Nick’s luck turned when a producer, Andrew J. Fenady, created a character for Nick to play in a TV series. It was Johnny Yuma, a young ex-Confederate soldier who helps restore law and order as he roamed the West after the Civil War. The series became known as The Rebel, and premiered on October 4, 1959.
It didn’t occur overnight, but eventually, Nick Adams became a household word throughout America. No more did columnists refer to him as “The Leech,” and even today, many viewers from the Age of Sputnik can remember the catchy jingle that opened each episode of the series. But in spite of its success, ABC canceled the series after two seasons. Nick was bitterly disappointed. He’d spent all his money.
Somewhere along the way, Nick’s straight side asserted itself. On May 10, 1959 he married Carol Nugent, a former child actress. They would have two children—Allyson Lee, born February 23, 1960, and a son, Jeb Stuart, born April 10, 1961.
Ultimately Nick had a devastating effect on Elvis. He was the man who introduced Elvis to drugs, supplying him with his first bennies.
On the verge of bankruptcy, Nick flew to Graceland for a meeting with Elvis. Their passion for each other had long ago cooled.
Nick arrived drunk for his showdown with Elvis. Alone in Elvis’s bedroom, Nick demanded that the star give him a check for $100,000 for all the services rendered over the years.
Elvis was drugged. He accused Nick of being “The Leech,” applying the exact same words used by tabloid columnists during the late 50s and 60s. Elvis refused to give him any money, even his return fare to Los Angeles.
At that point, Nick made a fatal mistake. He threatened Elvis, claiming that he was going to write a tell-all memoir. Throughout the course of his star-fucking career, he’d kept extensive journals, even describing the pornographic details of sexual bouts with both male and female stars. Nick used to tell friends, “I take the advice of Mae West. Keep a diary while you’re young, because it will keep you when you get old.”
The exact details of Nick’s final confrontation with Elvis aren’t known, but when Elvis steadfastly refused to “give you one buck, you bastard,” Nick delivered his final, perhaps fatal, threat. He warned Elvis that he was not only going to write about their affair, but tell all the secrets he’d learned about Elvis and Gladys during the three days and nights he’d spent with Elvis in the wake of his mother’s death.
Col. Parker “threw a fit” when he heard that Nick was writing about his affair with Elvis. “He’s joining those tabloid vultures,” the colonel told his confidants. “This is only speculation, but I’m not sure that boy has much longer to live.”
***
Nick Adams found peace at last on February 6, 1968. His dead body was discovered by his lawyer, Ervin Roeder, at his house in Coldwater Canyon. It was propped in a sitting position against the bedroom wall. An autopsy revealed that he had overdosed on a cocktail of the anti-anxiety medications Paraldehyde and Promazine. A coroner’s report determined that the death was “accidental, suicidal and undetermined.” But persistent reports of foul play continue to this day. There was no suicide note.
Roeder called the police at once. When they arrived fifteen minutes later, Nick’s body was removed on a stretcher and placed in an ambulance. As this was being done, the house was searched. There were no signs of a robbery, and the police even noted some loose cash and two valuable rings on a nearby nightstand.
When Roeder searched through Nick’s desk, he reported that the manuscript of the exposé which Nick had been working on was nowhere to be found. Even more significant were Nick’s journals, which were also missing. He’d kept them for years. Nick’s tape recordings were also missing, even his typewriter, a cherished gift from James Dean.
An autopsy performed that night by the L.A. County Coroner revealed that Nick’s body contained a massive dose of the sedative paraldehyde. The drug had acted in lethal concert with the tranquilizer Promazine. But no paraldehyde container was found in the house. A chemical cousin of formaldehyde, paraldehyde had been prescribed by Nick’s brother, a doctor, Andrew Adams.
Dr. Thomas Noguchi, “coroner to the stars,” finally concluded on March 3, 1968, that, “The mode of death is certified as accidental suicide and undetermined.” What was not said was that at first Nick’s death had been ruled a homicide.
The case would become fodder for a legend. The tabloids went wild, speculating that Nick’s so-called suicide was actually murder.
