Thanks to that episode, Sinatra started taking special care of Jean Leon. Every night, he gave him a hundred-dollar tip, and Leon knew that he was now part of Sinatra’s inner circle. He was one of his guys, and that was something very few people could say.
CHAPTER 5
“Hey, Jimmy, what are you doing here all by yourself?”
For days, Jean Leon had noticed his friend James Dean was quieter, more distracted, than usual.
“I don’t feel up to it tonight.”
“Everyone’s here, though.”
“Exactly.”
Mrs. Schneider’s acting school, a place many of the most renowned Hollywood faces of the day had passed through, was just next door to Villa Capri. It was a time of major social, political, and artistic upheaval, and of major productions and vitality in the cinema industry. There was talent wherever you looked, especially among a new wave of actors and actresses trained in the schools that followed the lead of the pioneering Actors Studio, founded by Elia Kazan a few years before in New York. For a while, even Jean Leon had tried the Stanislavsky method, a system developed by Konstantin Stanislavsky in the USSR and adopted by the Actors Studio in 1947, but it didn’t work for him: he couldn’t get into his characters’ shoes the way his friends could, and he wasn’t very striking physically. With a measure of frustration—which he kept closely guarded—he decided to focus his energies on other projects that were whirling around in his head. And so he put an end to his short-lived dream of becoming an actor, but he refused to leave behind that world that so enthralled him.
His close contact with the acting students led to important friendships, especially with the people who hung out in Sinatra’s restaurant after class. They were a group of kids who had managed to shed the stigma of “wannabes,” though they weren’t yet stars, either. New faces not afraid to mingle with Hollywood legends. They had taken their first steps in the cinema world, and they liked hanging out together. Jean Leon hit it off with a quartet of rebels without a cause: Natalie Wood, a child actor who longed to be taken seriously; Sal Mineo; Dennis Hopper; and Jimmy Dean. Later on, Warren Beatty, Robert Wagner, and Paul Newman would join the group, though they never became core members. As would Pier Angeli, born Anna Maria Pierangeli, who had bewitched James Dean years before and was sitting with the group that night in the restaurant.
“I’m out of here,” Jimmy said, playing with his Zippo. “You want to join me?”
When he was nervous or upset, Jimmy would fixate on some object to fiddle with—often, that old lighter his father had given him when he came back from the war. We were on our way to the bowling alley in his Chevrolet, he’d explained to Jean once, and I remember what he told me when he gave it to me: the flame won’t go out even if you’re on a motorcycle. The way it’s made, with a hinged top, makes it very hard to put out. You can’t blow on it, you can’t shake it. It only goes out when you close the lid.
“My shift’s not over yet.”
Dean shook his head. Leon, who knew him only too well, could see how agitated he was. He knew Dean wouldn’t get out of that spiral until he gave his thoughts free rein.
“What is it, Jimmy?”
“Anna Maria’s family doesn’t want us to be together.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her mother’s found a better husband for her. They already got a wedding date.”
A better husband? Jean thought, still looking at his friend with worry. “What’s her mother got against you?”
“Who knows!” Dean exclaimed, indignant. “She doesn’t want a guy like me for her daughter, a guy who only thinks about cars and motorcycles.”
What a hypocrite, Jean thought with distaste. If only Anna Maria’s mother could see the positive influence that her daughter had on his friend, and how she was growing beside him. The girl’s soft, delicate manner was like a salve for Dean’s wild spirit; she tamed his most rebellious instincts. They complemented each other perfectly.
“I love her,” he whispered, head lowered, eyes closed.
And with a characteristic click, James closed the lid of the Zippo. He took a few intense drags of his cigarette, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger and sucking down as much as he could of the blond tobacco that calmed his nerves. He blew out the smoke softly, threw the butt to the floor, and ground it out with his heel.
“You’ll find another one who won’t just give in to her parents,” Jean said, trying to encourage his friend.
“That’s easy for you to say. You’ve got Donna.”
