James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  One night at Googie’s, Jimmy and Lee shared a chance encounter with his friend, William Bast, who also wrote about it in his own memoir. Bast didn’t know that Lee was a well-known entertainer in her own right. At the time, she was a blonde in her late twenties, as he remembered it.

  “The talk was of motorcycles,” Bast said, “I asked her if she were a cyclist like Jimmy.”

  “I was, but I had to give it up,” she said. “I lost a leg. With that, she swung out into the aisle to show me that her leg had been amputated at the knee. Only then did I notice the crutches tucked discreetly beside her, against the wall.”

  After their brief three-way conversation, she disappeared into the night with Jimmy, accepting his offer of a ride home on his cycle.

  The next time Bast saw Lee at Googie’s, she was alone. “We talked about Jimmy.”

  “He’s the greatest guy in this whole god damn town,” she told Bast. “He’s got real guts. Most of the creeps in Hollywood are afraid to even look at my leg. Not Jimmy. He wanted to know all about it.”

  Bast asked her about her sex life.

  “Not many guys get their kicks fucking a one-legged woman,” she said.

  Actually, Lee was living at the time with six handsome young men, each an actor, in an apartment. She prided herself for being able to hobble around on one leg carrying hot chocolate without spilling it. Her six cohorts often rubbed her stump, and she claimed that the rubbing was her greatest joy in life.

  Lee also related a dramatic incident that took place one night with Jimmy. She met him at Googie’s when he was with photographer Dennis Stock and his date. It was agreed that all of them would go to this Hollywood party. They would go first to Stock’s place, with the understanding that Jimmy would park his motorcycle there, and that he’d then be driven to the party by Lee, who would drive her own car, following behind Stock in his.

  On the way to his house, Stock suddenly slammed on his brakes when a kid ran out in front of his car. Reactively, Lee slammed on her brakes, too. On his motorcycle behind her, Jimmy pressed hard on his brakes, but not fast enough. He was hurled off his bike and, literally under her car.

  “I got out of my car, screaming,” Lee said. “I feared I’d killed him.”

  Jimmy crawled up off the tarmac, groaning in pain, but smiling to signal that he wasn’t bodily harmed.

  “I begged him that night to sell that damn bike,” she said. “Time and time again, I begged him, telling him he was going to kill himself on it. “

  One night, he showed up, telling her he’d sold his cycle. “My new transportation is this shiny new Porsche,” he said.

  “In it, you’ll be much safer,” she assured him.

  Jimmy often dropped by,” she said, “because two of his friends, Nick Adams and Dennis Hopper, lived next door. Nick and I didn’t get along. Sometimes, we’d go out to Googie’s, even Villa Capri. But often, we stayed in my apartment. He’d read from passages in Lord Chesterfields’s Letters to His Son, which seemed to be his favorite literature after The Little Prince.”

  Jimmy turned me in the right direction in my life, as a friend, not a lover, although we had a kind of loving.”

  The last time she saw him, in September of 1955, he was heading to the car races in Salinas, and he invited her to go along. He was traveling with his mechanic, but he said he also had a station wagon. You’ll be comfortable in it, and we can tow the Porsche behind us.”

  She told him she couldn’t go because she had a gig coming up, but “I’ll see you when you get back from Salinas,” she promised him.

  “Of course, as the world knows,” she said, “Jimmy never came back.”

  Satanic Rites

  WITH SAMMY DAVIS, JR.

  One night, Sammy Davis, Jr. was dining at Villa Capri, Jimmy’s favorite restaurant, with Dean Martin and Peter Lawford. The leader of the “Rat Pack,” Frank Sinatra, wasn’t there that night, which was just as well. He didn’t like Jimmy, whose career was soaring at a time when Sinatra’s was bottoming out.

  Sammy went over to introduce himself to Jimmy and invite him to a party. He also ordered the maître-d’ to deliver a bottle of champagne to Jimmy and his date.

  After that night, Jimmy and Sammy started seeing each other, mostly at parties.

