Back- I'm Back

It's all Rimbaud if you only remember the sad parts. It's all Bo Diddley if you only pay attention to the beat. Suddenly it dawns on me that I'm not fragile at all. My mom always told me that I was the smartest kid in the class, the best looking. Great.

She never told me that I was fragile, too frail for this world, destined for heartbreak. That's what she thought, though, and I knew it. She was. She was and she projected it on me.

I still fret about that one-legged seagull on Indian Rocks Beach from 1953 or '54. Still mourn that orange cat that I ran over when I was seventeen.

Suddenly at this point in this long life the station is coming in more clearly. No static to speak of. Oh,  I'm not giving up any windmills. That's what I do. The signal, though- man! I'm picking up Mexico, Bulgaria.

I'm finishing up a song about "loving less." Makes it obvious to me that I should have always "loved more." Run up the score. That's how you win. Don't worry about that other team. Love harder.

If I adjust my tower, you know- maintain my antennae, I've still got a show. All the beauty in the world flows through these veins. Gary Cooper was an actor. I'm the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Good thing- I always knew I wasn't the smartest kid in the class. Or the best looking.

The Horse Back In The Barn

Chapter Nine

The Horse Back In The Barn

Pickens Klay moved to Vancouver several years ago. Just him and Mutt and Jeff, his mongrel babies. We're not in touch often. Neither of us rolls well on the telephone. To tell you the truth I'm not sure how much I miss him. When I get the blues I tend to look around and think that I've lost something. It's all about he loss then, isn't it?

He's certainly a good friend. I figure that the time I spent listening to Pickens probably kept me out of a lot of trouble.

People are good. I know that. Pickens Klay helped remind me of that.

It's funny, Pickens always wanted me to tell him my stories. One thing that I learned from my pal is that the good stories aren't always about the hotshots. On the other hand, the hotshots tend to really live life so they probably leave us with more.

I suppose I could go on and give you more detail. We all want to hear about movie star sex, especially when it gets weird.

You would probably get more mileage if I started on the Jerry Lee Lewis tales, the ones about extortion, murder, jury tampering and tax evasion. The sex parts make me blush. I usually skip over sections.

The Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Big Bopper case is still active. Every now and then an article will show up about a relative's plans for exhumation or a new review of the inventory of objects found at the crash site including a mystery handgun and cash. Apparently there is something to most of those stories.

You get the idea. If you'll excuse me I'm planning to spend more time living and less on other folks' stories.

Chapter Eight- What Liz Knew

Chapter Eight

What Liz Knew

It's one thing to charm Ronny Elliott. Blow in my ear, show me a shiny coin- I'll follow you anywhere. Except for the fact that she was married twice as many times as I've been, I'm guessing that we might all agree that the enchanting and glamorous Elizabeth Taylor was probably more difficult to beguile.

Without boasting, Pickens Klay assured me that he and Liz were laughing and crying together and telling each other their darkest secrets within half an hour of introducing themselves. He never said  how the meeting was arranged, only that they met at Bistango where they nibbled appetizers and drank Kir Royals. Sometimes you meet someone and you're meant to cut your arms and share blood.

He never mentioned who went first. Apparently he let Elizabeth know right from the start that he was sharing everything that he had.

She told him that there were things that she knew. Some since 1956. Lots of things she had put together since. There were other things that she suspected but had never been able to verify. Or dismiss. There were also scenarios that she feared, many that she had managed to put behind her.

She had signed an oath of renunciation of her American citizenship in 1965 but had been convinced to strike the phrase, "abjure all allegiance and fidelity to the United States of America." She signed another without alteration a year later. She confided in Pickens that she had been terrified for her safety at that time.

Taylor was positive that she was targeted by the FBI and the CIA during this period. He didn't have to confirm these suspicions.

She also knew that there had been Company guys all over the set during the filming of Giant. She knew that things were not like the usual set life. She pretty well knew that Rock was gay. All of his friends knew. Still, that didn't stop her from sleeping with him twice before Phyllis Gates showed up to keep up appearances and to keep Hudson company.

She continued to flirt with and spend time with Rock both on set and with Phyllis during the evenings. By the time that Jimmy and Elizabeth consummated their new friendship, things had gotten weird, even by Hollywood standards.

Elizabeth confirmed for Pickens that Jimmy disliked Rock, but that Rock absolutely abhorred James Dean. Still, she was pretty sure that the two of them slept together before she bedded either one. Dean poured his heart out to Taylor. That's what he did best. Apparently he never told her that he was homosexual but he did tell her that he had made love to more men than women. He would cry himself to sleep in her arms, then ignore her on the set the next day.

