“He was also going through his amputee period, dating this ugly woman who had only one leg. Jimmy told me that she was the leader of a gang of beatnik thieves who made their living robbing the homes of rich movie stars. That night, Jimmy stripped down to his underwear and rubbed her stump. To judge from the rising bulge in his underwear, that turned him on big time.”
[This unidentified woman, of course, was not Toni Lee, the well-known entertainer. It was another amputee with whom Jimmy became involved.]
In her way, Vampira loved Jimmy, but was aware of his dark side, “which was darker than the black nail polish and black gown I wore to introduce those horror movies,” she said. “I agreed with Elia Kazan, who claimed that Dean ‘was a punk but a helluva talent.’ He also said that ‘Dean liked cars, waitresses—and waiters.’ Sometimes, though, he dated high on the hog.”
“Jimmy even managed to seduce Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, and Merv Griffin. Even Howard Hughes found out what his underwear was hiding, but had to pay for it.”
“He often took me out and around as his date,” Vampira said. “One night we showed up at a party in Malibu. Jimmy encountered a former lover, who denounced him in front of everybody, claiming he dated women only for publicity. ‘Nobody in his right mind thinks you’re straight,’ the queen shouted at him.”
By now, Jimmy was used to having that accusation hurled at him.
Sometimes, Nurmi, with Simmons, would ride together in “The Black Death,” while Jimmy would precede them on his motorcycle. “He was reckless,” she said, “riding with his hands held above his head and gyrating his hips like in an old Carmen Miranda movie. I thought he might be killed instantly, since another vehicle was likely to run into him. I just knew he was going to kill himself one day, sooner than later.”
In addition to Simmons, Newman and Perkins were also fixtures in Jimmy’s life. “Tony was carrying on with Jimmy, even though he was involved in a torrid romance with Tab Hunter, I think,” Vampira said.
Jimmy revealed his affair with Tony to William Bast. “He’s tall and skinny, but he’s got a decent sized cock. He’s so god damn shy. When he tries to talk and relate to people, he practically gets lockjaw. When he does speak up, he glances nervously around the room. He doesn’t speak words, he spits them out. Late at night, though, he opens his trap and I can’t get him to shut up. I’ll wake up and find he’s still talking. What a contradiction.”
“His favorite form of sex involves dressing me in black and having me slip in through his bedroom window as ‘The Kissing Bandit’ before I rape him, violently, biting his lip as I do until I draw blood.”
Television director James Sheldon, one of Jimmy’s closest friends from his days in New York, once asked Tony why he didn’t date starlets for publicity purposes.
“If a pill existed that would make me like women, I’d grind it into the ground with my foot,” he said.
In the spring of 1955, director William Wyler wanted Jimmy to play a supporting role in Friendly Persuasion, Jessamyn West’s affectionate book about conscience-torn Quakers during the Civil War. Jimmy was excited to work with Gary Cooper, but since East of Eden had made him a star, he was advised by Dick Clayton not to accept this or any other supporting roles.
“I’m so glad he didn’t,” Tony said. “I got the part. It made me a star, too. I got an Oscar nomination.”
According to Nurmi, “Jimmy and I often ended our night at Googie’s just as Paul and Tony were beginning their day. We’d be wasted and Paul and Tony would come in all bright eyed and bushy tailed. Tony would order a dozen prunes and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, but Paul wanted the works, bacon and eggs. On some mornings, he even ordered a greasy cheeseburger for breakfast.”
Tony Perkins...inviting rape.
“Even though I knew the boys were bed-hopping like rabbits in those days, they seemed devoted to each other,” she said. “Tony would tell us goodbye and then hitch a ride down Sunset Strip. He always got picked up right away. No sooner did that sexy young stud stick out his thumb than we could hear the screech of brakes from some gay male eager to pick him up and give him a ride to the studio . . . or whatever.”
Nurmi remembered one evening when Jimmy, Tony, and Paul all went with her to Googie’s. “Paul and Jimmy climbed up on a soapbox that night. Jimmy said he was not going to become some performing monkey for the studio machine. Paul also claimed that he was not going to be turned into some paper doll created by a studio. ‘Surface glamour doesn’t interest me at all,’ Paul said. ‘These Hollywood stars can have all the false glamour they want. The estates in Beverly Hills. The swimming pools. Their fancy cars. Of course, the easy sex isn’t bad.’”