Donna. It was true. Jean had fallen head over heels in love recently, and Jimmy had watched the whole thing from up close.
It all started with a pre-shift meal at a nearby restaurant called the Brown Derby, a casual joint not far from Villa Capri. It was the furthest thing imaginable from a restaurant in the old country: shaped like an enormous hat, with red flower beds lining the brim, it was a draw for Los Angeles big shots. There was a liquor store inside, and if his tips had been good one week, Leon would leave with a bottle of Burgundy or Bordeaux. He’d been going there more and more lately, and it looked like he would soon become a regular: his server that day, a girl with long blond hair and a bright smile, bewitched him from the first moment she approached his table.
“Jean?” she asked him.
“Yes, Jean Leon.”
He leaned back into his studded leather booth, glancing nervously at the framed head shots of famous customers lining the walls, then met eyes with her. And once he had, he couldn’t look away.
“Your name has so much personality to it. Are you French?” Donna asked.
“Yep, from old Europe. And you—are you new here?”
“Yeah, today’s my first day,” she said, a bit abashed. “You’ll have to be a little patient.”
“I’ve got all the patience in the world . . .” Jean looked at her name tag. “Donna.”
“All the patience in the world, huh?” the girl repeated, intrigued by the customer in his spotless, uncreased uniform. He was a nice young man with a sweet face but a slightly reserved stare and seductive, drooping eyelids. He looked at once gentle and dangerous.
When he’d paid and said goodbye to her with a barely suppressed timidity, she told him later, she’d hoped to see him again. He wasn’t like the loners she had waited on in other places, who would lean on the bar hoping to get something more than just attention. She finished her first shift at the restaurant with the feeling that after a year in Hollywood, as far as could be from her hometown, the one she’d been desperate to leave, something good was finally about to happen to her.
And something good did. For some time now, Donna’s best friend, Connie Buchanan, had been berating her, saying, A girl as pretty as you, and a good person to boot, shouldn’t be alone—and only a week had passed since she’d gone from You should have a boyfriend to We’ve found the perfect person for you. He’s a friend of my husband’s, he’s a good guy. Before she had time to react, Donna had been wrangled into a blind date. At the very least, she wanted it to be on her home turf, so she suggested the restaurant where she worked, and that night at the Brown Derby, they sat at the same table where Clark Gable had proposed to Carole Lombard.
“It’s a sign!” Connie said roguishly, winking at her friend.
Donna could never have imagined the date her best friend had set her up with would be that gawky, exotic young man who always came in to eat during her shift. She was delighted. Now, finally, she’d get to know more than just his name: Jean Leon.
“It is a sign!” Donna agreed.
After the obligatory formalities, still surprised at his luck, Jean asked her, “Jefferson City? Where’s that?” The woman seated across from him was beautiful, and every word she uttered intrigued him.
“In Missouri.”
“So what’s a girl like you doing so far from home?” His voice betrayed his poorly concealed nerves.
“What’s a boy like you doing even farther from home?”
The knowledge that both of them had pulled up roots and run off to Hollywood to start a new life brought them closer. They felt relieved, and somehow less alone in that overwhelming city.
Soul mates? They didn’t want to get ahead of themselves.
“I left without my parents’ blessing,” Donna told him.
“Really?”
“Vera, my older sister, had already come to live in LA, and my parents didn’t want to lose their younger daughter, too. Especially not for what they thought was a completely ridiculous dream.”
“What dream is that?”
“Being an actress. Not very original.”
“That makes two of us,” he said. The coincidence amused them. “But the truth is, I’m less and less sure about the acting thing.”
“I haven’t had much luck so far,” she conceded. “A half dozen castings in a year. But you know what? I’m not giving up.”
“The world belongs to the brave.”
Leon raised an imaginary glass of wine in support. Donna was flustered. The waiter came over to take their order, and Donna grabbed the reins.
“A Cobb salad for the gentleman.”
