In my business I get “genius” dished out to me as regularly as the morning mail. To believe the press agents, every dirty-shirttail boy in blue jeans who comes over the hill from Lee Strasberg’s classes is the biggest thing to hit the industry since Jack Barrymore played Don Juan. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the gangling lad is like a dream brought on by eating Port-Salut cheese too late at night: if you wait long enough, it goes away. There’s that once in a hundred, though, when the press agent is right....
The chief public-relations man at Warners’ was as persuasive as ever: “This one is something special. We think he’s a genius, more or less. I want you to meet him.” So I agreed to go over for luncheon in the commissary, and he introduced me to Jimmy Dean, brought to Hollywood to do East of Eden by Elia Kazan, who had been bowled over by his Broadway performance as the Arab boy in Billy Rose’s production of André Gide’s The Immoralist.
The latest genius sauntered in, dressed like a bum, and slouched down in silence at a table away from mine. He hooked another chair with his toe, dragged it close enough to put his feet up, while he watched me from the corner of his eye. Then he stood up to inspect the framed photographs of Warner stars that covered the wall by his head. He chose one of them, spat in its eye, wiped off his spittle with a handkerchief, then like a ravenous hyena, started to gulp the food that had been served him.
“Would you like to meet him?” said the studio press agent who was my escort.
“No thank you, I’ve seen enough. If that’s your prize package, you can take him. I don’t want him.”
“He doesn’t always behave like this,” said my companion apologetically.
“Why now?”
“I don’t know. To be frank, he never acted this way before.”
I went back to my office and wrote a story describing every heart-warming detail of James Dean’s behavior. “They’ve brought out from New York another dirty-shirttail actor. If this is the kind of talent they’re importing, they can send it right back so far as I’m concerned.”
When an invitation came to see the preview of East of Eden, nobody could have dragged me there. But I heard next day from Clifton Webb, whose judgment I respect: “Last night I saw one of the most extraordinary performances of my life. Get the studio to run that movie over for you. You’ll be crazy about this boy Jimmy Dean.”
“I’ve seen him,” I said coldly.
“Forget it—I read your piece. Just watch him in this picture.”
Warners’ cagey answer to my call was to pretend East of Eden had been dismantled and was already in the cutting room for further editing. I telephoned Elia Kazan: “I’m sorry I missed the preview. I hear Jimmy Dean is electrifying as Cal Trask—”
“When would you like to see it?” Kazan said instantly.
“Today.”
“Name the time, and I’ll have it run for you.”
In the projection room I sat spellbound. I couldn’t remember ever having seen a young man with such power, so many facets of expression, so much sheer invention as this actor. I telephoned Jack Warner. “I’d like to talk with your Mr. Dean. He may not want to do an interview with me. If he doesn’t, I shan’t hold it against him. But I’d love to have him come over to my house.”
Within minutes his reaction was passed back to me: “He’ll be delighted.” A day or so later he rang my doorbell, spic and span in black pants and black leather jacket, though his hair was tousled and he wore a pair of heavy boots that a deep-sea diver wouldn’t have sneezed at. He carried a silver St. Genesius medal that Liz Taylor had given him, holding it while we talked.
“You misbehaved terribly,” I told him after he’d chosen the most uncomfortable chair in the living room.
“I know. I wanted to see if anybody in this town had guts enough to tell the truth.” He stayed for two hours, sipping scotch and water, listening to symphonic music played on the hi-fi, pacing the floor.
We talked about everything from cabbages to kings. About George Stevens, who ultimately directed him in Giant and who was sizing him up at this time as a candidate to play Charles Lindbergh. “I had lunch today with him,” said Jimmy, “and we were discussing Antoine St.-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince—the writer’s escapist attitude, his refusal to adjust to anything earthbound. Reading Exupéry, I’ve got an insight into flying and into Lindbergh’s feeling. I like the looks of Lindbergh. I know nothing of what he stands for politically or otherwise, but I like the way he looks.”
“Do you fly?”
“I want an airplane next—don’t write that. When things like that appear in print, the things you love, it makes you look like a whore.”
