Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I am just as passionate about actors as I am about writers. For me a good actor, either on the stage or on film, is someone who “writes” his own part by imbuing it with nuance, intelligence and an intangible connection with the audience. Intuition is key, as is inspiration. So it has always fascinated me when I stumble across an actor who later becomes a successful novelist. We don’t expect our stars to shine in other fields, but on occasion they do. A genius such as Noel Coward, above, of course, succeeded in nearly every genre, from acting and playwriting to singing and composing. He even penned a novel or two. But his flair for diversity is not the type of “double threat” surprise that I am talking about.

Think of the brilliant Dirk Bogarde, above. Here was an actor who excelled in most of the parts he played on the screen, whether essaying a matinee idol, a heartthrob doctor, a libeled baronet, a devious servant, a blackmailed homosexual, a Spanish gardener (admittedly a stretch), a dying composer, or a sadistic ex-Nazi. And yet, as Bogarde confessed at the end of his life, he was most proud of the fact that he wrote novels.

After his illustrious film career wound down, Dirk Bogarde picked up his pen and floored the cognoscenti by writing a handful of novels and a suite of memoirs, nearly all of which received surprisingly good notices. I, for one, prefer his memoirs, perhaps because they read like conversations, and one feels as if one is sitting beside Sir Dirk at dinner or over a “spot of tea” as he recounts his glamorous, but always slightly jaundiced, memories of past escapades.

His autobiographies, including A Postillion Struck By Lightning, Snakes and Ladders, An Orderly Man and Backcloth read like novels anyway. And judging by the response to them after his death, when many of his friends, family and critics openly discussed the lengths to which Bogarde hid, prevaricated or simply whitewashed his past, it’s safe to say that he used his skills as a novelist (those same ones that made him such a persuasive actor) to recreate, if not, reinvent, his life. The novels, including A Gentle Occupation, Voices in the Garden, West of Sunset and Jericho, probably won’t be read a hundred years from now, although A Period of Adjustment, which deals with AIDS, is an interesting time-capsule.

While Bogarde is clearly the best-known example of this phenomenon one might call “acthor,” there’s another person who came before him: Mary Astor, above. This elegant actress, who played so marvelously against type in The Maltese Falcon, turned to the page after a long career on celluloid. She wrote five novels and two memoirs. A friend of mine, Brad Bigelow at The Neglected Book Page has already done her justice. You can read more about her here.

Perhaps the first actor/author I discovered on my own was Gordon Merrick, above. I remember the moment vividly. When I was a teenager in the throes of puberty, I used to have terrible headaches (probably from repressed guilt.) My father sent me to an ancient doctor in Manhattan who gave me shots of histamine. His treatments did little to alleviate my suffering, but I loved my weekly trips into the city since they allowed me to explore New York and to shop in its bustling bookstores. One day, in Penn Station while waiting for a train, I found a paperback entitled The Lord Won’t Mind. No doubt it was the cover art which drew me to it: a shirtless blond boy with a come-hither look (this was the first paperback edition before the better-known Gadino cover came out.)

I bought the book and read it guiltily under the covers at night when I got home. The story of two young men summering in New Jersey who fall in love and have a clandestine gay affair (with a lot of turgid sex) was truly shocking for its time. The book created a sensation and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 5 months in hardcover (a feat unmatched by any other gay novel, I suspect, since then.) Reading Gordon Merrick at the ripe age of fifteen, I was transported into a louche realm of sensuality I only dreamed about. I was determined to read everything I could find by this unusual author.

What I soon discovered is that Gordon Merrick, above, had started out his career as a scrawny young actor on Broadway. While still a student at Princeton in 1939, Merrick dropped out (à la F. Scott Fitzgerald), moved to New York and found a job in a Broadway show called The American Way with Fredric March and Florence Eldridge. Perhaps it was here that Merrick first met Moss Hart (husband of Kitty Carlisle) who was rumored to be his lover. Hart, who wrote the show with George S. Kaufman, soon helped cast Merrick as Richard Stanley in their next show, The Man Who Came to Dinner. He played the restless son who is eager to leave home. The reasons are never fully explained. Even in the film version with Monty Woolley, when the part was played by Russell Arms, one gets the impression this young man needs to spread his wings a bit and that Sheridan Whiteside, who eyes him affectionately, wouldn’t mind helping him out. Merrick stayed with the show for most of its run but perhaps because of this lengthy commitment he soon grew weary of the theater.

He turned his attention to journalism instead and found jobs at the New York Post and the Baltimore Evening Sun. During World War II he served in the OSS and wrote a novel about his experiences, The Strumpet Wind, that garnered a lot of attention, and was repackaged as The Night and the Naked. He followed this up with more pulpy potboilers: The Demon of Noon, The Vallency Tradition and The Hot Season (all of which are completely forgotten today). He also adapted James Purdy’s novel The Nephew for BBC Television. But in 1970, after having lived in Hydra, the South of France and eventually Ceylon, where he maintained a home, he wrote the book that made his name: The Lord Won’t Mind. The title is the moral at the end posited by the black maid who says “So long as it’s love, the lord won’t mind.” It was one of the first gay novels that was unapologetically positive.

Merrick followed this up with two more books in a trilogy about Charlie and Peter: One For the Gods and Forth Into Light. Then came a series of equally erotic tomes, including The Quirk (about his experiences on the stage), Now Let’s Talk About Music, and Perfect Freedom. Gadino’s brilliant beefcake cover art did a lot to guarantee their success. Merrick’s later works suffered from a tendency to overplay the lurid, and the focus on the size of a character’s sexual equipment rather than plot undermined their credibility. He died of cancer in 1988. A posthumous novel, The Good Life, based loosely on the infamous Wayne Lonergan murder case, above, was finished by his longtime lover Charles G. Hulse (author of the excellent gay novel In Tall Cotton).