One of his closest friends was the Oscarwinning actor Broderick Crawford. “Nick was very outspoken to me in the weeks before his death,” Crawford said. “He told me about the memoir he was writing about Elvis and James Dean. I warned him that if Col. Parker found out about it, ‘You’re dead meat, kid.’ But no one could tell Nick anything. Until my dying grave, I’ll believe that Parker ordered Nick killed.”
Adams’ house on El Roble Lane in Los Angeles, where police found him dead. The unsavory circumstances of his death were never clearly explained.
A fellow actor, Forrest Tucker, agreed with him. “In the weeks before his death, Nick told me that he feared bodily harm from Parker. He also told me that he kept two guns in the house just in case of a break-in. When the police searched the house, no weapons of any kind were found. Whoever broke in to steal the incriminating journals and manuscript even took his Johnny Reb cap. Nick always told me he wanted to be buried in that cap one day. I just hope that hip gyrator, Elvis, had nothing to do with this.”
“Absolutely, it wasn’t suicide,” Robert Conrad, Nick’s closest friend, was quoted as saying. “We were so close that if he’d intended that, I’d have known about it. Murder? I don’t know. It could be foul play.”
Jeb Adams, Nick’s son, claimed in 1992 that he was “99.99% sure” that his dad had been murdered.
His revelations about James Dean and Elvis Presley have, as of this date, never been published. The whereabouts of his manuscript are not known. Perhaps it was destroyed.
Only a few graying fans, mostly homosexual men, still visit the grave site of Nick Adams. He was buried near his birthplace in Berwick, Pennsylvania. The restless son of immigrant parents from the Ukraine, he always maintained a burning ambition to become a movie star, “The New James Dean.”
After a brief success, his career began to slip into oblivion. Faced with mounting bills, he played the dangerous card of blackmail. That move probably cost him his life.
Chapter Twenty-Three
HOW A SHORT, NEARSIGHTED FARMBOY FROM INDIANA BECAME A
GIANT
ALONG WITH HOLLYWOOD SUPERSTARS
ELIZABETH TAYLOR AND ROCK HUDSON
A Lesbian Author, a Gay Leading Man, a Sultry, Bed-Hopping Beauty, and a Bisexual Rebel Bring a Sprawling Saga of Texas to the Screen
JIMMY DISCOVERS THE RATTLESNAKE-EATING COWBOYS OF TEXAS, WHERE MEN BOAST THAT THEY’VE ALL GOT SOMETHING BIG
Hollywood was abuzz with the news that director George Stevens was going to make the all-star spectacular film epic of the year, the screen adaptation of Edna Ferber’s best-selling 1952 novel, Giant, set in the Lone Star State.
In July of 2002, when the US Postal Service issued an 83¢ stamp honoring the literary legacy of Edna Ferber, collectors realized that, based on a printing plate error, some were missing the blue, black, and ocher-colored ink that would otherwise have been included in their print runs.
The value of those judged as “aberrant” immediately shot up to around $500 each, and the recognition quotient of Edna Ferber skyrocketed.
The novel had enthralled thousands of Americans, but not many Texans. As John Barkham in The New York Times wrote: “Miss Ferber makes it very clear that she doesn’t like the Texas she writes about, and it’s a cinch that when Texans read about what she has written about them, they won’t like Miss Ferber either.”
In reference to a saga that sprawled across three generations of sweeping historical changes, critic Robert Tanitch wrote: “The Lone Star State was turned into a symbol, a giant symbol, for all that
was the least estimable in America: It’s moneygrabbing materialism, its thick-skinned self-interest, its profligacy and vulgarity, its low-browism, its snobbery and racism, its narrow-mindedness, its self-satisfied isolationism, and its spiritual impoverishment.”
Set for release in 1956, Warner Brothers had budgeted it at five and a half million dollars, a staggering sum of money in the Eisenhower era.
Now at the peak of his acclaim, California-born George Stevens was a deeply respected kind of Renaissance figure with a career that had included stints as a director, producer, screenwriter, and cinematographer. As the head of the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War II, he’d taken newsreels of the Allied landings on the bloody beaches of Normandy. Later, he filmed the liberation by U.S. troops of the notorious concentration camp of Dachau.
