Dean had something the other two didn't have... an early, mythic death... a grisly automobile crash that ended his life on a rural California highway. He was the first of the three of them to die and at 24, the youngest. Life was snatched from him before he had a chance to become a broken alcoholic and drug addict like Clift who would be dead by age 45 or a behemoth bore whose glory days were long gone like Brando. But make no mistake about it, Dean was on a trajectory that had disaster written all over it. One way or the other there was little chance that it was all gonna work out for the volatile young man who never found peace. It just didn't seem to be his destiny.
He was born in 1931 in Marion, Indiana. His father, looking for a brighter future after leaving farming to become a dental technician, moved the family to Santa Monica, California, when Dean was around six. While there the youngster would become especially close to his mother who had a view of her son that no one else seemed to have. Some would say their relationship was unique while others would say it was odd and even detrimental. He fell apart at nine when his beloved mother died. Many would say that he was never put back together.
His father, who found young Jimmy to be a handful, decided he couldn't look after him and work long hours, too, so he went to live with the father's sister and her husband on their Quaker farm in Fairmount, Indiana. It was not something Jimmy wanted to do and he became a wild child. He would suffer his entire life from abandonment issues. The larger family found him entertaining and fun but they knew he could be obstinate, troubled and disobedient as well.
He was also lonely but things changed when he joined a Methodist church and the pastor took a special interest in him. He listened to Jimmy's woes and heartaches and is responsible for alerting him to the passions of car-racing and acting. They also engaged in a sexual affair that lasted for a number of years.
He raced toward acting when he entered high school. Like so many others, a kindly teacher saw something in him and encouraged his interest. Soon he was telling everyone he knew that he wanted to be an actor more than anything. While some tired of the harangue, they all paid a little more attention when he upped and returned to Southern California after graduation. He said he was afraid of turning into a farm boy.
In a likely attempt to appease his father with whom he did not get along, he paid lip service to taking pre-law courses but the ruse couldn't last. When the older man, who was nothing like his son, realized it was acting that was his son's passion, he stopped talking to him.
He took an acting class at UCLA and enrolled in actor James Whitmore's workshop. Whitmore thought the kid had something. Soon Dean was making commercials and appearing in numerous TV guest shots. It's always been said that Dean only made three films. I'm okay with that because he certainly only did three famous starring films. But he did appear in four more in the early 50s, all uncredited bit roles... Fixed Bayonets, Sailor Beware, Has Anybody Seen My Gal? and Trouble Along the Way.
He had grown into a handsome and lusty young man. There was always someone around to tell him how hot he was ... both women and men. He already thought he was a terrific talent but so were lots of people as he saw it. He could be maddeningly impatient and irritatingly arrogant. While he had yet to make it on the Broadway stage or in a big movie, he knew best, he knew it all. Whitmore and others told him to ease up. Belligerence doesn't result in a constantly-ringing phone.
He knew he had natural gifts and he was determined to use them to get somewhere. Though he had moved in with a gay roommate, Bill Bast, who also wanted to make the big time, Dean came upon a gay underground of sorts, the gay casting couch, if you will, and copped some of the aforementioned acting gigs as a result.
He was almost as secretive about his gay experiences in Tinseltown as he was about his Indiana minister. He was, in fact, deeply in the closet, saying he would never come out as a gay. On the other hand, when the draft board called him up, he told them he couldn't join up because I am homosexual. He was mocked by his fellow students at UCLA for his midwestern accent and ways which eventually led to being taunted as a homo. Friends like Bast and actor Nick Adams knew but few others.
His idea was to date women. He took up with comedienne Joan Davis' daughter, Beverly, who said he told her he wanted to marry her. He probably did say it. He had said it to others. It's unlikely he meant it or perhaps he fancied the idea momentarily, but it seemed everyone he said it, too, would believe it.
Around the time he had come to hate L.A., Whitmore, Bast and others talked to him about The Actor's Studio in New York. Director Elia Kazan had opened it in 1947 and while it was and always would be controversial, and tough to get into, they thought it would be a good move for Dean. So he moved to Manhattan.
Even though his early days saw him living at the YMCA, he loved New York. It didn't take him long to hear the sounds of the city and the beat that juiced up the non-conformists in a way that pleased him. Soon he felt he was living among the types of people he was born to be around. He loved the music, he loved the acting community, he loved the spontaneity, the great weed, the bongo drums. He did not love being poor.
