The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (13 page)

After location filming in Virginia, the company moved to Marfa, Texas, in the sweltering summer of 1955, traveling by Southern Pacific railway for six more weeks of location work. It was here that Elizabeth’s relationship with Dean began to develop an erotic edge. He had a love-hate relationship with women. Born on February 8, 1931, in Fairmount, Indiana, he adored his mother, Mildred, who pampered him and gave him music and acting lessons as a child. She died at twenty-nine from cancer of the uterus when Jimmy was nine, and he grew up to become a basketball star, also lettering in track at Fairmount High. “If my mother hadn’t died when she did, I would have been queer,” he told Arthur Loew Jr.
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Like many gay and bisexual males in the homophobic 1950s, when everything was explained in psychological rather than genetic terms, Dean blamed his homoeroticism on his mother’s influence, refusing to accept that his sexual makeup was part of his basic nature. If his mother had indulged him, it was because he charmed and captivated her, just as in adulthood he’d lure women into the same kind of relationship. Some nights he’d talk to Elizabeth until three or four in the morning, revealing intimacies, but the next day he’d snub her, ashamed of his confessions.

Like Rock, Dean owed his career to gay admirers, having gotten his start in 1949 by having an affair with a powerful advertising executive who landed Dean several radio and television shows in Los Angeles. He hustled while looking for acting jobs, rooming with Nick Adams, a short blond actor of whom it was said, “Big things come in small packages.” Later the star of the TV series
The Rebel
, Nick “publicly opened his fly . . . to prove he was a manly man,” according to Rona Barrett.
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When Dean left California to try his luck on Broadway, he made friends with other young hopefuls, including Betsy Palmer and Ray Stricklyn. James Dean “kissed me firmly on the lips,” said Stricklyn, describing a romantic encounter in a meadow in Central Park.
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Dean also developed a crush on actor Jonathan Gilmore. Dean asked Jonathan, “Can you be fucked?” and Jonathan answered, “Jesus, I don’t think so.”
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Dean was “multisexual,” recalled Gilmore, who added that Dean once told him, “I’m certainly not going to go through life with one arm tied behind my back.”

Returning to L.A. after Elia Kazan cast him in
East of Eden
, Dean fell in love with actress Pier Angeli, a green-eyed, Madonna-like beauty, though he also dated Terry Moore and Vampira (Maila Nurmi) and bragged that he’d escaped the draft during the Korean War thanks to “flat feet, bad eyes, butt-fucking.” Monty Roberts, the rodeo rider who’d performed Elizabeth’s stunt work in
National Velvet
, taught Dean how to act like a masculine Salinas farmer for
Eden
. “Get some teeth in your ass,” Roberts told him, “bite the saddle, and don’t just sit there.”
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In
Eden
Dean had emerged as the most compelling actor since Clift and Brando. Elizabeth’s 1954 pregnancy with her second child, Christopher Wilding, had been responsible for schedule shifts that enabled Dean to accept the lead in
Rebel Without a
Cause
, which later became known in the industry as the movie that would never have been made except for Elizabeth’s “act of God.” In
Giant
, Dean was again being butched up for his Western role by Monty Roberts.

In Marfa to begin location filming, Elizabeth and Rock formed their own exclusive clique, eating together and watching daily rushes in the local movie house, while Dean always sat with Actors Studio–trained Carroll Baker, who played Elizabeth’s daughter Luz Benedict II and who, in her next picture, as Tennessee Williams’s thumb-sucking “Baby Doll” Meighan, would outrage the Catholic Legion of Decency. Carroll found Dean to be “asexual,” and rumors of his homo-eroticism circulated after it was noticed that he spent all his spare time with stuntmen and cowboys. Conflict developed on the set after Dean used his Actors Studio know-how to steal scenes from every performer he worked with. In retaliation, Elizabeth and Rock ingratiated Carroll Baker with the aim of getting her to sabotage Dean’s scenes. Infatuated with Elizabeth, Carroll immediately became a part of the Taylor-Hudson clique, and Dean, who felt betrayed, stopped speaking to her. Another switch occurred in the social dynamics of the cast when both Elizabeth and Rock fell in love with the charismatic Dean. “My heart was broken,” Carroll later wrote, not because she’d lost Dean but because “I hardly ever saw [Elizabeth] any more.” She tried to turn Elizabeth against Dean by telling her, “Dean’s publicity seems to be only at your expense.” During a photo op, Dean had grabbed Elizabeth and held her upside down, exposing her to the photographers from her feet to her waist. Stevens sternly reprimanded Elizabeth, and for a while she stopped speaking to Dean.

