The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (14 page)

James Dean also caused delays by arriving late on the set or failing to show up at all. One occasion was on August 23, when he completed a move into a log house he’d leased for $250 a month on Sutton Street in Sherman Oaks. When Dean showed up late, the outraged Stevens upbraided him in front of the company, pointing out that Mercedes McCambridge had reported to work despite a broken arm. Dean took it in silence. One evening after work, Elizabeth and her husband joined Dean, Ginsberg, Arthur Loew Jr., and Joan Collins for dinner at a restaurant, where Dean picked up several girls. Later they all went to Oscar Levant’s Beverly Hills home. Oscar and June Levant’s fifteen-year-old daughter Marcia, who was already in bed asleep, was an ardent fan of Dean’s. Elizabeth, June, and Joan decided to lead Dean up the stairs to Marcia’s bedroom, where he woke her by placing his finger lightly on her nose. When she awoke and recognized him, she screamed and pulled the covers over her head. Finally, he convinced Marcia to put on her bathrobe and come downstairs, where he spent half an hour quizzing her about her life and advising her about school, friendship, and life in general. Then he told her to go to bed as it was quite late. After Elizabeth and the others left, Dean stayed and talked with Levant about Bach, Mozart, Arthur Honegger, Charles Ives, and Stan Getz. Then Levant played the piano for him, and he finally went home at 4 a.m. “He knows so much about music,” Levant said.
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Dean’s prime passion was racing his silver Porsche 550 Spyder. Just before he drove off to Salinas on Friday, September 30, 1955, for a road race, Elizabeth gave him a beige-and-brown Siamese cat named Marcus, but he passed it along to a friend, explaining, “You know what a crazy life I lead. What if I went away and never came back?”
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At 5:45 p.m., one mile east of Cholame in San Luis Obispo County, at the intersection of highways 466 and 41, Dean saw a two-tone black-and-white Ford sedan making a left turn onto the highway just ahead of him. At 115 mph, Dean was going too fast to avoid a collision. The other driver, Donald Gene Turnupseed, a student at California Polytechnic, walked away with a bruised nose,
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but Dean’s head was almost severed from his body. He was dead on arrival at Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital, and a doctor there rang the Warner studio in Burbank.

A guard answered the phone and relayed the news to the projection room, where Elizabeth was watching rushes with Stevens, Rock, and Carroll Baker. Stevens took the call and told the others that Dean had been killed. Elizabeth collapsed across the chair in front of her, then jumped up and ran from the room. Locating Dean’s friend, dialogue coach Bob Hinkle, she stayed on studio phones until 9 p.m., calling police, hospitals, morgues, and the press, trying to disprove the report, but getting nothing but confirmations. When she saw Stevens later, she said, “I can’t believe it, George, I can’t believe it.” Stevens replied, “I believe it. He had it coming to him.” She asked Stevens what he meant, and the director said, “The way he drove, he had it coming.” In a blind rage Elizabeth drove home at 100 mph, over canyons and around S curves, plotting how to get even with the director.
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Later that night, she rang him and said, “I can’t work tomorrow. I’ve been crying for hours. You can’t photograph me tomorrow.” He asked, “What’s the matter with you?” She replied that she “loved that boy. Don’t you understand?” Sternly, he told her, “That’s no reason. You be on that set at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, ready to shoot.”
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She was there as ordered, but no sooner had she started to rehearse than she went into hysterics, complaining of abdominal pains. She was punishing Stevens, whom she called a “callous bastard.”