We talked about Dietrich. Would he like to be introduced? “I don’t know. She’s such a figment of my imagination. I go whoop in the stomach when you just ask if I’d like to meet her. Too much woman. You look at her and think, ‘I’d like to have that.’”
Grace Kelly? “To me she’s the complete mother image, typifying perfect. Maybe she’s the kind of person you’d like to have had for a mother.”
Gable, who took up motorcycling in his middle-age? “He’s a real hot shoe. When you ride, you wear a steel sole that fits over the bottom of your boot. When you round a corner, you put that foot out on the ground. When you can really ride, you’re called a hot shoe. Gable rides like crazy. I’ve been riding since I was sixteen. I have a motorcycle now. I don’t tear around on it, but intelligently motivate myself through the quagmire and entanglement of streets. I used to ride to school. I lived with my aunt and uncle in Fairmount, Indiana. I used to go out for the cows on the motorcycle. Scared the hell out of them. They’d get to running, and their udders would start swinging, and they’d lose a quart of milk.”
We discussed the thin-cheeked actress who calls herself Vampira on television (and cashed in, after Jimmy died, on the publicity she got from knowing him and claimed she could talk to him “through the veil”). He said: “I had studied The Golden Bough and the Marquis de Sade, and I was interested in finding out if this girl was obsessed by a satanic force. She knew absolutely nothing. I found her void of any true interest except her Vampira make-up. She has no absolute.”
I turned on some symphony music while he fished his official studio biography out of his pocket, glanced at it, rolled his eyes up toward heaven, and threw it away. While the record played softly, he went into Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.”
When it was over: “I want to do Hamlet soon. Only a young man can play him as he was—with the naïveté. Laurence Olivier played it safe. Something is lost when the older men play him. They anticipate his answers. You don’t feel that Hamlet is thinking—just declaiming.
“Sonority of voice and technique the older men have. But this kind of Hamlet isn’t the stumbling, feeling, reaching, searching boy that he really was. They compensate for the lack of youth by declamation. Between their body responses and reaction on one hand and the beauty of the words on the other, there is a void.”
At that point he casually dropped his cigarette onto a rug and said: “Call the cops.” He went over to the mantelpiece, raised the lid of one of my green Bristol glass boxes that stand there, and, as if speaking into a microphone, said hollowly: “Send up Mr. Dean’s car.”
As he left I told him: “If you get into any kind of trouble, I’d like to be your friend.”
“I’d like you to be,” he said.
“I’ll give you my telephone number, and if you want to talk at any time, day or night, you call me.”
“You mean that?”
“I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
I learned a lot about James Byron Dean, some from him, some from his friends. He acquired his middle name in honor of the poet, Lord Byron, whom his mother idolized. She was a little slip of a thing, a farmer’s daughter, who spoiled Jimmy from the day he was born in Marion, Indiana. Five years later, in 1936, Winton Dean, a dental technician, took his wife, Mildred, and their only child to live in a furnished flat in Los Angeles.
* * * * *
“When I was four or five or six, my mother had me playing the violin; I was a goddam child prodigy,” Jimmy reported. “My mother also had me tap dancing—not at the same time I played the violin, though. She died of cancer when I was eight, and the violin was buried, too. I left California—hell, this story needs violin music.”
Jimmy rode aboard the same train that carried his mother’s body back to Indiana, to be buried in the family plot. He was on his way to live with his aunt and uncle, Ortense and Marcus Winslow. “I was anemic. I don’t know whether I went back to the farm looking for a greater source of life and expression or for blood. Anyway, I got healthy, and this can be hazardous.
“You have to assume more responsibilities when you’re healthy. This was a real farm, and I worked like crazy as long as someone was watching me. Forty acres of oats made a huge stage. When the audience left, I took a nap, and nothing got plowed or harrowed. When I was in the seventh or eighth grade, they couldn’t figure me out. My grades were high. I was doing like high school senior work. Then I met a friend who lived over in Marion. He taught me how to wrestle and kill cats and other things boys do behind barns. And I began to live.”
“How old were you then?”
“About twelve or thirteen. Betwixt and between. I found what I was really useful for—to live. My grades fell off—”
“Living without learning,” I said.
“I was confused. Why did God put all these things here for us to be interested in?”
