A new biography will be, reportedly, outing Paul Newman. Darwin Porter, who, in previous biographies, has "outed" Merv Griffin, writes about an interview with Marlon Brando where Brando states:He never fooled me. Paul Newman had just as many on-location affairs as the rest of us, and he was just as bisexual as I was. But, where I was always getting caught with my pants down, he managed to do it in the dark.In this incidence, the reference is to a supposed relationship with James Dean. The estate of Paul Newman is saying that this is false, and it is a continuation of rumors that went on about Mr. Newman throughout his life.
Just for the record, the Merv Griffin biography says this about the legendary television figure:
He lost his virginity, to a female, that is, when Judy Garland seduced him. His first crush was Errol Flynn, whom he saw passed out naked on a couch. His roommate a year and a half was Montgomery Clift. He lived with Roddy McDowall here at the Dakota, where he introduced Eddie Fisher to Elizabeth Taylor. He maintained a virtual male harem and a pimp who supplied porn stars, but I don't go into his pay-for-gay guys. I keep it to his A-list dates like Rock Hudson, whom he met through Henry Wilson, Rock's agent, and who advised him to keep his sexuality quiet.I mean, I'm as jaded and interested as the next guy -- god knows that, in the cocaine hey-day of the 1970s what the actors were doing -- but a lot of this seems pretty fanciful.
And there was a young James Dean selling his sex for cash. Plus Judy Garland's 'Meet Me in St. Louis' boy next door, Tom Drake, who, by the way, ended up a used car salesman. There was Peter Lawford, Robert Walker, Gordon Scott the then-Tarzan. And lots about Merv's prolonged sexual tryst with Marlon Brando. There are his experiences at Liberace's all-male orgies. His first encounter, a boyhood friend he grew up with, later tried writing a book about Merv. This being an era when male actors felt homosexuality was a danger to their career, lawyers shot down that book fast.
I write that friends who went to school with him in San Mateo say, when he was a young homosexual growing up, he was sexually molested.
Though, trust me, to have been a fly on the wall in the bedroom for a Dean-Newman tryst in the 1970s... WOWZA!
2 comments:
Newman and Dean came to New York at the same time in the early 1950s to join the Actor's Studio.
They became close friends, and they often headed out to California together during breaks on newman's motorbike. In fact at one stage, Newman's first wife, Jackie Witte, accused Newman and Dean of having an affair.
When they were making films at Warner Bros together (Dean East of Eden and Newman The Silver Chalice), Dean would often visit Newman on the Chalice soundstage.
Newman was upset with Dean's untimely death in 1955, he initially refused to take over Dean's television and film roles. In the end, he realised his film career was as good as over if he didn't.
In defense of the dead, when I met Paul Newman in 2004 I did not have any indication on my finely tuned gaydar, but trust me, I wish I did.
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