In acting, Dean had to "swallow the script," as he put it, "take it into the stomach and fart it out." Without digesting the words, he'd mumble and stumble and say he was figuring out "motivations" and character-all of which was a ruse, of course, to hide the reading problem. He had to have the full play inside himself before he could relate to any of the parts. This would later create some serious problems for Jimmy, as his work became spotty, a collection of ticks and mannerisms that seemed to be jumping out of the picture. You'd be watching him pop through a series of bits like corn on a hot pan, and you wouldn't be taking in the character. At moments he'd appear as an isolated figure in a river of rush-hour traffic. "He'll have to control the idiosyncratic impulses," a television director said, "or go for a one-man show."
The 47th Street drugstore provided thick pats of butter with its muffins, and Jimmy helped himself to all the butter on his plate as well as Curry's, heaping it on the muffin, which he ate with one hand, sucking each finger clean afterwards. He'd gone down to Tijuana from L.A., he said, to see the bullfights, and the American matador Sydney Franklin had given him a cape during the filming of a movie there.
"Why did he give it to you?" I asked. Jimmy said he'd mentioned a particular matador by name and used the correct Spanish pronunciation, which is what had earned him the cape. I said I'd seen that bullfighter gored less than a year before, not fatally, but bad enough to put him out of the ring.
"He was probably high as a kite," Jimmy said, and slid the book back to me. He asked if I'd seen the horn go into the matador, and I said it all happened so fast I didn't actually see the horn sticking him. But he was on the ground in a second, and the bull was going for him.
I talked to Curry a few minutes after Jimmy walked out, hands in his pockets again, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Curry said they had met working as extras on a picture on the coast, and that Jimmy was a hot actor now. I could see Jimmy through the window, waiting near the curb, his head craned back as he looked up at the building. "He's an oddball," Curry said. "We're going to smoke some reefers with this spade drummer he knows
..." When Curry joined him on the sidewalk, Jimmy glanced back and gave a little nod, holding up two fingers. I didn't know what he meant by that.
The drugstore wasn't a popular theatrical hangout like Cromwell's Pharmacy a few blocks away, but was right in the heart of the "the Great White Way." An acting school and dance studio were nearby, and performers ran in and out swapping news, grabbing lunch or coffee. The play Jimmy had worked in, See the Jaguar, had closed after six performances, but gained him a rush of television work. One actress from the drugstore said he'd been "the best thing in a bad play," but was "an asshole in every other way it's possible to be."
When I saw him again he was drinking coffee and
dunking a Baby Ruth candy bar in the cup. He 
had a small cloth bag of dance togs from a class he'd taken with Eartha
Kitt. I said I'd met her in L.A. at the home of Alfredo de la Vega when she was doing the Broadway revue New Faces of 1952. Jimmy said, "Shucks, I know that old queen. He wanted to suck my cock." Grinning, he said, "He must've wanted to suck yours."
Jimmy learned I'd bought an old Norton motorcycle and began talking about his high school days in Indiana, how he'd built a bike, then started putting together a hot-rod. But he'd gone to L.A., and he said, "I should've come straight here instead of getting groped by everyone out there."
Once we went to a 42nd Street movie theater to see
A Place in the Sun, and I slept through the last part the second time through. When I woke, Jimmy was staring at the screen, missing nothing, his jaw muscles working as he chewed popcorn and Milk Duds, mixing them together. Other times he'd stuff his mouth with more than he could chew comfortably, and he'd gag and spit it out. A couple of times he flexed his lower jaw to loosen the bridge of his three false teeth.
His eyes were bloodshot as we left the theater, and he didn't say much on the walk to Seventh Avenue. Then he began talking about Montgomery Clift's performance, and how Clift had managed to keep his work consistent even though we knew it was "all busted up" by the continuity of a movie. But it was "pure," and Jimmy brought up a particular piece of sculpture at the museum that he considered "perfect," with open ends, the same as Clift's acting in the George Stevens movie.
