James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  Beverly Long said, “Dennis Hopper was terribly in love with Natalie, too, and he was heartbroken when he found out that she was also sleeping with Ray and Jimmy.”

  Natalie told Cohan that it was Nick Adams who took her virginity at the suggestion of her mother.

  She approached Adams when he came over one evening to pick up Natalie. Her mother told him, “I want you to teach Natalie the ways of the world. I’m afraid that if you don’t, she might be broken in by that queer guy, Jimmy Dean. That fellow is really weird. You’re not. I trust you with my daughter.”

  Natalie showed Cohan her deformed wrist. “I have to wear bracelets to cover it on camera.” She shared her fears and anxieties with him. “After I moved on from child roles, I didn’t know who in hell I was or what they wanted from me. I’m talking about agents, producers, directors, and other actors.”

  In Rebel, Jimmy gave Natalie her first screen kiss. “We did a lot of practicing off screen so we’d be camera ready,” she said, giggling.

  “I played my first love scene with Jimmy,” Natalie said. “He seemed like a great nonconformist, a great rebel, but really, he was only eccentric.”

  She also said that Jack Simmons was always trying to find out if Jimmy were having sex with her.

  She was still curious to know if Simmons was also having sex with Jimmy. He told her, “I won’t say no, and I won’t say yes. I love and worship Jimmy.”

  During filming, Natalie developed this powerful crush on Jimmy, and was always ready to accept his invitation to his dressing room any time he wanted to seduce her.

  “He was so inspiring,” she said to Cohan. “Always patient and kind. He didn’t act like a movie star at all.”

  “After our lovemaking, he gave me advice as an actress, very good suggestions. He was very critical of his own work, and never satisfied with a performance he’d just given. He worried about how every scene would turn out. He also had the ability to make his co-stars look great, too.”

  She also told Cohan that during the making of Rebel, she was resentful that she and Mineo had to be supervised by a welfare worker because both of them were underage, and as such, their working hours, based on California State law, were limited. They were also given lessons by a tutor. “I was trying to play a grown-up, and I was embarrassed to be treated like a child. So was Sal.”

  ***

  Sal Mineo was also a friend and client of Cohan, who said, “During the filming of Rebel Without a Cause, the young Bronx-born actor had a hot and heavy affair with Jimmy. In one scene, Ray had the two young men kissing, but, in the uptight 1950s, when homosexuality could not even be mentioned on the screen, that segment was cut by the censors. ‘The world wasn’t ready to see two young men kissing,’ Mineo said.”

  Mineo told Cohan, “Natalie was real competition for me. I was madly in love with Jimmy and so was she. Before she was cast in Rebel, she told me that she must have seen East of Eden fifty times. Even if she were exaggerating, she’d seen it a hell of a lot.”

  [Ray confronted Natalie years after Jimmy died. “You’re telling the magazines and even friends that you and Jimmy did not have sex. Is that true?”

  “Come on, Nick,” she said. “I can tell the innocents that, but not you. You know I’ve spent many nights with Jimmy. What did you think we did? Hold hands? Frankly, I much prefer Robert Wagner’s cock to Jimmy’s, but we did go at it more times than I can remember. Sometimes, Jimmy liked to hurt his partner, and be hurt, and I don’t go in for that.”]

  “Both Natalie and I adored Jimmy,” Mineo claimed. “If he didn’t give me a warm embrace when we met on the set in the morning, I was a wreck for the day. Actually, I wanted to kiss him any time I was around him, but there were always people about. I waited for him to call me into the privacy of his dressing room. That guy was some swell kisser, among other attributes.”

  Jimmy’s friend, John Gilmore, paid a visit to the set. Between takes, the two actors amused themselves by naming the producers and directors who had put the make on them.

  During Gilmore’s visit to the set, he became aware that Jimmy was having an affair with Mineo. “I knew something was going on. We headed for lunch in the commissary, and Mineo was walking ahead of us. Jimmy stepped up and pinched the right cheek of his ass. Mineo jumped. He was startled. But when he realized it was Jimmy, his big brown eyes lit up. His face flushed red, and he giggled, beaming in awe at his top.”