Elizabeth had wrapped up her part of production when word came that Jimmy had died in the crash. Devastated, she scrambled to the studio where George Stevens was working around the clock to finish the picture. Stevens offered no comfort and was, in fact, crude and dismissive of James Dean's memory. He still had a movie to finish including scenes that were set for Jimmy to re-do.

By the time that Rock arrived on the set Liz was sedated and helpless. Rock Hudson was in worse shape. Close friends claim that he never got over the loss. Guilt? Maybe. He had wished Jimmy Dean a terrible end and he had been vocal about it.

It was two or three weeks before Rock and Elizabeth began putting together pieces of a very abstract puzzle. There were lots of pieces but you had to force any two of them together.

Now, you probably learned in junior high school like I did that the FBI handles domestic issues that cross state lines and that the CIA deals only with international affairs, their paths and jurisdictions clear of one another. Maybe that's true today. Pickens Klay laughs hard at any such notion when we're talking about the '50's, ' 60's and '70's.

If the scientists in the labs were playing Dr. Frankenstein, the agents in the field were playing Roy Rogers. There are no records of any Giant caper. All of the inside information that Pickens was able to share with Ms. Taylor was from stories that he knew from friends in the Company and in the Bureau. It was a lot.

Pickens was able to assure Elizabeth that the spying on the set of the film had been more kinky than sinister. In fact, if J. Edgar Hoover had not maintained such a crush on Rock Hudson for so long, none of the prying would likely have taken place. Hoover was gaga over Rock Hudson and disgusted by the stories of his homosexuality at the same time. He was, in fact, playing a minor role in the scandal that was being planned at the time by Confidential to out him. The same planned scandal that led within a few months to Rock's marriage to Phyllis Gates.

There was a broader agenda, of course, to the caper. Both agencies were extremely concerned about the coming youth movement. Warner Brothers executives were instrumental in helping set up and facilitate the spying. Those guys were pushing this new thing and fearful of it at the same time. All of their eggs were in the James Dean basket.

The CIA was leading the effort to put together an autoimmune disorder that eventually could be tested in control groups. Gay men was one group that the Company was considering. Pickens could find no link to any such program with the Giant project. In fact he found very little justification for the plot at all. The morals in Hollywood. The coming threat of teenage rebellion. Homosexuality in show business. Those vague notions  and a desire to see 8 x 10 glossies of Rock Hudson's wiener. More 8 x 10 glossies.

Dean's death ended the entire affair. It had pretty much run its course by the time that the set in Texas was closed down. 

In 1984 when Hudson was diagnosed with AIDS he and Taylor began spending more time together. Most of their intimacy at this point was by telephone. Both of them were suspicious of the intelligence agencies' role in the spread of the disease but neither of them believed that there was any direct link to Hudson's illness. 

Other than the possibility that the epidemic was more widespread in the gay community in the US because of their "experiments" that was probably the case. Lots of the spooks that Pickens had spent time with over the years had Giant stories. Several of the old-timers that he had known early in his career had actually partied with the stars in Marfa. One of them claimed to have gotten blow jobs from Carrol Baker, Jane Withers and Nick Adams. Liz loved those stories. Pickens loved it that she wanted to know if he had seen any of the pictures of Rock's penis. He had not.

Chapter Seven- Fine, Just Fine

Chapter Seven

Fine, Just Fine

All of the information, gossip really, about spooks and spies and monkeys and public health kept me on the edge of my seat but, honestly, I was mostly just waiting for the next dirty part. The sex. You know.

I never had to wait long. Oh, some days would be taken up with statistics and facts.

Pickens wasn't the only agent who was convinced that the spread of HIV/AIDS came more or less directly from laboratory experiments where scientists mixed various viruses and planted them into human and animal cells.

Which humans? Use your imagination.

Who were the promiscuous ones, conspicuous in our culture?

Movie stars in the '50's. Gay men in the '70's. Was it beneath our intelligence community and our scientific research organizations to intentionally infect individuals with these experimental doodads? The nerdiest of our great big little boys are still making science fair projects.

Our biological warfare program has always been top secret. There is no public record of any of the programs which have studied cancer-causing and immunosuppressive animal viruses adapted for biological warfare and tested on humans. We do know that since the 1950's various branches of the medical, military and public health sectors have been combined for purposes that will remain classified. The U.S. Army has been directly tied to the CIA, the World Health Organization, the CDC and private industry for the better part of five decades. Think smallpox blankets and syphilis experiments in the computer age. Label it "classified" and it all stays secret.

