James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  Only weeks before his untimely death, Jimmy once again extolled the importance of Whitmore in his life as an actor, ignoring any mention of the spade work of Rogers Brackett.

  Brackett’s composer friend, Alec Wilder, knew why. “The kid lived in terror as he became famous that his homosexual life would be exposed. He didn’t want the world to know he’d been some plaything to some older, male, TV producer.”

  ***

  Whereas he’d been deeply impressed with the dramatic potentialities of Hamlet, Jimmy became even more enthralled with the symbolism of The Little Prince, a copy of which had been provided to him by Brackett.

  The original French-language classic by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry became Jimmy’s Bible. He read it and reread it, and soon was quoting lines from it.

  A post World War II bestseller, translated from the French. It influenced James Dean more than any other book he ever read.

  One of his favorite excerpts from it was: “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” To anyone willing to listen, Jimmy maintained that the novella contained “some of the most profound observations of the human condition ever written. It shows how life really should be lived.”

  [Penned as a French-language novella or “adult fable” in 1943 The Little Prince (aka Le Petit Prince) is the third most translated book in the world, and was voted in France as the best book of the 20th Century. Translated into 250 languages, it has sold more than 150 million copies, with an annual sales rate of two million a year. Styled as an arch and artful children’s book, it focuses on its author’s wistful conclusions about human existence and love. Emotional “truths” are expressed by a fox to an isolated and highly spiritual alien child (The Little Prince) whom the author/narrator discovers wandering in a desert:

  On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. (“One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eyes.”);

  Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé. (“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”); and

  C’est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante. (“It is the time you have lost for your rose that makes your rose so important.”)

  Jimmy became obsessed with turning The Little Prince into a movie, although Brackett warned that the novella, in part because of its abbreviated symbolism and poetic brevity, would be difficult to adapt into a screenplay. Jimmy wanted to play the aviator who counsels and guides a young boy who wants to learn about life.

  To pacify Jimmy, Brackett made some queries at CBS and learned before the end of the same day that film rights to the novella had been purchased by Hedy Lamarr, the sultry brunette screen goddess from Vienna, hailed in some quarters as “the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  Jimmy had been enthralled by Lamarr’s performance as the exotic temptress in Samson and Delilah (1949), the steamy and campy Cecil B. DeMille epic co-starring Victor Mature.

  Behind Brackett’s back, Jimmy was continuing his sessions with the psychiatrist, Dr. Dean Taylor. The Canadian was counseling him without expectation of payment, in return for Jimmy unzipping after an hour of pouring out his troubles.

  After one of their sessions, the doctor told him that he had to hurry and get cleaned up and that Jimmy had to leave. “I’m seeing Hedy Lamarr at five o’clock.”

  Jimmy was stunned by the news. It was the equivalent of one of those weird coincidences that happen within the context of a Charles Dickens novel. As instructed, Jimmy left Taylor’s inner office, but remained in the doctor’s waiting room, with his secretary, for Lamarr’s arrival.

  Outfitted in a black suit with mauve accessories, Lamarr made a glamorous entrance fifteen minutes later. She walked past Jimmy as the secretary escorted her into Taylor’s inner office.

  As Jimmy remained in place for an hour, he flirted with the impressionable young girl behind the desk. He got her to agree to introduce him to Lamarr when she emerged from the psychiatrist’s inner office. He told her that he was a great fan of the glamorous star, and that he wanted her autograph. He also agreed to go out on a date with the rather unattractive secretary.

  Later, after Taylor uncovered how Jimmy had maneuvered, he said, “I’m not surprised that Hedy found Jimmy enticing. I’ve never known her to turn down the amorous attention of any handsome young man. She’s oversexed.”

  Among other reasons, Lamarr was consulting a psychiatrist because of conflicts associated with her career. Although Samson and Delilah had been a worldwide hit, she had recently made two flops in a row— A Lady Without a Passport (1950) and Copper Canyon (also 1950), in which her best scenes weren’t caught on film—i.e., episodes within the shrill and brittle feud she maintained throughout production with her leading man, Ray Milland, who detested her.