  Another friend of Jimmy’s, William Bast, learned graphic details about Jimmy’s affair with Mineo. “Sal may be just a kid, but he’s got nine inches of Italian sausage that no butcher has ever tampered with,” Jimmy claimed.

  “The nights Jimmy could spare for me were the most delightful of my life,” Mineo confessed. “I had never been penetrated before he did the job. Up to then, only oral sex. It hurt at first, but he made me take it, and I came to love it. He told me I had to endure the initial pain to prove my love for him. I did, and soon that pain turned into the greatest sexual thrill of my life.”

  Mineo also told Cohan that before filming began on the flirtatious scene in the mansion with Jimmy and Natalie, Ray had coached him on how to play the scene. “Both Natalie and I were instructed to look at Jimmy like we were in love with him. That wasn’t hard to do. Both of us were already in love with Jimmy, especially yours truly. We played the scene like he was ‘Lucky Pierre,’ and we couldn’t wait to discover his erotic zones.”

  Mineo talked to Cohan about what it was like working with Jimmy. “Rehearsing with him kept us on our toes. Without warning, he’d throw in different lines and improvise scenes. Frankly, I didn’t know at first what all the fuss about Jimmy was about, until I went to the first screening. He was great. He was sitting just behind me in the theater, and at least half a dozen times, I turned to look back at him. He was giving that grin of his and almost blushing, looking down at the floor between his legs.”

  John Cohan, survivor of decades in the entertainment industry, is a psychic and confidant to celebrities, as depicted on the cover of his 2008 memoir.

  Mineo confessed that off screen, as lovers, Jimmy experimented with S&M, and that, on occasion, urged lovers to crush out their cigarette butts on his ass. He wanted to keep his chest and back free from burn marks in the event that he had to strip before the camera. “Jimmy wanted some kinky stuff, but I told him to get it elsewhere,” Mineo said. “I wasn’t into doing stuff like that. I just liked regular gay sex.”

  In the wake of Jimmy’s fatal crash, a coroner examined his body, inch by inch, making a note of the “constellation of kerotoid scars” he discovered.

  Mineo described a bizarre and heretofore unreported event that happened to Jimmy and himself during the making of Rebel: Before the beginning of filming, Jimmy had hung out with a street gang from the south side of Los Angeles, hoping to absorb enough atmosphere to convincingly portray Jim Stark.

  At one point, Mineo and Jimmy were abducted and taken to an abandoned warehouse in South Los Angeles. One biker accused Jimmy of not only giving him crabs, but a venereal disease too.

  “We were saved by a miracle,” Mineo said. “Jimmy was allowed to call this doctor friend who agreed to cure the biker of both afflictions. Of course, getting rid of crabs was a lot easier than VD.”

  Jimmy also made a $5,000 payment to the bikers. Mineo believed that, “If he hadn’t done that, I expect that both of us might have gotten a switchblade embedded in our guts.”

  [Nightly in that part of L.A., bikers and members of their gangs were routinely murdered, especially during their turf wars.]

  As related by Mineo to Cohan, one night, Jimmy invited him to his rented home, the one that evoked a hunting lodge, and came up with a surprising idea. According to Mineo, “He wanted me to save a sample of my sperm, frozen in a capsule for the later impregnation of the right woman. The plan was, that when Jimmy found the right carrier, he would pay for her to have my baby, which he would later adopt. Back in the 50s, this was a radical idea.”

 
“Jimmy also told me that he’d had his own sperm stored away for future use,” Porter said. He wouldn’t tell me where the sperm was stored, but it was at some clinic.”

  [Shortly before Mineo was murdered in 1976, he told Cohan that “I’m the father of a child somewhere, but I don’t know where he is today.”]

  Jimmy’s on-again, off-again affair with Mineo would continue after both of them were cast in Giant. “Instead of Natalie and Nick Adams, I had to compete with Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, at least in the beginning. Elizabeth continued to adore Jimmy until the end of his short life, but by the end of filming, Rock hated him and turned to me for sexual relief.”

  “Mineo denied that he and Jimmy were lovers, at least at first,” Ray said. “Why not? It would have ruined his career. But his comments were hogwash. I’d seen them make love in my suite. They were great at it.”

