SEX PARTNERS: The first lover of note in Coop’s life was Clara Bow, the star of It, in which he played a small part in 1927. Clara rated her lovers, and gave Coop rave reviews on his magnificent endowments, boasting to Hedda Hopper that he was “hung like a horse and could go all night.” They liked to make love outdoors, on beaches or in walnut groves. Clara told friends that Gary was so kind that he let her take her dog in the tub whenever he gave her a bath. The rumor had it that Cooper proposed marriage to Clara, which soured her feelings toward the relationship. In the end, Cooper blanched at being called the “It” boy to her “It” girl, and would dismiss their romance as a creation of the studio publicity department.
There was no denying his relationship with actress Lupe Velez, “the Mexican Spitfire.” She was the girl friend of singer Russ Columbo when she and Coop first met for Wolf Song in 1929. Twenty-four hours later she and Coop were in bed together. A friend told biographer Hector Arce of his embarrassment on being trapped in a naked Cooper’s dressing room while Coop and Lupe tantalized each other over the phone with talk of the forthcoming night’s activities and Coop developed an unabashed erection. The affair was often characterized by screaming, violent fights, which scarred Cooper physically and emotionally. Pressure from his mother and the studio finally broke up the relationship, leaving Coop with a nervous breakdown and only 148 lbs. on his 6-ft. frame.
During a “long walk” through Europe to clear his head, he met Contessa Dorothy di Frasso, an American who had married into Roman nobility. She helped Coop become a sophisticate and returned to Hollywood with him, where she became famous for throwing lavish parties and haunting movie sets on which he was filming. The younger, beautiful Veronica Balfe soon eclipsed her in Coop’s affections, and the contessa faded off to Palm Springs and an affair with gangster Buggsy Siegel.
Patricia Neal was 23 when Coop met her during the filming of The Fountainhead in 1949. They fell in love, and he sought a legal separation from Rocky in 1950. He took Miss Neal to Havana in hopes of having the relationship blessed by his friend Ernest Hemingway, but neither Papa nor anyone else was willing to sanction the breakup of his 17-year marriage. As for Rocky, her Catholicism wouldn’t permit her to consider divorce and her pedigree wouldn’t permit her to wallow in self-pity. She continued to live her life to the fullest, and before the separation became final in May, 1951, Cooper and Miss Neal had parted—she for an analyst and he for two more trivial liaisons before a reconciliation with Rocky and their daughter Maria.
—D.R.
The Four-Year Itch
JOAN CRAWFORD (Mar. 23, 1904-May 10, 1977)
HER FAME: During her 40-year career as an actress, she appeared in over 80 films and was one of the screen’s longest-reigning stars. An emotional performance in Mildred Pierce earned her the 1945 Academy Award for best actress. Besides appearing in such memorable movies as The Women, Strange Cargo, Humoresque, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, she served on the board of directors of the Pepsi-Cola Company.
HER PERSON: Crawford was permanently embittered by her battered, poverty-stricken childhood. Her real name was Lucille LeSueur, and she was born in San Antonio, Tex. When Lucille’s father deserted the family, her mother found her jobs in Kansas City boarding schools. In one, the 12-year-old girl suffered severe beatings whenever she failed to perform her duties. Pudgy, buxom, and rather bland, she traveled to New York in 1924 and took to the stage as a dancer.
Described by F. Scott Fitzgerald as “the best example of the flapper,” Lucille was dancing on Broadway when MGM discovered her there and signed her to a five-year contract. On New Year’s Day in 1925 she moved to Los Angeles. Through a combination of stringent dieting and extensive dental surgery, she created a new image and was transformed into “Joan Crawford,” a screen name coined for her in a fan magazine contest sponsored by MGM.
By the end of 1927, the 5-ft. 4-in. starlet had become a flamboyant off-screen personality. She changed her hair color weekly, danced in revealing short skirts, and cavorted about town with a male harem of handsome escorts.
