James Dean: 50 years after his death

Wes D. Gehring

The actor "was not the aimless angst-ridden youth he played in the movies.... He was not that suffering, rudderless figure in real life. "

IN MANY WAYS, JAMES DEAN is the star who never died. Fifty years after his speeding sports car death, he remains one of the most enduring of Hollywood's iconic legends ... despite starring in just three features: "East of Eden" (1955), "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955), and "Giant" (1956). At the time of the fatal accident, actor Humphrey Bogart made the darkly comic observation that "Dean died at just the fight time. Had he lived, he'd never have been able to live up to his publicity." For all the macabre wisdom in Bogie's remark, there is no easy answer to the "why" of the enduring legend of the Hoosier-born "rebel." Ironically, during the cult hysteria that first followed his passing (which ranged from numerous global teen suicides to 300 fan clubs in Japan alone), many felt Dean's home studio (Warner Bros.) was manufacturing the mass mourning. Paradoxically, the Warner honchos were more concerned that audiences would not turn out to see a dead actor, since Dean died before "Rebel" and "Giant" were released.

"It always takes a while to look back and see on what point the significant lines of history converge--that's why they call it perspective," writes cultural historian Adam Gopnick. So, what now would be an educated guess as to why Dean, with only three major movie roles, remains one of the most celebrated of film stars--replete with a full array of memorabilia and marketing schemes--with "Deaner" fans still making his hometown of Fairmount, Ind., a movie mecca? It begins with talent. As period critic Alfred C. Roller of the New York World-Telegram suggested, Dean, coupled with his heroes Marion Brando and Montgomery Cliff, "helped revolutionize the finely-honed art of film acting by making it less finely honed, ruffling it up with [method's] rough edges."

Second, taking a cue from the equally iconic Bogart, the timing of Dean's death fueled the fame. Yet, this point is contingent upon a third component of the Dean legacy, what London Observer writer C.A. Lejeune called being a "symbol of frustrated youth, of mixed-up kiddery, revolt and loneliness." For instance, shortly before the world saw Dean's screen persona test fate by entering a potentially fatal automobile "chicken run" in "Rebel," the young actor's real life recklessness led to his death. A foolish waste--yes! However, that life-on-the-edge consistency legitimized the poignancy of Dean's screen characters. Like the signature fictional figure of the 1950s, novelist J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Dean was all about fighting phoniness. Indeed, Holden's central Catcher in the Rye riff, "I was surrounded by phonies.... They were coming in the goddamn window," sounds just like something Dean's "Rebel" character might have said.

The nature of Dean's death also is linked to a fourth factor in the mythology of the actor--the public's perverse fascination with the self-destructive artist, be it poet Dylan Thomas or rocker Janice Joplin. Why does such interest persist? Biographers and critics alike long have enjoyed romanticizing the creative process. For example, even author Val Holley's superior 1995 chronicle of the actor's life, James Dean: The Biography, finds the need to close with the most simple sentimentality: "Dean's earthy records were achieved because of--not in spite of--his self-destructiveness.... The gift of artistry can be a curse as well as a blessing." This is an entertainingly romantic take on Dean, but ultimately neglects so much.

A fifth item elevating him to movie deity was Dean's duplicity in suggesting he completely mirrored the troubled teens he played. Yes, Dean was every bit as passionate as these screen characters, and the actor suffered neither fools nor phonies in real life. Let's be clear, though. Dean was not the aimless angst-ridden youth he played in the movies. His beloved cousin, surrogate brother Marcus Winslow, Jr., told me in an interview that Dean knowingly let elements of this wounded film persona "rub off' on his accepted biography. Dean instinctively realized that, for the public, this would add poignancy to his performances. That is, he seemingly would be replicating his reality. Or, as a 1950s Movieland critic phrased it, "Fans have sighed and said, 'He didn't need to act, only to remember.' It is a compliment to his art. But it is also a fallacy."

Granted, Dean's method acting was sometimes fueled by tapping into painful memories, such as the childhood loss of his mother. Yet, this simply was performing technique for his art; he was not that suffering, rudderless figure in real life. His friend and pivotal early mentor, high school drama teacher Adeline Nall, probably was the most passionate of his inner circle to attempt to set the record straight. Her refreshing response to the misleading image of Dean as a melancholy boy always mourning his mother was: "Hogwash. It just wasn't so. Jim had as much, in fact more, love and affection than almost any one boy in Fairmount."