The stage produced two more of my favorite novelists. The first, at least in terms of age, was James Kirkwood, Jr., above. Born in 1924, Kirkwood was the son of the famous Hollywood figures James Kirkwood, Sr., (best known for his films with D. W. Griffith) and silent screen star Lila Lee. His first real gig on Broadway was in Junior Miss, a play directed by the ubiquitous Moss Hart. In 1950, Kirkwood wrote sketches for and appeared in a revue, Dance Me A Song, along with Wally Cox and Joan McCracken (who had been married to the dancer/novelist Jack Dunphy, later Truman Capote’s lover.) The revue lasted only 35 performances. Kirkwood’s next role was as the grown-up Patrick Dennis in Auntie Mame but according to the Internet Broadway Database, he was replaced in rehearsals. He later toured with leading ladies Tallulah Bankhead, Martha Raye, Kaye Ballard, and Elaine Stritch, all of which ended up being fodder for his later show Legends. Kirkwood, who must have felt it difficult to live up to his parents’s notoriety, fared better in the burgeoning field of television. Throughout the 50s, he appeared on such hit TV shows as Valiant Lady, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Lawman, and Perry Mason.

Kirkwood’s literary breakthrough came in 1960 when he wrote his first novel (as “Jim Kirkwood) There Must Be A Pony!, a thinly veiled account of his life growing up with his mad-as-a-hatter mother. In the novel she’s called Rita Cydney and the boy named Josh becomes embroiled in a murder mystery when his mother’s fiancé, who had taken a paternal interest in him, winds up dead. The story is as precocious, outrageous and funny as the young boy who tells it. He worries that he’s a sissy. “When people keep telling you you’re a sissy you start believing them,” he says. But he’s a cute sissy with an attractive “sensitive face.” Sometimes it gets him into trouble. “I’ve also been exposed to a lot of weird stuff because of the way I look,” Josh adds. “I mean if there’s a bona fide homosexual within a thousand miles, you can bet he’ll find me and make a pass.” Kirkwood dedicated the book to his parents “with love and shingles.” Recently a biography called Riding James Kirkwood’s Pony by William Russo was printed, purporting to reveal the true story of the murder of Lila Lee’s fiancé. The novel had legs. Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Wagner, below, starred in the 1986 TV adaptation by Mart Crowley (of Boys in the Band fame). Chad Lowe played the boy.

But it was his second novel, Good Times/Bad Times (1968) that firmly established Kirkwood as a writer to reckon with. The riveting tale of a lonely boy at a prep school, accused of murdering its sadistic headmaster, the novel has some autobiographical overtones. The boy, Peter Kilburn, is the son of a down-on-his-luck actor, and soon finds “a warm friend” in Jordan Legier, “a frail, but charismatic young man.” Good Times is a more explicit spin on A Separate Peace, with echoes of Tea and Sympathy as well. The sexually-charged massage scenes between Peter and Mr. Hoyt, the closeted headmaster, give the novel a decidedly pre-Stonewall air of homophobia, but the writing is strong enough that such political incorrectness seems irrelevant. The ever-respectable Cleveland Amory called it “the best young novel by the best young novelist we’ve read since J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.”

James Kirkwood, of course, went on to even greater triumphs. He wrote plays, memoirs, toured in a comedy show, and even wrote a non-fiction account of the Clay Shaw-Jim Garrison scandal surrounding the Kennedy assassination, American Grotesque. His novel P.S Your Cat is Dead, about a gay burglar, was made into a film with Steve Guttenburg. Some Kind of a Hero was bowdlerized in a screen adaptation for Richard Pryor.

His comedic Legends has had several lives since it debuted with Carol Channing and Mary Martin in 1987. He wrote a memoir of his experiences with that show, Diary of a Mad Playwright. Kirkwood is best-known, however, for co-writing A Chorus Line in 1976. He won the Tony, the Drama Desk award, and the Pulitzer Prize for that work. He died in 1989 from spinal cancer. His work will always be remembered for its wit, honesty, and willingness to take risks.

Kirkwood’s contemporary James Leo Herlihy, above, had an equally varied career. Born in 1927 into a working class family in Detroit, Herlihy enlisted in the Navy during WWII. Afterward, he studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, known as a think tank for artists such as Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Willem de Kooning. Herlihy studied acting and toured for several years in California and later in Boston where he starred in Edward Albee’s A Zoo Story. He would continue to act for years afterward, both on stage and on screen.

But starting in the 50s, Herlihy found his true voice as a writer. He penned his first play Blue Denim (with William Noble) about an affair between a young boy and a girl who end up having a baby. It opened on Broadway in 1958 with Carol Lynley in the lead. She recreated the role in the 1959 film, above, also starring Brandon de Wilde. The latter would end up starring in John Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down (1962), based on Herlihy’s acclaimed first novel. The poignant story of a young boy who is enamored of his wild and unpredictable playboy brother, All Fall Down is a novel which deserves a much wider audience today. The film version made a star out of Warren Beatty at the height of his “impossibly beautiful” phase. The paperback version also sported a compelling cover by Victor Gadino.

In 1959, Herlihy had published a book of acclaimed short stories, The Sleep of Baby Filbertson, with a cover illustration by Tom Keogh, husband of the writer Theodora Keogh whom I’ve covered here a few times. The collection is clearly inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and contains a telling little tale entitled “Miguel” about a young gay hustler from Uruguay who works his way across the United States from New Orleans to San Francisco, taking advantage of what Tennessee Williams had called “the kindness of strangers.” It ends on a note of ambivalence. Has he committed murder, killing the one man he loved? Or is he just drifting from one bed to the next, unable to make a life for himself, never finding true love? It is merely a sketch but one can see how Herlihy developed these dark themes later in his more mature work.

Meanwhile, Herlihy was still acting, appearing in Route 66 in an episode about a novelist who is shot and killed. He played a newspaper reporter. In 1963 he appeared in the now-cult Jean Seberg movie, In the French Style. But most of his acting was on the stage. He also taught acting and playwriting.

Herlihy, of course, achieved lasting literary fame by writing the modern classic Midnight Cowboy, about a hopelessly misguided hustler from Texas who befriends a down-and-out grifter in Manhattan. The film, which came out in 1970, directed by John Schlesinger, won the Oscar as Best Picture of the Year — the only X-rated film ever to do so, although the X-rating seems superfluous today. Season of the Witch (1971) followed. A tale of drifters in the psychedelic 60s, it is a novel that is nearly forgotten today, but which is much underrated. It has no connection to the film of the same name by George Romero. (Herlihy, below, with Tallulah Bankhead, whom he directed in 1959’s Crazy October. Courtesy of Tom Sutpen’s website.)

