James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  After serving his sentence, Joe heads for home, where his estranged parents live in a leafy suburb of New Jersey. Joe is in search of his wife, Barbie Harris (Naomi Riordan), who has deserted him.

  The teleplay opens with a scene in a delicatessen, where Jimmy reverts to some Method acting techniques, even sucking on the collar of his shirt. The deli owner knowns where Barbie went, but refuses to tell. In a fit of anger, Jimmy attacks the man and beats him up. Without meaning to, he kills the owner of the store and flees to his father’s home.

  Actor Ted Osborn was cast as the stern, unforgiving father, Fred Harris.

  Jimmy’s character pleads with his father to forgive him. “I’m not going to make these mistakes anymore,” Joe says.

  The teleplay evolves into a father-son conflict that would be played out better in Jimmy’s upcoming Rebel Without a Cause.

  Soon, Joe learns that his wife, Barbie, is upstairs. He emotes well in his scene with her, as played by Riordan, a Michigan-born actress wo would star in many TV series, including Armstrong Circle, Lux Video, and the Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse. Her most unusual role would not come until 1980, when she starred in Jane Austen in Manhattan.

  In bed with her, his wife in the teleplay, Jimmy’s character confesses to the killing, but claims, “He had no business hitting me. I didn’t mean to kill him.”

  When she urges him to give himself up, he turns on her. “You’re just like the rest of them. You’re all against me, all of you.” At this point, he retrieves a pistol from his suitcase.

  The police are on Joe’s trail, surrounding his father’s home. Fearing that it’s the end, Joe reverts to childhood, clutching his baseball to his chest and cuddling up in a fetal position on the bed. He looks as vulnerable as a helpless child.

  From the yard below, in dialogue culled directly from the script for one of those 1930s gangster movies from Warner Brothers with George Raft or Edward G. Robinson, one of the cops yells, “Put down your gun and come down or we’ll come up after you.”

  Joe calls down, “You’re crazy, all of you, crazy,” before appearing at the window with another clichéd line, “Come and get me!”

  The police then launch a barrage of gunfire aimed at the window, hitting Joe in the chest. In death, he falls to the ground below.

  Serling later said, “The kid did my teleplay brilliantly. I can’t imagine anyone playing that particular role better. There was an excitement and intensity about him that he transmitted to the TV public out there.”

  The New York Times wrote, “James Dean’s jittery performance demonstrates how annoying the mannerisms of Method acting can be.” Another reviewer pointed out that Jimmy’s performance “was unduly influenced by the acting of Marlon Brando, including some of his vocal intonations.”

  Another critic labeled Jimmy’s performance as “wonderful, but somewhat spoiled by Serling’s script, which makes us dislike the character from the beginning. Joe is vulnerable, but underneath, he’s also quick tempered, abusive, and a liar. Yet he truly wants redemption. His monologue about nostalgia is beautiful.”

  Harvest

  JIMMY CO-STARS WITH DOROTHY GISH AND ROBERT MONTGOMERY

  Still in November, Jimmy’s favorite director, also his mentor, James Sheldon, hired him once again to star in a teleplay, Harvest, for NBC’s The Johnson Wax Program. A Thanksgiving parable scheduled for broadcast on November 23, it was part of Robert Montgomery Presents and set amid Quakers living on a farm.

  Montgomery had made his film debut in 1929 at the dawn of the Talkies. In time, he would star with such luminaries as Greta Garbo in Inspiration (1930); with Norma Shearer in The Divorcée (also 1930); and in the psychological chiller, Night Must Fall (1937), for which he received an Oscar nomination. A staunch Republican, anticommunist and homophobe, he had been elected president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1935.

  George Cukor, who had worked with Montgomery early in his career, attributed his anti-gay distaste as a “cover-up for his own homosexual liaisons as a young man.” When Cukor knew Montgomery, he claimed he was sexually involved with a handsome, well-muscled stagehand. “Robert was like J. Edgar Hoover,” the director said. “He felt that by attacking gay people, he was throwing suspicion away from himself, and his own checkered past.”

  Privately, Montgomery referred to Jimmy as “that sawed-off little queer punk from Actors Studio where all the boys there, from Monty Clift to Paul Newman, are homos!”