During her tumultuous Hollywood career, she was alternately labeled “First Queen of the Movies” and “Box-Office Poison.” Survival as a star was her paramount aim; everything else—husbands, lovers, and children—was secondary. She seemed to love her fans more than her family and kept in close touch with 1,500 of them right up to May 10, 1977, the day she succumbed to stomach cancer. Although she died alone, these loyal fans mourned her passing.
LOVE LIFE: Joan was married four times, and each of her marriages lasted four years. Every time she changed husbands, she also changed the name of her Brentwood estate and installed all new toilet seats.
Her first groom was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., the charming scion of the royal Fairbanks family of Hollywood. Popularly referred to as “the Prince and Cinderella,” the couple was wed in June, 1929, despite strong opposition from Joan’s new in-laws. The senior Fairbanks and his then wife Mary Pickford boycotted the wedding, claiming that 25-year-old Joan was too old for 20-year-old Doug Junior.
The marriage, which for two years was ideal, ended in a shambles. Joan and “Dodo,” as she called her husband, dreamed of having children. But the feisty Miss Pickford supposedly warned, “If you ever dare to make me a grandmother, I’ll kill you.” The marriage died shortly after Joan had a miscarriage, which she later admitted was really an abortion.
Prior to her 1933 divorce, Joan plunged into a love affair with actor Clark Gable. He too was married, but Joan enjoyed his company enough to carry on a series of love affairs with him until his death in 1960. Although she called Gable “a magnetic man with more sheer male magic than anyone in the world,” she later confessed that he was an unsatisfactory lovemaker in spite of his screen image as a virile leading man. In fact, she was often faced with ploys which he devised to discourage sexual encounters between them.
Realizing that marriage to Gable was unlikely, Joan showered her affections on actor Franchot Tone, a wealthy, cultured easterner. And although she had claimed she’d never again marry, the 31-year-old Joan and 30-year-old Tone were wed on Oct. 11, 1935. This marriage was on shaky ground from the start, but Joan believed it might be saved if they had children. After suffering two miscarriages, she was informed that she could not bear children. When she caught Tone in bed with another actress, she decided that she had no further need for him anyway, and she divorced him in 1939.
While her relationship with Tone was disintegrating, she had a brief affair with Spencer Tracy. But his interest in her was fleeting. During a rehearsal, Joan betrayed her nervousness and flubbed her lines. Tracy lashed out at her: “For crissake, Joan, can’t you read the lines? I thought you were supposed to be a pro.” The wounded Crawford fled in tears, and the affair was over.
Now Joan centered her efforts on adopting a child. Despite her status as a single parent, in 1939 she began adoption proceedings for a baby girl, whom she named Joan Crawford, Jr. Months later Joan changed the child’s name to Christina. But having a child around did not fill the void. Lonely and starving for love, the 38-year-old actress married handsome, muscular, 6-ft. 1-in. supporting actor Phillip Terry in 1942. She’d known him for only six weeks, and by her own admission she never loved Terry, who was three years her junior. Their marriage became so mechanical that the daily schedule Joan drew up for herself, and issued to staff members, always included a specific time allotted for sex—usually an hour and a half in the late afternoon earmarked as “time with Phillip.” During this period she adopted a second child—a boy—and named him Phillip Terry, Jr. Following her 1946 divorce from Terry, she renamed the boy Christopher Crawford.
With another failed marriage behind her, Joan made her children the focal point of her frustration. Stories of her abusive treatment of them were well known to horrified journalists, but anyone who dared to put them in print could count on his or her career being smashed by MGM’s publicity department. The rumors didn’t even prevent her from adopting infants C
athy and Cynthia in 1947. Joan always referred to the girls as being twins even though they came from different families, were born a month apart, and in no way looked alike.
Joan’s behavior became increasingly eccentric and unpredictable. She started drinking heavily and often greeted her dates wearing little more than lingerie. She went out with numerous men, including young actors like Rock Hudson and George Nader, and was named as the “other woman” in two divorce suits. Although her emotional life was a mess, she continued to keep her body in excellent condition. Before filming Torch Song, the 52-year-old actress showed up at director Charles Walters’ home wearing nothing but a housecoat. Flinging it open, she told him, “I think you should see what you have to work with.” Walters was impressed.