Well, there you go. Now you've got me rambling on about the boring parts.

Without the AIDS angle, though, all we have here is a bunch of narcissistic movie stars fucking each other out in the middle of the desert in Texas. Did J. Edgar Hoover facilitate the party for his own voyeuristic entertainment or as part of scientific endeavor to cure cancer? Maybe it was nothing so lurid or so noble. Maybe it was merely an excuse to keep an eye and a lid on a bad influence on American youth.

Pickens Klay's job had been to determine Elizabeth Taylor's take on these questions before it was too late. Before she croaked. The big fear in the Company was that Ms. Taylor would leave a very embarrassing manuscript with a major publisher.

Chapter Six- Oh My Stars

My afternoons with Pickens Klay were getting longer. Longer and better and crazier. Not only were we meeting up earlier in the day, we were staying later. By seven pm or so when the regulars began filtering into Flynn's we had taken to heading up Grand Central to Krispy Kreme.We were usually out of there by nine o'clock, only because I had a dog and a cat to feed.

Every layer of story was making it crazier. I never doubted a word of it. Now I don't claim to know much about Hollywood. Movie stars. I know a good deal less about government and public health. Oh, I did work for the Hillsborough County Environmental Protection Commission for about ten years before they got rid of me for trying to protect the environment and I did see an awful lot of movies as a kid, including all three of James Dean's pictures eight or nine times. I had a vasectomy in a free clinic run by the health department for poor folks in the early 1970's, too. Nevertheless I wouldn't be the lifeline you'd call for any expert advice if your topics were motion pictures, civics or disease control.

Pickens' words all rang true, though. I never caught him in any contradiction and the stories just flowed. I mean, here we were connecting J. Edgar Hoover and Liz Taylor; the CIA, the CDC and Sal Mineo; the Grateful Dead and Rock Hudson's talleywhacker. Every time that Pickens rattled off a date or a statistic that I knew a little something about, and it didn't happen often, it was always right on the money.

He never seemed to be making the story about him. I'm telling you that if I ever had dinner with Elizabeth Taylor, you would never hear the end of it. You'd see it on my Twitter feed and you would read about it on the banner behind the Goodyear blimp.

He never seemed to come up for air. Usually we would stop rather abruptly because we were spending more time back and forth to the bathroom than talking across the table. Beer and coffee.

So, what did Elizabeth Taylor know?

Well, here's one of the parts of this tale that surprises me more than I can explain. Pickens Klay met Ms. Taylor for dinner on a balmy California evening in late 2002 or early 2003. Her fragile health had been slipping for some time. Pickens introduced himself to her as an employee of the CIA and answered every question that she asked. At a crazy level, well above Klay, the decision had been made that either the legendary star would be silenced or that a dialogue with her would be established.

Pickens Klay doesn't kill people. As nearly as I can tell he doesn't lie. Not by government standards. I guess you could describe him as a special agent.

Taylor had co-founded the American Foundation For AIDS Research in 1985 and The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991.

When Hudson died in 1985 Elizabeth was devastated. She had visited him earlier that summer at the UCLA Medical Center. They both understood that they would not see each other again. She organized the first major fundraiser for AIDS later that year, Commitment To Life, and put together a beautiful memorial service at his home following his passing.

Of course Klay knew all of this. Hey- he knew everything about Elizabeth Taylor at this point. Everything but what she kept in her head, in her heart.

The government had messed with them, all of them, during the filming of Giant. Funny thing is only Jimmy Dean believed that at the time of his death. George Stevens, the director may have known. In fact he may have been a source for the feds.

Hudson and Dean shared a small house with Chill Wills during the production. Jimmy suspected that Chill was keeping unusual tabs on the two of them. At first he was suspicious that Warner Brothers was protecting their property, keeping an eye on their two loose canons. Then he became convinced that it was George Stevens. Stevens never liked Dean and didn't think that Hudson could act. By the time that the picture was wrapping up Jimmy confided in Elizabeth that he was absolutely certain that the FBI was keeping records of all the comings and goings in the odd household.

Her only concern was her marriage to Wilding. It was sputtering but she had a reputation to uphold. She had bragged in the press frequently that she never went to bed with a man that she didn't marry. Jimmy and Liz were never going to be married.