He’d already won the Best Director Oscar for his 1951 A Place in the Sun, and was Oscar-nominated for his 1953 Western, Shane.
The trio of leads that Stevens would focus on first included Bick Benedict, patriarch of what becomes an oil dynasty and his wife, Leslie Benedict; and his employee, an upstart ranchhand-turned-wildcatter, Jett Rink. Giant also contained many lesser roles for which established stars would compete.
Bick is a strapping, tall, and handsome Texan, the owner of the sprawling Reata Ranch that’s almost the size of the state of New Hampshire. The cattle baron is proud and a bit of a chauvinist in that he treats women like second-class citizens, perhaps granting Mexicans third-class status.
George Stevens, perplexed, possibly based on an issue associated with James Dean.
The film opens when he’s in Maryland with the intention of purchasing a champion black stallion. There, he falls for the beautiful and somewhat calculating Leslie on her father’s horse farm. Unlike most of the women he had known, she’s intelligent and a bit of a liberated woman, rather strong willed and high-spirited. Ignoring certain warning signs, he is spellbound by her beauty, marries her, and hauls her back to his sterile, arid, and searingly overheated ranch.
She’s appalled at some of the conditions she finds there, including the Jim Crow class distinction between rich and poor and the horrible treatment of Mexicans.
A lesser role, but one far more colorful was that of a poor local rancher, Jett Rink, who works for the Benedict family. Edna Ferber described him as “a character threatening sexual danger. He was a brute, a savage, dirty, belligerent, irresponsible, sadistic, a sullen, loutish kind of boy, who bore a grudge against the world.”
“He was all right when he behaves himself,” she wrote. “But when he drinks, he goes kind of crazy. He’s a kind of genius, Jett is. He’ll probably end up a billionaire—or in the electric chair. Put him in a car and he goes crazy.”
It was almost as if she were describing James Dean.
When Jimmy heard through his lover, Arthur Loew, Jr., that the role of Jett Rink “might suit you as tight as a rubber on your dick,” he rushed out and bought the paperback edition of Giant, which he read cover to cover in three days. He later told Loew, “That’s me, boy. I’m Jett Rink. If I grab that role, I can escape being typecast as a sinister adolescent.”
Loew promised to approach Stevens and to pitch him for the role of Jett. To Jimmy’s dismay, he learned that the director had already sent the script to Marlon Brando. Once again, these two Method actors would each be in consideration for the same role. Brando sent the script back, rejecting the part as “too small.”
Stevens also considered Charlton Heston, Cornel Wilde, Anthony Quinn, Jack Palance, and Gordon McCrae for the role of Jett.
Right before reaching his final decision, Stevens came up with the idea of putting Richard Burton into the role as a “hell-raising wildcatter” in love with Bick Benedict’s wife, Leslie.
Had Richard Burton accepted the role of Jett Rink in Giant, his affair with Elizabeth Taylor might have begun years before he co-starred with her, (as depicted above) as Marc Antony in Cleopatra.
As it turned out, Burton was not available. “It would have been a challenge to me as an actor,” he said. “Having a Welshman speak with a Texas drawl.”
[Later, after Burton learned that Elizabeth Taylor had been cast as Leslie, he ran into Stevens one night at Chasens in Los Angeles. In the men’s room, he whispered, “I’m sorry I wasn’t free to play Jett Rink. It would have given me a chance to introduce Elizabeth Taylor to my Welsh dick.]
After losing Burton for the role, Stevens offered it to Alan Ladd, who, unknown to the director at the time, was despondent to the point of suicide, and drinking heavily. He dreaded facing the camera, and was undergoing a lot of personal hell, including fear of a blackmail attempt from one of his hustler lovers, who was threatening to tell all to Confidential unless he surrendered $10,000 in cash.
“Lightning didn’t strike twice,” said Alan Ladd. He was referring to my “idiotic decision” to reject the role of Jett Rink in Giant. Ladd had scored a big hit when George Stevens cast him in the Western, Shane (see above).
Stevens had gotten along smoothly with Ladd during the filming of their 1953 blockbuster, Shane. With that in mind, he sent him the first draft of the script for Giant.