  Long without an MGM contract, and in the process of visibly aging, Hedy’s career options were narrowing. She expressed her rampant fears that she’d end up “on Poverty Row,” chained to a dwindling roster of low-budget, badly scripted potboilers, or—even worse—ignored forever.

  Two views of Hedy Lamarr: lower photo, in Copper Canyon (1949), the last film she’d made before meeting Jimmy. Her career was in decline.

  It is not known exactly what Jimmy said to Lamarr after she emerged from her session with Taylor. He obviously delivered his pitch about bringing The Little Prince to the screen, and perhaps exaggerated the influence and intentions of Brackett, who might, he insinuated, be willing to produce it.

  Lamarr seemed to find Jimmy very appealing, as he focused upon her the full power of his manly charm and sex appeal. She agreed to receive him at her residence that evening at eight o’clock.

  In the only suit he owned, he arrived on her doorstep exactly at eight. He was ushered into her living room by a butler. Lamarr had carefully and artfully arranged herself on a sofa.

  He was stunned by her glitzy appearance. She wore a full-bodied, off-the-shoulder turquoise gown that had been designed by Edith Head for her performance in Copper Canyon.

  Over drinks and dinner, there were only small references to The Little Prince. Lamarr was the most self-enchanted actress in Hollywood, or so Jimmy believed, knowing that competition for that label was stiff.

  She expressed numerous complaints: “I’m tired of hearing that people adore me for my beauty. I want to be adored for myself, for the person who inhabits my soul. My beauty has lever led to my finding love.”

  “I may be the world’s most beautiful woman, but I was a disappointment to my parents. They wanted a boy. My father was a very large man, and very ferocious. One time, I wore this red ribbon in my hair, thinking it would please him. It did not. I learned he hated bows. He beat me severely.”

  Her main concern was that she was moving into “the dangerous years” for a woman in Hollywood. She had been born in 1913 in Vienna, and now was living in America in the ‘50s. “Many Hollywood actresses commit suicide at this time in their lives. They can’t stand the emotional strain of a fading career.”

  “I can get you involved in bringing The Little Prince to the screen,” Jimmy promised. “You still have the rights, don’t you?”

  “Indeed I do,” she said. “But I must warn you. I may look like a delicate hothouse flower, but I’m one strong negotiator. You must tell your producer friend that I don’t sell my rights cheaply.”

  Jimmy didn’t return to Brackett’s apartment until 2AM. He didn’t tell Brackett or Bast what had transpired with Lamarr. It was obvious that she had seduced him, as she had many other young men and even women. If legend is to be believed, she had even been seduced by Adolf Hitler, defining him afterward as “under-endowed and with only one testicle.”

  Months later, when The New York Journal-American announced that Lamarr was arriving in New York, Jimmy did tell Alec Wilder that he’d been sexually intimate with the star. “She was a femme fatale all right. Very demanding in bed. Ver
y hard to satisfy. I pictured her as the Black Widow spider.”

  “My God,” Wilder said. “I don’t know about the Hitler thing, or even the Mussolini claim, but I know of some of the other men who have preceded you into La Lamarr’s boudoir: Howard Hughes, Charles Boyer, Errol Flynn, Chaplain, Clark Gable, David Niven, and Senator John Kennedy.”

  To Jimmy, she confessed that the men in her life had ranged from a classic case of impotence—a Texan, no less—to a whip-wielding sadist who enjoyed sex only after he tied her up.

  ***

  Although Brackett reported that he was shopping The Little Prince to potential movie producers, Jimmy didn’t believe him. This led to a brutal fight, during the heat of which Jimmy stormed out of the apartment and disappeared for two days.

  “You could have found a producer if you’d wanted to,” Jimmy said to Brackett accusatorily after he returned. “You just want to keep me tied to you so I can’t become a star myself.”