  ***

  As the years went by, Mineo became more open about his sexuality. During one of his last interviews, he told The New York Times, “I was in incredible awe of James Dean. I was fascinated by him. I think it was sexual to some extent, but I had no understanding of affection between men. I really gave him hero worship, and I recognized later what it was, but the feeling then was that I couldn’t wait just to get near him. It was only years later that I understood I was incredibly in love with him.”

  Mineo recalled his death scene toward the end of Rebel, when he is shot by a policeman after he ran out of the Planetarium with a gun. It was not loaded. Jim Stark had removed the bullets.

  “I wanted to do the scene over and over because he was grieving over losing me, and I was thrilled to be loved like that by someone. If you watch the scene, you realize he seemed genuinely moved, and I felt loved. After that, he was very protective of me. For the rest of the time, he didn’t want me out of his sight. He was always there for me. Alas, it didn’t last.”

  As Mineo related to Cohan, “Both Natalie and I had the hots for Jimmy, both on and off the screen. But, according to the Production Code, for my sin, I had to get bumped off in the end. In those days, if a ‘queer’ was depicted in a novel, or whatever, he has to die at the end. I was fatally shot by the cops. Faggots aren’t supposed to go on living, much less loving.”

  ***

  Dennis Hopper, on the set of Giant, bragged to Jimmy about the conquests he had made, even at a young age. “I don’t think there’s a starlet walking that I can’t screw,” he boasted. “Actually, I prefer to give head to a beautiful woman rather than fuck her.”

  In time, Dennis would have A-list conquests such as Ursula Andress, Jimmy’s former girlfriend, and Joan Collins. But when Jimmy met him, he was involved in an affair with Natalie.

  He later confided to Jimmy, “A day after I met Natalie—Ray introduced us—the little bitch phoned and asked if I’d go out with her. She told me I was very good looking, and that she wanted me to fuck her. I found out that Nick Adams had broken her in. Back in Kansas, women weren’t this aggressive. The following night, we drove up to Mulholland Drive and made love. I think she wanted to get into her character of Judy, who in the first script, was sexually promiscuous.”

  “I got into terrible problems with Ray,” Dennis said, “because we were both fucking Natalie. Her parents were starting to figure that out. Nick snitched on me to them. I was furious at the bastard.”

  Perhaps to get back at Dennis for his pursuit of Natalie, Ray decided to set him up with his neighbor at the Château Marmont, author Gore Vidal. As a means of engineering the hookup, Ray lied to Dennis, telling him that Vidal was writing the script for a major motion picture that might contain an Oscarwinning lead role for him.

  “Hopper went for it,” Vidal later told Tennessee Williams and others.

  “He arrived all innocent and wide-eyed, dewey eyed, really,” Vidal said. “For dinner, he drove me to his favorite pizza joint in his new red Austin convertible he purchased with money he’d made in the movies.”

  “When I got him home, he objected to getting fucked, but he endured it anyway,” Vidal said. “I told him to think of God, country, and the lead role in the hottest new movie property coming up. He endured it, but then wanted me to blow him. I told him I’d owe him one.”

  “There was no movie contract,” Vidal said. “The kid had to learn that you don’t trust people like Gore Vidal or Nicholas Ray.”

  ***

  Despite his sexual involvements with a number of men—namely Simmons, Ray, Dennis Hopper, and Mineo—Jimmy continued his dating of women. Once, he invited the Swedish starlet, Lilli Kardell, to the set of Rebel to watch a scene being shot.

  Natalie seemed jealous of her, especially when Kardell informed her that Jimmy had escorted her to the bullfights in Tijuana the previous weekend. “Later, in our hotel, he stripped naked at the foot of the bed and told me to pretend that I was the bull. Then he got an erection and jumped on top of me, plunging his sword deep into the gut of the ‘bull.’”

  ***

  Beverly Long, cast as Helen, one of Rebel’s “gang molls,” noted how “Nick Adams was always sucking up to Jimmy, desperately trying to be his best friend. They had been roomies.”

  Adams had serious competition from Jack Simmons. He was ready to hop into Jimmy’s bed, or Natalie’s bed, whoever summoned him. Sometimes, it was Ray himself.

  “I had the feeling that Jimmy knew that Adams was sucking up to him,” Long said.

