James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  James Dean as a punk, menacing Mildred Dunnock.

  Months before their appearance together in the teleplay, Jimmy had deeply offended Dunnock during his audition for a role in a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida. Dunnock wanted the starring role that had once featured a grande dame of the American theater, Katherine Cornell, who had played alongside Marlon Brando. In the revival Jimmy sought Brando’s former role.

  As a test of his suitability, Dunnock alongside Eric Bentley, the playwright, critic, and author, agreed to meet with Jimmy.

  “He came in like some unkempt street urchin,” she claimed. “He wore some ragged clothing that appeared to have been purchased at some secondhand store on the Lower East Side. He was unshaven, and from the smell of him, he needed a long soak in the bathtub. He read for Eric and me. Unlike Brando, Dean was totally wrong for the part. I thought he was better-suited to playing a gas station attendant rather than a poet. His middle name might have been Byron, as he told us, but he was not Byronic.”

  I’m a Fool (for Jail Bait)

  JIMMY MEETS NATALIE (“SWEET SIXTEEN”) WOOD

  Don Medford had helmed Jimmy in the May (1953) teleplay, The Evil Within for the TV series, Tales of Tomorrow, in which he had co-starred with Rod Steiger. Medford wanted to work with him again, casting him in a very different role as a nineteen-year-old country boy who had left home to become a “swipe” (stable boy) at a racetrack. I’m a Fool was an episode within The General Electric Theater, which aired on November 14, 1954, and was introduced by its host, Ronald Reagan.

  Arnold Schulman had adapted it from a Sherwood Anderson short story. Anderson had become known for inspiring such other writers as John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.

  A blurred depiction of James Dean in I’m a Fool.

  As Jimmy’s co-stars, Medford had cast Eddie Albert and Natalie Wood, who was sixteen at the time. She played a rich girl who was Jimmy’s love interest. She would become his much more famous love interest within a few months, when Nicholas Ray cast her in Rebel Without a Cause.

  Medford recalled the first day of rehearsals when he was driving to its location in a remote section of East Los Angeles. “Suddenly, from out of nowhere, this motorcycle rider was zigzagging dangerously in and out of traffic and recklessly changing lanes on a whim. He practically hit my car. As he did, I looked into the face of this fool. My god, it was Jimmy Dean.”

  “At one point, he threw both hands up in the air and gunned the motor, racing ahead in some sort of no-hands balancing act. He could have been killed that morning, and by afternoon, I’d be looking for another actor. When he got to the rehearsal hall in one piece, I gave him a stern lecture. ‘Do you want to die on the highway?’ I asked him ‘Keep driving like that, and you’ll soon learn you have no tomorrow.’”

  “He just gave me that soon-to-be-famous smile of his and walked away,” Medford said. “He’d already filmed East of Eden at the time. Although it had not been released, the advance notices for him were terrific. He was already being hailed as the new Brando.”

  Wood recalled her first impression of him. “He crawled through an open window into the rehearsal hall instead of using the front door. He looked rather ragged with uncombed hair. His pants were held up by two large safety pins. He was very introspective and didn’t mingle with us that first day.”

  She had heard about him. A few days before, along with a girlfriend, she had tried to meet him at his hangout at Googies in Hollywood. But her mother had come for her and put her in the car to haul her home to bed.

  “On the second day of rehearsals, I was standing outside, coughing on my first attempt to smoke a cigarette, and up roared Jimmy on his motorcycle. I just assumed he was a junior version of Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Jimmy mumbled so you could hardly understand him. He was good looking, but eccentric. During the morning, his mood shifted suddenly, at one point charming, reverting to hostile, all within a period of a minute. It was amazing.”

  “I didn’t think he liked me, but then, he invited me to lunch. I got on the back of his motorcycle for a hysterical and dangerous ride to a local greasy spoon that served god awful food,” she said. “Over a bacon-and-cheese sandwich, he seemed to recognize me.”

  “You were that little girl in Miracle on 34th Street, a child actress.” He looked into her face for confirmation.