Gentleman that he is, I gotta tell you- Pickens interrupted himself regularly with, "Man, those eyes, those tits. Man." I don't think he ever got over "Leslie Benedict."

Chapter Five- Monkey, Si and Monkey, Deux

Chapter Five

Monkey, Si and Monkey, Deux

If you've never heard the howl and scream of wild monkeys in the jungle, I'm certainly not the one who can properly describe it. That person doesn't live. You can listen to Elvis sing Don't Be Cruel when the needle wiggles in the groove but if you never saw the King of Rock'n'Roll in live performance, you never heard Elvis.

A history of HIV and the AIDS virus is a tangle of facts, lies, superstitions and disagreements. First of all the AIDS epidemic began, as far as we know, in the US in 1979. Even that would be a shaky guess since viral infections in much of the world was undocumented before that time. Still is, in fact.

The virus, itself, is thought to go back much further. Most of what you heard on the NBC News in 1990 has been disproven and discredited. It's just not news so much these day. God gave up trying to teach gay heathens a lesson in this country and moved his efforts to darker continents.To date some twenty million people are thought to have perished from the virus and another forty million are currently infected.

There came a point when the science just got a little too raunchy for the six o'clock news. Chopping up monkey meat is questionable. Sex with monkeys is just plain taboo. Hillbillies aren't called hillbillies in some parts of the world. Nevertheless, when a young man's fancy turns to spring...

Well, if Pickens Klay is to be believed, and God, I want to, this stuff didn't just happen. This is the country that lied to African American men between 1932 and 1947 in order to "study" untreated syphilis and gonorrhea. Not only did we mislead the original three hundred and ninety nine men who came into the program already infected, we deliberately exposed and infected another two hundred and one innocent victims. Maybe I should reserve use of the term, innocent, for the forty wives infected and the nineteen babies born with congenital syphilis. These numbers are merely the ones documented.

So, we've got smallpox blankets and surprise LSD. We've got syphilis and we've got whatever malady that the intelligence boys think might come in handy some day.

With a really broad brush Pickens painted a completely amoral industry and gave me the briefest of updates on the structure of the beast.

From 1924 until 1972 almost all dirty work in this country was under the watchful eye of J. Edgar Hoover. His FBI had to begin sharing some small portion of official shenanigans with the CIA when it was formed in 1947.

By the early '40's Hoover had managed to transform his agency into his private secret police outfit.

He was probably gay. He was definitely weird. He may have been the original homophobic homosexual in our government. They would seem to be a dime a dozen now. Hoover used his little unit, pun intended, to smear and scare.

Now all of these great big little boys want to play in the other great big little boys' sandboxes. The turf wars in the intelligence community are legendary.

Pickens thinks that ol' J. Ed himself began the Hep Cat scare. By 1960 Hoover spoke at the Republican convention and called the "beatniks" one of the three menaces to this great nation, the other two being intellectuals and communists.

His infiltration of the Hollywood set had begun, in earnest, in 1955. He had real trouble trying to focus on targets who seemed to pose any kind of threat to White America. The Wild One had come out the previous year and Hoover was torn between lust and fear for his version of Marlon Brando.

You didn't need your own secret police department to have heard rumors about Rock Hudson. Confidential Magazine was threatening to expose his ways at the beginning of '55 when Rock suddenly married his manager's secretary.

Jimmy Dean was certainly no movie star at this point. His only starring role was in East Of Eden, hardly a teenage frolic. Warner Brothers was preparing his second release at this point, Rebel Without A Cause, however. There was already a buzz in tinseltown about the studio's plan to capitalize on the new youth movement brought on by the commercial rise of rock'n'roll. The suits at Warners worried themselves sick about Jimmy's motorcycle. They weren't thrilled about stories of fifteen year old boys hanging out with their future heartthrob, either. They managed to have him photographed with one screen beauty after another out on the town. They had big plans for their share of discretionary income suddenly in the grubby paws of America's teenagers. Jimmy was to be their boy.

Pickens never told me that James Dean slept with Liz Taylor during the filming of Giant. It was pretty clear that he believed it, though. Taylor and Hudson were drinking buddies for the most part. Except for the shooting schedule the three didn't spend much time together as a trio.

Sal Mineo, who had developed a crush on Jimmy while filming Rebel was in the cast and spent quite a bit of time with James and Elizabeth. He considered himself bisexual at this point and, even though there were rumors regarding his sexuality, he continued to be marketed to teenage girls as a dreamboat.