  Unlike many young men of his generation, Jimmy had no prejudice against African-Americans. He’d studied dance with Katherine Dunham in New York, and Eartha Kitt was one of his best friends, along with writer Bill Gunn and Cyril Jackson, who taught him how to play the bongo drums.

  Jimmy told composer Alec Wilder, “I have a lot to learn from black culture—the music, the dance. Those cats known how to have a good time. They know how to forget their cares and woes, at least for a few hours.”

  John Gilmore, Jimmy’s friend, remembered one Sunday afternoon visiting Sammy when he was living at his grandmother’s house, as hard as that is to believe.

  Jimmy invited Sammy for a spin on his motorcycle through the surrounding hills, careening around corners at record-breaking speed. Back in front of his grandmother’s house, Sammy climbed off. “Wow!” he said. “Wow, man, what a fucking gas!”

  Retro chic: Jimmy’s favorite restaurant, The Villa Capri, in the 1950s.

  His grandmother invited them to stay for lunch, the featured staple of which would be a ham-based stew bubbling on the stove. Sammy served a bottle of wine Dean Martin had given him.

  They ended up that night at a club, “with the hottest chicks in town.”

  As Gilmore recalled, “Jimmy was beating the bongos—stoned out of his mind. Sammy danced and shook the maracas at the hi-fi speakers, while other people seemed to arrive out of nowhere, thickening the group like chunks of starch in his grandmother’s stew.”

  By midnight, Sammy was throwing his arms around Jimmy, proclaiming, “This is the cat I love! The one I love!”

  Then Sammy and Jimmy kissed each other passionately.

  Still stoned the next day, Jimmy wanted to return to Sammy’s, but when he called “grandma,” he learned that Sammy had gone to Palm Springs.

  He came up with another idea. Back home, Jimmy wanted to dress up as a chick, with a big blonde wig and red high heels, and with makeup like a Parisian whore.

  He wanted Gilmore to be his “stud date” at the Tropical Village, the gay bar at Santa Monica.

  ***

  One night, once again at the Villa Capri, Jimmy dined with Sammy and Eartha Kitt. During that dinner, she told an amusing story of how she’d met Sammy when she was appearing on Broadway in New Faces of 1952.

  “He was standing near the stage manager’s door, and I took him for an errand boy, and demanded that he bring me a cup of coffee. Sammy went to get the coffee. When he got back to my dressing room and handed it to me, he told me that someday he’d be a bigger star than I would ever be.”

  Both entertainers laughed at the memory of that (embarrassing) incident.

  Later on, Sammy got serious, telling them that at parties, he often stood in the corner, looking at Tony Curtis or Robert Wagner across a crowded room. “Female fans nearly dropped dead at the sight of them.”

  His left eye was gone [he had lost it in a car accident in 1954] and a deep, dark socket was left in its place. Its eyelid was lower than the eyelid of the remaining eye.

  “Sammy always looked like he’s been in a terrible fight, perhaps with a knife,” Eartha said.

  “He’s a beautiful man to me,” Jimmy claimed, not really meaning it.

  “As a boy growing up, the fear of rejection always crawled beneath my black hide,” Sammy said. “I had an overbite, really crooked teeth. Before I became a celebrity, it was almost impossible to get a girl without paying for some poontang. Now, I’m sought out by gals, often blonde bimbos, but they’re usually there just to meet Frankie or Deano—or else to help me spend my money.”

  Eartha and Jimmy were quick to assure Sammy that they loved him for himself.

  Sammy Davis, Jr. onstage...He attended Satanist orgi
es with James Dean and “did our thing” in view of other devil worshippers.

  “Yeah, but you two don’t put out,” he answered. “I wish you would. I’d take both of you on at the same time.”

  “You can’t complain too much,” Jimmy said. “Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, and Ava Gardner, from what I’ve heard. Not bad, not bad at all.”

  One night when Sammy and Jimmy were out by themselves, he’d asked him why one fingernail was painted red. “That’s a signal to other Satanists. I’m a Satanist, you know. We use the red nail as a signal to each other,” Sammy said. “Actually, I’m on the edge of that cult. I’m not into all that shit about devil worship. I’m in it for the sexual kicks, and there’s plenty of that.”