  “That was me all right,” she said. “Better a child actress than acting like a child.”

  He laughed and that seemed to bring down the barrier he’d erected around himself. From that luncheon, a friendship blossomed that would turn into a love affair on the set of Rebel Without a Cause.

  She explained that she was trying to make the transition from child actress to roles that called for a young woman. “Shirley Temple didn’t pull it off, but Elizabeth Taylor seems to be managing,” Wood said. “Most child actors, as you probably know, fade into obscurity.”

  He began to learn about her, finding that she was seven years younger than himself, the daughter of Russian immigrants.

  “Even before the release of East of Eden, Jimmy had already achieved some sort of mythical status in Hollywood,” Wood said. “I had never seen anything like it. Without any movie of his being released, he was viewed as a major Hollywood star, right up there with Brando and Monty Clift.”

  At the time that Wood worked with him and became his friend, she recalled that he was already recovering from his failed romance with Pier Angeli, who had unexpectedly wed the singer, Vic Damone. “He told me that Pier’s mother was a control freak, and that she also detested him. She definitely did not want Pier dating him, much less marrying him.”

  “I was not Italian, and I was not Catholic,” Jimmy said. “Both were no-nos in her god damn book of rules.”

  Wood said she had to babysit with Jimmy on many a moody night as he poured out his deep despair. “He was like a lovesick fool in awful shape. I think he really loved Pier—that is, if he ever really loved anyone. I always had my doubts about that.”

  “At any rate, he awakened in me the possibility that I might become a serious actress and not just a movie star,” she said. “Up to that point, I thought being a movie star was what I wanted. I viewed acting like something you take for granted—you know, like being a girl.”

  Ironically, when Wood met Jimmy, she had just completed The Silver Chalice (1954), in which she’d been cast as Helena, a teenage slave girl who grows up to become the character played by Virginia Mayo. Paul Newman made his unhappy screen debut in this color film.

  Natalie Wood as a child actress in Miracle on 34th Street.

  Jimmy told Wood that he’d been offered the Newman role, but had turned it down after reading the script.

  “Paul hated his role, even complaining about his costume,” Wood said. “He said it was a cocktail dress in which he showed off his knobby knees and skinny legs.”

  “I would have looked terrific in that costume,” Jimmy bragged. “My legs have been compared to the male equivalent of Betty Grable’s.”

  Jimmy studied the script of I’m a Fool. Before he left home, his character, named only as “The Boy,” had been told that “clothes make the man.” According to his mother, “Put up a good front and the world is yours.”

  He sets out to prove that is true within a turn-of-the-20th-Century setting, the era of the horse and buggy. With his new suit and brown derby hat, he aspires to be a “swell,” hanging out with an upper class crowd, pretending to be one of them.

  Wood, cast as Lucy, is deceived by his deception that summer, and he falls in love with her. He deceives her with (false) information about owning a large Victorian house and a big stable of racehorses. The plot had cast him as a dreamer fabricating his background while smoking a twenty-five cent stogie.

  Wood and Jimmy performed the dramatic highlight of the teleplay. It took place at a train depot from which she is departing, and he is bidding her farewell. She promises to write to him, but then he realizes that she doesn�
��t know his real name or address. As the train fades into darkness, he cries out, “I’m not Walter,” the fake name he’d given her, along with a false address. Then, as an actor, Jimmy followed the clue that Anderson had written into his original story: He “busted out and cried like a kid.”

  Wood’s biographer, Gavin Lambert, wrote about the poignancy of their goodbye scene. “It was beautifully played by both of them. Dean was already the archetypal troubled outsider of this generation and the constantly inventive actor, and Natalie displayed an emotional depth that so many shallow teenage roles had denied her. The ache of loss and missed connections seemed personally resonant for both of them, as the youthful romantics at once eager and wary, as if they suspect that the world may never be theirs.”

  Biographer Donald Spoto wrote that “Jimmy’s attack on the role was properly callow, his protestations of self-importance more sad than pompous, his affection for the girl rightly pathetic in its doomed, precipitous misjudgment.”