Jimmy agreed with him.
“Tony shocked Jimmy and Paul when he took a different view,” Nurmi claimed. “‘I’m going to climb the ladder of success out here,’ Tony vowed. ‘Go to the right parties, meet all the VIPs. I want to be a movie star and enjoy all the trappings. You guys can ride your motorcycles into the desert and hang out with rattlesnakes. Not me. I want to drink champagne with the big boys.’ At that point, Jimmy took his glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and slowly drizzled it over Tony’s head.”
“Tony never fell for Jimmy,” she said. “If he was in love with anyone, it might be Tab. I’m sure he enjoyed sex with Jimmy, but as we found out later, Tony wanted to be James Dean, or at least ‘the next James Dean.’ He perhaps figured that by seducing him, some of Jimmy’s talent would be passed on through semen.”
“On separate occasions, Tony managed to entice Paul and Jimmy to walk barefoot with him from the Château Marmont along the entire length of Sunset Strip to Doheny,” Nurmi claimed.
“Those guys were before their time. In the 60s, thousands of hippies were walking barefoot along the Strip. Perhaps those boys launched a future fad.”
“The boys had their secrets,” Nurmi said. “Tony was a tormented soul who really wanted to go straight, but he was screwing around with guys all the time. It was hopeless. Paul was the straightest of the bunch. But in those days, he had a wild streak of adventure in him and could be had. I knew Jimmy had already had him. They were rivals, though.”
“Whereas Paul tried to suppress his dark side, Jimmy wanted to explore his, and that included lots of gay sex. Paul and Jimmy also took out their adventurous side through car racing, flirting with death.”
“All the boys back then were going through a period of sexual experimentation. Hollywood pretty boys were fucking each other, occasionally screwing gals, and going to orgies. What a glorious time that was—the Eisenhower 50s.”
Jimmy later denied it, but Nurmi on at least three occasions managed to lure him into her bed, draped in black sheets. “Frankly, I don’t think Jimmy’s prick was up for it at the time we bonded. I fear I didn’t turn him on with my witch act.”
***
Freddie Brandell had not given up on his scheme to seduce Jimmy. One night, a ghoulish opportunity arose that this schemer soon set into motion.
He remembered the pictures, published in Life, that Dennis Stock had taken of Jimmy. Some of them depicted him posed in a coffin—a display model in a general store back in Fairmount, Indiana.
Vampira’s career as a TV ghoul had suffered from some recent bumps and grinds. When her show was canceled, although none of them accepted, she approached some of its competitors in the hopes that they’d pick it up.
As it happened, her friend and “gopher,” Freddie, who was hoping for a career as a studio publicist despite the fact that it was going nowhere, convinced Vampira that her sagging career could be saved through a publicity scheme he had devised.
“We’ll have Dean lying in a coffin, pretending to be dead, and you’ll hover over him, looking like the most glamorous vampire who ever invaded a cemetery.”
At first Jimmy was reluctant, but one night, after a liberal consumption of drink and drugs, he agreed to it. Freddie drove them and a photographer to a funeral home owned by the unc
le of one of his friends. There were no dead bodies there on the night of this ghoulish party’s arrival.
Before Jimmy agreed to crawl into the casket and lie down, pretending to be dead, Freddie offered him a final drink. The young actor made a big mistake in downing the drink in one gulp.
Inside the coffin, Jimmy jokingly sat up, in emulation of a corpse rising from the dead, but finally drifted off into a coma on the satin upholstery inside the casket. Vampira just assumed he had fallen asleep.
She had another appointment, and asked Freddie if he’d hang around and drive Jimmy home. Planting a kiss on Jimmy’s lips, she left the funeral parlor accompanied by the photographer.
The next afternoon Freddie, told Vampira what he’d done the night before. Before Dean got inside that casket, Freddie had slipped him a vodka-based Mickey Finn. Not knowing the drink was drugged, he drank all of it, fast.
