From the Vault of Art Shay: The Legend of James Jones
By Staff in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 6, 2011 5:25PM
James Jones, one of America's good bad writers is in the New York Times this week. The late (died in 1977) sorta great Jim was impossible not to like, dirty words and all. He wrote best, played winning chess, and fucked best — he said — while playing the great riffs on the guitar of the Gypsy master, Django Reinhardt. The controlled crescendos of Django's passion filled Jim's cavernous house adjacent to the Colony. After the success of From Here to Eternity, Jim's new wealth (and having Frank Sinatra in his first two movies) showered him with largess.
So now, says the Times, his daughter Kaylie Jones, who has sold the digital book rights, is quoted on why she's done it: "My father fought bitterly to hold onto every four letter word in the manuscript. The publisher was (then) concerned about getting through the censors." Fuck yes, it was the worst of times and the worst of times. Jim out-fugged rival Norman Mailer's use of "fugging" with the real expletives, fuck all.
Jim Jones and I became friends in 1956, when I suggested to Life magazine we visit him at the Lowney Handy Writer's Colony in "Shitsville" - Marshall, Illinois. Lowney was a sexy fifty-year-old, hung up on writing and when she couldn't write up to her own standards, transferred her ambitions and then coaching regimen to a few hunky young writers. Jim was her first colonist, arriving in 1949. The regimen was up at 5:30 a.m., write all day, bed at 8 p.m."
"8:15 the first night," Jim told me," Lowney came into my trailer and fucked me harder than any woman or man I had in Pearl Harbor or since." (See below.) Jim hinted that good old white-thatched Sol Handy, who financed the Colony until From Here to Eternity made big money, knew all about Lowney's nymphomania and at least once rubbed his back while "she came like a fountain." Apparently she was a gusher, which was sexperts Masters and Johnson's sobriquet for that one in ten women so orgasmically gifted.
Here followeth something I've never done before: I'm sharing an excerpt from my 2000 book, Album for an Age because I think it's better than I could write about Jim Jones now, shameless and shamless as I've become in my dirty old manhood.
Of course James, after dropping a pearl before swine like me and my reporter, the great Roy Rowan (who would eventually edit Life), would say: "That's off the record - but you couldn't print it in a family magazine anyway, ha ha." All good-bad writers like to outsmart great journalists like Rowan, and modest me.
Excerpt from Album for an Age (slightly photoshopped for adult viewing)
Copyright © 2000 by Art Shay
Ivan R. Dee, Publisher
The manuscript of "Some Came Running" was over a foot thick. I photographed James Jones, then, like me and my Life writer Roy Rowan, in his mid-thirties. Jones proudly hefted the ultimate flop of a movie in the workroom of his farmhouse in southern Illinois. I preferred the shot of his lunging at me with one of his twenty-seven hunting knives.
"I got $750,000 for it," he said over and over again. "Much more than for "From Here to Eternity—including movie rights. Later he told Rowan and me, "You know, I had sex with all the women in 'Eternity' except Deborah Kerr—and most of the men." That would have included Montgomery Clift. Not the kind of information a family publication like Life would have used in those days.
Jones's mentor, Lowney Handy, stood at his side proudly nodding. She was in her early fifties, busty, sly, and so fond of Jimmy. Basking in the tolerant smile and shrug of her rich and loving husband, Sol, Lowney ran a nearby writer's colony for young postwar novelists. Jimmy was her prize, but she made no bones about loving the world of young writers. "Every Friday night I send Jimmy into Terre Haute across the river to play sandwich with two cute whores," Lowney told us(trying to throw us off the obvious scent that she was banging the kid- and one or two of the other writing aspirants. Or maybe to blunt our knowledge of his boast of bisexuality. "Jim gets drunk there, rolls around with the girls, then comes back here ready to write for another week."
One of my pictures Life ran showed Jones drunk, hanging on a lamppost outside a Terre Haute brothel. I had gone into the whorehouse with him when one of the girls reaching for my joint felt my Leica, "What's that?" she exclaimed and Jim riposted, "It's a gun, Brandy. Art's a helicopter guard."He was creative.