  Eddie Albert claimed that most of the cast, except for Wood, had Broadway experience. “Jimmy’s Method acting was new to us, but he did it with a sense of humor. I liked him, and was pleased when Variety lauded his role as ‘moving and excellent.’”

  Jimmy was fascinated and horrified at the dilemma that Albert was facing in his career. At the time, he was married to the Mexican actress known as “Margo.” She was shunned for her far-left views and for her friends in the American Communist Party. In the early 1950s, her name appeared on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Channels list, which purported to unveil camouflaged Communists in the entertainment industry. These names included Lucille Ball, who had once registered as a communist in the 1930s; playwrights Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and Charlie Chaplin.

  “All of us are living in fear,” Albert told Jimmy. “Some of my friends have lost their jobs. Dalton Trumbo, probably the most brilliant scriptwriter in Hollywood, is having to submit scripts under a pen name. Some great talents have become waiters or garbage collectors.”

  “Just when my career was really starting to take off, I find that some of the major studios don’t want to use me,” Albert said. “I was saved from being completely blackballed as a commie because of my World War II time in Tarawal, where I was viewed as a hero. I was the pilot of a Coast Guard landing craft that rescued almost forty Marines and later saved some thirty other guys, all this while under heavy Jap artillery. My war record has kept me off the blacklist, but damage has been caused.”

  In the same year that Jimmy co-starred with Albert, he was nominated for an Oscar as a Best Supporting Oscar for his role in Roman Holiday (1953) with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. But it wasn’t until his 1960s TV sitcom, Green Acres, with Eva Gabor, that Albert became a household word.

  Producer Mort Abrahams said he never got to know Jimmy, “because he seemed very standoffish. So I let him be. However, I did introduce him to Ronald Reagan, our host. Reagan came onto the set to watch the final rehearsal so he could introduce it when I’m a Fool went on the air.”

  At that time, Reagan’s movie career, more or less, was being assigned to mothballs with a few lackluster films left to him. He’d also married MGM starlet, Nancy Davis, whose MGM career would soon fade into the dustbin of Hollywood history.

  Reagan recalled Jimmy as “being an intelligent young actor, with a tendency to brood. He seemed to live only for his work. He was completely dedicated to his craft. He was a shy person, yet could hold a good conversation on many wide-ranging topics.”

  [After Jimmy’s death, I’m a Fool was re-broadcast, with Reagan again introducing the teleplay, calling it one of the landmarks of Jimmy’s short film career.

  “Those of us who worked with Jimmy Dean carry an image of his intense struggle for a goal beyond himself and curiously enough, that’s the story of the boy he plays tonight.”]

  After I’m a Fool, Jimmy thought he would never work with Reagan again.

  As a surprise to him, he learned that in his next teleplay, he would actually be co-starring with him.

  The Dark, Dark Hour

  ONSCREEN, JAMES DEAN THREATENS TO ASSASSINATE RONALD REAGAN

  Producer Mort Abrahams was not too keen on starring Jimmy again in another episode of General Electric Theater, but its director, Don Medford, who had helmed him in I’m a Fool, wanted to employ him. Abrahams agreed, especially when Ronald Reagan, the host of the series, said he wanted to appear with the budding young actor. “I think he’s going to the top, and you’ll be glad you hired him,” Reagan told his producer.

  With a script by Arthur Steuer as dark as sinister as its title, The Dark, Dark Hour was scheduled to be aired on December 12, 1954. “It was hardly a Christmas show,” Reagan said.

  In fact, it ran into the censors at General Electric. The first version of the script was rejected. “The suits over there thought it portrayed hoodlums in a sympathetic light,” Reagan said. “How wrong they were. What we did was remove some of the controversial dialogue and resubmitted it. This time, it was green-lighted.”

  Its actual filming took place at Republic Studios at 4024 Radford Avenue in North Hollywood. Jimmy was cast once again as a “hepcat hoodlum,” in a familiar juvenile delinquent role that by now was almost a James Dean archetype. His partner in crime was Peewee (Jack Simmons). Reagan played a small-town doctor married to an unsympathetic wife, Constance Ford, who had appeared with Jimmy on Broadway in See the Jaguar.