After the immense success of Midnight Cowboy, Herlihy seems to have drifted in and out of teaching jobs as well as a final acting appearance in the film Four Friends. Little is known about his private life. He apparently committed suicide at his home in Los Angeles in 1993 by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

Less depressing is the story of Bennington-born Carleton Carpenter, above, one of the bright stars of MGM’s second-wind era of musical-making. Sort of a blond Tommy Tune type, his gangly good looks and effervescent charm landed him a number of key parts on film. He appeared in Summer Stock, along with Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, and the Debbie Reynolds’s film, Two Weeks in Love.

Prior to all of that, he’d made his mark on Broadway in shows such as Bright Boy, Three To Make Ready and Hotel Paradiso. Most of his acting, however, was on television where he was cast in shows as diverse as The Shirley Temple Storybook and The Rifleman. He preferred writing songs and is credited with the tune “Christmas Eve.” According to IMDB, he wrote special material for Debbie Reynolds, Kaye Ballard, Marlene Dietrich and Hermione Gingold. His acting career fizzled, however, for reasons that are unknown. He appeared in a few later films, most notably the underground gay cult film, Some of My Best Friends Are (1971) and the particularly gruesome slasher film, The Prowler (1985).

But I first knew of Carleton Carpenter by reading one of his wacky mystery novels, Dead Head, which I had found at a paperback trader in New Haven. Starting in the 70s, when he could let his hair down, Carpenter scribbled clever mystery novels set in trendy demimondes, such as Only Her Hairdresser Knew, Cat Got Your Tongue, and Games Murderers Play. I read them more for the bitchy humor than the plots which often were too convoluted to follow. Dead Head, set in the theater world, was supposedly turned into a Broadway musical, although it does not show up on IBDB. During the 80s, he wrote for Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen magazines.

Eagle-eyed collectors are always on the lookout for his Gothic romance Pinecastle by Ivy Manchester, one of his female pseudonyms. It was later reissued as Stumped under his real name. Carpenter, unlike the other “acthors” discussed here, is still alive.

Another matinee idol who became a novelist, quite to the surprise of his aging fans, was George Nader, above. One of the beefcake heartthrobs of the 50s and 60s, and part of the notorious Henry Willson stable of young stars, George Nader did not have a particularly distinguished film career. He was always being shown off in tight trunks. His big break came in 1953 when he starred in a sci-fi B-movie Robot Monster.

He also appeared as the pilot in the Bette Davis film Phone Call from a Stranger. In 1954 he was cast in the notorious stinker, Sins of Jezebel, with Paulette Goddard. Two years later he starred opposite Esther Williams in The Unguarded Moment. But he found more consistent work in television, including his own detective series Shannon. Rumors of his homosexuality dogged his career. He moved to Europe with his partner Mark Miller and starred in a few flicks there. But basically his acting career was over, especially after a car accident damaged his eyes.

In 1978, having returned to the States, Nader amazed everyone by writing a science fiction novel, Chrome. It is considered by many to be the first homosexual sci-fi story, but that it not technically true since the love affair is between a robot and a man. The twist is that neither character, Chrome nor his lover Vortex, knows which one is the robot. Perhaps Nader was inspired by his earlier film, Robot Monster. Critics were mystified, but kind. The London Sunday Times columnist, Patrick Campbell, described it as “a laser-dazzling work of the imagination.” Chrome was published in hardcover by Putnam, then reissued in paperback several times. It is basically a metaphorical attack on the hypocrisy and repressive nature of modern America. Nader had planned it to be part of a trilogy but due to poor health, he never completed it. He died in 2001 after years of persistent health problems.

One of Chrome’s champions was cinematic hunk Thomas Tryon, above, who called it “a first-rate story, a futuristic page-turner.” As one of the most renowned “acthors” himself, that is not surprising. And like Nader, Thomas Tryon had appeared in a campy sci-fi film, I Married A Monster From Outer Space.

Born in 1926 in Hartford, the son of a clothier, Tryon trod the boards on Broadway, most notably in Wish You Were Here, the long-running 1952 musical starring Florence Henderson and Jack Cassidy. He went to Hollywood and was cast in several films, including Moon Pilot, The Longest Day and In Harm’s Way. He appeared often on television. His rugged good-looks and masculine demeanor typecast him however as a matinee idol and Tryon bristled at the lack of good acting roles. Today he is best known as the star of The Cardinal, a role which garnered him a Golden Globe. But he fought often with the director Otto Preminger who seemed to take sadistic delight in humiliating Tryon on the set.

That debacle led Tryon to basically forgo his acting career in favor of writing novels. His first, The Other (1971), a spooky thriller about a pair of evil twins, was a phenomenal bestseller and soon became a film by Richard Mulligan starring Uta Hagen in a rare film appearance. Tryon followed this up with Harvest Home, another haunting tale similar in spirit to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, that was made into a rather campy TV mini-series starring Bette Davis. His book Crowned Heads featured a story, “Fedora,” a thinly-disguised tale of Greta Garbo, that was made into a 1978 film by Billy Wilder with an all-star cast, including William Holden and Marthe Keller. Some consider Lady to be Tryon’s best novel, but I have a soft spot for Night of the Moonbow (1989), about a young kid at camp who snaps after being harassed by his fellow cabin mates. Tryon’s best work revolved around boys, and the mischief they can do.

The fact that Tryon was struggling with his sexuality throughout his career did not become generally known until later when he had an affair with Calvin Culver, aka Casey Donovan, the famous gay porn star. Tryon also was lovers with Clive Clark, a dancer from A Chorus Line. But Tryon never wrote explicitly about homosexuality. He was never part of the gay scene. His feelings on the matter are hidden, however, in between the lines of his strange, moody works. He died in 1991 from stomach cancer.

Perhaps you noticed that everyone I’ve mentioned above has been gay (with apologies to Mary Astor). This is not a coincidence. I could have included William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, above, both of whom are actors who have written novels (most likely ghost-written). But those are spin-offs of their TV shows. Peter Ustinov certainly counts as an actor who went on to great success on the page. But, like Noel Coward, Ustinov was a Renaissance man, not an “acthor.” Steve Martin has managed to do both quite well, thank you, but I don’t think of him as an actor so much as a comedian.

