European Task Force in Vicenza, first U. S. Army Missile Command Base
in Italy.]
[Illustration: 26. I’ve got Bob and Lucy just where I want them--at my
feet--during a visit on their set. But don’t worry, they didn’t stay
there long.]
[Illustration: 27. The conversation must have been dull, or was Darryl
Zanuck just pretending to be asleep? I almost didn’t get on the set.
The picture was _Roots of Heaven_, directed by John Huston, who never
cared for me after my review of _Moby Dick_. I felt sorry for the
whale, and it was made of cement.]
[Illustration: 28. I like to think it was a draw between Betty Furness
and me where hats are concerned. But in all honesty she had an edge on
me. Both of them came from Sally Victor.]
[Illustration: 29. Henry Luce and I trying to impress each other.
Jerome Zerbe, in the background, was the winner. He remembered
everything we said, but I’ve forgotten. (_Photo by Walter Daran_)]
[Illustration: 30. Mrs. Bob Considine, Gary Cooper, Hedda in Madrid,
where the señoritas and señoras followed him as if he were the Pied
Piper.]
[Illustration: 31. Perry Como never did take me seriously, and here’s a
picture to prove it. (_NBC Photo by Frank Carroll_)]
[Illustration: 32. Two of my best friends: Louella Parsons and Debbie
Reynolds at a shower given for Debbie before the birth of her first
child when she was Mrs. Eddie Fisher. I bribed the photographer to hold
this print. I like it.]
[Illustration: 33. Rudy Vallee, now one of the great hits in New York
in _How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying_, listening in on
a radio rehearsal of Jack Barrymore and me.]
[Illustration: 34. What a nerve I had showing my legs beside those of
Marlene Dietrich.]
[Illustration: 35. Hedda and Elvis sharing a koala.]
[Illustration: 36. Hedda and Robert Preston in Mason City, Iowa, June
19, 1962, when 121 high school bands paraded through the city.]
[Illustration: 37. Whenever I see a picture of George Washington, I
always try to get under it and this time I did with Dean Martin. (_MGM
Photo_)]
[Illustration: 38. Well, now, look how Senator Javits and Joseph Binns
have sliced off my hips, at a party at the Waldorf for Orphans of
Italy. (_Photo by Helen Grant_)]
[Illustration: 39. Adolph Zukor, Hedda, Mel Ferrer, and Audrey Hepburn
at Friars dinner honoring Gary Cooper, which was his last public
appearance. Coop became a star at Paramount Studios, whose founder
was Adolph Zukor. But those who arranged the dinner--and they didn’t
consult Cooper--didn’t have sense enough to place Mr. Zukor as an
honored guest on the dais. (_Photo by Jules Davis_)]
[Illustration: 40. Jimmy Cagney and Hedda Hopper--all passion spent.
(_Earl Theisen/Look photo_)]
[Illustration: 41. Barry Goldwater and Hedda Hopper at a luncheon for
crippled children in Scottsdale, Arizona.]
_Ten_
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.