James Dean: Young Man in a Hurry

You see what I did there, right? It wasn’t easy. Just TRY to find an unglamorous photograph of James Dean (1931-1955). Naturally, to focus my search, I went to “as old man in Giant“, calculating that that would be my best shot at such a thing (and those scenes, not coincidentally were Dean’s worst work on celluloid, a lesson in the limitations of The Method. You cannot age a 24 year old without tricks — more tricks than a smirk and a bit of silver paint).

Why would I want to run contrary to custom by subverting Dean’s image? Call it an experiment. Of course I like him, everybody likes him, and many even obsess about him. That is the whole point. He is at the center of Hollywood’s greatest cult. I can’t think of another male Hollywood star of whom it is true to so great an extent. Chaplin (who is the Hollywood star about whom I obsess to the greatest extent) is certainly ahead of most of the pack, but nowhere near Dean. Rudolph Valentino was the original sex-symbol-martyr but that phenomenon has been no more than a historical curiosity for longer than I’ve been alive. On either side of Dean in the timeline there are Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley, and they both rival him in death as they did in life. Elvis surpasses him in fact, but the cult of Elvis is not anchored to Hollywood but to Graceland. At any rate, you see my point. He’s big.

On the Grammys the other night I heard one of the young singers misuse the word “iconic” with reference to herself, belying a narcissism that would be hilarious if it weren’t so commonplace in the 21st century. But the word has a literal meaning. It’s related to those quasi-magical paintings of Jesus that Russians used to hang in their houses, as shrines to pray to. Photos of James Dean are like that. To do a Google image search for him is to come across dozens of photos and poses and attitudes of the young actor that you have already seen hundreds of times. They have been seared into your consciousness by constant replication, in books, magazines, tabloid TV docu-series.

When she was entirely too old for such a thing to have been appropriate (she was in her 50s I think), my mother hung a LARGE picture of James Dean in a prominent place in our family’s house. Maybe my sister gave it to her? A weakness for bad boys was something they shared. My mother wasn’t yet 30 when Dean became a star, it makes perfect sense that she would be a fan. It was merely strange that a mature person would display such a thing. It was easily the tackiest decoration in the house, something for a teenager’s bedroom, not the living room of a retiree. For some reason, my dad was okay with it. (He, by contrast, was a Sal Mineo fan, which I have always found kind of fascinating). Both my parents liked Dean’s last movie, George Stevens’ 1956 adaptation of Edna Ferber’s Giant. The genius of a picture like that is that it had something for both men and women (and frankly also both straight people and gay people). Telling stories that did so was one of Ferber’s greatest knacks, which she accomplished by writing about the lives of women in pioneer type settings. So they had something for everybody. And Dean appealed to both the female gaze and the male gaze. Men of course responded by imitating him. That imitation was so widespread in the ’50s and ’60s, so evident, so documented, that there is no question that it existed. There were clearly millions of men who, like Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause, were in love with James Dean as much as as any woman. Most would resist having it put that way, but that’s what it was.

At any rate, I share the photo above to demonstrate the difficulty in attempting to circumvent the power of such a thing. If I could somehow plasticize Dean’s Jim Backus imitation from Rebel Without a Cause and use THAT as the picture, I would do it. There was a guy in there somewhere, ya know? A person. He wasn’t just a photo, or a million photos. He had underarms that made stains, just like everyone else. We hear about the real Dean mostly from interviews in biographies. We know from such accounts that he was bisexual, and that many felt that he was a bit of a schemer, a user. Mostly the kind of sour grapes one hears from former friends who didn’t become movie stars, which is hardly a rare thing. But people seize on this stuff, too, because the basket is so SMALL. And that makes people so crazy. Dean had studied at the Actor’s Studio and with James Whitmore, done a bit of live television drama, and appeared in Gide’s The Immoralist (1954) on Broadway with Geraldine Page, Louis Jourdan, Charles Dingle, and Bill Gunn. Then Kazan needed a “new Brando” for his adaptation of Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1955). Dean proved a volcano of open vulnerability and passion, and possessed the intelligence to harness those qualities and turn them into performance. This, combined with that photogenic charisma, were world-beating. What couldn’t he have done, we wonder? He was both the perfect actor and the perfect star.

This new prince of motion pictures was no sooner introduced to the world then he went and killed himself in a manner consistent with his persona, in a manner, in fact, foreshadowed in Rebel Without a Cause. Compared with Socrates, Jesus, the Holy Saints, and the Kennedys, Dean’s “martyrdom” was meaningless but somehow it didn’t matter. He represented something to his generation, something frustratingly vague but that spoke to his times. Like Samson, like Prometheus, he was a “Rebel”. So, too, had Brando been. “What are you rebelling against?” Brando was asked in The Wild One (1953) with the famous reply “Whattaya got?” A decade later The Crystals sang “He’s a Rebel”. It wasn’t just Dean, it was everybody, it seemed, or let’s say many, who were enchanted with this image of a guy who wouldn’t knuckle under and be anybody’s puppet. Who’d pay any price, including death, not to be a square. It’s the animating spirit of adolescence, for most people, anyway. You’ve been told what to do throughout your childhood, and now you seek the freedom to do whatever you want.

But what’s that got to do with him? We associate it with Dean because our little snapshot of him was taken during that period of his life. Many artists have done a better job than the example above at imagining what James Dean would have looked like as an older man, which is a fun exercise. If you take it a little farther you surely know that the power of this moment would have dissipated. His next film role was to have been Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me, and that would have likely been amazing, and preserved his image. But after that? And after that? Brando had lost his mojo by the ’60s. Elvis never quite lost his, although the manner of his death I think is a signpost to the bathetic direction his image would have taken. But Dean never even got close to that line. He’s trapped in amber.

And was emulated. Robert Altman was so entranced he made both The James Dean Story (1957) and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982). Bob Dylan emulated his look in his youth. Warhol painted him. He was at the center of David Essex’s #5 1973 hit “Rock On”! (Haha, that was probably the first time I ever heard Dean’s name). He has been portrayed (inadequately) on screen by such actors as Stephen McHattie and James Franco.

My mom would have been thrilled to know that she may gave been distantly related to her heartthrob. Dean spoke of having roots in early colonial Massachusetts, and we have Deans in our family tree from that time and place. But that’s old, very old. James Dean will never be older than 24. Picture him now, if you will, in a Pilgrim outfit in a TV movie about Plymouth in, say, 1983. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you keep living.