[In spite of their deeply divided views of the world, some sort of bond was formed. “He is about the most amusing old redneck I’ve ever met,” Jimmy later said.
In fact, back in Hollywood, Wills invited Jimmy and Dennis Hopper for a weekend of charter fishing off the coast of Catalina Island. “During our sail, those two boys, out at sea, walked around jaybird naked. By the time it came for them to retreat to their bunks at night, I was too drunk to care what they were up to. I retreated to my own cabin to sleep it off.]
Wills would later describe to Forrest Tucker and John Wayne, among others, what it was like living in small quarters with James Dean and Rock Hudson. “The walls were paper thin. For the first week or so, those two pretty boys were as happy as a pig in shit. Those creaky bedsprings got a lot of workout.”
[In 1987, Elizabeth Taylor told Star magazine that, “In the beginning, I thought Rock and Jimmy were two lovebirds. When I was with the both of them, I felt like an uncomfortable third party. But that was to change very soon.]
“Jimmy and Rock were two such very different kind of men and polar opposites as actors,” she said.” It seemed inevitable that their fucking would soon turn to feuding. It was a short honeymoon before war was declared. Jimmy moved out.”
On the day he left, he told Wills, “Hudson is trying to queer me and make me his bitch. My ass is sore. He’s too big.”
Jimmy may have resented the enormous buildup that Warners was giving Hudson. One press release trumpeted, “The prize acting plum of the year, one which has often been reported in the grasp of a number of Hollywood’s top male stars, goes to a dark horse who has never once been mentioned in the spirited competition. Hudson will be co-starring with the beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, with newcomer James Dean in a small supporting role.”
Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson as man and wife in Texas. For a brief time, they were also off-screen lovers. Later in life, a drunken Elizabeth once said, “Occasionally, Rock delivered a mercy fuck to a woman.”
Jimmy almost detested Stevens on sight, but Hudson seemed to adore him. Or, as Jimmy said, “He follows Stevens around like a lovesick puppy.”
During their filming of Giant, Rock appeared on the cover of Life magazine, headlined as “Hollywood’s Most Handsome Bachelor.”
Life speculated about why the twenty-nine-year-old had never gotten married, telling its readers that it was about time he explained to his fans why.
The very urbane, very handsome, very charming Rock Hudson
At times, Jimmy found Rock very troubled. Somehow, a blackmailer had obtained sexually explicit photographs of him and was demanding a lot of money, more than Hudson had.
Jimmy and Hudson had completely different approaches to acting. Jimmy was from the Marlon Brando/ Monty Clift/ Rod Steiger/ Eli Wallach school of (Method) acting, and Hudson was from the “erotic hunk of beefcake academy” whose members also included Tab Hunter, John Derek, and Guy Madison.
When Jimmy was forced to act out a scene with Hudson, he referred to his colleague as “a lump of dead wood.” In retaliation, Hudson called Jimmy “that little scruff.”
When Hudson got to know Elizabeth more intimately, he confessed to her, “I want sex, real man-on-man sex, but I don’t go in for this kinky stuff. Dean wants to get into that claw-footed, old timey bathtub we have, and then he begs me to piss on him. He also likes me to burn his ass with my cigarette butt—shit like that. I’m not into all this sicko crap.”
Hudson would later tell Elizabeth, “Dean is the kind of guy who could make mad, passionate love with you one minute. Then, after he shoots off, he starts complaining about your acting. It’s amazing.”
The former child star, Jane Withers, was cast as a nouveau riche oil heiress, Vashti Snythe, in Giant, a role that several other aging actresses also wanted. On screen, Jimmy eyes her skeptically, but off-screen, she became his “mother confessor.”
***
Instead of spending time with Hudson, Jimmy bonded with Jane Withers. She had beat out more established stars to get the role in Giant of Vashti Snythe. Withers had worked as a child actress since the age of three. Less than a decade later, at the age of eleven and twelve, she emerged as one of Hollywood’s top box office stars of 1937 and 1938.
At the time that Jimmy met her, she was divorcing a rich Texas oilman, William P. Moss, Jr., with whom she had produced three children.
[Oddly enough, her greatest fame would come in the 1960s and early 70s, based on her TV commercials for Comet as “Josephine the Plumber.”]