His Aunt Ortense was active in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. When he was ten, she took him along to do dramatic readings for her ladies. “I was that tall,” he said, indicating half his adult height, “and instead of doing little poems about mice, I did things like ‘The Terror of Death’—the goriest! This made me strange; a little harpy in short pants.”
“You must have been a worse brat than I was.”
He gave me a sharp look. “I don’t know about that. I had to prove myself, and I had the facility to do so. I became very proficient at wielding a paintbrush and sketching. I won the state pole-vault championship. I was the bright star in basketball, baseball. My uncle was a tremendous athlete—he won the Indiana state track meet all by himself. I won the state dramatic-declamation contest doing Charles Dickens’ ‘The Madman.’ When I got through, there were broken bones lying all over the stage. If ‘Medic’ had been running then, I’d have been a cinch for it. But let me say this: no one helps you. You do it yourself.”
“Who would you say has helped you the most?”
He gestured toward himself in answer. “When I graduated from high school, I came out to Los Angeles and went to UCLA to take pre-law. I couldn’t take the [long pause] tea-sipping, moss-walled academicians, that academic bull.”
“You sure as hell cleaned that phrase up,” I said.
He had two years at UCLA, keeping in touch with his father, who had married again, and establishing good terms with his stepmother, Ethel. Jimmy discovered that James Whitmore, movie and stage actor, ran a theater group that met once a week. “There’s always somebody in your life who opens your eyes, makes you see your mistakes and stimulates you to the point of trying to find your way. That was James Whitmore. I met him around 1949, and he encouraged me to go to New York to join Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio. I did different things on television there and a couple of plays.
“When I came back to Warners, Battle Cry was being made, and Whitmore was on the lot. I wanted to thank him for his kindness and patience. He said: ‘It’s not necessary. Someone did something for me—Elia Kazan. You will do something for someone else.’ I’ve tried to pass it on. I feel I’ve been of some benefit to young actors. It’s the only way to repay Jimmy Whitmore. But you do it yourself.”
I steered him on to another subject—New York. He had a contract with Warners calling for a total of nine pictures in six years. He would have had 1956 completely free to go back to Broadway. I had a feeling he’d be one of the few actors who would, in fact, return to the theater and, what’s more, play Hamlet. He had the urge and push to do it.
“New York’s a fertile, generous city if you can accept the violence and decadence,” he said. “Acting is wonderful and immediately satisfying, but my talents lie in directing and beyond that my great fear is writing. That’s the god. I can’t apply the seat of my pants right now. I’m too youthful and silly. I must have much age. I’m in great awe of writing and fearful of it. But someday....”
“How old are you now?” I asked.
“Twenty-three.”
“You’ve got a long and beautiful life ahead of you.”
“I hope the second adjective is the more abundant,” he said. He then had almost exactly nine more months to live.
He made Rebel Without a Cause—and made a friend of its director, Nick Ray.
Hollywood started to simmer with excitement over this new, young talent when East of Eden was released and Jimmy went into Rebel, causing no problems for anybody because Nick Ray could communicate with him; they got along like a house on fire. Then came Giant, which he should never have gone into. The part of Jett Rink, Texas wildcatter turned millionaire, was not right for him.
George Stevens is a martinet, a slow-moving hulk of a man who tried to force Jimmy to conform to George’s interpretation of the role. Now Jimmy could be led but not driven; he’d bend like a young tree but not break. How poorly Stevens understood him showed in his remarks after Jimmy died: “He was just a regular kid trying to make good in Hollywood. He was determined to reach his goal of being a topnotch movie star at any price.”
Tremendous trouble was brewing on the set. It reached boiling point when Jimmy went on strike and boycotted Giant for three days. The newspaper and town gossips started picking on him, pinning all the blame on his shoulders. It was high time we had another talk.
“I’ve been reading some bad things about you,” I said. “I understand you haven’t been showing up for work.”
“Right, I haven’t. Stevens has been horrible. I sat there for three days, made up and ready to work at nine o’clock every morning. By six o’clock I hadn’t had a scene or a rehearsal. I sat there like a bump on a log watching that big, lumpy Rock Hudson making love to Liz Taylor. I knew what Stevens was trying to do to me. I’m not going to take it any more.”