In a cafeteria near Broadway, we used the men's room before getting in line and Jimmy laughed about some holes in the wall between the urinal and toilet. He asked if I knew what the holes were for. I said I had a fair idea, and he said, "Do you know how to tell a sissy by his eyes?" I said I didn't know. He said, "Because he's got highballs!" I grinned, but I didn't really get the joke. I'd never heard it before and I've never heard it since, so I suspected it was something he'd made up on the spot, clowning
around - even throwing in a little dance step that had nothing to do with what he was saying.
Jimmy squinted at the holes in the partition and touched them. He said they had been drilled, not cut into the divider with a knife or some other tool. "Someone's come in here and drilled these holes!" he announced. Had somebody brought a brace and bit into the john, he wondered, sat there drilling holes with his pants down around his ankles as a cover in case someone came in? It seemed to matter very much to Jimmy how the thing had been done.
The all-night cafeteria was hot and stuffy, and Jimmy drank coffee and smoked one cigarette after the other, lighting each new one from the butt of what he'd puffed down to his fingers. He hadn't told me where he was staying, even though I'd asked, and after a couple of these cafeteria sessions, he told me about "the flake and the chick," a situation he'd extricated himself from as quickly as possible. He said they were baggage-"over-freight," is how he put it-that he couldn't "drag any further." He'd met the guy at UCLA drama school though the guy had switched over to writing since then. They had roomed together on the Coast, and then the guy followed him to New York, Jimmy said, where the chick he'd known hooked up with them. He said if one of them should die or "kill themselves," he'd be stuck with carrying the other farther than he wanted to. Laughing, he asked if I'd seen dead bodies in my travels, and I said only my grandmother in the coffin. He wanted to know what the coffin had looked like, and I said I couldn't remember exactly except the rails were shiny like the handlebars on my bicycle, and a different color than the casket. I asked him why he wanted to know, and he dropped the subject.
I didn't know what his intentions were or why he'd ask things like that. I only knew he wanted to be the "most important actor in New York." He'd lean toward me and tap his finger on the cafeteria table and say, "I'm going to be the most important actor in town."
Another time in the cafeteria I said that getting pulled into the Army could blow a pretty serious hole in someone's career. I knew a little about trying to get into Special Services, being an actor and doing shows in the service, but Jimmy said one could beat the draft by claiming to have bisexual tendencies, "which includes having homosexual tendencies," he said, but one had to be careful about being branded a queer. The Selective Service wasn't dumb, he said, pointing out that by telling them you were a bisexual they'd think you were trying to hide the real facts from them. "It's like saying you've got only a little bit of leprosy," he said. He hadn't been drafted yet because he was below 1-A due to his eyesight, but he was above 4-F because he wasn't blind.
"They're not going to make you prove it by asking you to suck someone's dick," he said.
On our way out he flirted with a woman at the cash register. He told some joke I didn't hear, and they were both laughing. Then, some time later in the drug store on 47th, he approached the waitress with the same playfulness, and suddenly she called him a jerk for acting up. It was as though she'd knocked the air out of him, and the brief incident bothered him a lot longer than it should have. He seemed to carry it around, a kind of nagging confusion he was working into some unnecessary grudge.
In Cromwell's he described the cartoon of a man in a small box who didn't like the world. He said it was the same as "an emotional prison" that few could escape. You had to "close up" and pull back in order to discover the truth about something, he said.
Jimmy also seemed to inhabit his own world, yet gathered me into that same world as though into a conspiracy against an "outside" he perceived better than I did. If you weren't paying attention, he could take you in without your knowing it. Eartha Kitt and I talked later about Jimmy's knack for pulling people into tightly episodic, one-on-one relationships that had a way of running disconcertingly, if not disturbingly, deep. He had few pretensions and seemed to demand that you join him to form some single purpose.
Maybe that's what intrigued me most about him. Eartha said she couldn't remember going through any sort of "figuring out" of how he'd climbed into her life, or whether she liked him or not. "He was just suddenly there," she said. "I felt he'd always been
there - one of the strangest friendships I've experienced . ..."