“After you and that guy left, I went and opened the back door and let in four of our friends,” Freddie confessed. “Jimmy was knocked out, and we were sure that he’d remain that way for a long time. We lifted him from the coffin and placed him on a mortuary slab where we stripped off every piece of his clothing.”
As Vampira listened in horror, Freddie told her more. “As you know, Jimmy has denied us any sex for a hell of a long time, even though all the guys have been panting for him. Unconscious on that marble slab, he could deny us nothing. We did everything we could think of, sexually speaking, before the rooster crowed. We left him lying on that slab to be discovered by the mortician in the morning. I hope he realized that Jimmy was still alive and didn’t embalm him.”
Vampira let out one of her famous screams and slapped Freddie’s face. “You little fool! Don’t you know each of you guys could get ten years or more for a stunt like that? Get out! I never want to see you or any of your so-called friends again. All of you are sick. Sick!”
She immediately called the photographer and told him to destroy all the negatives. She didn’t want a picture with her in it to be used in evidence in case a trial was later held and the boys’ rape of Jimmy exposed in open court.
***
After several months, Jimmy tired of Nurmi and had nothing good to say about her to gossipy Hedda Hopper, who published his comments.
“I don’t go out with witches, and I dig dating cartoons even less,” Jimmy claimed. “I have never taken her out, and I should like to clear that up. I resent her exploiting our acquaintance for publicity.”
“I have a fairly adequate knowledge of the occult,” he said. “I have studied The Golden Bough and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. I was interested to find out if this girl was obsessed by satanic forces. She knew absolutely nothing. I found her a novice with no true interest in the occult, except her Vampira makeup.”
Biographer David Dalton wrote: “Vampira cut off all her hair in a last attempt to get Jimmy Dean’s attention, but he would not respond to her trick-or-treat threats. Finally, she actually cast a spell on him! ‘Oh, Ye Powers of Mwuetsi Moon Men, Come to My aid!”
Dalton continued: “She drew Oola-Oola signed with thrice-charmed ashes. Snakes and lizards! She was using black magic against Dean! She administered the dreaded rites of the eight-by-ten glossy, cutting out his eyes and ears from the photographs with a little gold dagger, incanted fiendish curses (“by the Fates of Ghastly Guchkakunda!”), made a black-and-white voodoo doll to represent his body and performed the macabre ceremonies in her room, which was said to resemble some witch doctor’s shack back in Haiti.”
In one of Hollywood’s tragic ironies, a few weeks later, on September 30, 1955, Dean suffered a broken neck, and subsequent death, during a car accident while recklessly driving his Porsche near Salinas, California. His ruined body was placed in a coffin at the Kuehl Funeral Home on Spring Street in Paso Robles, California, for shipment to Indiana. This coffin would be the final one.
Shorly after Jimmy’s death, Nurmi posed for a postcard photo depicting herself sitting beside an open grave. The inscription read: “Come and join me!”
Published less than a week after Jimmy died, and interpreted as a nuanced but clearly implied reference to his violent and unexpected death, her campaign catalyzed a backlash of protests. In Vampira’s words, “Letters from Jimmy’s fans poured in by the tons.”
Later, Liberace hired Vampira to appear in Las Vegas as a minor part of his nightclub act. She told him, “You’re the only person in show business who has been nice to me since Jimmy died. I liked Jimmy so very much. It was the little things. I gave him a Tokyo-made ear picker, so he’d quit using those damn toothpicks to clean his ears.”
In Vegas, Liberace told her that he’d tried to offer Jimmy money, as a means of enticing him to visit him in Nevada, but he never would fly out to see me.”
Three years after Dean’s tragic death at the age of twenty-four, Vampira met with director Elia Kazan to discuss the actor’s growing legend. “I don’t like it,” Kazan said. “His fans are glorifying a Dean that never existed. They see him as a little waif brutalized by Hollywood. He was a sicko with talent. He hated everybody, mostly himself. I’d call him a half-baked pudding of hatred. If you actually tasted that pudding, it was poison.”
In the immediate aftermath of Jimmy’s death, Vampira, the ghoulish neurotic of the night, shamelessly tried to twist it into a tasteless publicity stunt for herself. In this replica of a postcard she distributed, she poses in front of an open grave, with the implication that she’s inviting him to join her during her “walks with the living dead.”
