Part 14

Marty set out to do over Doris, making her an entirely different kind of woman. A long list of subjects was barred in interviews now. Questions were welcome that let the two of them concentrate on picturing her as the girl next door who never smokes, drinks, or cusses, and always minds her manners. Any queries that probed into the real past were rejected. “Doris is not a movie star,” Marty told me blandly. “She’s a talented girl who through circumstances has been pushed into the limelight.”

That was quite an interview, telling as much in its silences as in its words. They came in to see me together, and that’s how they answered, though they didn’t exactly overflow with information. So they won’t be misjudged, I’ll quote them verbatim:

“How does being married to you affect him?” I asked.

“He couldn’t live without me,” she said.

“Seriously, how has this marriage affected you?”

“I’ve learned an awful lot.”

Marty broke in: “That’s pretty ambiguous.”

“Let me put it this way. We’re both striving to be real good people. Marriage has made a terrific change in Marty.”

“In what way?” I said.

“We’re very serious about our religion, but we can’t discuss that.”

“Why not? I think it should be discussed. Do you go to church every Sunday?”

“No, we’re not churchgoers. But we’re trying to be good people, and we’ve come a long way. It’s helped me to be less impatient. I used to be so impatient. Now I’m not.”

“Our religion,” Marty explained in words of one syllable, “is being good. Take out one ‘o’ and you’ve got God. To do good is to prove God.”

Doris hastened to explain: “For instance, we don’t gossip. We don’t talk about people. We don’t stand in judgment of others. We have only enough time to mind our own business.”

Minding their own business has made Mr. and Mrs. Melcher into a ten-million-dollar corporation. They hold interests in a motion-picture production company, recording companies, music companies, real estate, and a merchandising firm with plans to cash in on Doris’ new-found reputation as a clothes horse by peddling “Doris Day” dresses and make-up.

In spite of, or maybe because of, the dollars that come arolling in, Doris is neurotic about her health, which can cause mighty big problems for a Christian Scientist. When she was sure she had cancer--she was wrong--she put off going to a doctor in case she would be betraying her faith. Her brother Paul, who was going to be her manager on the recording side of her career, was a convert to the same faith; he died of a heart condition in his early thirties.

Both the Melchers keep a tight hold on their money. Their social life scarcely exists beyond having an occasional couple in for an early dinner--carrot juice in place of cocktails and desserts from Doris’ celebrated home soda fountain. She also holds on tight to the clothes she gets from her movie roles. When Irene Sharaff, who designed her _Midnight Lace_ outfits, wanted to borrow one coat to be modeled on the Academy Award night where Irene won an Oscar nomination, she had the devil of a time borrowing it--and it had to go back to Doris the next morning.

As for Al Levy, he had one more bit of business to sort out with Marty Melcher. Century Artists’ client list was shrinking as Marty concentrated on Doris, and the decision was made to sell the agency to MCA, who would latch onto anything in those days that promised to increase their holdings in the industry. There was just one cloud on the legal title when the time came to close the deal--the contract Doris had once insisted that Al sign with her.

“It doesn’t mean anything now,” the lawyers told Al Levy. “So just let us have a release before the first of the year.”

“If it doesn’t mean anything, let’s forget it,” he said, by this time deep with David Susskind in Talent Associates, the television production company that Al founded the day after he sent the locksmith and Marty’s relations on their way.

But the lawyers insisted that something had to be done to satisfy Lew Wasserman, president of MCA, that Century Artists was in the clear. “All right,” Levy told the attorneys, “I’ve never asked Doris Day for anything in my life. Fact of the matter is, I put more money into her than I ever took out in commissions. So you give me a check for $3000 signed by Doris--it’ll buy a mink coat for my wife.”

He got the check and gave it to his wife. But Ruth Levy didn’t buy a coat. She put the money in their bank account.

_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.