“I hold no brief for Stevens,” I said, “but what you don’t know is that there’s a man on that set who put the whole deal together. Henry Ginsberg, Stevens, and Edna Ferber are partners. It took Henry two years to do it. This is the first time in Ferber’s life she took no money, only an equal share of the profits as they come in. If this picture goes wrong, Stevens can walk out, and those two years of Ginsberg’s life go down the drain.”
“I didn’t know,” Jimmy said.
“Something else. Henry has a great deal of affection for you, but he can’t show it or else Stevens might walk off the set.”
“I’d no idea of that. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. Thanks for letting me know.”
He could do anything he set his hand to. In Texas for Giant, he had so little to occupy him that he learned to ride and rope, until he could twirl a lariat as well as Will Rogers. He had overpowering ambition. Like John Barrymore, whom he might have equaled had he lived, Jimmy never thought of consequences. There was no risk he would not take. He was too young to know restraint, and he was marked for death.
He got even with George Stevens. I watched him play the climactic banquet scene where Jett Rink, middle-aged and defeated, is left alone to get drunk at the top table. He had some marvelous lines, but he mumbled them so you couldn’t understand them. When Stevens realized what had happened, he wanted to retake the scene. Jimmy refused.
There was no time for Stevens to try again to talk him into it. On the evening of Friday, September 30, 1955, Jimmy was racing down Highway 41 in his new, 150-miles-an-hour Porsche, which he had christened “The Little Bastard.” He ran into another car, and Jimmy Dean was dead.
Liz Taylor had two more days’ work left on Giant, including a call for the next morning. She was extremely fond of Jimmy, had presented him with a Siamese cat, which he treasured. That Friday night she telephoned George Stevens: “I can’t work tomorrow. I’ve been crying for hours. You can’t photograph me.”
“What’s the matter with you?” said Stevens, who had heard the news just as she had.
“I loved that boy, don’t you understand?”
“That’s no reason. You be on that set at nine o’clock in the morning, ready to shoot.”
She was there. When she started to rehearse, she went into hysterics, and an ambulance had to carry her to the hospital. She was in the hospital five days before she could finish Giant.
The body of Jimmy Dean was claimed by his father, who rode on the same train that took the casket back for burial in Fairmount. The only man from the Giant set who went back to Indiana for the funeral was Henry Ginsberg.
Only once before had anything equaled the mail that deluged my office, and that came after Rudolph Valentino died. Letters mourning Jimmy came by the thousands week after week. They came from young and old alike, some crisply typewritten, some pencil scrawls, and they kept coming three years after. He was an extraordinary boy, and people sensed the magnetism. He stood on the threshold of manhood, the adolescent yearning to grow, trying to find himself, and millions knew that feeling.
I begged the Academy to award him a special Oscar, to stand on a plain granite shaft as a headstone to his grave. The Academy declined.
* * * * *
Another young actor often came to talk with me. The electricity of James Dean was missing in Robert Walker, but this gangling, shy man carried a gentle sweetness with him that touched your heart. He sat out on the patio one day and said: “Everybody expects miracles to come along and get him out of drudgery and misery. Not many people can face themselves, and the miracle, of course, rarely happens.”
He had come over alone from a new house in Pacific Palisades into which he’d moved with his nurse and his two sons by Jennifer Jones, Robert, Jr., and Michael. “All we have is three beds,” he said, “a dining-room table and a refrigerator. We’re going to furnish it like we want it.”
He was just out of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, from which he had been discharged after four and a half months of treatment for compulsive drinking and the sickness that drove him to it—the searing melancholy that was as much a part of him as the marrow in his bones. He wanted to tell me about the experience.
The background is important, reaching back as far as Bob at the age of six, when he was expelled from his first school. Undersized then and unattractive, he was ignored by his schoolmates, and he couldn’t stand it. One day he ran amok, not knowing why, and raced screaming through the playground, yanking pigtails and kicking shins.
“From childhood,” he said, “I found myself up against mental walls. The maladjustments of that age grew and branched out all over the place. I was always trying to make an escape from life.”