Lowney Handy hinted that occasionally she was extremely close to her boarders. "I like to mother the boys," she said. "It's what writers need." What's not to like about nice tits?
That night Jones hosted a party for some of the colony members and some young women who were teachers from nearby towns. All writing fans. "Lowney's reading manuscript back at the colony," Jones said. "I got these teachers coming in. You gonna see some real action."
Rowan and I socialized playfully with the young ladies but were more interested in Jones's behavior, specifically in watching how the studly qualities he continually broached and wrote about would work out as Life picture coverage. We watched Jones like two of the night owls coursing the prairie outside. He went to the john twice, made a flat-out proposition to one of the teachers and was playfully rebuffed, danced a few times, and played some of his beloved Django Reinhardt guitar records. His sex score: zip!
When the other guests had gone, Jones dragged us to the kitchen table.
"I screwed the small one three times," he lied, shaking his head in awe of his own performance. He leaned toward Rowan and me. "This is what I like best about parties, getting together with some buddies afterward, to talk about what happened. That's why I'm never getting married. Here we are, three men of the world in our mid-thirties---let me ask you guys something. Did either one of you ever try it doggy-fashion?"
Rowan and I exchanged fleeting glances speaking reams in both directions. Here was a guy obsessed with sex, who had made a fortune putting Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster on that famous beach making love with the tide coming in.(Chicagoan Myron Davis made the classic still picture-) ... this guy who had in every sense of the word what we judged to be a lusty writing coach ... and here he was asking us a kindergarten question about sex! Doggy-fashion! "Jeezus H. Christ," as he loved to exclaim.
"What're you gonna do next?" I asked Jones before we left.
"Either go hiking along the Great Divide," he said. "Or learn skin diving in the Bahamas."
"Could I go as photographer?" I pitched pushily.
"Sure," said Jones.
"Would you mind if I got an assignment for us from Sports Illustrated?" I asked. "With an advance?"
"Better and better," he said.
I called Sports Illustrated's managing editor Dick Johnston, an old friend (I had once gotten him a Chicago date/interview with Jean Harlow's niece - a stripper on State Street), and put Jones on. After a few minutes Jones hung up and put his hand out. "They've already got something on the Great Divide. We're goin' to skin-diving school, buddy. Let's get some scuba stuff and charge Sports Illustrated." A week later SI called. They already had a fotog in the Caribbean, and unassigned me.
The Jones story had a strange codicil for me. Some months later Jones phoned me to say, "Hey, I met Marilyn Monroe's stand-in down in the Bahamas—Gloria Moselino—and we got married.(His official biographer told me he had met her earlier.) Now we're getting ready to move to Europe." He invited me and my wife to his farewell party on New York City's Upper West Side. Florence and I went to the party from Chicago, which was held around an open steamer trunk that dominated the living room.
Periodically Jones or Gloria would stuff something into the trunk. Actor-songwriters Adolph Green and Betty Comden sat with their little chihuahua who doggedly and (to me) disgustingly kissed both of them on their lips, cadging food morsels. The famous, aging show people sang and cracked wise. Jimmy took my picture with his Polaroid and lectured us on how animals — and me — starve themselves better when they get sick. "Like Upton Sinclair taught me." He said if I got to Paris with my friends Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir, to call him for a party. We could bring Sartre and Camus. He gave me his arondisement address-to-be. Lots of alcohol flowed. He insisted I not take pictures of the trunk. "You're just here to party." There went my expense account trip for Life who I'd promised at least a page.
"You look like Scott and Zelda," I said as we parted.
"Yes, yes," Jones yelled. "That's who we are. Scott and Zelda." They left by ship in the morning to live and breed in Paris. He sent me a couple of picture postcards, a manual on starving yourself into health— a book or two from publishers-and I never saw them again.
Once, shooting Kurt Vonnegut for a little book, Kurt told me that his pal Gloria Jones, Jim's widow, hated my guts and would shoot me on sight because in a book review I'd written that a good writer like Algren only got a 10 percent utility out of a 90 percent talent and that a good bad writer - James Jones got 90 percent utility out of a ten percent talent.
I hope the new digital edition is a gusher.
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