There is one actor who was straight who does fit my parameters: Gardner McKay, above. Like his hunky cohorts, Gardner McKay was a creation of the Hollywood factory. Born in New York City in 1932, McKay attended Cornell where he excelled at sports. At 6′, 5″, 200 pounds of muscle, he was a world-class sailor who crossed the Atlantic 18 times. He graced the cover of Life magazine before he had really accomplished anything besides being incredibly handsome.

In time he made the rounds of TV studios. He landed a few roles but it wasn’t until he caught the eye of television producer Dominick Dunne (yes, the same guy who became a noted novelist himself) that fate beckoned. Dunne saw something in McKay and got him cast in a new series Adventures in Paradise, which was based on the South Seas experiences of writer James Michener. The show was a hit and ran for over three years.

I first laid eyes on McKay in the film The Pleasure Seekers, which is a camp classic starring Ann-Margret. His sultry good looks nearly stole the picture from her and co-star Anthony Franciosa. A popular playboy, McKay dated screen sirens Julie Newmar and Joan Collins. But McKay seems to have grown bored with acting, and took up photography, sculpture and writing. He became a film critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and wrote several plays.

In 1999, he published the novel, Toyer, a strange crime story about a demented serial sadist who tortures his victims rather than kills them. The book later made publishing history since it was reprinted with twelve different front covers, featuring each of his victims. I have not read the novel, but it got very good reviews and was made into a play that opened in London not so long ago. McKay, who had retired to Hawaii with his family, died two years later of prostate cancer. His memoirs Journey Without a Map were published after his death. An obit mentioned four other novels but I’ve not been able to find any of them on various internet book selling sites and I wonder if they ever saw the light of day.

So where does all this leave us? Are actors who write as rare a creature as I surmise? I suppose I could wax poetic about Ethan Hawke, the former teen idol, whose novel The Hottest State was a surprise to many of his fans, and to talk show hosts who were literally speechless when it came out in 1997. The same with Ash Wednesday in 2002 which I had a hard time selling even to college students when I still had my book store. In my mind, Hawke, below, simply does not have that je ne sais quoi of the men I’ve mentioned here.

Perhaps he lacks that sense of gravitas one finds in Dirk Bogarde, whose film work as well as his books are timeless and profoundly moving. Nor do such wunderkinds exude the rich heritage implicit in the oeuvres of veteran actors such as Herlihy and Kirkwood. When I look at the stylish novels of Carleton Carpenter and Thomas Tryon, I also see a reaction against the past, the need to find a new voice, a new medium, to express what demons lurked inside. And then I go back to read one of Gordon Merrick’s hilariously over-the-top gay romances and I scratch my head and wonder, why did he do it? Was it just for the money? Or did he know that the world was changing and that the kind of sleaze he was writing would soon be the norm? (Merrick, below, as captured by Hulse.)

Actually when you think about the reverse, writers who have become actors, the numbers are practically non-existent. I can only think of Gore Vidal whose star-turn in Bob Roberts generated a heap of hype. Perhaps there is something left unsaid by actors that needs to find new meaning on the page. I find it fascinating that these larger-than-life personas, who once graced the screen and the stage, collaborating with crowds of co-workers, chose to reinvent themselves as authors. Writing is a solitary art. And perhaps these troubled souls found in it the solace they were seeking.

Ironically, the same day in Maine that I found the novel based on James Dean, featured here last week, I also happened to come across an old issue of Saga magazine from December 1957 with Alfonso de Portago on the cover. Nicknamed “the madcap Marquis,” this flamboyant Spanish playboy had lived large, and died, like Dean, in a devastating car crash.

There are striking similarities between the two, although “Fon,” as he was called, led a far more glamorous life.

Born in London on this day October 11, in 1928, Fon was the offspring of a celebrated bon vivant, Antonio Cabeza de Vaca, a gambler and polo player, and a dazzling Irish nurse named Olga Leighton. De Vaca, scion of a distinguished Spanish noble family, was pals with the Spanish King, who became Fon’s namesake and godfather. The De Vacas had ancient roots in Spain and were early explorers in the Americas. According to Jack Newcombe’s Saga article, Fon’s ancestors included a Spanish hero of the 13th century, Martin Alahaja, who routed the Moors and Francisco de Vera, who conquered Grand Canary Island in 1483. The most famous ancestor was Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, who in 1527, joined an expedition sailing from Spain to colonize Florida and eastern Mexico. “Shipwrecks, disease and desertion cut the original party of 600 down to a handful,” Newcombe writes. “For six years, he wandered half-naked among the Indians of the Southwest, a trader in cones, conches and skins. He was always in danger of being hacked to pieces by Indians.”

Because of his miraculous medicinal skills, however, de Vaca (pictured above), survived and became something of a religious cult figure, a hero in Mexico, lauded by all. He later became governor of Rio de la Plata in South America. Fon’s father inherited this adventurous streak. He once won two million francs at a table in Monte Carlo. A first class sailor and crack polo player, he hired Jack Johnson to teach him boxing.  He also produced five movies in which he acted as the star.

Fon’s mother, Olga Leighton, above, was the widow of her former employer, Frank Jay Mackey, a rich American who was the founder of the Household Finance Corp. Mackey, who was 40 years her senior and ill, shot himself to death. Other sources say she was British, not Irish. The de Vacas lived the high life in Europe until Antonio died in 1941 from a heart attack. Fon was barely a teen. His mother placed him at Lawrenceville prep school outside Princeton, but Fon hated it and left after a month. His mother found him a tutor, and moved him into the Plaza where she was living. (Alfonso, age seven, below.)

There he befriended a rough-and-tumble elevator operator, Edmund Nelson, who became his constant companion until the bitter end. Fon said he drove his first sportscar at the age of 7. But after his father’s death he became even more reckless. Newcombe describes him as a teenage dandy, a prissy snob, who smoked cigarettes from a gold holder. But he also rebelled against his noble upbringing, refusing to bathe and to observe social niceties. One society wag said that if he hadn’t been a nobleman, Fon would have been a truck driver.