  [The Little Prince finally made it to the screen in 1974 as a British movie directed by Stanley Donen, and it did not include an onscreen appearance from Hedy. The role of the aviator, so ferociously coveted by Jimmy, was assigned to Richard Kiley after Richard Burton rejected an offer to play it. The young prince was portrayed by Steven Warner. The musical score by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe was not particularly memorable.

  Meanwhile, Hedy had devoted her time to other pursuits, including another painful bout of plastic surgeries, and endless rewrites of a screenplay coauthored with Christopher Taaj. Entitled Untamed, it was about a Viennese femme fatale who become romantically involved with a brutal Teutonic dictator until he discovers that she is a Jewess. For her description of this European goddess, she surprised a reporter by saying that for inspiration, she had drawn upon the persona of four different American movie stars—Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean.

  “I’ll sure have to wait and see how you combined those four all-American stars into a European femme fatale,” the newsman had queried.

  “An artist sometimes draws inspiration from the strangest sources,” Lamarr responded.]

  AN ANGUISHED, ALIENATED SCENE WHEREIN

  Jimmy, With His Gay Patron, Visits His Father

  Rogers Brackett was anxious to meet Winton Dean, Jimmy’s estranged father, so one Sunday afternoon Jimmy drove his “surrogate” father figure, Brackett himself, to the modest Dean home in Reseda, California, north of the campus at UCLA , which Jimmy had briefly attended.

  The ostensible goal of the visit involved hauling away mementos from Jimmy’s schoolboy days in Indiana. Winton had stored boxes of his son’s memorabilia in a leaky woodshed in his backyard.

  Later, Brackett recalled that visit to Winton’s home, where he lived with his wife, the former Ethel Case. To Brackett, the home evoked his favorite novel about Hollywood, Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust. In Jimmy’s former bedroom was a small, caged, colony of chinchillas, which the Deans were raising to eventually sell for their fur.

  Jimmy and Brackett tried to make small talk with Winton, but both the son and the visitor found him unwilling to communicate. The hostility between father and son was too apparent, and it became clear from the two or three remarks he made that Winton suspected that “something perverted” was going on between Jimmy and his older “roommate.”

  “As for Ethel, she disappeared into the kitchen and didn’t come out even to tell Jimmy goodbye,” Brackett said.

  ***

  On another occasion, Jimmy drove William Bast to visit his father and stepmother. “Two less responsive creatures I have seldom encountered,” Bast recalled. He found Ethel “mousy and shy, Winton reserved and monosyllabic.”

  Bast later wrote that he felt sorry for Jimmy, “as he twisted himself in knots trying to please his father.”

  He also suggested that Jimmy performed a virtual tap dance for his father. “We smelled something good that Ethel was cooking in the kitchen, but we were offered only a cup of coffee. Both of us were hungry.”

  Bast claimed that he found Winton “a dreadful, stupid, uncaring father. He was awful with his son, even when he became successful. Instead of taking pride in Jimmy’s sudden fame, Winton was jealous of his achievements.”

  Jimmy complained to his father about his transportation, explaining how hard it was to move around Los Angeles in search of a job. Two weeks later, Winton delivered a battered 1939 Chevy, which had otherwise been sitting, unused, in his garage, long ago replaced with a newer vehicle.

  Gradually, over a period of months, both Bast and Brackett managed to elicit some meager biography from Jimmy about his childhood years in Indiana.

  ***

  Jimmy’s father, Winton, had been born into a Quaker family which had settled in Indiana in 1815. A tall, very taciturn man, Winton worked as a dental technician at a local veterans’ hospital in Marion.

  Born into a Methodist family, Mildred Wilson was Jimmy’s mother, the daughter of a factory worker. Short and a bit plump, she was rumored to be part Indian, as evidenced by her complexion and black eyes. Quiet and sensitive, given to daydreaming, she played the piano and often escaped to books.

  Jimmy was born six months after his parents’ marriage, on February 8, 1931. They lived as a family together at the poetic-sounding Seven Gables apartment complex in Marion, Indiana, which is about seventy miles north of Indianapolis.

