John Howlett - James Dean: Rebel Life

If a man can bridge the gap between life and death, I mean, if he can live on after hes died, then maybe he was a great man.

James Dean

J AMES DEAN died at the age of 24, fulfilling his own premonition of an early death. He was killed in a Porsche Spyder on his way to compete in a race meeting, victim of a banal traffic accident. He had been working in Hollywood for only sixteen months and just one of his three films had so far been released. Yet that one film had already established him as a major star. Death would now make him the cult figure of his and following generations and provoke a hysteria unparalleled since the time of Rudolph Valentino. It was a legend that became briefly hideous: a necromantic, necrophagous and, for some, highly profitable frenzy. The very sickness of the cult should have killed his name and reputation. Yet they survived, his face and manner images to dominate the genesis of pop culture in the 1960s. Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers, Eddie Cochran, Bob Dylan: they all belonged among those who idolised Jimmy Dean. It was as though he had pushed open the door for them.

They were not articulate, the post-war adolescents of the mid-fifties. They were scarcely conscious of themselves as an entity. The Kerouac-style beats and the rock and roll aficionados were still minorities. The majority, truly silent, had no sub-culture of their own in which to hide, or through which to express their hopes and frustrations. The cinema was their only refuge and Hollywood stories their only escape. The moment James Dean appeared on that screen in front of them angry, dishevelled, hurt, unsophisticated, androgynously beautiful their response was immediate.

He appealed equally to girls and to boys, to men and women and when his first film, East of Eden, was released in March 1955, young people all over the world recognised themselves in his portrayal of lost adolescence. He became, literally overnight, a superstar. The title of his second film, released two weeks after his death, exactly defined his image and status: Rebel Without a Cause.

He died leaving that image uncompromised in any of his three roles. He had not wandered, as an actor must, beyond self-reality. He had portrayed himself, and the traumas and style of his life made the identification genuine. He had also quite consciously played to his image. How can I lose? he told a friend. In one hand I got Marlon Brando yelling Fuck you all; in the other, Montgomery Clift asking Please help me.

Revelations continue to be claimed and denied about his private life and how he whored his way to success on the casting couches of homosexual Hollywood and Manhattan. As with any subject of posthumous biography, the whole truth belongs only with him. Speculation about his sexuality had started already during his own short lifetime and was for many of his closer friends a forbidden subject after his death. Yet that very ambiguity with his lost boy looks would make him the ultimate bisexual icon for each succeeding generation.

Sixty years later he is either half-remembered as an insufferable little jerk or still revered as a distant myth, puzzled over by generations that recognise the image but hardly know who he is. He appeared to Eisenhowers paternalistic America of the 1950s as ill-mannered, petulant, selfish and has regularly been dismissed in much the same language ever since. What cannot be dismissed so easily is the astonishing effect his behavioural acting had on young audiences and how, for better or for worse, that effect gave image and identity to the youth cultures about to liberate the western world. Marlon Brando, it was said, changed the way actors acted; James Dean changed the way people behaved.

Halfway between then and now, in 1972 the Andy Warhol Interview reassessed the legend, defined his achievement and identified the nostalgia that has kept the myth alive. Their words are still apposite:

James Dean made just three pictures, but even if he had made only one he would still be the greatest male star of the 50s. The pictures are East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, Giant. Just the titles evoke epic visions, and all three films live up to their titles, constituting a three part heroic poem on atomic age youth, its beauties and its obsessions... James Dean was the perfect embodiment of an eternal struggle. It might be innocence struggling with experience, youth with age, or man with his image. But in every aspect his struggle was a mirror to a generation of rebels without a cause. His anguish was exquisitely genuine on and off the screen; his moments of joy were rare and precious. He is not our hero because he was perfect, but because he perfectly represented the damaged but beautiful soul of our time...

An actor must interpret life and in order to do so he must be willing to accept all experiences that life has to offer. In fact he must seek out more of life than life puts at his feet. In the short span of his lifetime an actor must learn all there is to know, experience all there is to experience, or approach that state as closely as possible. He must be superhuman in his efforts to store away in the warehouse of his subconscious everything that he might be called upon to use in the expression of his art. Nothing should be more important to the artist than life and the living of it, not even the ego. To grasp the full significance of life is the actors duty; to interpret it his problem; and to express it his dedication Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. Youre all alone with your concentration and imagination, and thats all you have. Being an actor isnt easy. Being a man is even harder. I want to be both before Im done.

James Dean

I told him straight one evening: Your mothers never coming home again. All he did was stare at me.

Winton Dean

J AMES BYRON DEAN was born on 8 February 1931, at the Green Gables Apartments on East Fourth Street, in the small industrial town of Marion, fifty miles north of Indianapolis, his mother giving him the christian name of a family friend and the family name of her favourite poet, Lord Byron.

The choice of eponym surprised no one in her family. Mildred Wilson had been brought up by her own parents with a love of poetry and music and a vision of worlds beyond their mid-west farming background. A passionate romance and an unexpected pregnancy had forced her to settle for the attainable in her own life, but she had greater ambitions for her son. However unplanned, marriage had now taken her out of farming and into the classless gentility of small town suburbia: her lover and now husband, Winton Dean, was a dental mechanic in the respectable and safe employ of the Federal Government, a steady job with a regular salary, important security in those years of uncertainty. And through this security Mildred Dean intended to give her son the opportunities she had never known.

The vivacious, good-looking, young mother deliberately set about creating the atmosphere and conditions in which she believed prodigy would develop. She read her son poetry, played to him on the piano, took him for long walks into the country. When he was old enough to sustain interest in a game, they built a toy theatre together, an upturned cardboard box pinned with curtains, in which they acted out stories and make-believe with puppets and dolls. And as soon as the little boy was strong enough to hold it, Mildred bought him a childs violin, sending him to lessons in the town, encouraging a musical talent that proved at the time to be non-existent.