Within a year he was at the famed acting workshop, being taught by the sometimes scary Lee Strasberg, and sitting among Clift and Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Arthur Kennedy, Shelley Winters, Kevin McCarthy, Kazan, and two of his future leading ladies, Julie Harris and Carroll Baker. Dean loved what he learned there (some wondered if he'd picked up mumbling from Brando) but he and Strasberg butted heads many a time. When Dean didn't get his way, he scowled and pouted while Strasberg could be punitive. He made the master angry when he wouldn't adhere to auditioning rules. The young know-it-all was fond of saying rules are made to be broken.
Everyone knew that he idolized Brando and yet the older actor didn't give him the time of day, didn't much like him. Dean called Brando on the phone once and asked him if he would do him a favor. Taken aback, Brando said what, you need the name of a good psychiatrist?
Monty Clift was at the end of his regular stay at The Actor's Studio when Dean began so there wasn't a lot of interaction. Dean found Clift attractive but nothing became of it. Then Dean found himself watching A Place in the Sun three times because he had become besotted with Clift's beauty and his astonishing acting. Dean told everyone at the studio that they had very similar acting styles.
His sex life went into overdrive. He had spent nearly all of his life sleeping with older men but now it was countless handsome creatures his own age. He would say to a few that there wasn't anything sexually he wouldn't do... at least once. He had a penchant for violent sex and daring public sex. History tells us that he was known as The Human Ashtray.
When his wealthy agent moved to New York and into some posh quarters, he asked Dean to move in with him. Dean, admitting he was a kept boy, did anything the agent liked and and the agent took care of everything else, including getting Dean some work and meeting important people. He left this arrangement when Bast moved to New York and they lived together again. It didn't work out so well this time because Bast said that his pal had changed and apparently not much for the better. He said Dean was more headstrong (as if that was possible), disagreeable, publicly insulting to people who rubbed him the wrong way and there was more viciousness to his tone.
He did get some TV work and also appeared on Broadway, most notably in a gay role opposite Louis Jourdan in The Immoralist. And then Elia Kazan, at the height of his directorial fame, whom Dean had seen many times at the Actor's Studio, came-a-calling.
Kazan was set to direct John Steinbeck's East of Eden, an enormous, multi-generational novel which would be pared down for the film. Its concentration would be on the Trask brothers, Cal and Aaron, their father and a girl who was involved with both brothers. I wrote an earlier piece on this film. Steinbeck met and did not care for Dean but agreed that he would be wonderful as Cal. Raymond Massey as the cold father was as odd as his character. He had to be calmed down by Kazan because he didn't understand Dean's style of acting at all. Kazan told him to just read your lines and let Jimmy do his thing.
Paul Newman, not having made a movie yet, read for the role of Aaron (oh my... if only) but the part was given to relatively unknown Richard Davalos with whom Dean would share living quarters during the filming. Dean was happy that his Actor's Studio classmate, Julie Harris, was playing Abra.
Dean worked on pure instinct and Kazan allowed him free rein most of the time. Many times the director would film a scene twice... the way he wanted it and the way Jimmy wanted it. A number of times he used Jimmy's version.
In order to do the film, however, Warner Bros insisted Dean sign a seven-year contract. The studio had heard he was a very good actor (and they trusted Kazan) but they heard more. They knew he hadn't paddled a smooth stream on his journey to Hollywood. They insisted that Dean becomes heterosexualized for public consumption and hired a gay publicist, Dick Clayton, to bring it about. Dean wouldn't have had it any other way.
Clayton did what Hollywood always did in such cases... get him photographed with beautiful women and work up some fiction of a romance. A not-yet-famous Ursula Andress was snapped hugging Dean tightly on the back of a motorcycle and going with him to dinner.
But it got better. While he was making East of Eden at Warners, Italian waif Pier Angeli was making The Silver Chalice (in which Paul Newman was making his film debut) on an adjacent sound stage. While the two met on their own, as soon as Dean mentioned her to Clayton, the publicist went into overdrive.
Within a short amount of time, the press said they would be married. That titillated readers until Angeli's controlling mama was said to put the kibosh to it. He would not be proper for her daughter because he was not Catholic, he was not Italian, and besides, she hated him. Regardless, within a month of their parting, Angeli entered into an unhappy marriage to Italian singer Vic Damone. It's long been said by those in the know that the Dean-Angeli romance was strictly platonic. Diehard Dean fans never wanted to believe it and in some quarters the actress is still regarded as the great love who got away.
Young people went bonkers over Dean. Clayton was doing his part so WB immediately assigned the young actor the lead role in Rebel Without a Cause. Playing a wayward teen in East of Eden was a training course compared to playing Jim Stark in Rebel. This is the only one of his three films I have not previously written about but a little something is coming up.
