James Dean: 50 years after his death

As "Giant" director George Stevens later told the New York World-Telegram: "Dean wanted success badly and he had a concrete plan to achieve it .... He worked hard to get publicity and always had a photographer with him. He had a fine concept of how [the screen personal Jimmy Dean could be made popular."

Consistent with Stevens' glimpse of the real-life methodical Dean, the actor's immediate plans for the future (post-1955) were ironically ambitious, with no sense of a struggling life-without-purpose soul. He recently had signed a long-term contract with Warner Bros. for nine pictures. He was set to portray boxer Rocky Graziano in "Somebody Up There Likes Me," which was to be followed by a loose biography of Billy the Kid--"The Left-Handed Gun." (Dean bad long been fascinated by this outlaw and the Western genre itself.) Both films ultimately were made, with Paul Newman finding fame as the title character of each production. (In early television's New York-based live production beginnings, Dean and Newman often had competed for the same parts.) Dean also planned to form his own production unit, in collaboration with Nicholas Ray, his "Rebel" director. Dean's immediate 1955 plans, after competing in several automobile races (he was driving to a race at the time of his fatal accident), were to return to his favorite city, New York, and star in some television specials, including a series of Shakespearean plays. The ambitious actor felt television would be the perfect medium in which to work on his ultimate goal of being a director. Ray and "Eden" director Elia Kazan had encouraged these megaphone aspirations by way of their collaborative filmmaking styles. Consequently, instead of some troubled floundering fellow, Dean might be called a Rebel with a Cause.

A sixth component in Dean's emergence as a cinema immortal is the total wild card of chance. An overly modest Marion Brando later discussed in his 1994 autobiography, Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me, how this fortuitous, yet totally random, sense of timing swept him and Dean 'along in its very public wake: "Because we were around when [the counterculture began], Jimmy Dean and I were sometimes cast as symbols of the transformation--and in some cases as instigators of alienation. But the sea change in society had nothing to do with us; it would have occurred with or without us. Our movies didn't precipitate the new attitudes, but the response to them mirrored the changes bubbling to the surface."

Brando's reality check here reminds the reader that a pivotal point of the memoir or biography is to preserve the humanity of the subject. To illustrate, when Dean's close friend and first biographer, William Bast, later did a television documentary on Dean, he told the Christian Science Monitor, "If I don't tell them [the public] who he was on a more realistic personal level, they'll forget that he was anybody. He'll just become their instrument, the instrument of their fantasies." Of course, one should hasten to add that the humility of Brando's views in no way lessens the great gift he and Dean had to share. Brando, though, prompts us to keep things in cultural perspective.