It was Jean’s favorite dish, one he always ordered. That salad was a classic at the Brown Derby. It was a simple dish, with all the ingredients chopped: lettuce, tomato, crispy bacon, chicken breast, hard-boiled egg, avocado, blue cheese, onions, and a special vinaigrette. Donna ordered one, too. Despite having worked there for weeks, she had still never tried the salad. It seemed they shared the same taste in food as well.
Soul mates?
In the background, a song was playing: “That’s Amore,” by Dean Martin, and it made them fall silent. Is this another sign? Donna wondered. They looked each other intensely in the eyes, and he took her hand.
After that first date came others. Things moved fast, and when the time came, Donna said “Yes” very softly, gently biting his lip just afterward. For more than a year, the entire time she’d lived in the city, she had turned down offers for hollow flings, preferring to keep herself for something better. Jean respected her chastity, but soon, kisses, caresses, and heated words were no longer enough for him. In the heat of passion, they took off for Las Vegas, more than two hundred miles away, stopping to spend the night in a roadside motel in a town with a prophetic name—Paradise.
Once they had gotten the keys to the only room they could afford, they walked, holding hands, across the parking lot toward their humble suite. Inside, they left the suitcase on the floor, closed the door brusquely behind them, and embraced, sharing a long, intense kiss. Their impatient fingers hurriedly pulled, unbuttoned, and tore at their clothing.
After they’d made love for the first time, on top of the stiff, starched sheets, Jean smoked and toyed with one of Donna’s curls, which had fallen over her chest. As he caressed her, he couldn’t help but let his fingers descend, sliding over her body, covered in pearls of sweat. Again, Donna arched her back when she felt his soft touch, and a gentle moaning accompanied her movement. They made love for a second time, more slowly. Without hurrying, without any demands, without holding back.
She lit another cigarette. She sat up partway and offered it to her husband-to-be, who sat leaning against the headboard.
“I like everything about you,” Jean said. “Your blond hair, those honey-brown eyes, your beautiful lips, that little dimple in your chin, it drives me wild. I feel like I’m living in a dream, but I see you, and it’s real. Do you love me, Donna?”
She kissed him on the corner of the lips. “Yes,” she murmured. The next day, she repeated that yes in the wedding chapel. “Yes,” she said, clearly, with feeling, as Jean slid on the simple ring they had chosen just minutes before asking for their marriage license.
They were young, they were in love, and they had just married. They both felt they were living in a dream, and neither wanted to wake up. This is a sign! They felt lucky—invincible, even. And so, that night, they bet everything they had in the casino. And they won. They won big.
The money from Las Vegas was enough to make a down payment on their first home. To start a life together, a life where they could make their dreams reality. Not only their individual dreams, but their dreams as a couple, as a family. But sometimes, two people’s dreams aren’t the same.
CHAPTER 6
“Why don’t you go inside and get a pizza? It’ll do you good. You can think better on a full stomach,” Leon encouraged a grumpy James Dean. “Plus, now you’re making enough to pay for a whole one yourself.”
Jimmy laughed.
A year earlier, when the group of actors had started frequenting Villa Capri, it wasn’t so much to eat—they couldn’t afford anything on the menu—as to see and be seen. But then, that was why everyone was there. All of them were short on cash, and the most they could aspire to was splitting a pizza five or six ways. Jean Leon used to give them one or sometimes two extra for free, always making sure the boss, Billy Kant, a frustrated actor himself, didn’t find out. As those young prodigies devoured their food, Jean watched them go over their scripts one last time before auditions and callbacks. Whenever they landed a role, he congratulated them.
Jimmy was Jean’s best friend in the group, and they were growing closer by the day. Their relationship was cemented one day when he found Dean lost in thought, in a melancholy mood he would soon understand was a basic part of the actor’s character. Dean was sociable, but only to a point. Whoever knew and loved him would respect his occasional need to flee the company of others. Imagine you were at a party no one invited you to, he told Jean once, that’s what it feels like for me sometimes, and I just don’t know how to play along. Dean made an exception for him, and often shared his secrets with Jean even when he had pulled away from everyone else.