On Saturday, October 1, as
Rebel Without a Cause
went into release across the nation, garnering rave reviews and enormous popularity, Dean’s father, Winton, arranged for his casket to be transported from the Kuehl Funeral Home in Paso Robles to Los Angeles. The same morning, Elizabeth showed up late for work at Warner Bros., “upset,” according to an October 4, 1955, memo from Tom Andre. She threw up her breakfast in the makeup department, and first aid was summoned to give her medicine to settle her stomach. Finally, at 11:45 a.m., she reported to the set to finish the final sequence in the Reata ranch house. “We felt she was upset over James Dean’s death,” Andre continued. She finished her long shot scenes, but later that afternoon, she again felt nauseated when she attempted to perform close-ups. “We shot a close-up of the final scene in the hope that if it were OK we could finish the picture,” Andre memoed, but when Stevens printed the scene, he found it unsatisfactory. By then Elizabeth was so ill Stevens sent her home, and Andre noted that her indisposition resulted in the loss of a “whole day’s work, roughly 3/4th of a day.”
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There is no evidence among the voluminous
Giant
documents in the Stevens archive, which includes Warner memos and physicians’ reports, that Elizabeth had anyone on her side during this crisis. Where, one wonders, were her parents as she struggled through the arduous shoot, taking care of her children, supporting a helpless husband, anxious over a terrible tax situation that ate up eighty percent of her $180,000 annual income, and wondering how she was going to get out of debt.
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No one seems to have supported her as she slowly came apart at the seams. Occasionally Sara called when she read newspaper hints of a nervous breakdown.
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Doctors warned Stevens that Elizabeth would be out for at least two days, but promised the studio that no exploratory operation would be performed on her until they got her “back in shape” to finish the picture. Due to the uncertainty of her health, Stevens, Ginsberg, and Andre decided to close down the first unit and lay off all personnel. Dr. Davis later stated that she was ill “due to extreme nervous tension from the fact that one of her co-actors was killed in an automobile accident, but more important, the extreme mental duress she was put under by the director at this time.” As the crisis worsened at Warner, Ginsberg tried to get some idea of when Elizabeth would return to work on the picture, which was one of the longest and most anticipated films since
Gone with the Wind
, but she said “the date when she would be able to return to work was up to her doctor.” Eager to cover the expenses of this further delay, Ginsberg immediately told Warner’s insurance doctor to get in touch with Dr. Buckley. He also requested that Elizabeth be given an examination the following day. Using a double for Elizabeth, Stevens was able to get at least a few shots of the film’s coda scene involving Rock, Chill Wills, Tina Menard, and two infants.
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As Elizabeth’s sitdown strike continued, Dean’s remains were flown to Indianapolis. A Hunt Funeral Home hearse carried the coffin to Vernon Hunt’s store in Fairmount, which also served as the town’s mortuary. Later, there was a viewing at the Winslow farm where Dean had grown up. In Los Angeles, Warner was in turmoil as doctors hovered over Elizabeth, trying to diagnose a lump in her side but unable to agree whether it was appendicitis, a broken cyst in her ovary, or adhesions from her cesarean section. Elizabeth told Warner she was “terribly anxious” to complete
Giant
, but her doctors could not state a definite date on which she could return to work. The studio instructed its insurance adjuster, Mr. Eggenberger of Toplis & Harding, to start an investigation into her condition.
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On October 8 in Fairmount, three thousand mourners jammed the Black Creek Friends Church for Jimmy’s funeral, the largest in the town’s history. Not one Hollywood celebrity showed up, though Henry Ginsberg, representing
Giant
, did attend. Elizabeth sent flowers, as did Edna Ferber. His estate, inherited by his father, amounted to $96,438.44 after taxes, but by the 1990s, Dean’s trademarked image was earning $6 million a year from items ranging from T-shirts and posters to sunglasses and Converse sneakers. Dean, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe became the biggest cult figures of the twentieth century.

Elizabeth was hospitalized at the University of California Center on October 2. According to Drs. John H. Davis and Robert Buckley, she “presented a diagnostic problem with a major differential between a volvulus [a loop twisted in her small intestine] versus a Mittelsmertz syndrome [a dull pain during ovulation] . . . The former is the most likely diagnosis and it resulted secondary to prolonged retching and vomiting and to a marked visceroptosis [a downward shift of viscera].” The following diagnosis was made: “1. Volvulus self reduced. 2. Acute tracheobronchitis.”
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She was released from the hospital on October 10. By May of the following year, Elizabeth and Warner were still arguing over who should pay her doctor bills.