  Jimmy wanted to attend a Satanist orgy, and the following week, Sammy escorted him to a gathering of devil worshippers, where sexual acts among the participants were always part of the ritual. Details are sketchy, but rumors still persist that Jimmy, in front of others, fellated Sammy at the orgy. He’d performed a similar stunt at a late-night jazz club in Harlem, so the rumors were met with some belief.

  As Sammy later told Lawford, “It was the right night. There was a full moon. Jimmy was stoned out of his mind. There were no limits about what he could or could not do. He did. I admired him for that. What a little devil!”

  “Our friendship was just starting to blossom,” Sammy said after Jimmy’s death. He regretted that he hadn’t approached Jimmy sooner at parties.

  “I didn’t take too much notice of him when I spotted him a few times in 1954,” he said. “He was always in the corner somewhere looking depressed and sulky. If someone approached him, he would look up and say, ‘I want to act.’ And then he would slump back into his own world.”

  “Hollywood hardly touched him as a person. It was to our eternal shame as a community that we passed him off as a bit of a slob. He was difficult to talk to, but we should have tried harder.”

  He also said, “I finally broke through his barrier, and was well on my way to having a new best friend…but then I lost him.”

  Sammy once wrote, “James Dean was more than a phenomenon or even a legend. He was far more than a cinematic genius who could act his balls off.”

  He was simply the greatest screen experience of all time. The fact that he was cut off in his prime is unfortunate, but irrelevant. The three films he left us will stand as their own monument. He remains indestructible. In only three films, he ruined the careers of hundreds of other aspiring actors who tried to follow him.”

  In a subsequent memoir, published after the death of Marilyn Monroe, Sammy drew a parallel between the two icons: “Unlike Jimmy Dean, who never realized his real potential, Marilyn became prematurely spent as an actress because she was never allowed the artistic freedom she craved. After Some Like It Hot, she went into decline. She even began to lose her international clout at the box office. Jimmy, on the other hand, faced possibly a series of some of the greatest motion pictures ever to be made.”

  Sammy would also respond to one of the most vicious posthumous attacks on Jimmy ever made. It occurred in October of 1956 and was the opinion of show business biographer Maurice Zolotow, wrote it. His article was headlined “Jimmy Dean Should Be Nobody’s Idol—The Late Actor Was Sadistic, Uncouth, Arrogant, Cruel, & a Filthy Slob.”

  “He was surly, ill-tempered, brutal, without any element of kindness, sensitivity, consideration for other, or romantic passion. He was physically dirty. He hated to bathe, have his hair cut, shave, or put on clean clothes. He smelled so rankly that actresses working with him in close contact found him unbearable.”

  Zolotov also asked, “What’s so great and beautiful about stepping on the gas, blowing your horn, and speeding down a public highway like a maniac?”

  Sammy shot back, “I don’t give a fuck how some of these assholes criticize Dean. He did his number and he did it better than anybody else in the world.”

  Lance Reventlow

  HOW THE INSECURE, MUCH-ABUSED SON OF BARBARA HUTTON, ONE OF THE RICHEST WOMEN IN THE WORLD, RACED WITH JIMMY TO THE FINISH LINE

  For the most part, Jimmy and Lance Reventlow, son of the heiress, Barbara Hutton, went their separate ways, but they got together whenever they could to resume their affair.

  They not only made love, but attended car races and fussed over their vehicles, discussing the merits of one racecar over another. Mostly, they were concerned with how fast a car could go.

  When they weren’t together, Jimmy and Lance sometimes talked on the phone during the early morning hours. One of their conversations lasted for four hours.

  Lance told him, “I never know what continent my mother is on.”

  Bruce Kessler, Jimmy learned, was Lance’s closest friend. His father, Jack Kessler, had founded Rose Marie Swimwear. “His wife, Nina, was like a surrogate mother to me.”

  Jimmy also found out that Lance’s friends were radically different from Hutton’s. He preferred the company of Ronnie Burns, son of George Burns and Gracie Allen, or that of Julie Payne, daughter of actor John Payne. Lance also liked to hang out with Gary Crosby, the abused son of Bing, or Chick Daigh, a race car driver.