He began running away from school when he was ten. Finally, his Aunt Hortense, who raised him, sent him to San Diego Military Academy. It was much the same old story. The young cadets didn’t care for him, so he fought them. He trailed his class in everything, but he landed the job of playing the big bass drum in the school band, and he beat the daylights out of it.
It was just as a matter of course that he tried out for a part in a school play. There were several contestants, and the teacher made a little speech before she announced the winner. Ability and hard work always succeed, she said, and “that’s why Bob Walker has won the role.” On the strength of that, Aunt Hortense staked him to a course at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he met a fellow student, a beautiful girl christened Phyllis Isley who later changed her name to Jennifer Jones.
When they began looking for jobs, nobody wanted either one of them. Then she had an offer to work on radio in Tulsa, and they persuaded the station to hire them both for a total of $25 a week. He was twenty years old when they were married.
They put together a dollar or two and tried to crash Hollywood. They failed, went back to New York, found a cheap little Greenwich Village flat, and sold their car so they could eat. A baby was on the way.
Bob and Jennifer, whom he called “Phyl” all his life, took turns in tending Bob, Jr., while the other scoured the town job hunting. They were poor as church mice, happy as larks. These struggling days were bound to leave their mark on both of them.
He broke into New York radio in time to pay the obstetrician’s bills. He made a fair living in soap operas, so they had another baby. They outdid each other in looking after their two infant sons, born only a year apart.
One day Jennifer went out looking for a job, bearded David Selznick in his den, and landed herself a contract. Letting her go to Hollywood was almost a sacrificial blow to Bob, but he stayed in New York with his soap operas to hold up his end.
But lightning struck twice in the Walker household—the only miracle he ever knew. He was offered a part in Bataan that let him join Jennifer in California. They were wrapped up in each other’s happiness until Selznick fell madly in love with her; then the Walkers separated. She divorced Bob in June 1945, after six years of marriage. David’s wife, Irene—Louis B. Mayer’s younger daughter—was separated from her husband two months later. She divorced David in January 1949, and David and Jennifer were married six months later.
“The breakup with Jennifer,” said Bob on my patio, “gave me an excuse for amplifying my troubles. When I had a few drinks, I got to thinking about Poor Me and the broken home and all the et ceteras. Only now I can talk about it freely. I used to refuse to discuss my breakup with Phyl because I felt it was nobody’s business. I talk about it now because it’s part of the story that I want to get over. So far as I’m concerned, she is first and foremost the mother of my two children.”
He went on working, detesting himself. “Laying oneself open to be hurt,” he said, “is an agonizing way to be living.” He tried another marriage—with John Ford’s daughter, Barbara, after he’d known her eight weeks. That was two weeks longer than they lasted together as man and wife.
He relied chiefly on liquor for survival. It was a news picture of Bob Walker drunk in a police lockup, with fists clenched and mouth distorted, that convinced him he needed psychiatry. “I would rather have had a knife stuck in my side,” he told me, “because then I should have known what was wrong. There was terrific remorse the day after. I decided that sometime soon I was going to end up dead. I tried an analyst in town, but I wasn’t ready for him. My back wasn’t yet up against the wall.”
When Dore Schary took over Mayer’s job at Metro, he had Bob in for a talk. “I think you need help,” he said. “I want you to go to the Menninger Clinic.”
“After I left Schary’s office,” Bob said, “fear hit me. I thought about a mental clinic like an insane asylum. I kept asking myself: ‘Is there something about me that others can see and I can’t?’”
But he promised Schary that he’d try Menninger’s. With a studio publicity man as companion, he rode the plane to Kansas wearing a pair of dark glasses, with his hat pulled down over his face, hoping nobody would recognize him. “When I first hit Topeka, I couldn’t bear the thought of people looking at me. It was as if the whole world had its eyes focused on me. Actually, nobody gave a damn.”
Living in a hotel, he drove each day to the clinic for a week of tests. “I hated myself and blamed myself all my life for things I shouldn’t have blamed myself for. I felt that everybody was against me, hated me, couldn’t understand me. I couldn’t even understand myself. I was only moments away from alcoholism, which is a slow form of self-destruction.”
