James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  Almost from the beginning, Hepburn and Stevens disagreed over the interpretation of the role. She wasn’t really interested, anyway, telling Stevens, “I hear Texans eat rattlesnake for breakfast.”

  What Might Have Been: Actresses considered for the role of Leslie Benedict included TOO GLAM! Marlene Dietrich (depicted in 1951 in No Highway in the Sky; TOO PIOUS AFTER SONG OF BERNADETTE! Jennifer Jones, as she appeared with Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun (1946); and the very cosmopolitan but NOT PARTICULARLY CONVINCING AS A RANCH HAND, Audrey Hepburn.

  Within a week, Hepburn was no longer in the running.

  Grace Kelly in her very-fashionable, much-reviewed-by-fashion-writers black dress, as she appeared in Rear Window.

  His telephone kept ringing throughout the rest of the year. He decided that Eva Marie Saint would be perfect for the role, only to learn that she was pregnant with a baby due in April.

  Stevens then began to focus on Grace Kelly, who had just made such hits as Dial M For Murder (1954) with Ray Milland, and Rear Window (also 1954) with James Stewart. Her interpretation of the female lead in The Country Girl (1955) with William Holden and Bing Crosby would later be awarded with an Oscar.

  Jimmy’s lover, Arthur Loew, Jr., through his direct pipeline to the executives at MGM, learned that Grace had wanted the role of Leslie so badly that she was willing to go on suspension, refusing to show up for the filming of Jeremy Rodock with the aging Spencer Tracy.

  As all of this was happening, Jimmy was spending many of his nights in Nicholas Ray’s suite at the Château Marmont, a venue that was by now so familiar to him that management seemed to think he was a permanent resident.

  By coincidence, he learned that Grace was living within a bungalow at the same hotel. He hadn’t seen her since their previous encounter in New York.

  Ray noted a smirk on Jimmy’s face. “Don’t tell me you’ve bedded her, you little devil!”

  “Something like that,” Jimmy said. “My dream might be coming true. Starring in a movie with Grace Kelly.”

  The next morning found Jimmy, in a bathing suit, beside the hotel’s swimming pool, from a position with an unobstructed view of the door to Grace’s bungalow.

  When she emerged from her quarters, she was putting on a pair of white gloves as she headed toward the lobby. “Hi Gracie!” Jimmy called out to her as he emerged from the pool. [“I imagined I was a male version of Esther Williams, trying to look as sexy as possible,” he later told Ray.]

  She kissed him on the lips as he wrapped himself in a giant bath towel.

  “Well,” he said. “What have we here? The most beautiful girl in New York is now the most gorgeous gal in Hollywood.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” she said. “Now I hope the world will agree with you.”

  “They will, I predict,” he said.

  “I’m terribly rushed right now,” she said. “and I’m running late. Perhaps we’ll get together sometime.”

  Fearing that he was losing her forever, he said, “I just heard from Arthur Loew. MGM is considering lending you out for Giant. And Stevens has more or less given me the third lead of Jett Rink.”

  Grace stopped in her tracks, focusing on him with renewed interest.

  “Is that so? Then by all means, we must get together. Are you free to drop by my bungalow at four tomorrow afternoon?”

  “I’ll be there with my Stetson and some Texas cowboy boots,” he promised.

  She gave him another gentle kiss on the lips. “I will hold my breath until you’re on my doorstep.”

  Over pillow talk, late the following afternoon, she shared her anxieties with him. “I’m afraid to go on a location shoot in the Texas desert. I’m a city girl.”

  “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “You’ll have me to protect you.”

  “I’ll consider that, but only on one condition,” she said.

  “What might that be, princess?” he asked, ironically referring to her as “princess” long before she actually became one.

  “That you don’t fall in love with me. Too many men fall in love with me.”

  Over the next ten days, Jimmy paid four visits to Grace’s bungalow. Once, he invited her to lunch in the Hollywood Hills, at a restaurant with a scenic view. Although she seemed serenely cool with his driving, back at the bungalow, she admitted, “That’s the last time for that. I was terrified every time you came to a curve in the road. This psychic, Frank Andrews, once told me that I’d be killed one day in a car crash.”