Dennis Hopper was another pal of Dean's from Rebel who was prominent as Taylor and Hudson's son in the movie. The nineteen year old actor was establishing himself as a hipster-hanger-on and was frequently tagging along with Jimmy and Liz.

It would be almost a quarter of a century before Elizabeth Taylor, or any of the rest of us for that matter, would hear of AIDS. Known for her extreme intelligence in addition to her wild beauty, it didn't take much for Elizabeth to worry about her friends and her own safety. Hoover had been gone for nearly a decade but those ridiculous secrets were still considered a matter of national security.

Of course I was never going to get Pickens to tell me that the CIA spread AIDS across a swath of a gay culture in this country like we did with syphilis in the '40's among Black southern men. I don't think he even believes that.

He did tell me that he was sent to find out just exactly what Elizabeth Taylor knew and what she thought she knew about the Company, the monkeys and her friends.

Chapter Four- Ooh La La

Chapter Four

Ooh La La

By the time that Pickens found himself across the small round table at Bistango the only part of Elizabeth Taylor's grand beauty that remained intact was the stunning violet eyes. He had grown up part of a generation of young males who groveled at the altar of the American/British starlet.

The charm and innocence of the dreamy young lass from National Velvet in 1944 set many a young heart aflutter and supplied many a wet dream. By the time that she began shooting Giant with Rock Hudson and James Dean in 1955 she was a movie star. She was a grown woman.

Elizabeth grabbed the role of the beautiful socialite, Leslie Benedict, when her pal, Rock Hudson, convinced director, George Stevens, that she would be a better match for him than Grace Kelly. Taylor and Hudson palled around onset and off throughout shooting. 

The real fireworks were between Elizabeth Taylor and Jimmy Dean. She was married to Michael Wilding but the heat had been gone from that union for some time. If there's one thing that Liz is known for as much as those lavender eyes, it's her inclination to change men.

Jimmy and Rock were suspicious, more or less, of each other and their own relationship. Rock Hudson was homosexual and the movie industry had long been aware of his real life clash with his reel life reputation.

James, on the other hand, was a much more complicated guy. He loved a good romp with a pretty, tough boy with a great big dick as much as he enjoyed cuddling under the covers, postcoital, with some Warner Brothers beauty, crying over his tragic upbringing. To refer to him as bisexual is to over- simplify a disputed lifestyle.

More than one man has written and spoken of his "great love of my life" relationship with Jimmy Dean. It's hard to compile all the stories from various girls and women who make claim to being his "true love." Stir in the whispers of his interest in several young boys in those Hollywood days and it's  pretty clear that we're never going to have a definitive Dean.

James and Rock were friendly but never close. The story goes that Jimmy didn't respect Rock. They had worked together on Universal's Has Anybody Seen My Gal? a couple of years earlier.He was introduced to Rock again, poolside, at a party at Hudson's rented mansion in Bel Air some six or seven months before Dean was signed for the picture. Rock was the only one naked, cavorting around the turquoise pool with his genitals tucked between his legs. James' sexuality was big and it was kinky but it was never without dignity, at least in his eyes. He frequently dismissed the limp-wrist fop image of the gay man in the arts.

In his eyes, Rock Hudson was convinced that Jimmy's dalliance with bullfighting, motorcycles, promising young starlets and race cars was nothing but an attempt to compensate his manliness.

Was James Dean madly in love with Elizabeth Taylor by the time Giant was wrapping up? We'll never know. What we can pretty well figure out is that Elizabeth was head over heels for him. She had found the ultimate "wounded bird."Dean had a well-deserved reputation by now of convenient romance. With men and women.

Now, Pickens was here with Elizabeth Taylor to find out what she knew. How much she remembered. What she planned to leave behind. The tabloids had been waiting years for her demise by this time.

Jimmy was long gone. Rock Hudson- gone; Sal Mineo- gone; J. Edgar Hoover- gone; George Stevens- gone; Nick Adams- gone; Dennis Hopper- gone.

The only real source left, at least the only famous one, was the fading beauty with the purple eyes and the big diamonds.

How this bunch ever became entwined with the CIA and the FBI is shaky when it comes to facts. Let's just say that there were never any file folders, photos or tapes to destroy. I'm being kind describing the average agent for either agency as a great big little kid. Kind and accurate.

When war and conflict are subtle, intelligence agencies dream up threats. They invent weapons. They develop convoluted schemes and plans. The Korean conflict and the cold war led to some doozies for lots of those great big little kids.