Joan’s final marriage took place in May, 1955. Her fourth husband, Alfred Steele, was the dynamic, square-faced president of Pepsi-Cola. Until he died of a heart attack in 1959, they circled the globe together promoting Pepsi. Despite her happiness in the role of corporate wife, Joan’s feelings for Steele often have been called into question. Six months after they had married, Joan described her 54-year-old bespectacled husband as being too fat and hard of hearing. Yet it appears that, for the first time, she actually felt loved. Toward the end of her life she confided to interviewer Roy Newquist in Conversations with Joan Crawford: “A pillow is a lousy substitute for someone who really cares. And when it comes right down to it, aside from Alfred and the twins, I don’t think I came across anyone who really cared.”
QUIRKS: After achieving stardom, Crawford refused to go in front of the movie cameras during her menstrual period, complaining that she didn’t photograph well then. There was a time, however, when she was willing to go to any extreme to appear on the screen. During her peak in popularity, stories began surfacing that years before, while still known as Lucille LeSueur, Joan Crawford had made a series of stag movies bearing such exploitative titles as Velvet Lips and The Casting Couch. Joan allegedly spent $100,000 buying up every copy of these films in order to destroy them. She learned later that one collector still harbored some prints, and shortly thereafter a mysterious fire swept through this collector’s home, burning to a crisp not only the sex flicks but the sleeping collector. Years after, rumor had it that a complete set of Crawford’s stag films had turned up in the private collection of a Prague munitions king.
—A.K.
Little Boy Lost
JAMES DEAN (Feb. 8, 1931-Sept. 30, 1955)
HIS FAME: Few movie actors, in life or death, have been worshiped the way James Dean was after he died at the age of 24, having had major roles in only three films. These were East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant. Humphrey Bogart said of him: “Dean died at just the right time. He left behind a legend. If he had lived, he’d never have been able to live up to his publicity.” Andy Warhol called him “the damaged but beautiful soul of our time.” And an entire generation of teenagers saw themselves in Dean as they’d seen themselves in no other star. One publicist summed it up when he said, “I thought Dean was a legend, but I was wrong … He’s a religion.”
HIS PERSON: Dean’s happy, healthy childhood in Fairmont, Ind., and in Los Angeles, was cruelly marred when his mother died of cancer. He was nine years old, and his father sent him back to Indiana, where he was raised on a farm by his kindly aunt and uncle. Despite his blond, boyish good looks, the sex-symbol-to-be was small and nearsighted and spoke haltingly. Growing up, he embarked on an acting career, bouncing back and forth between New York and Hollywood. Dean’s personality was so intense that he made an unforgettable impression on almost everyone he met—and often for the worst. He seesawed wildly from clowning and joking to morbid, sullen depressions. Jimmy threw his powerful energy into one activity after another. He studied dance, played the bongos, learned to sculpt, wrote poetry, dabbled in art, read constantly, and won trophies racing sports cars. When he turned this energy on his greatest passion, acting, the results were remarkable.
But it was Dean’s death that was truly, as the saying goes, larger than life. On Sept. 30, 1955, he was driving his $7,000 silver, aluminum-bodied Porsche 550 Spyder to a race in Salinas, Calif. At 5:45 P.M. he died in a collision with a car driven by Donald Turnupseed. The end of Dean’s life was the beginning of a rabid death cult. It was bigger than Valentino’s and bigger than Marilyn Monroe’s. Teenagers paid 50¢ to sit behind the wheel of the crushed Spyder. They bought chewing gum wrappers supposedly peeled from gum chewed by Dean. In the three years following his death, his studio received more mail addressed to him than to any living star—hundreds of thousands of fans writing to him as if he were still alive. A magazine offering Dean’s words “from the other side” sold 500,000 copies. Dean’s death mask was displayed at Princeton University along with Beethoven’s.
SEX LIFE: The great debate over James Dean’s sex life centers on whether he was gay, straight, or bisexual. Actually, though he dabbled in sex with both females and males, he was somewhat ambivalent sexually. One friend went so far as to say that he didn’t think Dean enjoyed sex, that he only wanted to be mothered. Another said that he was basically asexual in his needs and drives, that acting and car racing came first.
