Change Of Heart—Pier Angeli & Vic Damone

EDITOR’S NOTE:

A few hours before we went to press with this issue, Pier Angeli surprised us all by announcing her engagement to Vic Damone. The news was particularly surprising because Pier had been spending most of her time with Jimmy Dean who appeared to be her best beau. What follows is our writer’s report on the events leading up to the engagement, Pier’s own words as she explained why she would not become Mrs. Dean. Between the lines you find the key: Mrs. Pierangeli never approved of the match. Vic Damone is an old friend, a charming, personable young man who is just right for Pier.

It was very funny to everyone except Pier Angeli and Jimmy Dean.

Pier and Jimmy were having a small téte a téte in Pier’s dressing room on the set of The Silver Chalice. Jimmy had come over from the sound stage a few doors away where he was making East Of Eden.

While Jimmy and Pier were talking, Pier’s mother, a strict Italian matriarch from the old school, walked in.

With Mrs. Pierangeli was Count Carlos Franchesioni, a family friend from the old days in Italy, who wanted very much to watch Anna work. Anna is Pier’s real first name. Her whole name is Anna Pierangeli, and everyone who knows the fragile, green-eyed, little gazelle calls her Anna.

When the Signora Pierangeli encountered the T-shirted Dean in her beautiful daughter’s dressingroom, she grew mildly livid.

Dean looked at Mama Pierangeli, muttered something like “Oh, brother!” and got out of the dressingroom in a little less than nothing flat.

A few hours later the story was being told around most of Hollywood: Pier Angeli and Jimmy Dean had it real bad—that yen for each other described as love.

On the Warner Brothers lot the story was old hat. Ever since The Silver Chalice and East of Eden had begun, Pier, twenty-one and Jimmy, twenty-three, had been exchanging visits, spending every spare minute together.

Announcement of Pier’s engagement to Vic Damone caught the press looking in the wrong direction

How had the romance begun?

According to one girl who knows Pier well, “It had something to ‘do with rebound. When Kirk Douglas suddenly decided to get married, I think she was a little hurt. She says that she and Kirk were never in love, just good friends, and all of that. But he was the first man of any consequence in her life and I know she felt very friendly toward him.

“Kirk also thought the world of her. Mama wasn’t enthusiastic about this affiliation. But last year Pier took Kirk all over Rome showing him the sights. And he gave her gifts, and I saw them together lots of times. And it looked to me like much more than ‘just friendship.’ That’s why I say that when Kirk ran off to Vegas and married Anna Buydens, Pier was a little taken back. After all, the one man in her life had been taken out of circulation.

“At twenty-one a girl needs a beau, so it was only natural for Pier to keep her eyes open. That’s how come she took up with Jimmy Dean.”

Pier’s version of the origin of her friendship with Jimmy Dean makes no mention of Douglas.

“I never,” Pier insisted in her cute Italian accent, “went to see any other actor work but Jeemee. We hear one day on the set that there is this keed on the Kazan picture, you know, the picture Elia Kazan is directing. They say he is very good.

“I say to myself, ‘Anna, maybe you better look.’ So I look. I watch Jeemee act. He is good, very good. I was amazed. I have never seen a young actor like Jeemee. I have great respect for his talent. We are introduced.

“Soon he is visiting my set. I am visiting his set. Just visits. That’s all.”

“Haven’t you and Jimmy been dating?” Pier was asked.

She smiled graciously. “We were so busy working, there was not much time.”

“You mean that in all the weeks of your friendship you two never went out?”

“All right,” the diminutive actress said. “I will tell you. But do not make it sound that we are chasing over the country, that we are flying to each other. This is the truth.

“One evening after these visits on the set, Jeemee asked me to go out. We went to a restaurant, to Frascati’s. His parents were there. He introduced me. They are wonderful people. Then Jeemee, after his picture was finished, had to go to New York.

