As the years passed, Bast’s statements about Jimmy grew increasingly ambivalent and bitter. Friends sometimes interpreted his unflattering comments about Jimmy as “traitorous.”
He told the press, “In real life, Jimmy was not an extraordinary person. If anything, he was rather bothersome.” On Entertainment Tonight, Bast defined Jimmy as “cocky and arrogant.”
Sir John Gielgud...”Were you and Jimmy lovers?”
Yet it was his very association with Jimmy that made Bast famous in certain circles. “Dean was very, very shrewd in the way he used people. He knew what he was doing. To get where he got, he kissed a lot of asses, and he hated himself for that.”
For the rest of his life, whenever Bast was introduced to people, they more or less asked the same question.
On the Left Bank of Paris at an all-male party in the 1950s, Bast met John Gielgud.
“Ah, yes, William Bast,” Gielgud said. “The young man who knew James Dean. Tell me, my dear, were you lovers? I had Brando, but never Dean.”
In his final known comment about Jimmy, Bast told his remaining friends, “When one dines with the devil, it’s best to use a very long spoon. Of course, I loved him. There is no denying that. Not a day goes by but what I don’t wonder what it would have been like, had I moved in with him again, this time as his lover. Could I have trusted him with my love, my devotion, my life? I doubted it then, and I doubt it still, but the biggest question persists. Would I really have risked it, for better or worse, at least to find out if it would have worked?
JIMMY’S NEWEST BEST PAL & CONFIDANT EXPOSES HIM TO
Life in the Straight World
During the final year of his life, Jimmy bonded with Lee Bracker, a well-dressed insurance agent.
In the Warner Commissary, Leonard Rosenman, one of Jimmy’s closest friends, brought the two men together. Bracker was married, the father of two girls, Alison and Lesley.
Two young men of the mid-century came together, and within a week or so, they were “best pals and confidants.”
Their friendship did not begin all at once. It evolved gradually, beginning one night when Jimmy arrived, unannounced at the Rosenman home. He discovered that the couple were out, and that Bracker had volunteered to babysit for them.
Jimmy decided to stick around, and they talked for hours, discovering their mutual interests.
Before the night was over, Jimmy had intrigued Bracker with Porsches and car racing.
A friendship was formed that would last until Jimmy’s death. Bracker and Jimmy would soon be meeting at night, arriving in separate vehicles at the top of Mulholland Drive “to go for a spin,” in whichever of the several cars jimmy was driving at the time, since there wouldn’t be many cars on the road at that hour.
Bracker was straight, and he made it clear in a personal memoir, published in 2013, that his relationship with Jimmy had nothing to do with sex. He was of the opinion that Jimmy’s homosexual life ended when he arrived in Hollywood to film East of Eden.
Jimmy was an expert at keeping various facets of his life separated, especially when he was with his straight friends.
Lew Bracker with James Dean...call it a “bromance.”
It was Bracker who accompanied Jimmy when he went to purchase his infamous Porsche Spyder 550, little knowing that it would become his friend’s coffin. Coincidentally, Bracker, the week before Jimmy’s death, in his capacity as an insurance salesman, drew up an insurance policy on his life.
[James Dean died without leaving a will. Even though he’d made only one payment on his insurance policy, the company owed Jimmy’s heir $100,000. It is not known who Jimmy would have selected as an heir to his estate.
In the absence of any specific instructions designating a beneficiary, Winton Dean, Jimmy’s father, received the policy’s the entire benefit. It was ironic that he’d given Jimmy so little money—almost none—and he ended up profiting from his son’s death.]
Two days before, Jimmy had confronted Bracker, telling him, “you and I have got to get married.”
“To each other?” Bracker asked in astonishment.
“We both have to get married to women and have families. That’s what we both want. That’s what we both need.”
“He never talked to me like a man worried about cutting life short,” Bracker later wrote.