When
Giant
was released in 1956, it was the hit of the year, establishing Elizabeth as one of the leading movie actresses of her generation, along with Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and Kim Novak. The consequences for Rock were even more momentous: he immediately shot to superstardom, the Film Buyers of the Motion Picture Industry voting him the number one box-office attraction in America. Under pressure from
Life
to prove he wasn’t gay, he married Phyllis Gates but continued sleeping with boys. The marriage ended after two years.
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Jack Larson recalled how Monty came back into Elizabeth’s life in 1956. “I was in New York with him, and then I came back to L.A. to shoot a season of
Superman
. He had been offered
Raintree County
and offered every script in town. I was very surprised when he called me and said, ‘I’m coming out there, I’ve decided to make
Raintree
.’ I said, ‘Is it good?’ ‘No, it isn’t good,’ he said, ‘but it’s good enough that I’d be a coward not to do it, and it means working with Bessie. I love her.’ Lew Wasserman, his agent, found Monty a house that didn’t work out because neighbors kept coming over on the pretext of needing a cup of sugar but really wanting to see Montgomery Clift, the mysterious movie star. Monty then got another house. He’d run his car off the road while making
From Here to Eternity
, so he hired Florian, a Filipino, as combination house boy/driver. When Monty moved from the first house, the one Wasserman had helped him get, he found a small place with a pool on Canter, and spent much of his time either with Elizabeth and Michael or with me.”

In the cluttered and unhappy Wilding household, Monty became an interpreter between Elizabeth and Wilding, who barely spoke to each other. Wilding was always drowsy and confused from his constant drinking and the Seconals he took for his epilepsy. Taking a separate room in the house, he virtually disappeared from Elizabeth’s life. Besides Monty, she entertained regular guests like Rock, the Grangers, Kevin McCarthy, and Humphrey Bogart, who brought around his entourage, known as “The Holmby Hills Rat Pack.” Elizabeth started an affair with Frank Sinatra, according to restaurateur Jilly Rizzo, a close friend of Sinatra’s.
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Eddie Fisher later added that Sinatra’s manager picked her up in a limousine and drove her to “some dirty place in Mexico—where she had an abortion.”
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When a Sinatra biographer reported these allegations, Elizabeth issued an emphatic repudiation of them through columnist Liz Smith.
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Wilding had an affair with Marie “The Body” McDonald, a minor actress who’d appeared in forties fluff like
Getting Gertie’s Garter
, and Elizabeth had a fling with Victor Mature, whose lovemaking was described as “a force of nature” by Esther Williams. According to one of her many biographers, Wilding caught Elizabeth in bed with Mature, his costar in
Zarak Khan
.
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Wilding then became a ghostly presence in his own home, where Elizabeth and Monty seemed more like the married couple and Wilding the house guest. “I just can’t get over it—Liz is the only woman I have ever met who turns me on,” Monty told Wilding. “She feels like the other half of me.”

Eddie Dmytryk began filming
Raintree
in April 1956 following his directorial triumph in
The Caine Mutiny
. Metro paid Elizabeth $125,000, and Monty, still a bigger star than she, received $300,000. He played John Wickliff Shawnessy, an idealistic schoolteacher and Union soldier during the Civil War, and Elizabeth portrayed Susanna Drake, the deranged Southern belle who loves him. It was a hexed picture from the start. “The author was Ross Lockridge, whose widow told me he was struggling with some sort of psychotic problem—depression, I imagine,” said Dmytryk. “He wanted to go to a psychiatrist and his family said no, it would be a blot on the name. Imagine—his family wouldn’t let him go to a psychiatrist. He committed suicide.”

Explaining the casting of
Raintree
, Dmytryk added, “As the director, I cast my films, but in this case, MGM already had Monty and Elizabeth, and who would say no to Monty and Elizabeth. Making that (or any) picture was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. You couldn’t cut it off and go home at five o’clock. I always knew exactly what I wanted to do the first thing in the morning, because the previous day I’d quit early, at 4:30 p.m. or so, and rehearse the next day’s shot with the actors so they would know exactly what they were going to be doing. I’d tell the actors, ‘Okay, go home, see you in the morning,’ but the lighters, electricians, and crew would stay on and get ready for the next morning. I’d arrive early the next day, the actors would be ready, and they’d get the shot in the can by nine o’clock. A director’s biggest job is getting the pace out of people, making it lifelike. Elizabeth was a natural at that, and so was Monty. They both needed just a little bit of goosing.” She also needed help with her Southern accent. Marguerite Lamkin, a stylish young woman from Monroe, Louisiana, took Elizabeth in hand and turned her into a passable Southern belle.