  Sheldon said that “Montgomery made it respectable for bigtime stars to appear on television, which in the beginning was seriously frowned upon by the studios. He introduced many high-class dramas on TV and acted in some of the episodes himself.” Notable guest stars in his series included James Cagney, Claudette Colbert, Grace Kelly, Angela Lansbury, Jack Lemmon, Paul Lukas, Roger Moore, Raymond Massey, Burgess Meredith, Dorothy McGuire, and Constance Bennett.

  Harvest starred the legendary Dorothy Gish, sister of the more famous actress, Lillian Gish. D.W. Griffith had made both of them household names in the early days of silent pictures. Ed Begley was also in the cast, as was Vaughn Taylor, with whom Jimmy had recently worked in the Bells of Cockaigne.

  Washed up as a matinee idol, homophobe Robert Montgomery reconfigured his failing career into that of an (egomaniacal) Master of Ceremonies on TV.

  Lower photo depicts him as a dashing, predatory rake in Night Must Fall (1937).

  The story of Harvest revived Jimmy’s memories of Fairmount, when he had lived with Ortense and Marcus Winslow on their farm. The dialogues, especially the running commentary by Sandra Michael, was a bit preachy, and the soundtrack contained a soulful rendition of a hymn whose lyrics included “Bless the folk who dwell within, Keep them pure and free from sin.”

  For Jimmy, his greatest thrill involved meeting and talking to Dorothy Gish. Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart,” had introduced the Gish Sisters to D.W. Griffith, who had cast them in silent films for Biograph. In time, Dorothy would star in more than 100 short films and features, something with her sister, Lillian.

  “The greatest compliment my sister ever gave me,” Dorothy said to Jimmy, “was to tell me that my performance was almost as good as hers.”

  She also told him that she had married only once, and that was to James Rennie, a marriage that lasted from 1920 to 1935. “I’ll never marry again. The institution is not for me.”

  Two views of Jimmy living among Quakers on a farm in Harvest. Top photo shows Dean with Nancy Sheridan and (lower photo) with Dorothy Gish.

  “You’re preaching to the choir,” he said. “Imagine being tied down to just one person.”

  Ed Begley played Jimmy’s father, Carl Zelenka; Gish his mother, Ellen. Jimmy was their son, Paul. Ed wanted Jimmy to follow in his footsteps as a farmer, but Paul has wanderlust in his eyes.

  Unlike some actors, Begley worked smoothly with Jimmy. A New Englander, he had dropped out of school in the fifth grade and ran away to work in the circus. During World War I, he joined the Navy. He later became a veteran of Broadway shows and a star on radio. By the late 1940s, he was making feature films in Hollywood and, in time, starred in teleplays. By 1962, he would play a crooked southern politician in Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth, starring Paul Newman as the hustler, Chance Wayne, and Geraldine Page as a fading movie star. In its Broadway version, the Chance Wayne character had been castrated by the political boss.

  “Jimmy Dean wasn’t a seasoned actor when I worked with him,” Begley said. “But I had high hopes for the boy, even though he was a bit reckless.”

  In the final part of the drama, Jimmy enlists in the Navy and appears in a sailor suit at a homecoming Thanksgiving dinner. “He looked real cute as a sailor,” Gish claimed. His appearance brought several hundred fan letters from impressionable girls and from many gay men.”

  Taylor’s character of Gramp doesn’t join the family for its Thanksgiving dinner. In the play, he dies before attaining his 100th birthday. He looked the right age on camera,
although he was still in his 40s, having been born in 1910. His “son,” Begley, was born in 1901. Taylor could be made up to look decades older, and he was making a career of playing elderly characters.

  One reviewer wrote, “Country boy James Dean broods, then broods some more, broods in the kitchen, broods at the mailbox, broods on the front porch, and experiences angst, often in silence.”

  The Little Woman

  JIMMY SUCCESSFULLY INTERACTS WITH A SCENE-STEALING CHILD ACTRESS

  Jimmy didn’t make an appearance again in a teleplay until March of 1954 because he had other commitments, such as starring in The Immoralist on Broadway.

  Once again, Andrew McCullough offered him a lead role in The Little Woman, an episode within the popular Danger series on CBS. His co-stars included child actress Lydia Reed and Lee Bergere, who played a cop on his beat.