“A nobleman in spirit,” Newcombe writes, “Fon made no effort to dress or cultivate the part. His customary appearance was one of studied dishevelment. He let his hair grow to unruly lengths. He chain-smoked cigarettes, dangling them like a blade of grass between his teeth. He was handsome in a dark, masculine way, but he often dressed like a garage mechanic. At Sebring or Monaco or Nassau, he was seen hiking quickly along the pit area, wearing rubber-soled shoes, wrinkled slacks and an alligator sports shirt with the alligator neatly removed. His father, once described as the best dressed man in Europe, was the very model of a modish Marquis. Fon was satisfied to behave like one.”

From day one de Portago was a daredevil, addicted to hazards, horses and hot rods. He yearned to be an aviator, so he took flying lessons in Lynchburg, Virginia. But his flirtation with having wings did not last long. In Palm Beach, a hotel chef bet Fon $500 that he could not fly under a causeway bridge. The span was only 20 feet above water. Portago won the bet, but landed in jail. Later, in 1946, he was flying in France when his plane suddenly malfunctioned. He managed to fly into a field, landing, he said, “on a cow.”

Portago was always testing the limits of speed. As a horseman, Newcombe writes, “he twice rode in the Irish Grand National, the most famous and hazardous of steeplechases, and was thrown from his mount each time. He was an excellent swimmer… He became an Olympic bobsledder with only a few weeks practice. He slithered down the Cresta Run at St. Moritz, setting a record for that suicidal sled course. In auto-racing, he survived a series of 100-mile-an-hour spins and crackups to develop into one of the ten best professional drivers in the world.”

At 20, he slowed down long enough to marry Carroll McDaniel, above, a disarmingly beautiful American, seven years older than him, from a small South Carolina town. Fon first saw her in New York at El Morocco and was enchanted. The first time they met, they barely spoke a word to each other. She was with a group who didn’t care for him. But he remembered her. The next day he made certain to get her alone. Always impulsive, he asked her to marry him two hours later. She did so in 1949. They had two children, Alfonso and Andrea. Alfonso inherited his father’s way with the ladies. One of his wives was Barbara de Portago, a prominent New York socialite who grew up in Versailles. Her father-in-law was its curator.

Andrea (above, with Scavullo) who inherited her mother’s fine features, became a model and an actress, and traveled in chic circles, including the Warhol crowd. I remember when I worked with Jay Presson Allen, who had written a Broadway play designed for Angela Lansbury, entitled A Little Family Business, Andrea Portago (she did not like to use the “de”) came into the office to audition for one of the parts. Reeking glamour and sophistication, she was also surprisingly down-to-earth and charming. You can always tell a person’s breeding by how they treat the staff, and she was as gracious as she was lovely. People magazine profiled her in 1977, when she was promoting a new perfume by Nina Ricci. After affairs with Garry Trudeau and Bob Neuwirth, she wed Mick Flick in 1978. She later retired from acting.

From the outset, Fon’s marriage to Carroll was tempestuous and difficult. His mother was said not to approve of her, perhaps as Charlotte Hays writes in The Fortune Hunters, she saw too much of herself in the ambitious young American. Carroll befriended the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who remained lifelong pals, and entertained on a lavish scale. Fon, meanwhile, had become more and more impulsive. She was not fond of his rowdy friends, nor his constant traveling, and Fon’s Latin eye tended to rove. He also threw himself into racing. He started out with a Ferrari, then a Maserati, then an Osca, which flipped over at the Grand Prix in 1954. He went back to a Ferrari and gained their sponsorship. In 1956, he won the Grand Prix of Portugal and the Tour de France.

At the time of his final race in 1957, he and Carroll were separated, but not legally divorced. He had carried on a very public romance with Dorian Leigh, below, the Revlon “Fire and Ice” model who was the sister of Suzy Parker. Truman Capote is said to have modeled Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s in part on her. The two were wed in Mexico, although the marriage was not formally recognized. That affair resulted in a son named Kim de Portago, who would later turn to drugs and commit suicide by jumping out a window at the age of 21.

Prior to the prestigious Mille Miglia race in Italy, Fon was courting sultry Mexican-born actress Linda Christian, the ex-wife of Tyrone Power. Lusciously beautiful, she is perhaps best known for her 1948 role in Tarzan and the Mermaids, Johnny Weissmuller’s last turn as the ape man. She also appeared in Up In Arms (1944) with Danny Kaye and Dinah Shore. Some might remember her as the first Bond girl, appearing in an early TV-version of Casino Royale.

On that fateful day, during the 1000-mile race, she flew to Italy and ran out at the pit stop in Florence to embrace him. Photographers caught their kiss (below) just moments before his crash.

Throughout that hair-raising race, Fon seemed to be thumbing his nose at death. Ferrari mechanics had noticed that one of his tires was grating against the body of the car, causing severe abrasion. He paid it no mind. He was hellbent on winning the race.

Finally, rounding a curve outside Mantua, one of his back tires exploded (he was driving 150 mph) and the rear axle broke. His Ferrari flew off the road, taking out a large milestone marker, snapping a telephone pole in two, flipping from one side of the road to the other, killing his companion Edmund Nelson and ten spectators, including numerous children. Portago’s body was found in two sections. It was one of the most horrible wrecks in the history of motor car racing. He was only 30 miles away from the finish line.

Portago’s fatal crack-up was front-page news all over the world in May, 1957, just a few weeks after I was born. I remember people talking about it often when I was a child. His tale was part of the zeitgeist. It remains embedded in my psyche.

I was not the only one obsessed with his tragic tale. There have been countless articles about him in magazines and newspapers. A newsreel about the crash was released in 1957 called Speed Week. Recently a French cable channel presented a detailed documentary with interviews with family members. Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, Heaven Has No Favorites, about passion and thrills in the world of auto-racing, is said to be partly based on Portago’s life, although the situations are quite different. It was later made into the film, Bobby Deerfield, starring Al Pacino and Marthe Keller.

A novel, The Fast One, by Robert Daley, was written in 1978. Loosely based on Portago’s short, daredevil life, it captured the spirit of the auto-racing circuit. From the dustjacket:

“The intertwining of sex and death has long been a preoccupation of literature. Robert Daley’s hair-raising novel about the Grand Prix auto circuit roars from Palermo to Le Mans. As Jack Blakemore, the reigning world champion and Alex Cavelli, an aristocratic and exultantly fearless challenger, fight for the checkered flag and the love of a rich and beautiful but inexperienced American girl, the thrills and perils of danger at high speed mix with the intense exhilaration of the erotic.”