She lived in a rented house for the duration of the shoot with her sons Britches and Chris. When she’d first arrived in Marfa with her children, Stevens glared at her and asked, “Do you have to do this?” Glaring right back, she asserted, “Yes, I do have to do this. I know how hard you are to work for. Michael is being sent abroad to make a film with Anita Ekberg. I’m not going to have my boys left just with servants. You see, dear George, I know that I won’t always be camera-beautiful or camera-young, and I am not going to lose my hold on things that are real.” Stevens later confessed, “Elizabeth probably knew a lot more about how to live her life than people with less courage did, in which group I might include myself.”
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Dean and Rock shared a house with Chill Wills. Rock couldn’t resist hitting on Dean, but he proved not to be sexually appealing to Dean, who moved out of the house.
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Thereafter, a spiteful Rock scorned Dean as un-professional and selfish. Elizabeth, fascinated by Dean’s acting skills and personal magnetism, forgave him for having embarrassed her and became attached to him, sitting with him in the theater balcony to view daily rushes. Abandoned by Elizabeth, Rock was consoled by Carroll, Jane Withers, and Phyllis Gates, who joined him briefly in Marfa but left after a fight. Elizabeth began to spend more time with Rock again, comforting him during private talks about Phyllis. Now Carroll felt excluded, but Earl Holliman, who played Elizabeth’s son-in-law in the film, rushed into the vacuum and became Carroll’s constant companion.

On June 3, 1955, Elizabeth shot her first scene with Dean on an open set at the Worth Evans Ranch. Dean was supposed to hoist a rifle over his shoulder and ask Elizabeth in for tea, but he froze. “Jimmy was really fuckin’ nervous,” recalled Dennis Hopper, who played Elizabeth’s son. “At that time, there wasn’t anybody who didn’t think she was queen of the movies.” They filmed numerous takes, but nothing worked. “He was really getting fucked up,” Hopper continued. Then, suddenly calling on his Method training, Dean unzipped his Levi’s and rolled out his penis. He urinated in full view of twenty-five hundred onlookers, then told Stevens, “Okay, shoot.” They got the scene in one take, and later Dean told Hopper, “I’m a Method actor. I figured if I could piss in front of those 2,000 [
sic
] people, man, and I could be cool, I could do just anything, anything at all.”
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And indeed he could, recalled costars Carroll Baker and Hopper, both of whom assumed that Elizabeth and Jimmy had an affair. Her sons were sent back to Los Angeles, where they were looked after by their father.

Discussing Dean in November 1997, Elizabeth said Dean hadn’t made his mind up whether to live his life as straight or gay. “He was only twenty-four,” she explained, “but he was certainly fascinated by women. I loved Jimmy. He and I . . . ‘twinkled.’” Kevin Sessums, the interviewer, warned Elizabeth that people would think she and Dean had played water sports in bed. “Oh God!” she said. “We had a . . . well . . . a little ‘twinkle’ for each other.”

When Wilding visited Marfa, Dean told him, “You’d better know right away, Mike, that I have fallen madly in love with your wife.”
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During Wilding’s stay, Sara and Francis Taylor kept the children and their nanny in Beverly Hills. Elizabeth’s quarrels with Wilding became so violent that he left Marfa after a week and returned to L.A., where he drank away his days with other unemployed actors at Barney’s Beanery. Elizabeth confided to Jean Dmytryk that she and Wilding “had problems. He has minor seizures. And he’s the most terribly British character that we’ve ever had on screen; simply can’t speak American.”