  Jimmy admitted to Ray, “I’ve had to deny you and everybody else sex because I’ve been saving it for Grace.”

  But one afternoon, Jimmy learned that he was paying his last visit to Grace’s bungalow. She told him that she was not going to play Leslie in Giant. “MGM is not going to lend me out. Another thing, I learned that George Stevens really doesn’t want me in the role. He prefers Elizabeth Taylor.”

  She went on to tell him something else. “I want you to understand,” she said. “My dance card is very full. You’re sweet, cuddly, and adorable. I’ll always have the fondest memories of you. Got to run now.” Then she gave him a gentle farewell kiss on the lips.

  That night, Jimmy told Ray what had happened. He didn’t seem surprised. “I was a bit taken aback that Grace took up with you in the first place. She’s known to prefer older men. Established stars. You’re just small fry.”

  “But unlike some of those grandfathers, I can always produce a reliable erection.”

  The next afternoon, Jimmy, at the pool, was joined by his least favorite author, Gore Vidal. “I heard Grace has given you the brush-off.”

  “You might call it that,” Jimmy said.

  “Well, she’ll be doing another picture, and she’s sure to have an affair with her leading man. Just think of it: Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, William Holden, Bing Crosby, James Stewart. She refused to make a movie with Spencer Tracy, but I hear he’s fucking her anyway. Now she’s going to star in a movie with Cary Grant. Oh, did I leave out Clark Gable from Mogambo?”

  As Jimmy was exiting from the pool area later that afternoon, he spotted Grace heading for her bungalow. When the face of the man who was accompanying her came into view, he recognized that it was the much married actor, David Niven.

  [More than six months after Jimmy’s death, Grace abdicated her throne as Queen of Hollywood to become a mere Princess of Monaco, based on her (relentlessly publicized) marriage to Prince Rainier.

  She would eventually die in a car crash at the age of fifty-two in September of 1982.]

  ***

  During several tense weeks, Elizabeth knew that the role she coveted, that of Leslie in Giant, was almost beyond her reach. George Stevens, who had directed her so brilliantly in A Place in the Sun, “seemed to want every other actress in Hollywood, but considered me chopped liver, I guess,” Elizabeth told her husband, Michael Wilding. “But I want that part, and I’m going for it. Imagine a script that calls for me to transform myself from a beautiful young bride to a grandmother. Oscar, you’ve got Elizabeth Taylor’s name written on your ass!”

  When it became clear that Grace Kelly would not be available, Elizabeth jumped with joy and headed for Benny Thau’s office to beg him to have MGM lend her services to Warner Brothers.

  There was still one problem: MGM didn’t want to lend her. “I had to go on a sitdown strike…well, almost,” she said to a reporter. “Dare I say blackmail in certain quarters? No, don’t print that…it wasn’t exactly blackmail.”

  Then, she engaged in a big brawl with Thau. “I think he wanted me to play Lassie’s mother—or some such shit—in a sequel.”

  She finally won out, “but my bruises were black. I got no extra money. MGM took it all for the loan-out.”

  When at last they become convinced that Elizabeth was the right actress for the part, the executives at Warner Brothers offered $250,000 for her services, even though her contract called for her to make only $100,000 a year from MGM at the time. MGM pocketed the difference.
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  ***

  Once she signed for the role of Leslie, Elizabeth insisted that “the only actor to play Jett Rink is Monty Clift.”

  Knowing what a good actor he was, Stevens went along with her proposal until Warner’s insurance underwriters advised Jack Warner that “Clift is just too god damn risky. We won’t insure him.”

  Stevens, even at this early stage in the compilation of Giant, was already hearing rumbling suspicions that Jimmy might carry some baggage with him. As expressed so colorfully by biographer David Brett: “Jimmy was already being hailed as a lost cause, a cock-hungry schizophrenic, a pre-‘Brat Pack’ prima donna, whose only truly happy, but not entirely sane moments occurred when he was creating merry hell.”

  Stevens was forced to delay the filming of Giant to accommodate his three big stars. Elizabeth was pregnant; Hudson needed to finish shooting All That Heaven Allows with Jane Wyman; and Jimmy still had scenes to shoot for Rebel Without a Cause.

