Robert Tanitch - The Unknown James Dean

THE UNKNOWN JAMES DEAN

F orty years after his death, the memory of James Deans mercurial talents remains undiminished. This lavish pictorial study highlights not only Deans film career but also his less familiar work in theatre and television.

THE UNKNOWN JAMES DEAN traces Deans development as an actor through his numerous roles in theatre and television when he worked with the leading authors, directors and actors of the day (including Ronald Reagan!).

THE UNKNOWN JAMES DEAN is handsomely illustrated throughout with both classic and less familiar stills and portraits, and also looks at the documentaries, films and plays which have been inspired by Deans life and work.

ROBERT TANITCH, playwright, author, critic, has published 12 highly acclaimed theatre and filmographies. These include books on the careers of Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, Dirk Bogarde, John Mills, Sean Connery and Marlon Brando.

THE UNKNOWN JAMES DEAN

THE UNKNOWN JAMES DEAN

ROBERT TANITCH

For Veronica and John Mooney

First published in the United Kingdom as an eBook in 2014 by
Batsford
1 Gower Street
London WC1E 6HD
An imprint of Pavilion Books Company Ltd

www.batsford.com

Copyright Batsford 2014
Text Robert Tanitch 1997

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
eBook ISBN: 9781849942492

Also by Robert Tanitch

A Pictorial Companion to Shakespeares Plays

Ralph Richardson, A Tribute

Olivier

Leonard Rossiter

Ashcroft

Gielgud

Dirk Bogarde

Guinness

Sean Connery

John Mills

Brando

Clint Eastwood

Introduction

JAMES DEAN, an actor of outstanding promise, never lived to see his fame, his career tragically cut short almost before it had begun. This book is a pictorial record and chronology of his work in theatre, television and film.

James Deans fame as an actor rests on three roles: Cal Trask, the bad twin, in John Steinbecks East of Eden (1955), directed by Elia Kazan; Jim Stark, the definitive 1950s teenager, in Rebel Without a Cause (1956), directed by Nicholas Ray; and Jett Rink, the cowhand turned megalomaniac tycoon, in Edna Eerbers Giant (1957), directed by George Stevens. He was nominated for an Oscar for two out of these three films, but strangely, not for his best performance.

For those who know only of Deans acting career through these films, it may come as a surprise to learn that between 1951 and 1954 he acted in two major stage roles in New York and in over 30 plays on television, appearing in works by John Drinkwater, William Inge, George Roy Hill, Rod Serling and adaptations of Sherwood Anderson and Henri Bernstein. It is a reminder (if a reminder is needed) that actors do not suddenly appear out of nowhere.

His roles on television tended to be crazy mixed-up kids, teenage delinquents on the run, vagrants, convicts, safe-crackers, counterfeiters and killers, though from time to time he was also cast as a farm boy, a bellhop, a lab assistant, a stevedore and, perhaps more unexpectedly, as a French aristocrat, an apostle and even an angel.

His roles in the theatre included the simpleton in Richard J. Nashs See The Jaguar (1952), the homosexual Arab street boy in Ruth and Augustus Goetzs adaptation of Andr Gides novel, The Immoralist (1954), and Herakles in a Sunday night reading of Sophocless The Women of Trachis (1954) in a racy translation by Ezra Pound.

James Dean in The Immoralist

Right at the very beginning of his career he landed bit parts in three minor Hollywood movies, playing a GI in Korea in Samuel Fullers Fixed Bayonets! (1951), a boxers second in the Dean MartinJerry Lewis comedy, Sailor Beware! (1952), and a young man ordering an ice-cream sundae in Has Anybody Seen My Gal (1952).

James Byron Dean, son of Winton and Mildred Dean, was born during the American Depression on 8 February 1931 in Marion, Indiana. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1936 and shortly afterwards his mother died of cervical cancer when she was 29 and he was only 9. Her death left him insecure and vulnerable for the rest of his life. What did she expect me to do? he would ask later. Do it all on my own?

His father, a dental technician, sent him back to Fairmount, Indiana, alone (accompanied by his mothers coffin) to be raised by his aunt and uncle on their 180-acre farm. He saw little of his father thereafter. His aunt was a member of the Womens Christian Union and he learned religious tracts on the evil of drink, which he read to the congregation in the church, his first tentative steps in drama.

At Fairmount High School he was an average student, who was good at athletics and played in the basketball team. He took part in a number of school productions, mainly melodramas, and entered a speech competition, coming first at State level and sixth at the National level. His text was The Madmans Manuscript from Charles Dickenss The Pickwick Papers.

James Dean in East of Eden

In 1949 he enrolled in the pre-Law programme at Santa Monica City College, choosing as his subsidiary subject the history of theatre arts. He joined the Jazz Club and Jazz Appreciation Society. He painted the scenery for The Romance of Scarlet Gulch at the Miller Playhouse Theater Guild and appeared in the Santa Monica Theater Guild production of She Was Only A Farmers Daughter.

In 1950 he gave up Law and enrolled at the University of California to study Theatre and played Malcolm in Shakespeares Macbeth, his Indiana twang causing much amusement among the students.

In January 1951 he dropped out of university and went to New York and successfully auditioned for The Actors Studio (known to its detractors as the slouch and mumble school) becoming one of their youngest members. His idols were Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift and such was his obsession with both actors that he would sometimes sign his letters James-Brando-Clift-Dean. He took dancing lessons with Katherine Dunham.

He made his Broadway debut in 1952 in Richard J. Nashs See The Jaguar as a simple-minded and bewildered lad who had been locked up in an ice-house all his life. The play was dismissed as sententious and baffling. If you want to see See The Jaguar, advised John McClain in The New York Journal American, you had better hurry. Theatregoers who did not hurry missed it. The production ran five nights. Deans notices, however, were excellent (Lee Mortimer, critic of The New York Daily Mirror, thought he stole the show) and they led to television engagements.

The early 1950s was the Golden Age of Television in America and drama was one of its staple diets. Dean was one of many young actors who took advantage of the open casting calls. The teledramas were cheaply made, underrehearsed, poorly designed, flatly lit and crudely staged, but they were an excellent training ground. In the same way that a British actor in the 1950s got his experience in weekly repertory so the New York actor got his experience on television.