting because everybody thought we’d stopped seeing each other.”
Pier was more serious, claiming, “He wanted me to love him unconditionally. But he wasn’t able to love someone in return, that is, with any deep feeling for the other person. He wanted to be the beloved. He was a troubled boy who wanted to be loved very badly. I loved him as I had never loved anyone else in my life. I could not give him the enormous amount that he needed. It emptied me. There was no other way to be with Jimmy, except to love him and be emptied myself.”
***
When East of Eden was wrapped in August of 1954, Jimmy told Pier goodbye and flew to New York where his agent, Jane Deacy, had arranged for him to star in The Unlighted Road. He had pleaded with Pier to accompany him, but she refused. Their relationship was beginning to fall apart.
Jimmy’s composer friend, Leonard Rosenman, said, “Jimmy would get drunk on a couple of glasses of wine, and when he got loaded, he became very nasty, really mean. He underwent a complete personality change. I loved the guy, and I put up with it on many a night. But he had a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality. I mean, he’d get out of control. Often, he became vicious. Sometimes, he became violent and had a reputation for beating up his girlfriends. Perhaps he did this to Pier once too often. I think she had reached the point where she could take it no more.”
“I don’t mean to take up for Jimmy, but Pier was at fault, too,” Rosenman said. “She wasn’t some sweet hothouse flower, She had a very gloomy, dark side to her, and Jimmy told me about this. She also suffered great mental anguish and had a streak of cruelty.”:
“Perhaps Jimmy did love her, but she’d go and flaunt affairs with other men, throwing them in his face. Many men, not just Jimmy, beat up their girlfriends or wives. I’m not forgiving Jimmy or any other men. These two volatile human beings would in the end kill themselves, Pier by descending into heavy drug abuse which led to her suicide.”
During a reunion with Deacy, Jimmy told her that he was considering marrying Pier.
She urged him not to. “Do you want to be forever known as Mr. Pier Angeli? Surely, you don’t want that.”
He became cross with her. “Are you saying that you think her career will overpower my own? Thanks a lot.”
“I hear she’s always trying to control you,” Deacy said. “Dick Clayton keeps me informed. And do you really want Enrica Pierangeli for a mother-in-law? Dick also told me that Pier wants you
to become a Catholic. She’s even got you wearing dark suits, white shirts, and a tie!”
Deacy had arranged for Jimmy to star in The Unlighted Road for the Schlitz Playhouse of Stars. Although he didn’t know it at the time, this half-hour thriller, aired on May 6, 1955, would be his last television film.
His co-star was a pretty starlet, Pat Hardy, with whom he launched an affair. In another irony, she had been having an affair with Vic Damone.
One reporter picked up on this. “James Dean, the boy who was cooing it up with Pier Angeli before she switched to Vic Damone, has been seeing Pat Hardy, the girl who was mighty cozy with Vic until Pier came along. Sort of a change-partners deal.”
There was another irony that the journalist didn’t know about at the time. When she wasn’t dating Jimmy or Damone, Hardy was also conducting an off-the-record affair with Marlon Brando.
Before he’d been drafted into the Army, Damone had sustained an affair with Elizabeth Taylor. In her column, Hedda Hopper had written: “Fickle Elizabeth Taylor has fallen in love again, this time with a handsome young crooner, Vic Damone, who is giving Frank Sinatra’s fading career a push toward oblivion.” [Sinatra, ofcourse, was furious.]
“Vic was adorable,” Elizabeth later said. “A dear man, but he was drafted, and I’m not the kind of woman who waits around.”
[Born in Brooklyn in 1928, Vito Rocco Farinola, known for his melodic lyricism and impeccable enunciations, was three years older than Jimmy. As Vic Damone, he became a household word in America, singing such hits as “My Heart Cries for You,” and “On the Street Where You Live,” from My Fair Lady.
He became a serious rival of Sinatra, who very generously said, “Damone has the best set of pipes in the business.”]
On the very day Jimmy flew to New York, Pier had a reunion with Damone at Warners. They’d had a brief romance before.
Ironically, she’d not yet run into him in Hollywood, even though her twin sister, Marisa Pavan, had been recently dating Damone too.
Pier and Damone had met in 1952 when she was in Munich filming The Devil Makes Three. At the time, he was stationed nearby with the U.S. Army, and he’d called Pier, asking her to appear as one of the players in a show he was producing for the servicemen at the base.
She agreed to make an appearance. Three days later, on stage, he was singing “September Song” to her, which led to their “heavy dating” for two months.
As she later admitted, “We danced a lot, had long talks, and enjoyed a lot of fun together. I had this electric sensation when I was around him. He was so cute, so very cute. But eventually, we went our separate ways. I had meant to call him until I heard Marisa may have been hot for him.”
After having a drink with Damone, and reminiscing about their time together in Germany, Pier met him again at a Hollywood party that same evening. The next thing he knew, he was dining at the Pierangeli’s family table presided over by Enrica.
When Marisa was confronted with Damone, her former date, being welcomed into her family circle as an escort for her sister, she had yet another reason to be jealous of her twin.
Enrica doted on Damone, finding him, “so handsome, so talented—I love his voice—so Italian, so respectable, and so Catholic.”
She later told Pier, “and so heterosexual. Not a pervert like some of your other dates.”
Before proposing marriage to Pier, Damone had not only very recently dated Marisa, but also Pier’s major rival on the screen, the singing sensation Anna Maria Alberghetti. Anna was also dating Eddie Fisher when Pier wasn’t out with him.
Damone was also seen out with Mona Freeman; Frank Sinatra’s daughter, Nancy (Frank didn’t like that); Maureen O’Hara (when she wasn’t making a pirate film); Judy Spreckles; Sheela Fenton; and Joan Tyler.