Slowly, Bracker came to know his new friend, who was becoming more famous every day. “Jimmy would be bothered when someone would say he was mean and disrespectful. Actually, he wasn’t. They took silence to mean he cared little or nothing for them. They didn’t have the insight, or didn’t care to exercise that insight, in knowing that he was a shy boy that just didn’t know how to approach them. Instead of making an attempt to approach him, they just wrote him off.”
Some of Jimmy’s closest friends, who knew about his relationship with Bracker, felt he was in love with his new friend, who shared so many of his mutual interests.
“Stanley Haggart had that view: “I never met Bracker, but the way Jimmy talked about him made me aware of just how strong his feelings were for this man. But Jimmy was no fool. He was completely aware that Bracker didn’t go that route, and I doubt if he ever made a pass at him. He didn’t want to ruin what he saw as an important new figure in his life. Of course, Jimmy wouldn’t be the first gay man who fell in love with a straight man.”
From all reports, Bracker and Jimmy enjoyed many a “crazy, fun-filled day” in the bittersweet and halcyon summer of 1955, as Jimmy’s life edged toward a cliff.
Bracker recalled hanging out with Jimmy beside a swimming pool one hot afternoon, inventing a parody of a “swords-and-sandals” movie with a Biblical theme. “We had Mary having an affair with Joseph and getting her pregnant,” Bracker said. “They decided to hit the road because no one believed that cockamamie story about an Immaculate Conception. During their journey to Bethlehem, Joseph tried to tune out Mary’s kvetching.”
In their contrived scheme for a screenplay, Joseph suddenly flashes on a moneymaking scheme: “From this mensch, we can make a living. Look what Moses did with the burning bush tale and that slab of stone with ten scratches on it. I’m broke and can’t afford a room. I’ll find a barn; you’ll have my boy, and I’ll round up a few goat and pigs. And I’ll get three guys from Central Casting with costumes borrowed from Hope and Crosby’s Road to Morocco movie. We’ll be in business.”
Before his fateful trip to Salinas, Jimmy stopped by Bracker’s house and pleaded with him to accompany him to the car races. Bracker refused, preferring to stay home for what he called “My most pleasurable pastime, a USC football game.”
The last time Bracker saw Jimmy was when Jimmy, rebuffed, called back to him during his exit, “Okay, it’s your funeral.”
In his memoir, Bracker related how dazed he’d become when he received news about Jimmy’s sudden death. As the years went by, he summed up his involvement with Jimmy by writing, “His physical presence in my life has ended, but our friendship continues.”
JIMMY ON THE FAST TRACK WITH A
Hot Brunette from Sweden
In January of 1955, as Jimmy experienced a California winter, his romantic life with women consisted mostly of a series of “chicks picked up at Googie’s,” as he confessed to William Bast. On the mornings after his adventures, he usually didn’t bother to remember the name of his conquest of the previous evening.
As he complained to Bast, “Sex with these mannequins isn’t turning me on. These gals really aren’t interested in me. The want to brag about fucking James Dean, the new movie star.”
Just when he was about to give up on women, Lilli Kardell came into his life. When Jimmy started dating her, virtually no one in Hollywood had heard of her.
Lilli Kardell...Jimmy’s last female flame.
She was beautiful and Swedish. She had come to Hollywood to become the next Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman, both of whom had also been from Sweden.
She had been discovered by a Stockholm-based agent worki
ng for RKO films. As a secretary, she’d been employed because she had a good command of English, which she’d been taught in school.
Soon, at the age of eighteen, she was “shipped” to Hollywood. Her diary recorded that she met Jimmy on February 19, 1955, early in the year he died.
Ironically, Kardell was introduced to him by Arthur Loew, Jr., his male lover. The Swede and the farm boy from Indiana would soon become engaged in an affair that would endure through his last summer.
Author Joe Hyams described Kardell as, “The quintessential starlet, a pretty brunette with almond-shaped eyes and a big bosom. She was good-natured, forgiving, and generous with her favors. She was also dedicated to the craft of acting. Before seeing Jimmy at night, she took singing, dancing, and diction lessons during the day.”