The tasteless prank backfired, provoking massive outrage from Jimmy’s fans.
In 1959, Vampira made one last attempt at stardom when director Ed Wood, who made the most ridiculous movies ever filmed, cast her alongside Bela Lugosi (“Count Dracula”) in the schlocky, not-even-funny-enough-to-be-camp Plan 9 from Outer Space. Critics have, since then, defined it as “the worst film of all time.” It was the last film Lugosi ever made—an inglorious end to a fabulous and otherwise legendary career.
In 1994, when the historic reality of Vampira had evolved into a cultish and very campy icon brought back to the screen, she was too old to play herself in Ed Wood, Tim Burton’s tribute to the F-movie director. It starred Johnny Depp. Vampira was portrayed by the Goth-inspired Lisa Marie Smith, a model and actress from New Jersey who billed herself simply as “Lisa Marie.” [No, not the one associated with Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson.]
In 2006, two years before her death, Vampira’s life story, or at least a heavily edited version of it, would be relayed in a documentary by Kevin Sean Michaels entitled Vampira: The Movie.
She never benefited financially from her fame. In later life—almost destitute—she sold handmade jewelry. At her lowest point, she lived in a garage and became a cleaning woman in a restaurant.
Unlike her friend, James Dean, who died young, Vampira would not meet the Grim Reaper until January 10, 2008, in Los Angeles. She’d lived a turbulent, unhappy life before finally—at the age of 85—releasing her last breath.
In her later years, she proclaimed, “The world doesn’t have much use for a broken-down old fag hag. Where are all my golden boys of the 50s? Of course, they were sleeping with each other and rarely gave me a tumble, but I loved them all the same.”
HIS LATE, LATE SHOW: JIMMY HANGS OUT ON SUNSET STRIP WITH
“Unsavory Aliens of the Night”
During the last summer of his life, James Dean moved into an apartment on Sunset Plaza Drive, overlooking Sunset Strip. Rogers Brackett had brought him to this street when he was the producer’s kept boy. He could now thumb his nose at Brackett and pay his own rent. “Now, Brackett runs from his landlord, who’s demanding back rent.”
Googie’s remained Jimmy’s favorite hangout. When Bast spotted him there with the gay actor, Tony Perkins, Jimmy stopped to acknowledge him and introduce a former lover (Bast) to a new lover (Perkins).
“Tony and I have been hanging out with a lot of spooks,” Jimmy
said. “I’ll give you a ring some night.”
Bast stood watching as Tony and Jimmy wandered off together into the night.
The “spooks” Jimmy referred to were no doubt members of what the press called “The Night Watch.” After midnight, these young men and women, on the fringe of show business, convened at Googie’s. Bast described them as “the lonely, the alienated, and the disenfranchised, trying to meet other kindred souls.”
Newspapers made outrageous claims against the coven, labeling them “Satanists who practice the black arts, including eating both excrement and human flesh.”
The Warners publicity department was horrified that Jimmy’s name would be dragged into this group, which was becoming increasingly notorious and was under scrutiny by the police.
“Jimmy was not the man I had known and loved,” Bast claimed. “He was dealing with the darker side of his personality and, for a time at least, found comfort with these unsavory aliens of the night. When I dared ask him about that during another encounter, he told me he had an answer.
“I like bad people,” he said. “I guess because I’m so god damn curious about what makes them bad.”
As Jimmy moved into the final weeks of his life, he saw less and less of Bast, who was writing teleplays. Their long ago sexual contact in the California desert never blossomed into a love affair. Jimmy had turned elsewhere.
Finally, that day in late September that Bast had long anticipated had arrived. Jimmy was killed in a car crash on the road to Salinas.
Bast later wrote, “I’d spent much of the time of the past five years, between the time we met and the time he died, in his thrall. I couldn’t have guessed then that I would spend the next five decades in his shadow.”
Throughout the rest of his life, Bast, in spite of his own accomplishments as a writer, would be famous for having known James Dean. Fueling that fame would be his authorship of two books and a TV movie focusing on details associated with the life of his former friend.
James Dean Page 80