During the Marfa shoot, Withers turned her rented lodgings into a kind of USO-inspired social center. Inviting cast and crew to hang out there at night. She played records, organized games, and served refreshments, but didn’t allow liquor or poker.
She recalled that Jimmy would sit in his parked car across the street from her house. “He’d wait until my eleven o’clock curfew, when I kicked everybody out. Then he’d come in alone and talk to me until two or three o’clock in the morning. That certainly interfered with my sleep when I had a 4AM call on the set.”
“I think that in some way, I helped Jimmy get over his negative attitude toward life,” she said. “He became my Number Three son. We sometimes read the Bible together.”
[Long after Jimmy died, Withers appeared in a DVD documentary about his life, revealing that she owned this favorite pink shirt he wore off screen nearly all the time. He didn’t want it washed, fearing that it would lose its vibrancy. “It was pretty rank, so he let me wash it for him. I did this often. In fact, before he left for Salinas on that fateful day of September 30, 1955, he came by house and dropped off the pink shirt for me to wash. He told me he’d drop by and pick it up when he returned from Salinas. That pink shirt is still hanging in my closet.”]
Sal Mineo
ADIOS! TO REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE AND JIMMY, HOLA! TO GIANT AND TO THE ROCK
Jimmy had campaigned for Stevens to cast his sometimes lover, Sal Mineo, in the small role of Angel Obregon II, the son of poor Mexican immigrants. Jimmy said, “Sal has the look of the angels.” The director agreed and gave Mineo the small but key role. [Mineo had no scenes with Jimmy onscreen.] They’d been lovers on the set of Rebel Without a Cause, and the Italian-American actor retained powerful emotions. He had bought a rebuilt Mercury like the car his idol had driven in Rebel. He had also taken to wearing a red jacket similar to the one Jimmy had worn in it.
“My father made coffins, hand-finishing them for the Bronx Casket Company, where he was a hand-finisher and later, a foreman,” Mineo said years later, in Manhattan, to Darwin Porter. “Near the end of Giant, I join the Army and leave Texas, only to be sent back in a coffin. Since my dad made coffins, I tried to get Stevens to use one of his since it was my coffin in the film, but he turned down my offer.”
Sal Mineo was cast as a U.S. soldier in Giant. returning from war in a coffin. Like James Dean, in real life, he would meet a violent end. At 9:30PM February 12, 1976, a paramedic noted in his report that Sal Mineo’s murder had been committed in an alley at the rear of his Manhattan apartment. He had died from a single stab wound to the middle of his chest, apparently part of a garden-variety mugging unrelated to his status as a movie celebrity.
“I did not have to go to Texas because my scenes were shot at Warners in Burbank. But I went there anyway, to see what was happening and with the intention of shacking up with either Jimmy or Rock—or maybe both, if I got lucky.”
“When I got there, I found out that Jimmy had moved out of the house with Rock, and that big, muscular son of a bitch was looking for another boy ass. I volunteered and he got mine.”
“I didn’t think I had a chance, because the rumor was that he preferred tall, blonde-haired and muscular guys who looked liked Steve Reeves. Here I was, a 5’8”, raven-haired 120-pound, olive-skinned WOP from the Bronx.”
“But he really came on to me and invited me to spend the night with him in a bed recently vacated by Jimmy. What a pounding I got that night! He
nearly split me open, and I loved it. I got to spend two of the most glorious weeks of my life in bed with Rock until he discovered this cowboy in Marfa. Into that little bedroom went the cowboy. Out went Sal Mineo.”
“Jimmy broke off his friendship with me when he heard I’d slept with Rock. We later made up. I’d planned to get involved with him again, since we’d been cast together in the boxing movie, Somebody Up There Likes Me. Of course, that was not to happen. Into my life walked Paul Newman instead.”
“The last time I saw Jimmy, I almost didn’t recognize him,” Mineo said. “It was on the Warners lot. I was coming out of the commissary as he was going in. This old man with gray hair, a mustache, and hunched shoulders passed me by. Well, almost passed me by. He stopped and groped my salami. I was about to punch him out when I saw through the makeup. It was Jimmy. He grabbed me and embraced me. He promised to call me real soon.”