  HOW HOLLYWOOD’S FADING MATINEE IDOLS SCHEMED FOR THE ROLE OF TEXAS PATRIARCH

  Bick Benedict

  AND HOW IT WAS EVENTUALLY AWARDED TO THE MACHO AND CHARMING

  Rock Hudson

  During his selection of candidates for the male lead, the character of Bick Benedict, Stevens was bombarded with phone calls from William Holden, Gary Cooper, and Clark Gable. At least a dozen other Hollywood males also made their voices heard.

  Lying on different massage boards at their gym, John Wayne told Forrest Tucker, “I’m gonna play Bick Benedict.”

  “Like hell you are,” Tucker responded, lying nude on his board. “The role calls for a big dick.” Then he ripped the towel off Wayne. “As you can plainly see, my Moby Dick is six times the size of yours.”

  Sterling Hayden said: “Forrest Tucker is too drunk to play the part. I’m the right size to play Benedict . . . in all departments.”

  William Holden, as the doomed writer, Joe Gillis, in the 1950 movie that made him a star, Sunset Blvd., starring Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond.

  Robert Mitchum said: “I’ve practically got the role of Bick Benedict sewn up! Stevens has always had a hard-on for me. I can just see billboards across America: ROBERT MITCHUM AND ELIZABETH TAYLOR STARRING IN GIANT WITH JAMES DEAN.”

  Mitchum had also been considered for the role of Jett Rink

  “With a chest like I used to have, I didn’t mind going topless in a movie,” said Robert Mitchum, pictured here in the 1962 Cape Fear. “I was considered for both Jett Rink and Bick Benedict.”

  Late one afternoon, a call came in from Ross Hunter, the producer of Magnificent Obsession (1954), starring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. “I want you to consider Rock for this part. He’s going to become the biggest macho male star since Gable.”

  Universal, however, didn’t want to lend Hudson, rushing him instead into another soapy tearjerker with Wyman, All That Heaven Allows (1955). But when it became clear that Hudson could fulfill his obligations to both films, he persuaded Warners to let him star in Giant. “I had to let a lot of guys at Universal suck my cock to get the role of Bick,” he later told Elizabeth.

  Before deciding on Hudson, Stevens had more or less made up his mind that the role of Bick Benedict should go to William Holden. Hudson later recalled that on the day the announcement was made that he would be the male star of Giant, he entered the studio sauna nude, only to discover an equally nude Holden sitting on a slab of marble.

  Hudson would describe the incident’s irony to Elizabeth: “Here I was, the new star of Hollywood, confronting an aging star with my better body, a bigger dick, and a more awesome presence. I felt embarrassed for Holden.”

  Some Hollywood historians have suggested that the casting of Giant, more than that of any other picture, represented “a changing of the guard in Hollywood,” based on the fact that box office champions of yesterday [James Stewart, Clark Gable, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Sterling Hayden, Gary Cooper, and William Holden] were rejected in favor of new, postwar stars such as James Dean and Rock Hudson.

  Mean-Spirited Jimmy and Confidential Magazine

  HOW THE MALE LEAD IN GIANT WAS DANGLED BEFORE PAUL NEWMAN

  Newly arrived in Hollywood for the filming of The Rack [a war drama based on a play by Rod Serling and released in 1956], Paul Newman invited Jimmy for an afternoon swim at the Château Marmont. Newman was anxious to learn about how filming was progressing on Rebel Without a Cause.

  Jimmy told him that Warner Brothers was cracking down on the script, especially as regards the implied homosexual attraction between his character that of Plato. “Sal and I are playing a trick on them. I told him to look at me with moonglow eyes. It’ll be obvious to audiences that he’s in love with me.”

  He also claimed that he had been lobbying to get Mineo cast in the role of a Mexican soldier in Giant. “If I’m going to be shipped off to a remote outpost in Texas, I’ll need a fuckmate with me. I can’t take a chance of finding someone on the hoof there.”

  “Don’t you think Sal is a bit young for you?” Newman asked.

  “I take the position of the Emperor Caligula,” Jimmy answered. “As long as they’re out of the womb.”

  Later, Jimmy asked him to go with him to a car race, but Newman turned him down, pleading another engagement.

