The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (12 page)

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 longterm 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 occasionally, 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.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“My mother died on me when I was nine years old. What does she expect me to do? Do it all by myself?”

—A.W.

The Juggler

W. C. FIELDS (Jan. 29, 1880–Dec. 25, 1946)

HIS FAME:
William Claude Dukenfield

was the product of English working-class

parents who lived in Philadelphia, a city

he always spoke of with disgust. He left

home at the age of 11 to pursue a career

as a vaudeville juggler, adopting the stage

name W. C. Fields. In 1915 he settled in

New York and worked in various Broadway reviews, notably the
Ziegfeld Follies
.

He moved to Hollywood to break into

the movies, and people soon flocked to

their local theaters to see the man with

the bulbous nose, cigar, and top hat be

tormented by children and dogs in films

such as
Tillie and Gus
(1933),
The Bank

Dick
(1940), and
Never Give a Sucker an

Even Break
(1941).

LOVE LIFE:
Much of Fields’ boyhood was spent in poverty, and as an adult he was constantly fearful of being broke. As a result, his girl friends found him a tight man with a dollar.

In 1900 Fields married Hattie Hughes, his vaudeville assistant, who bore him a son named Claude. Although Fields faithfully supported his wife and child for 40 years, he called them “vultures” who were always after his money, and he very rarely saw them. A typical Fields letter to Hattie in 1933 began, “I am in receipt of your complaint No. 68427.” Fields and Hattie never obtained a legal divorce.

For seven years during the 1920s, Fields shared an apartment with Ziegfeld show girl Bessie Poole, who also bore him a son. Although Fields never publicly acknowledged the child, he sent Bessie a check every month. Friends said of Fields that he changed mistresses every seven years, but the truth is that few of his loves lasted that long. His stinginess, his drinking, and his unwarranted suspicion were more than most women could take. In Hollywood, Fields began the practice of hiring detectives to follow his girl friends. One of them, a New York show girl, fell in love with her detective and married him.

In 1932, when Fields was 54 years old, he was introduced to 24-year-old Carlotta Monti, a dark-haired, olive-skinned beauty of Italian-Mexican-Spanish descent. He doffed his stovepipe hat, bowed low, and said, “It is a pleasure, my dusky beauty.” On their first date Monti asked him if he had ever been married. “I was married once,” Fields replied. “In San Francisco. I haven’t seen her for many years. The great earthquake and fire of 1906

destroyed the marriage certificate. There’s no legal proof. Which proves that earthquakes aren’t all bad.”

In her book,
W.C. Fields and Me
, Carlotta describes their love life: “Beginning with the first intimate night together when we consummated our love …

it was ecstasy…. Woody [her pet name for Fields] seemed starved for real love and affection, and I gave it to him in large quantities…. He was as much a perfectionist in his lovemaking as he was in his juggling. He never dropped a cigar box accidentally, and by the same token, he never fumbled during a golden moment.” However, alcohol eventually disrupted his sex drive completely.

Carlotta put up with Fields’ eccentricities for the last 13 years of his life.

He would sometimes leave piles of money around the house to test her. Wise to him, she would add $5 to the pile to confuse him. When it came her turn to be followed by a detective, she responded by leading the man on long meandering drives around the California countryside, knowing that Fields would be charged by the mile. As soon as he got his first bill from the detective agency, Fields ended the surveillance.

When Fields died in 1946, his final words were, “Goddamn the whole friggin’ world and everyone in it but you, Carlotta.”

HIS THOUGHTS:
“Women are like elephants to me: I like to look at them, but I wouldn’t want to own one.”

—M.J.T. and D.W.

In Like Flynn

ERROL FLYNN (June 20, 1909–Oct. 14, 1959)

HIS FAME:
One of the greatest swash—

bucklers in motion picture history,

Errol Flynn was among Hollywood’s

top money-making stars in the late

such films as
Captain Blood
,
The Charge

of the Light Brigade
, and The
Adventures

of Robin Hood
.

HIS PERSON:
In his prime Flynn

stood 6 ft. 2 in., and his astonishingly

handsome looks rivaled those of any

idol of the silver screen. Born in

Hobart, Tasmania, of Irish-American

parentage, Flynn was a chronic runaway

as a youth. He left home for good after

finishing secondary school and spent

the next few years traveling the South Seas. In the early 1930s he was leading a tour expedition of New Guinea when he met film producer Charles A.