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.

Dean undoubtedly would have shared these sentiments. Though Brando based his autobiographical insights upon the wisdom of a then-stormy 70 years of life, Dean already was leaning in this direction at age 24. In pianist/composer/actor Oscar Levant's comic 1968 memoir, The Unimportance of Being Oscar, this Hollywood wit described a gracious Dean coming for a visit, largely because one of Levant's daughters was an ardent fan. He was completely charmed by the young actor, and they talked until dawn. However, "a strange thing ... [upon seeing] my daughter's room filled with dozens of pictures of him in various poses, did not seem to please Dean. On the contrary, it depressed him. He said he felt crashed under the weight of such adulation."

Paradoxically for Brando, though he predated Dean, the younger actor's death pushed him to the front of the iconic rebel line. Brando's innocent desertion was not just about surviving, or even getting old and tat, it also involved moving on to merely traditional parts. One passionate pop culture student of the 1950s, Derek Marlowe, later wrote, "At first the [rebel] hero could have been Brando, until he put on a suit and sang songs just like Dad [in the 1955 hit "Guys and Dolls"]. That was a betrayal. It had to be someone else, someone who would remain permanently young, permanently rebellious... James Dean."

A seventh possible enduring fame factor for Dean was Warner Bros.' sale of "Eden" and "Rebel" to television in 1960. The thinking here is that, just as repeated small screen appearances of "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) and "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) turned those movies into cherished classics (almost rite of passage pictures), the sudden easy availability of Dean's two most antiheroic films (at the beginning of the anti-establishment 1960s) help solidify his status as the patron saint of the misfit and the misunderstood. A 1971 Chicago Sun-Times article went so far as to suggest that "without these two movies on television, the Dean legend might have dimmed and finally died." An overstatement or not, the real irony here was that Warner Bros. had made the sale because the studio felt the obsession with Dean finally was fading!

An eighth element feeding the phenomenon of James Dean is youth culture itself. This goes beyond a simplistic recycling of Rod Stewart's recording of "Forever Young." Yes, Dean's death will keep him forever young, but the reference here is to the nostalgia most people have for that early time in their lives when they are burning with curiosity about everything. Thus, besides being moved by Dean's attempts to reconnect with his screen fathers, audiences might equally be drawn to the boy/man fascinated by the young plants in "Eden," or the nurturing friend to Plato (Sal Mineo) in "Rebel." I am reminded of a passage from S.E. Hinton's coming-of-age novel "The Outsider" (1967), a 1950s tale saturated with the spirit of Dean. The dying Johnny has written a letter to his friend, Ponyboy. He describes, in part, what he thinks a poem noted earlier in the text, Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay," means: "I've been thinking about.., that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you're gold when you're a kid.... When you're a kid everything's new, dawn. It's just when you get used to everything that it's day." Though Frost's title warns, "Nothing Gold Can Stay," to me the image of Dean represents a capsulization of Johnny's implied advice to Ponyboy, which was to stay golden-young at heart.

A final puzzle piece to the deification of Dean could be the pity factor--bemoaning what might have been. Would he have maintained the youthful diversity of his old New York stage and television rival, Paul Newman, or would he have gone the riveting-in-ruin route of his hero, Marlon Brando? I could not resist asking Winslow where his cousin might be today had he avoided that sports car death. He answered with one word, "Director." It is a good and knowing answer.

So, should we mourn what might have been? As a biographer currently writing on the life of Dean, my answer is drawn from a profile of the inspired French director Jean Vigo, whose iconoclastic "Zero for Conduct" (1933)--about a boarding school where the authorities cannot regiment the most spontaneous of children--reminds me of Dean. Vigo also died in his 20s, after only four films. P.E. Salles Gomes observed in a 1957 biography of the director, "To dwell on the brevity of Vigo's career, and to speculate on what might have been if he had lived, is to dismiss the scale of his achievement." I would advise the same concerning Dean.

Wes D. Gehring, Associate Mass Media Editor of USA Today, is professor of film, Ball State University, Muncie, Ind., and author of several books. Among his latest is Film Classics Reclassified: A Shocking Spoof of Cinema.

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