“It was a day in late September. That phone call never came in. The next thing I heard, he was dead.”
Biff Beaufort, a Hot Local Cowboy, Is Reconfigured as “Sage Durango”
BASED ON JIMMY’S ADVICE, HE RIDES INTO THE SUNSET TOWARD HENRY WILLSON’S DREAM FACTORY
After Hudson, Jimmy was soon shacking up with a tall, blonde-haired, handsome cowboy he’d presumably met through Pat Hinkle.
Biff Beaufort had drifted down from Wyoming, where he’d gotten into some trouble with the law. Jimmy was immediately attracted to the 6’4” rodeo rider.
It was reported that he borrowed some of Beaufort’s characteristics for his portrayal of Jett Rink.
Hollywood Dreams
May They Rest in Peace:
Whatever Happened to Biff Beaufort, aka
SAGE DURANGO?
Whenever they could get away, they drove off to a battered-looking shack about ten miles from Marfa. Otherwise, they lived together in the town’s only hotel.
Jimmy spoke little about his relationship with Beaufort, except to tell about one of the most romantic nights he’d ever spent in his life.
It was a clear night when two horses took Jimmy and the cowboy to a scenic outlook on the outskirts of town. Perhaps that was the night Beaufort shared his dream with Jimmy, and that involved becoming a Hollywood star. “I’m bigger and better looking than Rock Hudson,” he bragged.
Actually, he wanted Jimmy to promise to take him back to Hollywood after the filming of Giant. Jimmy didn’t really want to do that, as he had other plans.
He had an idea. One night, he asked Beaufort to put on a pair of tight-fitting briefs. He told him to get them wet in the bathtub, thereby making them semi-transparent. Then Jimmy photographed him, “bulging out” of those briefs.
He sent the photograph to Henry Willson in Hollywood. At the time, Willson was “dating,” (of all people) Margaret Truman, the daughter of the former U.S. president Harry S Truman.
Five days later, Willson responded, sending Beaufort a one-way train ticket to Los Angeles and a money order for five hundred dollars. Willson wrote, “I’ve already changed his name: Instead of Biff Beaufort, why not Sage Durango?”
The re-christened cowboy spent his last night in Texas in Jimmy’s arms before riding a train to Los Angeles.
With only weeks to live, Jimmy never heard of him after that.
Oil Baron, Glenn McCarthy
JIMMY FLIES TO HOUSTON WITH THE KING OF TEXAS
“I’ve flown to this hellhole of Marfa just to size you up,” said the big, burly Texan who stood before Jimmy, looking him up and down. “That asshole, George Stevens, must have been on something when he cast a little runt like you to play me on the screen. Hell, I’m bigger than the State of Texas itself. You look like the kind of pretty boy a whore might ask, ‘Are you in yet?’”
“Thanks for the buildup. I’m James Dean. Just who in hell are you?
“I’m Glenn McCarthy, the King of Texas. In case you didn’t know, that pussy-eater, Edna Ferber, based Jett Rink on me.”
Jimmy did some sizing up too. Indiana didn’t produce men like McCarthy. His eyes were hidden behind the darkest sunglasses Jimmy had ever seen. He wore a gleaming leather jacket with a leopard-patterned ascot. On his pinkie rested a diamond ring which Jimmy thought might have been the Hope Diamond.
[McCarthy’s nickname was “Diamond Glenn.]
“Listen, Buddy, you don’t have to be big in person to look big on the screen,” Jimmy answered.
“Guess you’re right, kid,” McCarthy said. “After all, everything’s blown up thirty feet or so, isn’t it?”
In the late 1940s, much of America knew who McCarthy was, as he ranked up there with that coven of billionaire Texas oilmen such as H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, and Hugh Roy Cullen.
As a wildcatter, McCarthy drilled himself a fortune of “black gold,” built the massive and legendary Shamrock Hotel in Houston, and then, in time, faded into obscurity, a relatively forgotten figure.
He was called “Texas Crude, a stereotype of the raw, hard-living, bourbon-swilling, damn-thetorpedoes, Texas oil millionaire,” as one reporter defined him.