The book was not warmly received. Critics carped that it was overwrought and badly written, with sentences like this one, about Alex Cavelli (the de Portago-inspired character): “He can bend anything to his will, this car, race, season: this girl, this day, life itself.” Kirkus Review asked, “Who would have thought that a super-ordinary Grand Prix car-and-sexarama would present a seminar in pretentiously clumsy writing?” Their critique ended on this cruel note: “For readers with a special interest in speed and gears, the painstaking descriptions of the actual tactics and sensations of racing may sometimes rise above the murky similes. But even the fiercest four-wheel fans will put on the brakes when they run up against ‘Her heart lands on the table like a crowbar.’”

What happened to the people touched by Alfonso de Portago’s brief but tumultuous life? Dorian Leigh, below, continued to shine as one of the premier super models, marrying five times. She opened a restaurant outside Fontainebleau, Chez Dorian. Then became a born-again Christian. She wrote her memoirs The Girl Who Had Everything in 1980. She dedicated it to her son Kim, although as she said, he would never read it.

Linda Christian, below, was married briefly to Edmund Purdom, the handsome British actor. Her two children with Power are actors Taryn and Romina Power. She wrote her own autobiography, Linda, in 1962.

And what of Carroll de Portago? Well, as it turned out, her divorce papers with Fon had not yet been filed, so she became his widow. She went through the funeral with the kind of dignity Jackie Kennedy displayed a few years later. But there was an awkward moment when Linda Christian, in a black veil, arrived just as she was leaving. Despite de Portago’s noble name, there was little or no money for her to live on and to raise her two children. She moved around the world. Andrea recalled how she felt like Eloise, constantly inhabiting one hotel after the next.

Carroll, above, eventually moved to Hong Kong where she married a Welsh doctor, John Carey-Hughes. That marriage did not last, and she returned to New York. Carroll went on to a much-rumored affair with Charles Englehard, then married a businessman, Richard Chadwick Pistell, who later had legal problems and lost his money. In the end, Carroll wed Milton Petrie, king of ready-to-wear, and settled into her role as philanthropist, collector, and socialite. She has a knack for survival, unlike Alfonso de Portago, the madcap Marquis, who flirted with death once too often.

An American Idol in Novels

Driving home from my September sojourn in Maine, I stopped in at one of the many book barns on the roadside along the coast. I used to make my living by scouring such places for rare first editions, esoteric ephemera and the odd volume. But since closing the shop, as well as my internet business a year ago, I’ve been less inclined to spend time in places that bring back a swarm of memories. But on this journey, I had time to spare and entered the barn’s portals without a clue as to what I might find inside. Floor after floor, I searched the shelves and came up with nothing. I was almost grateful as I slipped out the front door and left empty-handed.

But wait! What’s that? I asked myself, spying a tome with an intriguing title: Farewell, My Slightly Tarnished Hero. The book was tucked in the corner of a shelf in the outside bin. If it had been any cheaper, it would have been free. I glanced at its dust jacket, on which a face peered out that looked remarkably like James Dean. Picking it up and reading the blurb on the flap, I soon realized that this novel was a fictionalized account of the famous dead icon’s life:

“When film star Johnny Lewis died in a highway crash in the early fifties he was only 24. Although only two of the three movies he made had been released, his death shocked the world. If Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield would always recall the world of the 1940s, it was Johnny Lewis more than any other star who became the rebel hero of the 1950s.”

I flipped the owner the coin it cost to buy it, and took it home with me.

Very few actors can lay claim to the distinction of having a novel written based on their lives. But icons are different. In James Dean’s case, there have been several books. It is an odd phenomenon. One would think that a biography would be sufficient, but for some reason, authors look upon James Dean as a kind of tabula rasa on which they can dissect the tenor of the times he lived in, or even bring him back to life. Perhaps it is because he died so young. And so tragically, although the word tragic applied to someone whose car crashed into an oncoming vehicle seems a bit of a stretch. Tragedy implies a heroic struggle. Ill-fated might be a better way of putting it. It was almost a death wish on his part. No doubt that is part of the appeal. To understand why on earth this talented young man with his whole future ahead of him, the world at his feet, could die so young.

The myth-making began almost the moment he expired in that fiery crash. He hadn’t died at all, some claimed. He merely pretended to die in order to escape his unwanted fame. He was that kind of guy, nervous and awkward and painfully shy. He loathed the Hollywood machine. He wanted out. I never bought those fantasies. But I did want to know what made him tick.

There was a side to James Dean that called to me, even as a young teen struggling with my own identity and sexual issues. I don’t know how old I was when I first saw Rebel Without a Cause. But I suspect I was fourteen or so. I watched it alone upstairs in my father’s room where the color TV was. Dad was probably away on one of his business trips. I often spent hours each day parked in front of the tube, inches from the screen. It was not uncommon for me to watch TV from 4:30 in the afternoon when I got home from school, until midnight each day. I had a little routine that amused me. I’d sit with my head perched on my right hand, the forearm at a 45 degree angle. I refused to move until my arm became completely numb. My hand would feel like it was dead. It would cease to exist. I could pinch it, jab it with a pen, slam it on a table. Nothing. No feeling whatsoever. Then I’d get up, shake it until the blood flowed back into it, and start the process all over again.

On one of these lonely nights, I just happened to turn on the TV and landed on an old movie. A bright flash of red caught my eye. It was James Dean’s jacket. I didn’t know who he was. I’d never heard of him. And at that moment, I had no quick way of finding out. I just watched the film unfold. I guess I’d been lucky and caught it early on. Dean was running around a sunny campus, then went on a school trip to a planetarium (although even at my young age, I thought he looked too old and pretty ridiculous as a high school student). But I didn’t care about casting mistakes. I was entranced by his “look.” The jeans, the pompadour, the angst in his face. And that gorgeous red jacket, which flashed across the screen like a matador’s red cape in the bull ring. I lunged into the story, trying to figure out what this film was about. Who were these odd characters? The father wearing an apron? The tough kids who called each other “chicken”?

