I remember looking at James Dean one day when he and I had been hanging around in New York - he was standing in the rain with his head tipped back and water running down his face. He reminded me of the famous circus clown, Emmett Kelly. Dean's eyes had the same look as the clown's: not funny or cheerful, more a sort of distant craziness, a controlled kind of craziness that kept you from knowing what he was thinking.

The first time I saw Dean he looked like a small scarecrow. I was at the counter in a drugstore at 47th and Broadway when he shambled in behind a guy I knew from Hollywood. Dean lurched into the place as though he'd tripped on the door sill and was struggling for balance. With that shock of hair standing out like straw, his hands jammed into the pockets of baggy trousers, and a checkered jacket that hung on him big and had leather patches sewn around the cuffs, Dean seemed like a burlesque character. He was all hunched down into himself, squinting through his brown-framed glasses.

The other guy, Ray Curry, introduced us, but Jimmy hung too far back for a handshake, so I nodded. He said nothing, just stood there staring suspiciously and bending slightly forward as though from a stomach ache. I was also wearing glasses, and he asked if I was near-sighted or far-sighted. I told him I was far-sighted. "You're lucky," he said, sitting on a stool. He glanced at what I'd ordered and asked the waitress to bring him the same: orange juice, coffee, an English muffin. Curry told her he'd have that also, then went to make phone calls with a big safety pin. You could stick the point into a mouthpiece, touch the clasp to the nickel or dime slot, and presto - a dial tone. Not every pay phone fooled so easily, but the drugstore and a booth in the Museum of Modern Art never failed to plug through free of charge.

While waiting for the juice, Jimmy twirled the stool between us, wanting to say something important. "Eyes can be a drag," he said. He'd been in a Broadway play, lost his glasses and had trouble seeing the other actors if they "got out of reach." He had seen them "only as shapes" and couldn't see how they were looking at him.

I asked him how he had managed to play it, and he said he had related to the scene in his mind, as opposed to "what the hams were doing on the stage. "I asked him what the play was, and he said it was "a shit-fucker with Arthur Kennedy." He didn't say anything else about it, which I figured meant it had been a rotten experience.

Leaning closer, he eyed the book I had open on the counter, Barnaby Conrad's Matador. "Why are you reading a book about bullfighting?" he asked. I told him I liked it. Had I read Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon? he wanted to know. "Now that's a fucking book about bullfighting," he said. Of course I'd read it, I told him. In fact, I had a copy at my apartment. He asked where I lived and I said, "Around the corner on 48th off Eighth."

"What've you got," he asked, "a room? You got to come here to eat?"

I said, "No, there's a kitchen - part of one main room, and a bedroom."

"What about a bathroom?" he asked. "You got one in the hall?"

"It's in the apartment," I said. "A shower - no tub, you know."

"It's better to take a shower," he said, laughing, "or you start playing with your dick . . . So, no shit," he continued, "What's it cost?" I told him what I paid on a weekly basis, and he asked, "You live there by yourself?"

"Right now," I said and Jimmy nodded, logging in the information. When he asked to take a look at the Conrad book, I said, "It's a novel," and he said he knew it was fiction. He knew the book. I slid it down the counter and he picked it up. He held the book open in one hand. He hunched over the pages, touching the paper like someone reading Braille. His lips moved quickly, and he'd glance off as if remembering something or mouthing lines.

That was how the friendship began: without wanting to know if I'd finished reading the book, he asked to borrow it. I remember the way he was holding it and looking at me with his mouth slightly moving with whatever thoughts were spinning in his head.

There would come a time when we'd talk about other books - Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell and Garcia Lorca's plays. I loaned Jimmy my copy of The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, and when we tried discussing the book, I could tell he hadn't read it. I tricked him on it; he didn't say anything at first, but later told me he hadn't had time, finally confessing that he read "slow." He said, "It takes me a while to get the gist of the whole thing." It was because he thought in "circles," he said, grinning.

I'd soon find out about his reading disability. Eager to talk about books, he'd absorb what was said, taking it in and quite consciously making it his own. An amazing trick, his sponging whatever you knew about a subject, kind of shaking it around with what he'd learned elsewhere and piecing together a rather original, persuasive presentation.

It took him a long time to actually read pages. He thought in pictures, not in words. Reading was an excruciating chore, and though he'd profess to be an avid reader -a "cosmolite," as he once put it - he rarely cracked a book. And yet he could evolve a spontaneous performance from what he'd heard and made his own.

GO TO PART TWO

  Click on Images to see larger version

Home - Biography - Books - Celebrity Spotlight - Crime - CDs & Music - Coming Attractions
Exposed - Interviews - Links - Previews - Scrapbook - Site Map - Contact

copyright © 2005 All rights reserved
Webmaster: VJ Web Designs

Questions or comments?
gilmore@johngilmore.com