Ladd read the script that night and eagerly telephoned Stevens the next morning. “I’m your Bick Benedict!”
Stevens was aghast. He hadn’t told Ladd that he wanted him for the lesser role of Jett.
“There’s no way in hell I could make a midget like Ladd play a tall, strapping Texan,” Stevens told his aides. “Stand him on crates to make him taller?”
Stevens got back to Ladd with, “No, no, Alan, I want you to play Jett Rink!”
“I’m not going to play that shit,” Ladd said. “A flamboyantly corrupt Texas oil millionaire who begins life as a dirty little punk? Not for me, buddy.”
He hung up on Stevens, but two years later, he told a reporter, “Turning down the role that went to James Dean was one of the biggest mistakes of my career.”
What Ladd had rejected, James Stewart went for in a very big way, even though Jett Rink would be a radical departure from the good guys he usually played on screen. Perhaps that change of pace was the reason he wanted to star as Giant’s corrupt ranch hand.
Nothing illustrated “New Hollywood” vs. “Old Hollywood” better than the rivalry for roles between James Dean and James Stewart. Stevens called it “The Battle of the Two Jimmy’s.”
Stewart was pushing fifty (actually forty-seven years old) when he campaigned for the role of Jett Rink. From the beginning, Stevens didn’t want him. “If he were twenty years younger, he could have handled it with that drawl of his, his beanpole physique, and his shy, gulping manner,” Stevens said. “Being in a Western was no problem. He’d come to personify the American West as much as John Wayne. I could make a younger actor old with makeup, but there was no way I could make Stewart a young man—even with all the makeup in the world.”
“It was one of my greatest embarrassments to have to call Stewart and turn him down for the role,” Stevens said. “After all, he was one of the greatest of all screen actors. I didn’t feel so bad for him, however. After all, he’d just had a hit opposite Grace Kelly in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).”
“I finally decided the role should go to Dean,” Sevens said. “The guy had been hounding me for days to get that juicy part. I called him to tell him to transform himself into a Texas ranger. ‘The role is yours,’ I promised him.”
Stevens believed that Jimmy would be ideal in the opening scenes, when Jett Rink was a young rancher. But since he has to age into a drunken, battered 45-year-old for the film’s final scenes, the director worried that he might not pull them off, even with heavy makeup and graying hair.
Actually, he’d been aware of Jimmy’s acting ever since he’d watched his teleplay, A Long Time Till Dawn. He told a reporter, “It was the first time that I ever watched anxiously during the credits so I could find out who this brilliant, sensitive actor was.”
After Stevens had East of Eden screened
for him, he congratulated Elia Kazan. “I found the kid’s performance mesmerizing,” Stevens said. “I was sorry I lost your boy, Brando. I’d wanted him to play Jett Rink. But getting Dean might be even better.”
“Working with Jimmy will be an experience you’ll carry with you to your grave,” Kazan said. “I’ll say no more.”
“Don’t Fall In Love With Me”
—Grace Kelly to James Dean
After Jimmy agreed to play Jett, Stevens turned his attention to casting the two other leads, Bick and Leslie Benedict.
Producer Henry Ginsberg , in a phone call to Stevens, recommended Marlene Dietrich for the role.
“Are you out of your mind?” Stevens responded. “As far as it is known, Marlene was born in 1901, or maybe even in the 1890s. She’d be perfect if we adapted Leslie as a grandmother, and if we rewrote the character as a German. The answer is ‘no.’ She’s too old, and too Teutonic.”
Jennifer Jones, with the understanding that she’d have to age from a young bride to an older woman during the course of the film, was the first to personally lobby Stevens for the juicy female lead.
More than a decade before, Jones had won an Oscar for the somewhat sappy religious tear-jerker, The Song of Bernadette (1943). She promised Stevens that if he’d give her the role of Leslie Benedict, she would win another Oscar—“and put your big movie on the map.”
He thought she was “too syrupy” for the role, his mind set on Audrey Hepburn. Flying to New York in July of 1954, he visited the petite actress, who was appearing at the time on Broadway in Ondine.
James Dean Page 88