It was unlike any Hollywood film I’d ever seen. The love interest was all wrong. He wasn’t after the girl. She was after him. And that friend, the school nerd who kept following him around. That was really peculiar. His name was Plato, which I found fascinating, because even at fourteen I knew that Plato was a Greek philosopher and that he was supposed to be homosexual. He had written the Symposium, which advocated both straight and gay love. I knew about such things because they were important to me. They were the only glimmers of that life available to me, tiny shards of a distant past that seemed more real to me than the phony present. I saw in this kid, the nerd named Plato, myself. And I knew that his bizarre obsession with this outcast, the James Dean character, the “Rebel without a Cause,” was sexual in nature. He lusted after Dean. And stalked him. And wanted to make love to him. And did so with his eyes, if not his swollen lips.

But what really floored me was that James Dean didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t do what was expected, hauling off and belting the poor kid, or getting others to laugh with him. He was tender and kind and loving, and even though he got the girl in the end, it was as if he had loved them both equally. I didn’t see their menage a trois as a metaphor for the family, as some critics have suggested. I didn’t need to extrapolate from what was on the screen. It was there in living color. When the film was over, and Plato was dead (draped in Dean’s coat, I seem to recall), I lay in my Dad’s room in a state of ecstasy and devastation. Watching this picture had been like living through a strange, erotic dream.

Later, I figured out the name of the motion picture from the day’s paper. And then researched the film. Like countless other Americans exposed to this movie over the years since its release, I became obsessed with both Sal Mineo and James Dean. Natalie Wood had seemed like a sister to me, from her star turns in Gypsy and West Side Story. I didn’t need to fixate on her. But I saw in Mineo and Dean dual sides of my own nature and I felt that by figuring them out, I might solve the riddle of myself.

Part of the incredible aura of James Dean is the fact that he died in a horrible car accident before the film Rebel Without a Cause was released. Coming across this slice of information, after having just watched this film in a state of heightened awareness of its unique power, was too much. It was like learning the story of Christmas only to find out that Jesus’s life ends in a gruesome crucifixion. What are we celebrating? The same with Oscar Wilde. I read his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in junior high school. Then learning about his tragic life, I found out that he was persecuted, spat at, had his plays removed from the stage and died nearly forgotten after serving hard labor in prison. A similar unhappy fate befell Sal Mineo. He was stabbed to death by a pizza delivery boy turned petty thief in Los Angeles under mysterious circumstances. (Sal with Don Johnson, below, in Fortune and Men’s Eyes.)

Such are our icons. They are martyrs, symbols of revelation and inspiration, but also the grim truth of life and death. And man’s inhumanity to man, his endless battle with his own demons. James Dean seemed to fit into that mold. We project our innermost turmoils into his tortured soul, or what was left of it. This effect is chillingly realized in the famous erotically-charged photograph from Giant in which Elizabeth Taylor kneels like the Virgin Mary in front of Dean, posed Christ-like with a rifle for a crucifix (below).

The two other films that Dean did never had the same kind of power over me, although I certainly was moved by his performances in them. Watching them, it made no difference to me whether one had been written by John Steinbeck, and the other by Edna Ferber. Their stories were irrelevant. I was only interested in James Dean’s screen time. And he did not disappoint. He tore up the screen. Later, as I grew older and wiser (as in jaded and over-educated by film teachers and historians), I saw how he was miscast in Giant. And how over-the-top his performance in East of Eden really is. Method acting is a ruse, an excuse to spill one’s guts out on celluloid in a bath of tears and maudlin sentimentality. But it works, the same way that Mahler works, wrenching your heart out.

So it should not come as a surprise that authors have attempted to bring James Dean to life on the printed page. The first attempt that I know of was a book, above, by Walter Ross, a former PR rep at BMI, called The Immortal. It came out in 1958, three years after Dean’s death, sporting a cover by a young Andy Warhol (whose pre-pop career began with book jackets and store illustrations.) The novel is a riot to read today. It’s pulpy and pop, and cheesy. But it’s as satisfying as a double cheeseburger with ketchup-drenched fries. Johnny Preston bears a startling resemblance to Jimmy Dean. The copy on the dj sums it up:

“As an actor Johnny Preston was a combination of James Dean, Marlon Brando and the Devil. As a human being, he was a mixture of child, man — and time bomb. Other actors envied him. Producers hated him. Teen-agers copied him. Audiences idolized him. Women loved him. And so did a certain kind of man. Johnny didn’t care. He’d try anything. Fast cars… books… bongo drums… marijuana… people. For him, an experience was neither good nor bad, but something to be bitten into like bread, tasted like wine and spat out like garbage.”

The story is told through a series of contrived interviews, with the people who knew him best: a young starlet he was in love with; a psychoanalyst whose male patient, an actor named Hairston Sklar, was his keeper; his agent; a studio detective. Each presents his own take on the “movie star in dungarees.”

The character based on Dean is a scoundrel, a social vampire, who uses sex as a means of absorbing the souls of the people around him. He is a giant sponge, sucking others dry. Early on one of his conquests finds him holed up in a bar. “I’ve been trying to reach you,” she says to him. “I haven’t been home much,” he answers. I’ve been hiding out from the fag patrol.” I suppose this type of banter was racy and daring when The Immortal was printed. To even talk about bisexuality was risqué, and risky. But since Ross was writing about an icon, a “mutant king,” he got away with it. Its pre-Stonewall take on homosexuality is fascinating from a sociological standpoint. The actor Hairston Sklar seduces Preston and indoctrinates him into a “secret society” of inverts:

“A group of like-minded men who share a common attitude toward life quite far above the usual bourgeois conception of existence. Some of us are actors, some playwrights, some painters… some designers, some are in TV. We’re a group that is, well, more sensitive than the herd, and so we stick together. We help one another. If you are one of us, we will help you.”

Young Preston, who is only looking out for number one, sees a chance and seizes it. He moves in with Sklar, then dumps him when a richer sugar daddy comes along (a yacht-sailing queen who takes Preston to Capri.) It’s rather ludicrous in hindsight, but it had a strong impact in the 50s, and was a bestseller. The book went on to become a cult classic.