Soon, Jack Simmons, Jimmy’s closest and most faithful male companion, met Kardell. “Lilli was quite bovine,” he said. “Jimmy and I called her ‘The Cat Lady.’”
[As the Cat Lady, she must have been more “feline” than “bovine.”]
Author Donald Spoto claimed, “Kardell could have passed for a reverse image of Jimmy himself. They wore their hair similarly, they wore matching bathing suits, and they favored black leisure outfits. As with Pier Angeli, he favored exotic foreign ladies to escort out in public, following the example of Marlon Brando.”
At their first public outing, Jimmy and Kardell were accompanied by Tennessee Williams and Anna Magnani.
While the women were at table, Tennessee had a brief chat with Jimmy at the bar. Later, to Darwin Porter, in Key West, Tennessee recalled that evening: “I asked Jimmy if he were in love with this young Swede. Had she made off with his fickle and most unreliable heart?”
“Tenn,” he answered. “You know me well enough to know by now that I’m a deceitful lover, not to be trusted out of one’s sight. I’m sure you once fell in love with me, and I’m equally certain I broke your heart. That’s what I do. When biographers record my life story years from now, I’m sure at least one of them will entitle their bio, James Dean, The Heartbreaker.”
“I’ve never really loved anybody in my life,” Jimmy confessed to the playwright. “I tried to have an affair with myself, but that didn’t work out. As for Lilli, I’m just hanging out for the sex, and sometimes, even that bores me. I hate to confess this, but my greatest sex has been with myself. I failed in an affair with myself, but the sex is great.”
“I know what you mean,” Tennessee said. “Masturbation is, after all, one of life’s pleasures when one’s sexual partners prove unreliable.”
Jimmy held up his right hand. “This is my most reliable sex partner. This hand never fails me. I’m sure she’ll be there servicing me when I’m old and gray.”
“If you ever become old and gray,” Tennessee said. “Time herself, that relentless bitch who destroys all of us, both mentally and physically, will never claim you. You’ll outrun her, I’m sure.”
“Does that mean you’re predicting an early death for me?” he asked.
“You know in your heart that’s how your story will end.”
***
For his first trip out of town with Kardell, Jimmy drove her to Palm Springs for a car race at a track alongside the foreboding concrete runway of the Palm Springs Airport, the arrival point for many visiting celebrities from Hollywood. To Kardell, Jimmy cut a dashing figure, dressed in black racing coveralls with a black-and-white checkered cap. Before the beginning of the race, he told her, “I know I’m going to win. I can feel it in my bones.”
She reminded him to be careful. “Bones can be broken!”
It was late March, but the noonday sun already made the desert resort feel like August.
About twenty cars were competing, driven by such ace drivers as Ken Miles and Cy Yedor, along a grueling 2.3 mile track. The starting positions were drawn by lot, and Jimmy was “seriously pissed off” at his car’s subsequent placement in the fourth row at the rear. “I’ve been assigned to the fucking boondocks,” he complained.
The moment the flag went down, he jammed his foot on the accelerator and took off, zooming past cars who had been assigned better starting positions. He cut wide around them on the outside, almost scraping the left door of a driver from San Diego. “The fucker almost killed me,” that driver complained in a formal protest he later filed against Jimmy.
As the first quarter-mile was reached, Jimmy had moved up to fifth position. Never letting his foot leave the accelerator, he was leading the pack at the end of the hazardous first lap. His Porsche could go no faster than one-hundred miles an hour. His aim was to beat Yedor and Miles in their MG Specials.
To his disappointment, Jimmy ended the race in third position. However, judges, on a technicality, disqualified Miles, so Jimmy was moved up to second place. That meant he would carry off the Silver Trophy. “I should have won the gold,” he complained to Kardell.
“On the track, I learn about both people and myself,” he told her.
“Speed fascinated Jimmy,” Kardell said. “He loved it so much, it would ultimately lead to his death. It was not just some passing fancy, but an all-consuming passion.”