  In a script by Joe Scully, Jimmy was cast as a counterfeiter on the lam. He hides out with a poverty-stricken little girl (Reed) who lives in a world of her own, a playhouse in a seedy alleyway. Scully, a major writer for television at the time, said he created the character of Augie, the young delinquent, specifically for Jimmy to play.

  McCullough expected trouble from Jimmy, but didn’t find it. “Even though working with a child, he gave one of the most generous performances I’ve ever seen. Not one ounce of ego.”

  “I heard that Dean did not cooperate with other actors,” Bergere said. “But I found him right on the mark, and we got along fine.”

  During World War II, Bergere had supervised the entertainment for American soldiers stationed in North Africa. Before that, He’d been an understudy on Broadway for Danny Kaye. Later, in the 1980s, he became known for his role of Joseph Anders in the hit TV series, Dynasty.

  Reed, in the title role, would later become famous when she starred as Hassie McCoy in 145 episodes (aired between 1957 and 1963) of ABC’s sitcom, The Real McCoy, with veteran actor Walter Brennan, who usually played a hayseed sidekick in westerns.

  Child starlet Lydia Reed, as she appeared on The Real McCoys (1957-1963) a few years after her appearance with Jimmy.

  In 1956, Reed would be cast in High Society, with Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Grace Kelly, a remake of The Philadelphia Story (1940), that had starred Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart.

  In a review of The Little Woman, one critic claimed that “Dean is a brooding, self-involved actor so many times, perhaps too many times, but with Lydia Reed, he shows us that he has a gift for interacting with a child.”

  In its review, Variety wrote: “Child actress Lydia Reed has built herself a dream world in a slum alley—a habitat with all the props and knickknacks—and her best friends are Lee Bergere and James Dean, who gets himself involved as a transmission belt for a couple of traveling burglars and safe-breakers, who were intending to steal plates used for counterfeiting. On the run from police, he is provided shelter by the eight-year-old girl. It wasn’t much of a yarn, but the thesping is good, particularly that of Reed. A neat first try for McCullough, who is bringing the Danger series out of its rut.”

  Run Like a Thief

  WITH KURT KAZNAR IN HOT PURSUIT, JIMMY HANGS OUT WITH SCARLETT O’HARA’S MOTHER

  Involved in other pursuits during the summer of 1954, Jimmy did not appear in another teleplay until that September. Director Jeffrey Hayden cast him as the young protégé of gay actor Kurt Kasznar, a waiter in a hotel. Jimmy becomes disillusioned with Kasznar when he learns he is a thief.

  With a script by Sam Hall, the NBC presentation was telecast on September 5 as part of the Philco TV Playhouse series.

  It was one of Jimmy’s less prestigious teleplays, although it got fairly good reviews. Variety wrote, “This was the first Playhouse under the Gordon Duff production, and it offered proof that prior high standards of the program would be preserved. It has good performers and created a good deal of suspense.”

  Kurt Kasznar, a profligate, unapologetic, amusing but predatory homosexual on the make for Jimmy.

  Director Jeffrey Hayden, a New Yorker, had married Eva Marie Saint in 1952, and he would make a career out of helming episodes within TV series. He would later direct a feature film, The Vintage (1957), which starred Jimmy’s most serious romance, Pier Angeli. Of course, Jimmy wouldn’t be around by the time that film was released.

  As a hotel worker, Kasznar discovers a diamond necklace, which belongs to the owner (Barbara O’Neil) of the establishment. But instead of returning it to its rightful owner, he gives it to his wife (Gusti Huber). When Jimmy learns what he has done, he brands his mentor a thief.

  The Hollywood Reporter claimed, “James Dean as the protégé emerged as a rather unclear figure, even though thesping was beyond reproach. He was the man the script by Sam Hall forgot to explain. The void made a difference.”

  Jimmy was thrilled to meet O’Neil, a fellow Midwesterner from Missouri. In 1939, she had starred in his favorite movie, Gone With the Wind. She had been cast as Ellen O’Hara, Scarlett O’Hara’s prim and respectable mother, even though she was only three years older than her on-screen daughter, Vivien Leigh. Lillian Gish had rejected the role.