  “When I’m racing, it’s a more powerful thrill than any drug,” Jimmy claimed. “I feel like I’m not of this earth. I feel like a real man. I answer to no one. I’m in control of my universe.”

  Newman, too, seemed intrigued by car racing, promising, “Sooner than later, I bet we’ll be racing together, maybe even competing for the gold.”

  Although the two men didn’t notice her, Susan Strasberg, daughter of Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio, was checking into the Château Marmont with her mother, Paula.

  She later recalled seeing the two actors in their bathing suits. “They both had slender bodies, not beefed up, but perfect in every way, like Michelangelo’s David. They had thick hair, Paul’s being wavier. Paul had this habit of touching his finger to his nose when talk got a little rough. I saw him do that a lot at the Actors Studio. Lying on a pad side by side, they were the epitome of male beauty. I understood why men turn gay. Each of them could have posed for a Renaissance painter, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci, not just Michelangelo.”

  The next weekend, Newman did agree to drive down the Pacific coast for a weekend at a roadside motel outside Laguna Beach. After a night of heavy drinking, they went back to their motel and fell into bed together, too tired to make love. As Jimmy would later tell Nicholas Ray, “We were too exhausted and too intoxicated that night, but came the rosy glow of dawn, we made up for it.”

  Ex-con and bisexual, Rory Calhoun, depicted above, was sacrified and savaged by Confidential magazine and a conspiracy of Hollywood agents and casting directors.

  Over lunch that day, Jimmy promised Newman that, “I’m going to do everything in my power to get you cast as Bick Benedict in Giant. We didn’t get to work together in East of Eden, but the two of us will be dynamite on the screen together. Both of us can take turns fucking Elizabeth Taylor.”

  “I don’t understand,” Newman said. “I’ve heard that George Stevens has already cast Rock Hudson.”

  As a western star, Paul Newman survived his rejection for the role of Bick Benedict in Giant, moving on to play the male lead in Hud, depicted above.

  “Don’t let that worry you,” Jimmy said. “The shit’s about to hit the fan. I’ve heard that Confidential has been on Rock’s tail for some time. They’re going to expose him as a homo. Rock is certain to be fired from Giant before shooting begins. It’s all over for him. The part will make your career after that Silver Chalice shit.”

  [At the last minute, Henry Willson, Hudson’s agent, made a deal to expose (and sacrifice) another of his stars, Rory Calhoun, in lieu of his bigger, more profitable client, Rock Hudson. Consequently, it was revealed that Calhoun had spent time in prison years before becoming a Hollywood star.

  Hudson st
ayed in the cast of Giant, and Newman went on to star in the boxing saga, Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), cast as Rocky Graziano. The role had been earmarked for Jimmy, but his fatal car crash abruptly ended that dream.]

  Susan Strasberg Aborts Jimmy’s Kid

  The sixteen-year-old actress, Susan Strasberg, had long admired James Dean. In her memoirs, Bittersweet, published in 1980, she wrote: “He fascinated me. He epitomized an iconoclastic approach to life, opposed to the more measured, intellectual cadences I was accustomed to.”

  She also said that during her stay at the Château Marmont, “Nick Ray, Jimmy, my mother, Paula, and I used to go out for dinner. Jimmy borrowed one of Nick’s jackets, which made him look like a little boy dressed in his father’s clothes.”

  Soon, Jimmy and Susan were dating without their chaperones. The Hollywood Reporter took notice. “James Dean courts Susan Strasberg in jeans, a dirty pair at that, a leather jacket, and scruffy cowboy boots. Susan is as happy as if he had dressed in a tuxedo.”

  The couple were seen at dives on Sunset Strip.

  She was in Hollywood because Vincente Minnelli had cast her in The Cobweb (1955), which Jimmy was to have starred in. His role went to John Kerr, his rival and former lover. The other stars included Charles Boyer, Richard Widmark, Lillian Gish, Lauren Bacall, Gloria Grahame, and Oscar Levant, who had become Jimmy’s friend.

  Jimmy was anxious to learn how the shoot was going.

  Susan claimed, “I’m cast as a hypersensitive, paranoid teenager. Call it type casting.”

  One morning, Susan introduced Jimmy to the former silent screen great, Lillian Gish. He told her that he’d once appeared in a teleplay with her sister, Dorothy.