Then, amid a flurry of tabloid speculation about Damone and his entanglements with Pier, Marisa, Anna Maria Alberghetti, and others of the women listed above, reports appeared that Damone was about to fly to New York with either Pat Hardy or Joan Tyler (claims differed), where they would announce their engagement. “Joan (Tyler) and I have kissed and made up,” Damone told Variety.
Then, within the week, Damone’s engagement to Pier was announced.
Vic Damone...Stealing Frank Sinatra’s fans and James Dean’s girlfriend.
Two days later, in New York, Jimmy read about Pier’s engagement to Damone in Dorothy Kilgallen’s newspaper column. He made no attempt to call her or to confront her.
Later, after Jimmy’s return to Los Angeles, he phoned Pier, who agreed to meet with him. He later told Rosenman what happened: “She claimed Enrica was forcing her to marry Damone,” Jimmy said. “But Damone wasn’t the reason I beat the shit out of her that night. I found out that while I was in New York, she’d been fucking with Brando. I know Brando likes exotic foreign women, but I knew that he was fucking Pier only because I told him I was in love with her. Sometimes a gal can look so goddamn 'angeli'—pardon the pun—and be nothing but a tramp.”
“When Damone strips her down to fuck her, he’ll discover she’s black and blue. She’ll probably tell him that a mad dog attacked her. Actually, I’m not a mad dog, but one cool cat. But if you get me riled up, watch out! I go from cool cat to Tigerman.”
Enrica also reported that Jimmy—pumped up on liquor, pot, and amphetamines—sometimes struck Pier in anger. Even his friends used the words “erratic”, “intense”, and “impulsive” to describe him.
“I’m a serious-minded and intense little devil,” Jimmy admitted. “I don’t see how people can stay in the same room with me. I know I couldn’t tolerate myself in the same room.”
That confession was made to Elia Kazan.
Jimmy also told Rosenman, “I was shocked when I read about her engagement to Damone. I didn’t see it coming. I figured that her family and friends got to her and changed her mind about me. Maybe she liked his singing better than mine.”
Before the wedding, at the Villa Capri, Jimmy and Damone confronted one another. Jimmy was dining there with his new friend, Lew Bracker.
Recognizing Jimmy at a nearby table, the singer got up and made his way over to where Jimmy was sitting, extending his hand.
Jimmy refused it, just staring at him. “You may be marrying Pier,” he said, “but she isn’t yours. Never was, never will be.”
Damone took a swing at Jimmy, but a waiter restrained him. Jimmy and Bracker got up and quickly left the restaurant.
Jimmy would meet Damone once again, months after the wedding, again at the Villa Capri.
***
When Jimmy escorted Terry Moore to the premiere of Sabrina, it led to press speculation about a break-up with Pier. Louella Parsons rushed into print, calling Jimmy’s romance with Pier “as cold as an ice cube in Greenland.”
Reporter Kendis Rochlen called Pier, asking if she and Jimmy had had a tiff.
“I was just too tired to go to the premiere,” she claimed. “They’re always such big productions, and I’d rather see the picture a few days later, when I can relax and eat popcorn. I’ve been terribly busy with dancing lessons and costume fittings for Green Mansions.”
[Pier never appeared in Green Mansions. MGM decided to shelve it until 1958, when Mel Ferrer directed Tony Perkins, with Audrey Hepburn cast into the role originally slated for Pier.]
Jimmy’s last public outing with Pier was on September 29, 1954 at the world premiere of Judy Garland’s “comeback picture,” A Star is Born. Photographers were in a frenzy snapping their picture. Jimmy looked discontented, as if he wanted to escape the gala.
[It can be assumed that he didn't tell Pier that he'd previously been sexually intimate with Garland.]
One reporter spotted Jimmy and Pier talking in a corner of the lobby with Clark Gable and Marlene Dietrich, who were apparently waiting for their respective companions to emerge from the toilets. Eavesdropping, the reporter heard Gable tell Dietrich, “Why, with my track record, haven’t I gotten around to you yet?”
Pushed as
ide in the crowd, the reporter didn’t hear Dietrich’s response.
***
At St. Timothy’s Catholic Church, on November 24, 1954, Pier and Vic Damone were married.
[Ironically, this would be the same church where seventeen years later, Pier would be buried after committing suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills.]
Some six-hundred star-studded guests showed up for the ceremony, including her best friend, Debbie Reynolds. Other celebrities included Ann Blyth, Jack Benny (who had once seduced Jimmy), Cyd Charisse, Danny Thomas, and tap-dancing Ann Miller. Since Pier’s father was dead, E.J. Mannix, president of MGM, gave the bride away.
A legend still persists that Jimmy, wearing a black leather jacket, was spotted across the street, astride his Harley-Davidson, as confetti rained down on the newlyweds as they emerged from the church. As photographers snapped away, the roar of the motorcycle engine could be heard by members of the wedding party.
As one reporter wrote, “Jimmy, looking like Marlon Brando in The Wild One, roared down the street and out of Pier’s life forever.”
Parts of that statement might not have been true.
Jimmy later told William Bast, “That wasn’t me. As a bizarre joke, I hired someone to impersonate me, knowing that at that distance, no one could make out my face behind those goggles. Shame on you, Willie, for thinking I’d be so dumb, actually showing up myself. Surely you don’t think I’m that dumb.”
“Well, the rest of the world was taken in,” Bast responded.
There was at least one eyewitness who claimed that Jimmy and Pier continued to see each other after the wedding. Joe Hyams, in his book, Mislaid in Hollywood, spotted Pier speeding past after leaving Jimmy’s house when he was on the way there to interview him.
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