  Ronald Reagan’s millionaire bosses at General Electric helped shift him from a liberal Democrat to an archly conservative Republican.

  Jimmy insisted that Medford cast Simmons as Peewee, whose character had been wounded in a foiled robbery attempt. The hoodlums break into Reagan’s house as he’s asleep upstairs with Ford. As Jimmy aims a gun at Reagan’s head, he demands that the doctor remove a bullet from Peewee.

  Reagan replies that he has to call the police, and that he is not qualified to perform the surgery that’s required. Jimmy responds that if he doesn’t remove the bullet, he’ll be killed. Before the teleplay’s end, as could be predicted, the doctor overpowers Jimmy as part of an unconvincing climax.

  Although this is a scene from a teleplay, not from real life, the hour was, indeed, dark for the future president’s career as an actor.

  Simmons became one of the most mysterious relationships in Jimmy’s life. Perhaps his all time closest friend, Simmons would be with him during the upcoming filming of Rebel Without a Cause. Medford was not impressed: “By casting Simmons as Peewee, I think I gave him the wrong impression that he was an actor.”

  “Reagan was his usual wooden self,” Medford said, “but Jimmy brought imagination to his role. When the doctor is out of the room, he turns on the radio and pretends to jitterbug with his dying friend. Not only that, but at one point, he taps on the lens of Simmons’ glasses and asks, “Are you home, Peewee?”

  Peewee ultimately dies on Reagan’s makeshift operating table.

  The future president of the United States was host of The General Electric Theater from 1954 to 1962. His acting gig with Jimmy occurred during his first year hosting the series, a job that paid him $125,000 a year.

  Over dinner one night, Reagan told Jimmy that he almost didn’t get the job, and that he was almost desperate, as his bank account was sinking toward zero. “I was the ninth choice. Other actors had already turned it down—Edward Arnold, Kirk Douglas, and Walter Pidgeon, as I recall.”

  Apparently, Jimmy didn’t tell Reagan just how well he knew Pidgeon.

  “I used Robert Montgomery as a role model, and I know you were on his series,” Reagan said. “He was also president of the Screen Actors Guild before me. I was impressed with his own TV anthology series and wanted to follow in his footsteps. Even my former wife [a reference to Jane Wyman] is in negotiations to host her own TV series.”

  “Right from the beginning, General Electric Theater came in number three after I Love Lucy and The Ed Sullivan Show. My job offer came in the nick of time. I’d been reduced
to performing as an emcee at a burlesque show in Vegas. At home, Nancy was manning the vacuum cleaner. But things have turned around for us.”

  “I think Jimmy was experimenting with his part,” Reagan said. “At rehearsals, he would always vary his performance. You never know what he was going to do next. By the time the show was televised, he had arrived at the performance he wanted. As his co-star, I lived in amazement at what I was going to have to respond to. He sure kept me on my toes like a ballet dancer. I’ll tell you one thing about Jimmy: I liked him, but he wasn’t easy to know. I read in Sidney Skolsky’s column that he was undisciplined and irresponsible, but that didn’t reflect the dedication I saw in this young actor.”

  “One of my best friends was Robert Taylor,” Reagan said. “Bob told me that Monty Clift, Brando, and now James Dean would soon be replacing us, a bunch of guys who broke into the movies in the 1930s as leading men. He cited not only ourselves, but added Ty Power, Errol Flynn, and an aging Clark Gable to the list of endangered species.”

  “I was struck by how much Jimmy off camera resembled Jimmy on camera,” Reagan said. “He worked hard, even struggled, to perfect his role and his craft as an actor, and I admired him for that. He rehearsed with the same enthusiasm he brought to his actual performance. Most of us just glided through a rehearsal, saving our juice for the shoot. Not Jimmy. He didn’t hold back his punches, but took every rehearsal like a boxer in the ring, trying to win every round. He seemed to have boundless energy.”