Oil baron Glenn McCarthy on his 15,000-acre ranch near Uvalde, Texas, about 80 miles west of San Antonio.
Author Bryon Burrough wrote that McCarthy rubbed shoulders with the likes of Howard Hughes, another Texan billionaire, and such movie stars as Errol Flynn and John Wayne, “drinking and brawling his way from Buffalo Bayou to Sunset Boulevard.” At the peak of his fame in the late 1940s, he was depicted on the cover of Time magazine.
Jimmy was almost stunned by the larger-than-life creature who stood before him, now, in Marfa. Then, welcoming the chance to study the character he was depicting on film, he accepted McCarthy’s invitation to fly with him to Houston for a weekend at the Shamrock Hotel. [Ironically, although McCarthy had built and widely publicized it, at this stage in his fortunes, he was no longer in full control of its management.]
Before the end of their time together, Jimmy had learned plenty about McCarthy, perhaps more than he needed to know. McCarthy enthralled him with stories of his wildcat days, when he was known as the hottest oil finder, and biggest risk taker, in Texas.
James Dean in a detail from a scene in Giant.
“I owned 15,000 acres of West Texas prairie outside Uvalde,” McCarthy boasted. “Hell, Rock Hudson as Bick Benedict could also be playing me, but he’s not wild enough like you are, kid. I’ve heard stories about you. I hope it’s just a rumor that you suck cock.”
“But if you are,” he continued, “you’ve come to the state where the men have the biggest dicks in America. At a urinal, I stood next to Lyndon Johnson. He called his ‘Jumbo.’ We sized each other up. I had him beat, but not by much.”
Arriving at the Shamrock, Jimmy was ushered into the gray-granite, eighteen-story hotel. He stood in awe at the sight of the cavernous lobby covered with Honduran mahogany. “It’s called the Lone Star State’s answer to the Taj Mahal,” McCarthy said.
“I felt like a king riding the elevator up to the top floor of this colossus where I was installed in the guest bedroom of McCarthy’s suite.”
Two hours later, the two men descended together to the lavish bar, where McCarthy treated him to what he called “Kentucky bourbon a century old.”
“No one makes bourbon like Kentuckians,” he said. “It’s got that special flavor. I hear they piss into the mash for that zippy tang.”
Over drinks, McCarthy amused Jimmy with stories of the spectacular opening of the Shamrock in March of 1949, when dignitaries flew in from all over Europe and North America. He said he rented the entire fourteen cars of the Santa Fe Railway, renaming it “The Shamrock Special” as it hauled movie stars to Houston from Los Angeles for the hotel’s lavishly publicized gala opening.
It was disastrous. “I invited two-thousand people and about another five-thousand showed up, storming all over the place and disrupting everything. It became a raging stampede, Texas-style.”
The press described it as “a gaudy, diamond-strewn, chaotic metaphor
for the New Texas of the vulgar nouveau riche.”
“I personally checked in my first guest, Frank Sinatra,” McCarthy said. “Later that night, I arranged for him to fuck Miss Texas.”
To beef up the entertainment, he also staged the premiere of a movie. Because nothing recent was available at the time, he decided to finance his own, arranging for a scriptwriter to turn out a sad story of a young girl who wants to raise two baby lambs. “I cast Natalie Wood in the part when she was still a child star, long before you got to mess with her in Rebel Without a Cause. Walter Brennan was her co-star.”
[It was a low-budget affair for RKO, one that extolled the virtues of Heartland values and 4-H clubs. The love interest was provided by Robert Paige and Marguerite Chapman, a glamorous brunette. It wasn’t shot in Texas, but near the Feather River outside Sacramento.]
“Natalie had a special plate at her dining table every night for her pet Chihuahua. Her left wrist got broken when we shot this dramatic scene of her crossing a collapsing bridge in a thunderstorm, a stunt that went wrong. Her mother didn’t get a doctor for her. I hear that even today, her left wrist is misshapen. But you’d know more about that than I do. If you go for young poontang like I do, I’m sure you’ve banged her. Which reminds me—I’ve invited two sixteen-year-olds to join us. I married a sixteen-year-old, and I’ve been addicted to sixteen-year-old pussy ever since.”
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