  “Lance was never true to one person,” Jimmy recalled, although he was dating Jill St. John and planning to marry her. “He gave her a diamond engagement ring that stretched from knuckle to knuckle,” Jimmy said.

  “Like Jimmy, Lance, too, had dropped out of college, after attending only one semester at Pomona College. “I’m interested in car racing,” He said. “Why do I need an education?”

  Barbara Hutton holds her fifteen-week old son, Lance in her arms as her father (left) looks on and her husband, Count Reventlow (right), seems to approve.

  A photographer caught this troubled family leaving their London townhouse for the boy’s baptism in the Chapel of Marlborough.

  Lance told Jimmy that when he reached twenty-one, based on the complicated lineage of his abusive Danish father and American-born mother, he was offered the choice of citizenship, either American, Danish, or British. “I thought it over for twenty seconds and decided to go the Yankee Doodle Dandy route.”

  Jimmy often came and went from Lance’s house, which was a modest one on North Knoll Drive in Benedict Canyon. “He was having financial problems because his mother had cut him off at one point.”

  There, Jimmy met Dudley Walker, Cary Grant’s former valet, who organized and managed Lance’s bills when he was solvent. “I never had any sense of money,” Lance told Jimmy, “Other than how to spend it. That, I know.”

  Jimmy was fascinated by Lance’s fleet of cars, nine in all. His friend offered him the use of any of them “at any time.”

  “I have a Mercedes for running errands,” Lance told Jimmy. “A Jaguar for a hot date, and a Rolls-Royce for special events.”

  “For car racing, I prefer a Porsche like you have, or a Maserati, perhaps a Cooper-Climax. And just for the hell of it, I keep an old, beat-up Chevy like Howard Hughes drives around in.”

  Lance was the by-product of a marriage for which his mother, Barbara Hutton, had renounced her citizenship to become the wife of a Danish count. It was a bitter marriage, leading to endless custody fights over Lance.

  A terrified Lance is seen in this photograph from October of 1939, when a bodyguard, Bobby Sweeney, shielded his own face – not that of the three-year old – as reporters stared into the limousine.

  Lance was later removed from the car and put aboard the Conte di Savoia to sail across the Atlantic.

  Once, Jimmy invited Lance for a drive in the first Porsche he’d purchased. “He was like a kid who’d been given the greatest of all Christmas gifts, even though he had to pay for it,” Lance said. “He was excited by it, and wanted me to admire it, too. Sometimes, with me in the passenger seat, he would take me on a reckless drive through the Hollywood Hills. He treated those curvy roads like a race track. Finally, I told him I didn’t like being in the passenger seat, preferring to be behind the wheel where I belonged.
‘You can sit in the damn passenger seat and be my bitch,’ I told him.”

  “For Jimmy, the Porsche was a symbol that demonstrated that he’d arrived as a star, but it was more than that: It was a token of his newfound freedom, and his defiance of the system.”

  Jimmy and Lance frequently attended major car races together, after which they’d slip away to some retreat as a means of continuing what Jimmy defined as “our male bonding.”

  He rarely discussed Lance, even with his closest friends, other than to say, “He’s a very special guy, very special.”

  On scooters far too small for them, Bruce Kessler (left) goes for a ride with his best friend, Lance Reventlow,

  Lance was the first person Jimmy invited for a spin in “The Little Bastard,” the nickname he’d given his newly purchased Silver Porsche Spyder.

  At one point, he even let Lance take the wheel “to get the feel of it,” as they headed east to Little River, California, three miles north of Mendocino.

  When they got there, they checked into the Little River Inn, an establishment, built in 1853, which had housed Jimmy and the cast of East of Eden during its filming less than a year before. [Jimmy stayed in room #8 within what is now a California State landmark.]

  On May 1, 1955, they drove to Minter Field in Bakersfield, where Jimmy placed third behind Marion Playan in an MG Speck and John Kunstle driving a Panhard Devin.

  Lance Reventlow, depicted above, and James Dean were destined to die in fiery crashes—Jimmy in a racecar and Reventlow in a small airplane.