  At the time of filming, Adams was rooming with Dennis Hopper. Jimmy with a certain derision referred to them as “Big Dick and Little Dick.” [The chronically indiscreet shock jock, radio star Howard Stern, once asserted, on the air, that “Dennis Hopper’s got one the size of an elevator button.”]

  One day at lunch, Adams was dining with Jimmy in the commissary. Jimmy looked up and saw that a publicity picture of himself had been on the wall where an equivalent likeness of Dennis Morgan had once hung.

  “Morgan out, Dean in,” he told Adams. “I can’t stand publicity.” He jumped up, grabbed the photo from the wall, and smashed its protective glass by hurling it to the floor. Then he stormed out of the dining room.

  Ironically, George Stevens, who later directed Jimmy in Giant, summoned Adams to a recording studio after Jimmy’s death. When Jimmy played Jett Rink, an old man in a drunken banquet scene, his voice had not recorded properly. Nick Adams was the best imitator.

  “I stuffed my cheeks with chewing gum to produce Jimmy’s exact sound,” Adams later explained.

  Natalie claimed that “Nick Adams wanted to be my lover, Jimmy’s lover, and Ray’s lover, but what he really wanted was to become Jimmy’s replacement, adored by millions. Alas, dreams often are only to be dreamed.”

  ***

  One night in his apartment, Jimmy told Jack Simmons, “I really like Natalie, and I want to be friends with her, perhaps star in another movie with her. But I’m growing bored with her schoolgirl crush on me—in fact, I find it intolerable. I have this plan. It’s inspired by something really shitty that Marlon Brando did to Pier Angeli to break off their affair.”

  Independently, and as confirmation of that, Natalie also discussed some of the shocking provocations that ended her romantic fantasies about Jimmy.

  As they moved deeper into their relationship, he began to taunt and tease her. One day, when she was studying her lines from a script, he walked over to her, whipped out his penis, and urinated on her pages.

  At first, she was forgiving, dismissing it with, “He’s just a Method actor trying to work himself up to play Jim Stark before the camera. That act was something that Stark, an alienated outsider, might do.”

  His provocations of her continued: Almost daily, Jimmy began to chastise Natalie for being “too Hollywood,” accusing her of coveting the trappings of stardom and longing to become as famous as Marilyn Monroe.

  As part of this ongoing campaign, Jimmy invited Natalie to visit his rented home—the one that resembled a Bavarian hunting lodge. “I’ll be upstairs on the balcony—just call up to me
and come in. The door will be unlocked.”

  That night, however, he wasn’t waiting for her on his balcony, but downstairs on the ground floor, entertaining Mineo. Shortly before her scheduled arrival, Jimmy stripped off his clothes and ordered Mineo to do the same. They were kissing and fondling each other when Natalie’s car drove up. Mineo was ready to reach for his clothes, but Jimmy held him down and forcibly penetrated him, imprisoning him.

  From the driveway, Natalie called up to the (otherwise empty) balcony and, as instructed, opened the front door without knocking. She screamed in horror at the sight of her (naked) lover sodomizing Mineo. In tears, she fled from the scene.

  Love knows many faces in Rebel Without a Cause. Alienated from their own families, and although tragedy was about to strike, Sal Mineo (left), Jimmy, and Natalie Wood created an ersatz family all on their own.

  The next day on the set, Jimmy approached her. “Stop your dreaming about me. I’ll never marry you.”

  Holding back her tears, she ran toward her dressing room.

  ***

  In years to come, usually during conversations with a girlfriend, Natalie would become very graphic during discussions of the various merits (or lack thereof) of her lovers and their respective endowments.

  “Nick (Adams) had the biggest, Dennis (Hopper) had the smallest, and Jimmy was somewhere in between. Nick Ray was far more than average. When it came to kissing, Jimmy sure beat Elvis Presley. Nicky Hilton was a beer can. I don’t know why Elizabeth (Taylor) divorced him. Steve McQueen was a dud in bed, but he told friends I was lousy in bed, too. Frankly, he just didn’t inspire me. When it comes to giving out a prize the length of Oscar, the Academy should present a statuette to John Ireland. What a man! Oh, and Frank Sinatra should at least get a Supporting Player award.”