What is interesting is that even more than Kazan, director Nick Ray let Dean have his way. Many of his lines were improvised and Ray liked what he heard. Rumors have long persisted that Ray was in love with Dean and slept with him. One of them also apparently slept with Natalie Wood... and it wasn't Dean. Dean did sleep with costar Sal Mineo who had a serious crush on Dean's character in the film and in real life. Other Rebel actors, Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams, among them, also admitted they were wholly taken in by Dean's enormous talent and demeanor. There were steady rumors that Adams and Dean were also bedmates.
Things took a more serious turn when Dean began filming Giant, a film I also wrote about earlier. Dean, who was always at war with WB, had become their cash cow but the studio hated him as much as he hated them. He had not only developed a passion for auto racing but had bought a Porsche Spyder that he named Little Bastard. The studio legally barred him from racing as long as he was filming the epic Texas novel about cattlemen who discover oil.
George Stevens, a highly-esteemed, old-school director was going to run the show. Originally Giant was to star Grace Kelly, her former lover and two-time costar, William Holden, and Alan Ladd. I would have loved that but was not unhappy about their replacements... Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson as Leslie and Jordan Benedict, and in the role of Jett Rink, Dean.
Dean immediately ran into trouble with Stevens, who unlike Ray and Kazan, wanted the lines read exactly as on the page. They had some battles on that set which were not helped by Dean's tardiness. The accusations started to fly like confetti. Dean might have been happy that some gay actors were in the cast although he and Hudson took an instant dislike to one another. Dean and Taylor became fast friends while she became a mediator between her two leading men. Dean was also happy about his other leading lady, Carroll Baker, also from the Actor's Studio and new to films.
I have always been a fan of Dean's acting and can only wonder where it would have taken him. I used to tell friends that he was so special in East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and two-thirds of Giant. As some of you know, characters age in the works of Edna Ferber, and when Jett Rink aged, I thought Dean's acting stunk. Yes, stunk. I am not sure where he went wrong but it's known he was weary of making the long film and anxious to get to a race in Northern California.
On Friday, September 30, 1955, Dean, his German auto mechanic and the Little Bastard were on their way to a race in Salinas, 90 miles south of San Francisco. It was estimated he was going about 55 mph (he had gotten a speeding ticket a couple of hours earlier) outside Colame when a truck turned left in front of him. Of the three men involved in the accident, he was the only one killed.
His fans world-wide were inconsolable. Ultimately there were rumors that he hadn't really died but that he was so badly disfigured he was spirited away to some undisclosed location. Perhaps thinking that made them feel better. Something that did cheer them up was that Rebel Without a Cause and Giant had not yet been released. The fans would not only see their boy again (Rebel would become the definitive James Dean role) but he would be nominated for Oscars for both of them.
In reviewing his life and films after his death, the press dubbed him The First American Teenager. It stems largely from the first two movies where he in fact played disillusioned teens who acted badly. He spoke for American teens who were becoming riddled with angst and uncertainty. Rebel not only told of wild teenagers but also of parents who were shown in a most unflattering light. It was never one of my favorite films, per se, but it is one I could never forget. More on this one day...
I always thought that what Dean (and Clift and Brando) brought to the screen as never before was a true examination of their characters. He was always deeply grateful for what the Actor's Studio taught him and yet he thought there was more to it than sense memory and motivation. It was all about the character. He wanted to create unflinching but empathetic and deeply lived-in characters. He examined them inside and out. He isolated them from the scene, he needed to perform emotional surgery, to probe, to see what's in there. His intention was to know everything about a character there was to know, whether some specifics were used in the film or not. With friends he would discuss his characters as though they were real people. Cal would cry. His wounds were too deep. Jim would never back down from his father. Jett became half a person because he could not have Leslie. And then he would launch into why that was. He had a need to be aware of things he knew most audiences would never be.
Dean filled his plate and felt that what he was offerng was a new style of acting, something not seen before (except by Clift and Brando in their ways). He regarded most actors as mere paycheck collectors. He felt their vision was often simply the director's vision. They just said the lines they'd memorized. They made faces. They didn't ask why. They didn't probe. They did their jobs, they went home. That was not for him. He was aware that his hero, Clift, clashed with John Wayne while making Red River. It was that difference in acting styles.
He loved acting, truly loved it. He thought it was a noble profession, rife with constant promise and excitement. He was quick to say he didn't like being famous although he certainly had a knack for courting notoriety. One thing that was important to him was that he hoped he'd achieve mortality. If he only knew.
By the way, there are many books and films that deal with the life of James Dean and I want to recommend one of each to you, both superb. In 1994 Viking published Paul Alexander's Boulevard of Broken Dreams, an eye-poppingly honest account, and in 2001 James Franco was in a TV movie, simply called James Dean, that offers a dynamic Franco performance and a closer look at Dean's troubled relationship with his father.
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