On the basis of the tests, the clinic recommended that he be admitted, warning his father and Dore Schary that Bob would require at least one year of treatment, possibly two. He returned to Hollywood and went to the desert to hide, afraid to see people, until it was time to sign himself into Menninger’s.
“I got the idea that the clinic was something like a country club, so I asked for a single room and bath. First thing I noticed was that all the doors were locked. Then everything sharp, including my razor, was taken away from me—you could only shave with an attendant watching. The room I was taken to had bars on its window. When I was told: ‘You’re rooming with so-and-so,’ I said I was leaving. That first night a patient who understood how a newcomer felt gave up his room and bath without my knowing it, so it would be easier on me.”
For the first four weeks he was under observation only; no analysis. “You have to have a recreational therapist with you even on walks over the grounds.”
He lived in one of several “lodges,” with fifteen patients to each floor, ages varying from eighteen to sixty-five. “We didn’t discuss our illness with each other. Most of the men were wonderful, because it’s often the self-sacrificing, overly kind people who take all the blame on themselves and land up in such conditions.” His one thought was to leave the place.
At the end of that quiet first month he was still a good enough actor to persuade a doctor that he was perfectly capable of going into Topeka alone one night. “Or perhaps the clinic was trying to convince me how sick I was. Anyway, when I went to town I got drunk, landed up taking a swing at another cop, and smashed my fist through a window. I was more determined than ever to get away because I was sure the clinic had driven me to it.”
He contacted his father, begged him to come and take him away, signing to assume responsibility. It was suggested Bob should see one of Menninger’s analysts. “I told them I didn’t want to. Why spend more money on an analyst when he couldn’t do me any good? Even then, I was making excuses to keep from facing facts.”
Soon afterward, a psychoanalyst who had been assigned to him anyway, came to his room, said he knew Bob was leaving, but had just stopped by to say hello. “He stretched himself out on the bed and let me do the arguing. At the end of about an hour I thanked him for coming, but told him I was still going to leave. The next day I found some excuse to ask him to visit me again. I still argued that I was leaving. It was some time before I realized I was doing all the talking—not him. I made up my mind to stay.”
He had one hour of analysis a day, six days a week. “For three weeks I spoke to nobody but this doctor, keeping myself shut up in my room, eating scarcely anything, sleeping very little, drinking cup after cup of coffee. When I started to get some inside on the cure, I began to work constantly at it. Pouring out your thoughts and mind is an emotionally exhausting experience. But you could never know the thrill it was when I realized that hate was leaving my heart.”
In September 1949 an announcement from the clinic said that he had completely recovered from a “nervous breakdown.” “I came back here scared as hell,” Bob said, “and I don’t think I’ve got the world by the tail. I haven’t worked for over a year, and I’d like to do two or three pictures in a hurry now and go back to the clinic for two months next spring.”
He was in a proselytizing mood when he talked to me. “The $64 question is where the average man can go for mental help. They can’t afford high-priced clinics, and they can’t afford to take the time off for what I did. People are waiting to get into clinics, but there’s not enough public demand for real work in this field because so many are unaware of its importance. If you have a decayed tooth, you can go to a dentist and have it removed. But if you have a mental stumbling block, you’re provided with no such opportunity.”
He spoke of trying to shield his sons from the truth about himself. They wanted to read the first newspaper interview he’d given. “Since it mentioned several unpleasant subjects like drinking, I hesitated. Then I decided to keep nothing back from them. The boys read it, and I explained the things they couldn’t understand. At night I read to them. Right now, we’re going through Swiss Family Robinson. About once a week we take in a show, usually a drive-in. They work two hours a day, scraping paint off a fence and a shed, and get fifty cents a day for it.”
I had written up his interview with me when, two days later, he telephoned. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t run that story. I poured my heart out, but I wasn’t thinking enough of my sons. I’d rather not have them read it all yet. When they’re older they’ll understand.”
* * * * *
At six o’clock on the evening of August 29, 1951, Mrs. Emily Buck, who was Bob’s housekeeper and nurse, called a psychiatrist who had been treating Bob for the previous eighteen months. Mr. Walker, she said, needed help in a hurry. He had be