They recognized each other as dreamers—people who dreamed with their eyes open—and knew they could share not only their plans and longings but also their sorrows and disappointments with each other.
They had similar temperaments: curiosity about the world, a permanent state of alertness, an unwillingness to give in easily. This was the first time in his North American adventure that Jean Leon found a true friend, a soul mate. They spoke the same emotional language and they listened to each other attentively.
They didn’t always see eye to eye. But Jimmy never tried to impose his will, and that made him a person you could turn to. Jean, Jimmy knew, was looking for the kind of security that came from having a family, a home, and his own business—just the things Jimmy had fled from in boredom: for him, life was supposed to be about adventure and danger. Leon looked toward the future while Dean tried to wring every drop out of the present, living as hard as he could in the moment, as if death were eternally around the corner. But they understood each other. Something in Dean’s introverted, impassioned character clicked with Leon in the deepest part of himself.
They found lots of common ground in their pasts. Both had left home, pulled up roots, and maintained no contact with their families. They treated each other as brothers and confidants.
Dean was from Indiana, Leon from Spain, and each wanted to make his name in Hollywood, albeit through different paths. They were both young, and both were as far as could be from the conservative conformism of the time. Both had rigged things to get out of fighting in Korea. And both had suffered through losing a parent at a very early age: Jimmy’s mother died when he was nine years old, and at thirteen, Leon had seen his father and brother disappear. Those losses marked them forever.
Jimmy liked hearing stories about the Carrión children. He imagined a house full of boys and girls of all ages peeking in and out of the doors and windows like in a vaudeville show. Jean laughed at the comparison. When he told those stories, he got back a part of his old self—Ceferino, the boy he’d decided to keep hidden to protect himself in America. Those conversations also helped him deal with the memory of José, his older brother.
“You miss him?”
“A lot. José was my
hero.”
Jean thought about José often. He had always looked up to his brother, and now he missed him. He would have liked to have José there, to ask him for advice, to learn from him, to grow up by his side. He would have introduced him to Jimmy. Jean knew the three of them would have been good friends. Would José have been proud of how far Jean had made it on his own?
“He saved my life. I was just a kid, it was Corpus Christi, we were all excited for the celebrations . . . When the sun came up, a group of us kids from Sant Martí went off into the woods, with my brother in the lead. My mother tried to get me to stay home, but José convinced her. We wanted to leave before it was too bright out to gather broom and boxwood, and get back in time to make the flower carpets for the procession. I loved that holiday so much . . . The streets were filled with flowers and colors and such intense fragrances. The carpets are like works of art on the ground—they’re made of flower petals, seeds, all kinds of stuff unique to our region. And the scent—you can’t believe how good it smells. Families used to open their balconies to let a little ray of life into their homes.
“We wanted to make sure the parade would walk over the carpet on our street. It had to be the best-smelling, best-decorated one in the neighborhood. We needed flowers from the other side of a hanging bridge that traversed a fast-running stream, where the water crashed against the rocks. It was a gravity-defying structure made of reeds, so it bent with the wind but wouldn’t break. It was as safe as it was tough—it had been through lots of storms with pounding winds, and only ever came close to breaking during an earthquake. You had to cross it a few people at a time, in single file, holding on to the sides to keep the bridge from bouncing. No one dared to say it aloud, but everyone was scared of losing their balance and falling—or even worse, of the bridge breaking and the currents carrying us away.
“We all had our baskets tied to our backs and we walked across, one by one. I was the second to last, with José behind me. I clutched the sides and walked forward with a sure step, even though my legs were growing weak. The boards creaked beneath my feet. I prayed to every saint I could think of, and I only relaxed when I was across. Just around the curve, we saw spectacular waterfalls. At that point, the flow of the water slowed and wasn’t so ferocious. I was entranced, watching how it wound among the rocks and dropped down into a tranquil little brook.
Stars in His Eyes Page 7