“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.”