Still watching her now-ended romance with Jimmy Dean

“I drove him to the plane, and Debbie Reynolds was getting on the same plane, too. She was flying to New York with her mother. Yes, to see Eddie. So I introduced Jeemee to Debbie. I do not, excuse, I did not want them to be lonely. On a flight, a trip, it is good to talk.

“Anyway, when Jeemee got to New York he called me and said, ‘Debbie is a very nice girl but we did not talk. She was very sick most of the trip. Then I fell asleep.’

“Jeemee is what they call, well, you can say he is my close friend.”

Pier was asked, “How close?”

She smiled and said, “The closest.”

“Are you in love with Jimmy Dean?”

“I do not think,” Pier told the questioner, “that you understand me. I was raised in Italy, very strict, very close. My parents with me all the time. It is that way in Italy. In America young girls have more freedom. They meet somebody—how you say?—they meet some guy and fall for him? That is the saying, no? They get married. If marriage is not successful, divorce.

“Since I was born I believe in marrying one time. Was how I was raised. A girl is married one time. I will get married only one time. So I must be sure.

“Jeemee is a wonderful boy, a great actor. But we are very young. He will soon be twenty-four. This is first year for me I am allowed to go out alone. There is a very old joke in Hollywood. If a boy dates me they say he must also date my mother, my two sisters, my dogs and my parakeets. This is not true any more.

“I am allowed to go out alone on dates. Of course, I call my mother on the telephone from the outside—” (Pier laughed heartily at this) “—but I am now free and twenty-one. There is a responsibility in being free.

“You cannot meet the first guy and fall in love right away and there you are. No, it is the wrong bit.” (Pier’s speech is punctuated with theatrical slang, “bit” being a show-business synonym for act, routine, way.)

“I must grow up first before I fall in love.”

Anna Pierangeli is of course, at twenty-one, a full-grown young woman. In attitude and outlook, however, she is naive. (“The reason I took Kirk Douglas around Rome. The poor boy. He was so alone. He knew no one there, no girls, no friends, nothing.”)

Pier’s naivete is the result of maternal over-protection, of too much careful cloistering. Her background explains this.

Anna and Marisa Pierangeli, twins, were born on the Italian island of Sardinia. As children they were taken to Rome where Pier’s father, Luigi Pierangeli, soon became well known as an architect and builder.

When Pier was six years old, World War II broke out in Europe, and as Pier grew up she learned much of death and fear and suffering.

Pier understandably enough, doesn’t like to talk about it, but when she was ten the Nazis moved in and occupied all of Italy. It was unsafe, even for ten-year-old girls, to walk the streets of Rome even to and from school. There was a perpetual shortage of food. Pier remembers her father bicycling into the rural areas north of Rome to bargain with the peasants for fresh vegetables and a little milk.

She knows, too, that it was the strain of the war years that eventually weakened her father’s heart and killed him only a few weeks after she had finished her first American picture, Teresa, and had signed a contract to come to Hollywood.

“I do not like,” she says, “to talk about the past. The present is much nicer, and the future is always the best time for a girl.”

Pier’s mother had been an actress in Italy. Upon marrying she left the stage.

When Pier was offered a small part in Tomorrow Is Too Late, a neo-realistic Italian film directed by the great Vittorio DeSica, her father said no. Luigi Pierangeli did not want his daughter in show business. But gradually Pier and her mother wore him down.

Pier was supposed to play a young girl confused and terrified by the advent of maturity and love. And as DeSica recently said, “As soon as I saw the child, her fragile body, her sensitive face, I knew she was the right one.”

When Pier was granted paternal permission to play the part, she fainted after an actor kissed her during the first take.

Sheltered, watched over, kept away from boys during her adolescence, Pier came to Hollywood a frightened, inhibited girl.

Time, American ways, and half a dozen motion pictures have made changes but she is still emotionally afraid. And Mama Pierangeli is still afraid that someone will hurt her little girl. Now that Pier is twenty-one, Mama permits unchaperoned dating, but this is merely to avoid the eventual rebellion that springs from repression.