I'd learn later that the intense, sporadic friendships Jimmy imposed upon certain people would be like replenishing rest
stops - emotional banks from which he'd make withdrawals during bad times. Then he'd retreat to his box, maybe sticking his head out and making faces at the world.
Jimmy had his share of detractors, those who'd say, "Oh, shit," here comes that little bastard ... Let's get out of here before he sees us." Of course, a couple years later these same people would rally around as his closest buddies, with tales to unspool like the ball on a runaway kite.
I'd met a girl named Miriam Conley who lived at the Barbizon hotel for women. For a few weeks I'd been taking her on my motorcycle for modeling jobs, and a couple of times we had lunch in Central Park. We were walking my bike along the trail on the Fifth Avenue side one day and saw Jimmy on a bench with another actor, Martin Landau. They were sitting at opposite ends of the bench, having some sort of argument. Jimmy was eating peanuts and had a camera strapped around his neck. He said he was taking pictures of the
monkey - I thought he was kidding Landau, who looked angry.
As we talked, Jimmy tossed peanuts at Miriam, throwing basketball shots to sink them down the front of her low-cut blouse. She laughed, caught some and threw them back. Jimmy thought that was great fun, and giggled while Landau looked resentful and kept urging Jimmy to leave. He stood up, tried to pull Jimmy by the arm, but Jimmy said "No," mouthing the word exaggeratedly and repeating it, rolling his eyes and acting silly.
Disgusted, Landau said, "Okay, okay," and walked away. Though they were friends, Jimmy shook his head and looked at us, saying, "Who was that guy? Some flake, man!"
Miriam had never met Jimmy, but she'd seen him on television and knew about the Broadway play and a radio interview where he'd talked about Aztec Indians. He wasn't at all shy about her flirting, and began to joke around, jumping up on the benches and almost falling. Pulling his jacket over his face to look headless, he ran lopsidedly up the path, calling out, "Ichabod Crane! Ichabod Crane! I want you!"
He collided with a woman and nearly knocked her over, scattering her packages on the ground. She was angry for a moment, but had to laugh as Jimmy, still headless, scuttled around picking them up for her.
The monkey house was a metal building with a tunnel through the center,
bordered by cages. Jimmy was serious about taking pictures of the monkeys, and one in particular, a dark, noisy monkey that kept reaching frantically through the bars. Miriam said she'd heard of monkeys biting, and Jimmy gave the monkey a peanut, breaking the shell open with his own teeth. He wanted Miriam to be in the shot with the monkey, but then teased her by grabbing her hand and pretending to stick it into the cage. She squealed and laughed. He took pictures of the ceilings and walls because, he said, the light was "dancing" up there, I sat outside on the bike watching them, Miriam giggling in a kind of false voice while Jimmy's attention focused on the monkey and whatever he was seeing through the camera.
I know Miriam saw Jimmy again and snuck him into her room at the Barbizon, strictly against regulations. I'd made it upstairs to the Barbizon lounge with her, and we'd neck when no one was up there but I hadn't been to her room. She once said she wanted to "kiss it and take it into my mouth," and unzipped my pants. She put her head on my lap and I placed her coat over her head. A woman walked by and I said Miriam had been tired and fallen asleep.
Once heading down 8th Avenue, Jimmy told me Miriam had gone down on him and "gives pretty good head." I said I already knew that, and he said, "I hope you're not hung up on the chick ..."
I wasn't, but I wanted to know if he'd fucked her, figuring he'd tell me if he had. He'd told me about a couple of girls I didn't know, one of whom worked at the Actors Studio. But he said he hadn't fucked Miriam, because she'd said she was saving herself for marriage.
"That's a crock," I said. She'd mentioned a guy from Wisconsin who had gotten her pregnant and that she'd had a "dusting and scraping job" at Bellevue.