The crushing loss of his mother seems to have infused him with a kind of little-boy quality that both women and men found very attractive. His favorite seduction technique, which he claimed never failed him, was to curl up with his head in a woman’s lap and let her cuddle him. “All women want to mother you. Give them a chance to and before you know it you’re home free.” He discovered by the time he was 21 that he scored most successfully with older women. Sometimes he would date a girl for sex alone, and just as often he would date a girl repeatedly without ever making advances. As with every other aspect of his life, he was capable of yo-yo emotions and behavior. When he was courting a girl, he would take her on a hair-raising motorcycle ride as a kind of initiation rite. He often went on such rides with his very close friend Eartha Kitt, who called him “Jamie.”
Naturally, as the god of a death cult that fed on hysterical teenage worship, he inspired some weird rumors about his sex practices. The rumor that he was a masochist who enjoyed being burned with cigarette butts, and thus was dubbed “the Human Ashtray,” is completely false. Also, the fabled pornographic photos of a young man—allegedly Jimmy—sitting nude in a tree with a huge erection show no evidence of really being Dean.
The rumors of his bisexuality do have a basis, although they are often greatly exaggerated. He probably did a bit of hustling in his early Hollywood days, when he was practically starving, calling his gay dates “free meal tickets.” For a time he was “kept” by Rogers Brackett, a Hollywood ex-producer, but this was probably the only real affair he had with a man. Mostly what he did with men he did dispassionately—for the experience, for the money, or for the connections, until he found out the connections never came through. He told a friend, “I’ve had my cock sucked by five of the big names in Hollywood, and I think it’s pretty funny because I wanted more than anything to get some little part, something to do, and they’d invite me for fancy dinners….” When asked if he was gay, he replied, “Well, I’m certainly not going through life with one hand tied behind my back.”
SEX PARTNERS: His first major love affair was with Elizabeth “Dizzy” Sheridan, with whom he lived happily for a while in New York. Their relationship was a close and private one, and Dizzy remembers Jimmy as “gentle.” Eventually they drifted apart, and he began what was to be a long-term love affair with the thin, high-strung young actress Barbara Glenn, whom he affectionately referred to as “my neurotic little shit.” After he moved to California, Barbara finally told him she was marrying someone else. He took the news badly.
The great love of Dean’s life was the petite, demure Italian actress Pier Angeli. The main impediment to their union was Pier’s mother, who disapproved because of Jimmy’s tough punk image, and because he wasn’t a Catholic. To please Pier, Jimmy got regular haircuts, wore suits occasiona
lly, and even talked of becoming a Catholic. Pier and Jimmy considered marriage and quarreled about it. When an interviewer asked him whether “wedding bells would be heard,” he replied, “You mean with Miss Pizza? Look, I’m just too neurotic.” Dean finally did ask her to marry him in New York, where he was going for a TV show. Pier said it would break her mother’s heart if they eloped. So she stayed behind, and while Dean was gone she announced her engagement to singer Vic Damone. It broke Jimmy’s heart.
Dean told a friend that he had beaten Pier up a few nights before her wedding, and there is a persistent story that he sat outside the church on his motorcycle during the ceremony, gunning his motor. Some time later Pier visited Jimmy to tell him she was going to have a baby. He cried after she left, and two days later he was dead.
Pier Angeli’s marriage to Damone was a failure, as was her second marriage, and her life ended after a drug overdose. She never got over Jimmy Dean’s magic, likening the two of them to Romeo and Juliet and saying he was the only man she had ever loved. She said in an interview, “I never loved either of my husbands the way I loved Jimmy,” and admitted that when she lay in bed next to them she wished they were Dean.
Dean’s last important romance was with 19-year-old Ursula Andress, who had just been imported to America from Switzerland and was being billed as “the female Marlon Brando.” At first she said, “He nice but only boy.” As their relationship developed, Dean discovered that she was one of the few girls who wouldn’t put up with his shenanigans. Dean even studied German “so Ursula and I can fight better.” When she finally got fed up with his moods and left him, he was shocked.
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 8