  Mildred was fond of poetry, citing Lord Byron as her favorite. She decided to name her newborn James Byron in honor of that poet.

  The Dean family moved frequently, and Jimmy was a very unhealthy child, suffering from frequent vomiting, rashes on his skin, diarrhea, nosebleeds, and other maladies. Their causes were unknown. However, it was later speculated that Mildred painted every apartment they moved into, using paint that contained dangerous toxins which may have been the reason for Jimmy’s chronic bad health.

  He was four years old when his family moved to Greater Los Angeles, living in Santa Monica while Winton worked at the local hospital.

  As Jimmy grew up, he became a stubborn child. Winton believed in “bare butt” spanking, hoping to force his rebellious son to behave. That didn’t work. Years later, a psychiatrist who examined Jimmy in Los Angeles suggested the possibility that his taste for being spanked by his sexual partners in advance of anal penetration had originated with his father’s harsh discipline.

  When he was old enough, Jimmy entered the public school system. Noticing that her son had an artistic bent, Mildred saved up money for violin and tap-dancing lessons for her young son. When news of that reached his classmates, bullies beat him up after school and called him a sissy.

  Jimmy later confessed to Alec Wilder that “My father married my mother only because he knocked her up.”

  Theirs was not a compatible marriage, and each of the two spouses had very different interests and tastes. Based on her interest in the arts, Winton contemptuously referred to his wife as “my little bohemian.” He constantly lectured her that by cuddling Jimmy and encouraging him to learn dance techniques and to play the violin, “You’re turning him queer.”

  Tragedy struck in July of 1940 when Mildred, who had been suffering for months from ovarian cancer, suffered a painful, lingering death. In twisted reasoning, Jimmy interpreted his mother’s death as a rejection of him.

  His father shipped him back to Indiana, where he went to live with Marcus and Ortense Winslow. (Ortense was Winton’s sister.) They emerged as kindly guardians of the troubled youth, and welcomed him to their 178-acre farm outside Fairmount, Indiana. Jimmy was assigned his own bedroom within a large white house dating from the turn of the 20th Century.

  ***

  Aboard the train, on his ride back to Indiana, then nine-year-old Jimmy slipped into the baggage car that was carrying the coffin and the body of his mother. Prying open the lid of the coffin containing her body, he clipped a lock of her hair and carried it in his wallet throughout the remainder of his own short life.

  Wi
thin eighteen months of his mother’s death and Jimmy’s departure from his father’s California home, Winton was drafted into the U.S. Army in the wake of the surprise December of 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Throughout the rest of his life, Jimmy suffered from the loss of his mother. On the set of Rebel Without a Cause, he told Natalie Wood, “God played a dirty trick on me, taking my mother from me. That led to my father abandoning me.”

  He told another co-star, Dennis Hopper, that he used to sneak out of the Winslow household late at night and cry at his mother’s gravesite. “I would demand that she answer me and tell me why she left me when she was only twenty-nine years old. Sometimes, I fell sobbing onto her grave. I would cry out, ‘I need you! I want you back!’”

  During Jimmy’s adolescence in Indiana, he decided one summer that he wanted to be a trapeze artist, and began practicing trapeze acrobatics in the family barn in Fairmount. During one of his improvised “rehearsals,” he lost his balance and fell, knocking out his two front teeth.

  His father was due for a visit in two weeks. During his time in Indiana, he fashioned a removable bridge for his son. Forever after, as a joke, whenever Jimmy wanted to portray a snaggle-toothed hillbilly, he removed the bridge and shocked whomever he happened to be dating at the time.

  Later on, even when he became a movie star and could afford expensive dentistry, Jimmy preferred to keep the removable front teeth crafted by his father.

  He was graduated from Fairmount High School in May of 1949, where he had excelled in sports. By June of that year, he’d packed up his meager belongings and headed for Los Angeles.

  He rode the Greyhound bus, a transit requiring four days and nights. As he later recalled, “I was propositioned by at least five guys, usually when I went to take a leak. But I didn’t accept any of their offers.”