"They all fucking lie, man," Jimmy said. "Females lie." He talked about the girl he'd been seeing and staying with "half the time," together with the roommate he'd had in L.A. He said he should've played a trick on them by turning into a hermaphrodite.
In the late spring, he'd met a waiter who worked in a little Greenwich Avenue cafe. He slept on a slab door with a Japanese neck rest and, along with Jimmy, wore a motorcycle jacket and even a pair of black leather pants while visiting the bars along Third Avenue.
"These weirdos are fucking and torturing each other," Jimmy told me. He said he'd sleep on a stack of sofa cushions in the waiter's studio after wandering around. At night, when he was troubled, he'd amble through the city, hanging out in 24-hour diners, or he'd go to the 42nd Street movies and fantasize about acting the roles on the screen.
One night he called me, upset because he'd seen a dead guy loaded into a paddy wagon. He said the man's hand had been sticking up as if reaching for something.
Not long after we met, I'd been working on lines for a play, and I'd just fallen asleep when I heard
someone knocking on the door of my 48th Street
apartment. When I opened the door, Jimmy seemed surprised that I'd been asleep. He was holding his greasy hands up in front of him and said he'd been downstairs working on my motorcycle. I was on the third floor facing the street, across from a fire station, and I kept it chained to a pipe in a small alley between the buildings where the garbage cans were lined up. He said my carburetor wasn't original and that someone had "jockeyed it around getting it on the engine." "You do that?" he asked. I told him it had been like that when I'd bought it.
"A bad idea," he said, "using spacers like that." A friend in Santa Monica had used a part that wasn't stock and the bike leaked gas. "Burned the bike up," Jimmy said. He asked if I'd ever rebuilt a carburetor for a Norton, and I said I hadn't. He said it wasn't hard, then asked if he could use the sink.
After washing his hands, he stood in the middle of the room looking around at the walls. He said, "Where's the bullfight pictures?"
I'd told him of my photographs, and he said he thought I'd have them all over the walls. When I brought out the box I kept them in, he got down on the floor and went through all of them, studying each one, even turning them sideways. We were still there when daylight came. He found a picture of the matador we'd talked about, and mumbled something about men with mirror swords and eyes dripping blood, flowing capes and pinpoints of death in their pores
... He said it was from a Mexican poem, but I imagined he composed it on the spot.
Again he wanted to talk about the matador I'd seen gored, and again I told him what I remembered-the horn hooking and nailing the bullfighter. He wanted to borrow the photo to put on his wall-"as soon as I get a wall," he added.
Once walking along 42nd Street, looking at the whores and nuts and movie
placards -one for Brando's 
The Men- Jimmy said he had a snapshot of Brando with a cock in his mouth. The photo, however, has never been proven to be of Brando. He had another picture showing Brando in a room with a porthole window behind him. Jimmy mentioned the shot had been taken in a room on West 68th Street and, grinning, said, "I've got the place-the same apartment." Someone he met through Marty Landau, who'd worked out at Terry Hunt's with Brando, had given Jimmy the address of the apartment in the Brando photo. Jimmy said he'd dogged the manager of the building until the place became vacant. He believed it was the same apartment, the same porthole windows. "By the way," he said, "I've found out that Brando's fucked around with a couple of guys from Terry Hunt's, and one of them says Marlon keeps rolling over onto his stomach
... So he loves taking it up the ass," Jimmy said, joking. He made a circle with his thumb and finger, then left saying he had a rehearsal in less than twenty minutes.
Later, Jimmy said he was sorry I was just a fan of bullfighting and didn't seriously consider doing it. Again, I took that as a joke, but he claimed that bullfighting was something he'd have to do someday-learn to work the cape and face a bull. "Maybe one about this size," he said, grinning, his hand held waist high.
He said he could see it-it was there, a speck in the back of his mind. He said it was a "black hole burned in one of those old-time photographs." He said whenever "the chick" said she was sick, he could smell the bull's breath. It was like "getting married or dying," he said. "Your life opens up in that one moment, and that's when you're the most complete you can be
..."