Actor Jimmy Dean, on the other hand, is far from repressed or inhibited.

He is a member of what is euphemistically termed “the T-shirt school of actors” or “the Kazan school.”

He has been compared to Marlon Brando in behavior, dress, speech and manner. He is also a talented actor. His performance in East Of Eden, for example, is outstanding. This picture was directed by Elia Kazan (Pinky, Gentleman’s Agreement, Streetcar Named Desire, On The Waterfront). Kazan is an excellent judge of talent.

Dean had a role in a Broadway play, The Immoralist, which ran last year. His performance in that production was so good that he won an award as the most promising newcomer of the year. Kazan thereupon tested and signed him for Eden.

During the production of the picture, Jimmy was introduced to Pier Angeli.

“Her soul,” he says, “she’s got a beautiful soul. Strikes you right away. Doesn’t have to open her mouth. Just look at her. Beauty. Get it? Beauty. Sheer, overwhelming beauty.

“Sure, I like her. But right now I’m in no position to take care of her. She deserves the best. I’m no hustler. Never have been. Can’t hustle a buck. I don’t need dough. Never had any and got along fine. If I get some dough I like to spend it on records. Like good music. Things like that.”

Dean reported to Warner Brothers wearing a T-shirt and was immediately stamped an off-beat character.

“Who cares what they call me?” he asked. “The serious artist has always been misunderstood.”

He was raised on a farm in Fairmont, Indiana. His mother died when he was an infant, and he was brought up by an aunt and uncle. Pier calls them “his parents.”

Unlike Brando, who, as a child, had no desire to act, Jimmy has been acting “ever since I was a kid.” At Fairmont High School he won the Indiana State Dramatic Contest as the state’s best actor. He also won letters in baseball, basketball and track. A year later he went west and enrolled in the University of California at Los Angeles.

James Whitmore, then under contract to MGM, got to know young Dean and told him that there might be a place for him in Hollywood.

“After two years at UCLA,” Dean says, “I got fed up and took the bus to New York and started making the rounds for an acting job. Didn’t know the ropes. Didn’t have much dough. Got lonely and seared. Used to spend all day in the movies.”

Eventually, Dean hired out as a hand on a yacht whose skipper was connected with show business. The skipper got him an audition for See The Jaguar. It was a beautifully written allegorical play but it lasted on Broadway only a very short time.

Jimmy then began making the rounds of the TV casting directors in New York and gradually got enough work to live on. Last year Billy Rose cast him in The Immoralist and this year Kazan had him make his screen debut opposite Julie Harris in East Of Eden. Simultaneously, Pier Angeli was loaned to Warner Brothers for The Silver Chalice.

While the pictures were in production, Jimmy concentrated exclusively on Pier, They would lunch in the studio’s Green Room each afternoon, watch each other work in front of the cameras and spend their spare time together.

With Jimmy in attendance, Pier seemed to blossom, to become more gay. A hairdresser remarked, “Whenever Dean walks on the set the lovelight comes into that chicken’s green eyes.”

As for Dean, when asked about his feelings toward Pier he shakes his blond head and says, “She’s a doll, that one, a rare and beautiful doll. She’s so different from all the rest of the dolls I’ve seen in pictures. She’s young but she’s got depth and philosophy. She’s gracious with people, knows how to handle them, something I’ve got to learn out here.”

“Do you think that eventually you two kids will get engaged?”

“You mean me and Miss Pizza? Who knows? Right now I’m too neurotic.”

And this was the final word on the subject.

No wonder the film colony was completely unprepared for Pier’s sudden announcement that she would marry Brooklyn-born Vic Damone. A casual friendship that no one took seriously— except Pier and Vic—turned out to be the news item that caught all the Hollywood news hawks napping.

THE END

—BY ALICE HOFFMAN

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE DECEMBER 1954