There’s a famous photograph of David Bowie, shot by Terry O’Neill, with a copy of the book on the floor beside him, above. The connection is made. Bowie and Dean. Immortal gods. Bowie’s copy is the 1959 British edition from Shakespeare Head with a different cover illustration. (My own copy, below.)

But David Bowie, for all of his wanton past with drugs and sex, was never a tortured soul who longed for death. If anything, he seemed to be a reaction against that cliché, constantly playing the chameleon, ever evolving, never letting life or his fame overwhelm him. (Dean, below, on set of Giant, courtesy Life.)

The Edwin Corley book, Farewell, My Slightly Tarnished Hero, published in 1971 by Dodd, Mead, is surprisingly similar to the Ross novel. And I would be amazed if he did not know about The Immortal when he wrote it. Corley was a former publicist in the film business. As far as 70s novels go, which were known for pushing the envelope of good taste, this one is pretty wild, even a bit haywire. The novel is set in the present (1971) when Corley is asked by his producers to write a screenplay based on the life of Johnny Lewis, a character so similar to James Dean that it makes you scratch your head why the author bothered to change the name. You can’t libel the dead.

While he is struggling to write the screenplay, Corley, who uses his own name in the book, decides to use the material he’s dug up to pen a novel. (Why then begin with the conceit he is writing a screenplay? It makes little sense and adds nothing to the story.) Then in a weird bit of sleight of hand, Corley goes back in time to interview Johnny. He is part ghost, part time traveler. (Since Corley knew James Dean in real life, I find it odd that he’d use this tired Sci-Fi device to tell his story.) In one scene, he meets the Dean-inspired character in a beer joint on the West Side. Johnny takes out a knife and rubs it against the skin of the author’s hand, then he twists the blade, cuts the skin, drawing blood. Since this is all happening in a bizarre ersatz flashback, it’s hard to get swept up in it.

Later the book changes tone and tense, and the second half is written in the first person from Johnny Lewis’s point of view. Here it becomes far more interesting and persuasive. After achieving fame in a film eerily similar to East of Eden, called Paradise Gate, the James Dean clone has numerous affairs with women, including a photographer for Life magazine; a co-star (similar to Natalie Wood) and one character vaguely reminiscent of Pier Angeli. The sex scenes are vivid and lurid. Case in point, a grim but potent bit of foreplay in the shower:

“A savage longing swept through me, and as we uncoupled, I caught her head in both dripping hands and, wordlessly, pushed her down to her knees. She looked at what I was offering with an empty expression, turned her eyes up toward me in despair, then leaned forward woodenly and began to do what I wanted. I remember calling out obscenities as the orgasm came and pulling her face against me until it was all over and she collapsed against the tiled wall, retching.”

But Corley also wants to drive home the icon’s downward spiral. In one bizarre scene, Johnny is watching two chicks have sex with each other. One of their companions, an aging actor named Richard Devine, wearing a dress, wig and makeup, approaches Johnny while he’s staring at the girls, and seduces him.

“And, as I sank back onto a pillow and inched my way out of my khaki pants, Devine pulled off the blonde wig and I saw that he was completely shaven bald, and now his face had become very old under the garish makeup and behind the red lipstick. ‘I’ll do you,’ he said, stroking my trembling legs, ‘and then you do me.’
‘Yes… yes,’ I said thickly, ‘I’ll do you…’”

The way Corley writes it, one is shocked by the ugliness of it, but also disappointed by the lack of detail (especially since we’ve been subjected to several very graphic hetero sex scenes). The implication is that this unpleasant episode, which reminded me a bit of Death in Venice, the pansy as the grim reaper with a vile smile, has touched off a long dormant spark inside Johnny which causes him to self-destruct in a miasma of self-loathing. In the next chapter, his ex-girlfriend, who was involved in the lesbian lovemaking, now calls him a “fag.” Another calls him a “miserable, sickening queer.” Soon he’s seen picking up boys outside a high school. The leap from a minor male seduction to such wanton depravity is not only loony but laughable. It’s a sick 70s moral lesson.

After that it is only a few pages before Johnny tears off on his motorcycle (rather than a sports car, as in real life) and drives off into immortality. The vague insinuation is that he died because he was ashamed of or too frightened by his dark, homosexual urges. Considering that The Immortal had already tread this tenuous territory, it’s odd that Corley could not see beyond it. Corley went on to have greater success in both fiction and film. He wrote the thrillers Grizzly and Air Force One, which were made into hit movies. Corley, below, died at 50 in 1981.

A quick Google search led me to a new book that is also a fictionalization of the life of James Dean. The Rebel by Jack Dann. Originally to be called Second Chance, The Rebel is a conjecture type of novel. What if James Dean had not had a fatal accident on that road in California? What if he had survived the crash? It’s an interesting premise (similar to those novels asking what if the Nazis hadn’t lost the Second World War). Dann brings Marilyn Monroe into it as well, spouting some very salty dialogue. I guess two dead icons are better than one.

What ultimately is gained by reading these less-than-stellar novels about a famous film icon? For me the allure is in the context. Especially the Ross and Corley books, which expose more about the temperament and sensibility of their time than they shed light on any mysteries revolving around James Dean. The Ross book shines a light on the Beat generation and its fascination with bisexuality that was intrinsic to the appeal of figures such as Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, and would later evolve into the androgynous idolatry so omnipresent in punk and glam rock. No wonder David Bowie was posed reading The Immortal. The connection with the cult of celebrity is apt, since he is an artist who has mined this terrain so masterfully.

Likewise the Corley book is a classic of its time, coming on the heels of the early gay lib movement and the free-wheeling, drug crazy, disco 70s. The James Dean in his book is a rebel of the sexual revolution, seeking release from pent-up erotic hangups rather than rage against society or weak fathers who sport aprons (as in Rebel Without a Cause). In the Corley book, the men in drag are the seducers, the devils, not symbols of weak parenthood, or the decline of masculinity.

But in The Rebel, Dean is given another chance. He’s the Fitzgeraldian hero finding that elusive second act. He is the American hero reborn. What better metaphor for the 21st century male? We’re trying to get it right this time. That’s the key to James Dean and his immortality. He is an icon who is constantly evolving, reflecting back our ever changing desires — a malleable fashion plate who suits our mercurial dreams.