While in Texas, Elizabeth and Rock drank heavily. “We were really just kids,” he said, “and we could eat and drink anything and we never needed sleep.”
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Stevens’s private papers tell another story altogether. In July 1955, Elizabeth was calling in sick, alarming the entire studio. Warner executives began to exchange frantic memos about a succession of ailments, including a throat infection that went to her bladder and thrombophlebitis, a blood clot in a deep leg vein, for which Dr. John Davis treated her from July 30 to August 26. In a letter to Elizabeth’s accountant, A. Morgan Maree, Dr. Davis wrote that she had to wear “some very tight breeches” which caused great pressure behind her knee, causing “impaired circulation.”
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In another letter Dr. Davis revealed that she suffered from “a congenital anomaly of the spine.”
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After a scene in which she was required “to do a lot of jumping and twisting on a bed,” Dr. Paul McMasters diagnosed “severe low back strain and possibly a ruptured intervertebral disc.” When she attempted to get Warner Bros. to absorb her doctor bills, Dr. Davis concurred that Elizabeth’s back condition had not been hurting her until the wild bed scene, citing “a definite connection” between her pain and work conditions. When location filming was completed, Elizabeth returned to Los Angeles and finished the film in Burbank. According to a Warner memo, she requested two days of rest on Saturday and Sunday. “I questioned her husband Michael Wilding,” unit manager Tommy Andre told Stevens, adding that Wilding assured him Elizabeth’s physician, Dr. Robert Buckley, had ordered the rest. Andre went directly to Dr. Buckley, who confirmed that he was coming into the studio to examine Elizabeth. The doctor warned that the studio “might lose her in the picture for two or three weeks later on” if they didn’t let her have two days’ rest now.

Her medical complaints continued to hound the production staff. According to Dr. Nathan Hiatt, Warner’s insurance doctor, she was suffering from “a slight case” of sore throat and cystitis, but might be able to report to work on Monday “unless something
unusual or dramatic
happens.” On July 29, she told Andre that she needed half a day to one day off for the dentist. During her absence two production units remained idle. She was by no means the only cast member experiencing health issues. Rock complained of a painful hip and received treatments from an orthopedic specialist at the studio every morning, later going to Vineland Hospital for X-rays.
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As costs mounted, Warner’s patience ran out. Due to an infection in her left leg, Elizabeth didn’t come to work on July 31, checking into St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. Warner’s immediately alerted Dr. Nathan Hiatt to absolve the studio of any responsibility for the star’s behavior. On August 2, she said she couldn’t return to work until Friday, August 5, and Warner executives bemoaned the “loss of a whole day on our schedule.”
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The first and second unit directors and crews hastily made plans to shoot around her, but on August 6 the company was forced to shut down, according to Andre, who added, “Our understanding is that we are covered by insurance.”
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Though she returned to the set, she was still complaining of pain in her leg on August 10, 1955. A summit conference of physicians was held, and Drs. Davis, Hiatt, and McMasters agreed that she had sciatica. She left the set and went home. Stevens rehearsed her double for the sequence they’d been shooting, but because of close-ups they were unable to make it work. Instead, Stevens completed a second-unit shot of Rock in the Reata Thanksgiving scene. Dr. McMasters taped Elizabeth’s back to relieve her pain. On August 11, she missed work because of a medical examination. She also went to Dr. McMasters’s office for an injection of Novocain to numb her sciatic nerve. Warner’s insurance doctors met to decide whether to put her in traction for several days in the hospital. When Stevens heard this, he hit the ceiling. Elizabeth later wrote, “George was quite convinced it was all psychosomatic. But it is a characteristic of sciatica that it’s crippling one moment and disappears the next.” For a big scene to be shot at the Lockheed Air Terminal, the company considered using Elizabeth’s double, but on August 12 the star arrived on the set on crutches, saying she was ready to work. Dr. McMasters warned everyone to keep her off her feet as much as possible.
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Because of the delays it was necessary on August 12 for
Giant
producer Ginsberg to write MGM’s legal department for permission to use Elizabeth for another four weeks beyond August 21, when her loan-out period expired. At 7:30 a.m. on August 31, Elizabeth called Stevens complaining of a “bad headache” and asking “did she have to come in so early,” according to Tom Andre. When she arrived an hour late for filming, Stevens, Ginsberg, and Tom Andre met to consider asking “Miss Taylor if she would care to move on the lot until the picture is finished,” Andre wrote. Predictably, Ginsberg had to ask MGM for another extension on her loan-out to September 30, 1955. Metro’s Marvin Schenck granted the extension. Warner Bros. then had to persuade Universal to extend Rock’s expiration date of August 23 to September 30.
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