THE fiftieth anniversary of James Dean’s death is not until September 30, but already the Dean bandwagon is going full tilt. Rebel on the Road, an exhibition of Dean’s cars and motorcycles including a replica of the car in which he died, recently opened in Los Angeles. A DVD box set of his three feature films is due out in May. A new documentary, James Dean: Cinema’s First Rebel, will have its premiere at Cannes in May, followed by another Dean film, Forever Young, in June, but not before stage versions of Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden open in Tokyo and Osaka.
Of all the rebellious stars who died young, Dean died the least embarrassingly. No drug overdose, no choking or vomit, no belt-throttled suicide. He crashed his silver Porsche Spyder 550 at 75 miles an hour, on what is always described as a “lonely” stretch of highway, into a car driven by the ironically named Donald Turnupspeed. There are photographs of the mangled car, but not of the corpse.
This means his legacy of agonised pretty-boy portraits — and it’s a massive gallery for such a brief period of stardom — can enchant each adolescent generation anew.
On February 8, friends and co-stars gathered in Los Angeles for what would have been his 74th birthday. They praised Dean’s talent and discussed his vulnerability and sullen, childish ways.
Phil Stern, the photographer whose shot of Dean’s face half-covered by a turtleneck sweater graced teenage bedroom walls during the 1970s, said: “Dean was very prescient because he structured his career so that he passed away in a way that precluded people seeing him as a potbellied, bald man.”
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Perhaps the only ground not tilled to death is the game of “What he would be like now if he were alive?” Making twitchy cameos in Tarantino movies? Hosting motorbike rallies? Waddling around in distraught reclusedom? The blimpish fate of Marlon Brando is the most obvious option.
While a young actor in New York Dean was obsessed with Brando. When he finally met him, during a visit by the great man to the set of Dean’s first film, East of Eden, he was “so adoring it was painful”.
There is a sunnier alternative in Paul Newman, with whom Dean made a screen test for East of Eden. But the prospect of Dean reaching a similar emotional maturity feels remote. He was a tangle of shy attention-seeking, flinty ambition and push-me-pull-you neediness.
In the screen test with Newman, Dean jokingly said, “Kiss me”, which leads to a more probable incarnation: Montgomery Clift, who died a disfigured, tortured drunk in New York. Dennis Hopper once described Dean’s appeal as being half-way between the “f*** you” of Brando and the “forgive me” of Clift.
Dean’s bisexuality emerged with a spate of frank biographies in the 1990s, but the aggregate evidence suggests that his gay relationships were just another form of attention-seeking and exploration. He was admittedly neurotic and wildly moody, swinging between outrageous play-acting in public and fleeing the first sign of socialising.
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Elia Kazan, who directed East of Eden, called him a breathtaking narcissist. “He would stand in front of the mirror taking pictures of himself — picture after picture. And yet he was more vulnerable than anybody I’ve ever seen.”
His problems can be traced to the death of his mother when he was nine. Dean accompanied the coffin back to Fairmount, Indiana, where he was raised by an aunt and uncle, and never reconciled his feelings of loss. He channelled it into his drive to achieve success and outgrew his small town, thanks to acting and the help of the odd bohemian mentor. But he did it without ever becoming a sophisticate. He was a lost boy to the end.
In all his films he is on the outside looking in. In Giant, he is the muddy, oil-covered interloper at Rock Hudson’s ranch.In Rebel without a Cause he is the new kid at school, driven mad by his craven father. The opening of East of Eden could not offer a better summary of Dean’s raging feelings of abandonment: he is found sitting on a sidewalk watching his mother walk past. She doesn’t know him, having fled the family home years before, and now runs a brothel.
The posters and iconic images of Dean tend to show him coolly in control — cocked leg, upturned collar, angled cigarette. But in his three films he spends most of the time fidgeting, or contorted with the pain of being misunderstood.
He was an instinctive talent, who probably suffered from dyslexia. He found Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio too critical, and shied away from classes, so he never really honed any technique. When he was cast as the eternal adolescent, all these tricks and ploys played into the character. When he had to play an old man at the end of Giant he looked amateurish. Robbed of his absurdly photogenic looks, his magic evaporates.
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The director of Giant, George Stevens, didn’t indulge and nurture Dean the way Kazan and Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause) had done. Stevens told him he was not a railroad lantern and must not wag his head, and he had to walk properly: “No hopscotch.” He wanted to curb all “Brandoisms”.
Dean was not ignorant of his emergent craft. He admitted he needed to “develop a style of my own”, and talked about travelling to Europe as the first step. But his array of junior Brandoisms were actually perfectly fitting for the embodiment of callow misery.
Newman’s acting in his Brando phase in the early 1950s is more crudely imitative and ineffective. He feels like a strong character playing confused or dumb. Dean really was a tortured soul trapped between boy and man.
Of the 28 James Dean biographies listed by Indiana University, the most inaccurate title is The Mutant King. If he was anything regal, Dean was a prince, and a neglected, illegitimate one at that.
THEY WANTED A BIT OF JIMMY
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The Eagles’ James Dean
“You were too fast to live, too young to die, bye-bye”.
Robbie Williams
re-created the iconic turtle neck shot as an ode to the actor but also to hide his pie chins. Probably.
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Broadway, cigarette, black overcoat
It’s become a rite of passage for every band to pose as Dean in that picture.
James Dean Bradfield,
lead singer of Manic Street Preachers. His father wanted to name him Clint Eastwood Bradfield — a plan his mother, a Dean fan, successfully vetoed.
Morrissey’s Suedehead
The video for the song was filmed in Dean’s home town of Fairmount, Indiana, in 1988.
Diane Tell’s La légende de Jimmy
The French chanteuse is religious about Jim: “Et je me donnerai à toi/ Comme si tu étais lui” (“And I will give myself to you as though you were him”).
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean
The play by Ed Graczyk, about a meeting of the Disciples of JD, was turned into a flick by Robert Altman in 1982.