The idea of cramming everything into one moment obsessed Jimmy. It was one
of the ideas that nearly drove Eartha Kitt nuts. "He couldn't let go," she said later. He'd latched onto Eartha as a soul mate; there was nothing sexual between them. "We were like brother and sister," she said. Jimmy was convinced Eartha had "special powers" and knowledge she could deliver to him by some kind of osmosis if he hung around long enough. She had "a sense of magic, and the answers," he said, "were locked up in her." He'd badger her into long discussions, and while she enjoyed his friendship, she said at times it was almost painful for her. He'd devise some theory he knew she'd disagree with. "He'd play the devil's advocate. People had to get shook up. Sleepers had to wake up."
He was inclined to learn a little, she said, and then attempt "to teach the instructor." If Eartha thought he was wrong about something, he'd insist she didn't understand what he was trying to say: "It was one-sided. Jimmy wanted me to prove to him or demonstrate how he wasn't right. He believed that if I understood what he was trying to say, then I would agree with him." He'd go to great lengths to meet with her at such times and try to make her understand his ideas.
Such as his theory of "synchronization." He sensed moments in Eartha's performances when it seemed to him that everything she knew was fused directly into the moment. Even things that had nothing to do with performing, he thought, translated directly into one energy force-a magic connection. This moment of fusion was "synchronization."
He phoned her one night to meet him at the cafeteria. Jimmy had a small flask he used to spike the coffee, cup after cup, chain-smoking and sipping so intensely, she said, "he seemed to buzz with electricity
... sparks flying off him."
The flask held brandy. He'd been told "by the gang Marlon hung around with at Terry Hunt's gym" that Marlon Brando drank hardly at all, but when he had to get to the meaning of something, he drank brandy. Jimmy wanted to learn everything and compress what he knew into one energy force representing "something perfect." He had to dance and sing, learn photography and bullfighting, because he knew that what he'd learn could come through in some other way, would make up qualities he would project as an artist-as an actor.
She told him she understood, "But whether or not all that can be 'fused' into a whole, some performance or art as a single energy, I didn't know. My logic inclines to say it can't, because life doesn't operate on single notes. It's a whole symphony." When she tried to tell him the "lessons of living" were orchestrated by God, Jimmy laughed.
"What bullshit!" he said. There was no
God - there was only art, only the composer, the creator of the symphony.
"And God created him who creates the symphony," Eartha said. Jimmy laughed again. "He said I was passing the
buck - shirking things off and not taking credit for my own perfection. He said that was why people go around walking in pig crap all the time
... He didn't think I understood or was using my real knowledge to get at the answers he needed.
"He wasn't playing in anyone else's symphony," Eartha said. "He was a loner, a solo player, and those meetings with him were excruciating and frustrating and trying
..."
A few years later, photographer Roy Schatt, from whom Jimmy had wanted to learn, displayed portraits of Jimmy in Rienzie's, a West Fourth Street coffeehouse, and told me Jimmy had bugged him mercilessly. "He was a miserable runt who was a genius at posturing in a different guise for almost everyone he came in contact with." Schatt said, "Alone and left alone, he was just that-miserable, a squinty-eyed runt. But he was like an electric
bulb -- you plug him in and there's all this light, a battery or something inside him, generating this incredible light
... He wanted me to teach him everything about photography. I don't know why. I was the photographer. He was the subject, but he wanted to be as proficient as me. I said, 'What for? All you're interested in is yourself!'"
Jimmy's relationship with me was more fundamental. He told television director James Sheldon, whom I met through Jimmy, that I was a "kid iconoclast," a Rimbaud on a beat-up motorcycle. And others, particularly later in Hollywood, would say, "He's one of Jimmy's people-art-for-art's-sake." Jimmy's association with the Actors Studio was minimal; he was disliked by members of the board, and especially by Lee
Strasberg.
GO TO PART THREE
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