  Barbara O’Neil as Ellen O’Hara (right), with Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara, her rebellious daughter, in Gone With the Wind (1939).

  When Jimmy met O’Neil, he was hoping that it would lead to an introduction to the director, Josh Logan, whom O’Neil had divorced in 1942. He asked her to set up a meeting with Logan, but O’Neil said, “We’re not speaking. Our ill-fated union ended long before our divorce. Frankly, my dear, as Rhett Butler might have said, Josh would have preferred a guy like you to a wife like me. I have never remarried, and I like it that way.”

  Jimmy was intrigued by the Viennese actress, Gusit Huber, who had a bit part in the teleplay. Kasznar, a fellow Viennese, told Jimmy that she’d been a Nazi. Josef Goebbels had lured her into making propaganda films for the Nazis, at least in Kasznar’s view. He detested her. In the 1930s, she had refused to work with Jewish actors or directors. “Not that there were many Jews still left in Berlin,” Kasznar said. “Those that were were sent to the ovens.”

  A contrast in types: Kurt Kasznar with James Dean.

  However, at the end of World War II, Huber had married a U.S. Army officer and moved to the United States, where she had tried to conceal her National Socialist background.

  In 1959, she would be cast as the mother of Anne Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank. Many Jews objected to her in the role of the mother of this anti-Nazi heroine, but the director, Garson Kanin, stood by his choice. It would be Huber’s last movie role.

  From the first day, Kasznar turned out to be a problem for Jimmy. “He had his tongue hanging out when I was introduced to him,” Jimmy told Stanley Haggart.

  The New York Times had called the actor “a big, glib, dapper man who spoke with an accent and was almost always cast as some sort of Continental gentleman.” As a soldier, he had fought on the American side during World War II, and was among the first Army photographers to film the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which had been laid to waste by atomic bombs.

  In an attempt to impress Jimmy, Kasznar told him that he’d worked with the celebrated director, Max Reinhardt. “He taught me to act, write, built sets, even how to live.”

  “Kasznar was hot for my tail, and I couldn’t shake him,” Jimmy told Haggart. “He told me that his friend, Rock Hudson, let him give him blow-jobs. ‘Why can’t you, Jimmy?’ he asked me. ‘After all, Rock is a far bigger star than you.’ I finally gave in to him. After about three blow-jobs, his curiosity was satisfied, and he let me alone for the duration, having shacked up with one of the cameramen. Kasznar’s mouth is a suction pump. He told me he once blew twenty guys in one night in a bathhouse on 28th Street.”

  Padlock

  MILDRED DUNNOCK FINDS JIMMY OBNOXIOUS

  In November of 1954, Jimmy returned to CBS to appear in another episode of its Danger series in which he’d starred before, most recently in The L
ittle Woman. This time around, he was in distinguished company, co-starring with Mildred Dunnock and directed by John Frankenheimer. He was already acquainted with Dunnock from his time at the Actors Studio, and she had gone to see him in See the Jaguar.

  A story of suspense, Jimmy was cast in Padlock as a gunman fleeing from the police, a role now familiar to him. He tries to rob an eccentric old lady (Dunnock).

  She recalled working with him. “He came into rehearsal like something that might have been shot out of a cannon. He seemed to have energy enough to walk up a steep wall.”

  Frankenheimer and Jimmy were only a year apart in age. This native of New York City’s Outer Borough of Queens became known for his social dramas and his action/suspense movies, including such future features as The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964).

  He was one of the last remaining directors who insisted on having complete control of his productions, as he would assert in some thirty feature films and more than fifty plays.

  He made it clear from the beginning that he was the director, and that Jimmy should execute a scene according to his specifications. Jimmy would become just one in a long list of stars Frankenheimer would direct: Mickey Rooney, Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Warren Beatty, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, Faye Dunaway, and David Niven.

  [As a footnote to history, in June of 1968, Frankenheimer was the driver of the car that then-Senator Robert F. Kennedy used for transportation to his speaking engagement at what turned out to be the scene of his assassination, the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. En route to the hotel, from behind the wheel, Frankenheimer found the presidential candidate “Jubilant. He was going to beat Eugene McCarthy for the nomination, and he predicted he’d clobber that asshole Nixon. Alas, it was not to be.”]