After the race, Kardell and Jimmy got into a tiff, perhaps because she was seen having a drink with the dashingly handsome Robert Evans, who would later, from 1967 to ’73, be in charge of production at Paramount.
“What are you doing with him?” Jimmy later asked her, angrily. “I hear he got his start selling jockstraps in New York.”
[Evans would later marry actress Ali McGraw, who would eventually divorce him—with disastrous consequences for her movie career—to marry Steve McQueen.]
In her diary, Kardell wrote: “Jimmy and I were angry at one another. Idiotic evening. Finished with myself drunk, and sleeping in a rented car.”
The two made up the following day, and he took her to the Shadow Mountain Resort and Golf Club in nearby Palm Desert to celebrate his victory. There had been two races.
In one of them, he came in first, beating out several veteran drivers.
Miles, an English driver, told the press, “Dean is a reckless daredevil, even if he doesn’t give a fuck for his own life, he should not try to kill the other drivers. Car racing is not a bullfight, his other favorite sport. The bloody little punk just doesn’t get that.”
[Miles would later die in an accident during a car race in Riverside, California.]
In her diary, Kardell recorded details about the second night of their weekend together. “Terrible atmosphere between us. He behaved in a ridiculous fashion and ignored me completely and flirted with other girls. Finally, we reconciled, and he drove me back to Los Angeles. He slept a little, and we made love. Everything is well between us now. I hope.”
Jimmy spent the following night in the bed of Arthur Loew, Jr., on Miller Drive, where he’d been given the keys to come and go as he wished.
Kardell later described what it was like being “Jimmy’s girl.”
“He would all of a sudden just leave and go away and find some buddy of his and start talking about cars. He would be gone for half an hour or more. He was very moody. He could one minute be very deep in thought about something, and then snap out of it, and in the next minute, he’d be on the floor dancing and making some joke, and it was just no use getting mad at him for that kind of thing, because that just didn’t do any good. You just had to understand—that was the way he was.”
In April, while Jimmy was filming Rebel Without a Cause, he came down with the flu. Both Maila Nurmi (Vampira) and Kardell took turns bringing him hot soup and making hot tea for him.
When he recovered, he did not date Kardell exclusively. Not only was he involved sexually with certain members of the cast from Rebel, he was also seen on occasion with April Channing, a Broadway showgirl, and with Dana Wynter, who had arrived in Hollywood from her native London, hoping to make it in American pictures. Lucy Marlow, who had had a small role in Judy Garland’s A Star Is Born, was also seen on his arm, as was Julie Robins
on, a dancer with Katherine Dunham’s troupe. Jimmy publicly referred to Robinson as “my mambo instructor.”
In August of 1955, perhaps against Jimmy’s wishes, Kardell talked to a reporter from Modern Screen. “Jimmy is an ice man. Some of the things he does, it is because he is youthful. It takes time to handle fame. But he really is very kind. They tell me he doesn’t smile enough. Not true. He smiles much. He has a good sense of humor.”
As that summer of 1955 came to its inevitable end, Kardell perhaps realized how hopeless any long-term commitment from Jimmy would be. She began dating other men, especially after Jimmy left for Texas to shoot Giant.
On September 30, 1955, she wrote in her diary: “Jimmy Dean, my only love, died on his way to Salinas for the races. Auto crash. Please take care of him, God, and let him be happier now than before. I can only hope that I will find Jimmy in some other person. My thoughts will always be with you, Jimmy. Goodbye forever. I love you, and will never forget you and the memories we shared.”
Troy Donahue...No replacement for James Dean.
[Kardell never found Jimmy in another person. In 1958, she married an insurance executive, but the relationship ended disastrously. Alleging cruelty, she divorced him after less than a year.
Her next engagement was to an actor as different from Jimmy as a mongoose is from a snake. She began an affair with Troy Donahue, that handsome blonde pin-up who became a cardboard fixture in films during the late 1950s and early 60s before his Hollywood fame flickered and died. Ironically, he once made a film called Live Fast, Die Young, which is the most-used epitaph applied to Jimmy.
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