James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  “Working with Jimmy was a mind-blower,” Davalos recalled years later. “We were so into those roles, me and Jimmy. Without going into too much detail, let me put it this way: It took me two years to get over working with him.”

  ***

  A Canadian actor from Toronto, veteran star Raymond Massey, born in 1896, was known for his stage-trained voice. He’d made his first stage appearance in London in 1922, and his first movie role, in High Treason, in 1927. His greatest Broadway triumph had been in Robert E. Sherwood’s play, Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Later, he repeated his performance in the film adaptation, for which he was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor. He would go on to portray Lincoln again and again, and became so associated with the dead president that a fellow actor once quipped that Massey wouldn’t ever be satisfied with his impersonation of Lincoln until someone assassinated him.

  Filial Anguish: James Dean, playing the less favored son, interacting with his screen father, Raymond Massey, who genuinely detested him.

  Right from the beginning, Jimmy and Massey detested each other with a hatred that might even have surpassed the on-Broadway loathing between Jimmy and Louis Jourdan.

  “Ray couldn’t stand the sight of the kid, dreading every day he had to do a scene with him,” Kazan claimed. “He never knew what Jimmy was going to say or do. He knew only one thing to expect: Whatever Jimmy did would not be in the script.”

  “Our boy was fully aware of how much he was scorned by Ray,” Kazan said. “He was sullen and surly around Ray, not disguising his contempt for the older actor. This was an antagonism I didn’t try to heal. I almost encouraged it. It would make their portrayals of alienated father and son more effective.”

  During an especially bitter exchange, Jimmy yelled at Massey, “Gary Cooper wanted to play my father, but an old fart like you got the job, much to my regret.”

  According to Massey, “Dean approached everything with a chip on his shoulder. The Method had encouraged this truculent spirit. He never knew his lines before he walked onto the set, rarely had command of them when the camera rolled, and even if he had, he was inaudible. He went away alone after a scene was rehearsed. He would disappear and leave the rest of us to cool off in our chairs while he communed with himself somewhere out of sight.”

  In his memoir, A Hundred Different Lives, Massey wrote, “Simple technicalities, such as moving on cue and finding his mark, were beneath Dean’s consideration.”

  Troublemaker: Set in the rough-and-tumble boom years of early 20th-Century California, Jimmy, as Cal, is caught between the Sheriff, as played by Burl Ives (left), and his morally obsessed father, Raymond Massey (right).

  [Coincidentally, Massey went on to become one of the leading contenders for the role of Uncle Bawley in Giant, which meant he would have had to work with Jimmy again. Eventually, however, the part went to Chill Wills.]

  ***

  Jo Van Fleet was a very talented, California-born theater and movie actress. Jimmy met her after she’d won a Tony for her portrayal of the abusive daughter-in-law in the 1953 Broadway adaptation of Horton Foote’s teleplay The Trip to Bountiful. [Its plot revolved around an elderly woman, played in 1953 by Lillian Gish, who lives with a daughter-in-law (Jo Van Fleet) who loathes her, and a weak-willed son who is afraid to defend her.]

  In East of Eden, Jimmy learned that his mother, played by Jo Van Fleet (depicted above), is the owner of a profitable bordello in a neighboring town. He desperately wants to connect with her, but until he virtually forces her to recognize him, she shuns him.

  The role of Jimmy’s prostitute mother in East of Eden was Van Fleet’s first film role. [After finishing it, she’d go on to star in The Rose Tattoo and I’ll Cry Tomorrow, both released in 1955.]

  “I had always been told that Dean was a homosexual,” Van Fleet said. “But I didn’t get that impression. Word reached us that he strayed over to the set of A Star is Born to service Judy Garland. Pier Angeli also showed up almost every day, panting at the mouth.”

  ***

  Burl Ives, also known as a singer and banjo player, was cast in Eden as Sam, the town’s tough, wise, and burly sheriff. Ives would later appear, brilliantly, as Big Daddy in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. In Eden, as a law enforcement agent, Ives is relatively benign. Consoling Jimmy, he gives him information and advice about his mother, who deserted him and his brother so long ago.

  ***

  Cast as a secondary character named Will, Albert Dekker was a veteran actor from Brooklyn. He had previously appeared on Broadway as Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and on the screen in such hits as the mad scientist in the 1940 horror film, Dr. Cyclops. Off screen, he’d entered politics, winning a seat in the California State Assembly, where he served from 1944 to 1946.

  [Dekker, like Jimmy himself, was destined for a violent death. On May 5, 1968, under suspicious circumstances, Dekker was found dead, perhaps murdered, in his Hollywood home. Naked, his body was discovered in a bathtub. A noose had been tightened around his neck and attached, tautly, to a shower curtain rod. He had been blindfolded, his wrists were handcuffed, and a ball gag had been inserted into his mouth. Two hypodermic needles dangled from one arm, and his body had been covered with vulgarities that included the word FUCK scrawled upon his skin with red lipstick. Money and valuable equipment were missing, but there was no sign of forced entry.

  Despite skepticism and widespread protests, the coroner ruled out the possibility of murder, claiming that Dekker’s death had been the accidental aftereffect of autoerotic asphyxiation.]

  Albert Dekker...He’d face a noose in his future.

  ***

  Lois Smith who, like Jimmy, had studied at the Actors Studio, had snagged a small role as one of the “bar slaves” in Jo Van Fleet’s bordello. Her character throws herself at Jimmy when he invades the forbidden premises. She was not the right weight before filming began, and lost many pounds, fast, by eating nothing but raw carrots, lettuce, an occasional slice of bread, and lots of black coffee.

  Kazan had discovered her in New York based on her appearance in the Broadway comedy, Time Out for Ginger (1952). After the release of East of Eden, she was designated by The Film Daily as one of the industry’s top juvenile actresses.

  For a while, she stood a good chance of winning the ingénue role of Lux Benedict II in Jimmy’s later film, Giant (released in 1956, after Jimmy’s death), but the part eventually went to Carroll Baker. Smith did appear years later in Five Easy Pieces (1970) with Jack Nicholson.

  ***

  On the set, Jimmy was frequently late for work, a result of his frequent late-night partying along the Sunset Strip. According to Kazan, “He didn’t accept the fact that movie stars, when they’re working, have to get up early. He started showing up looking like he needed a two-by-four to prop up the bags under his eyes—hardly the image of a California farmboy working the fields. I demanded that he give up the nightlife, get to bed early, and look the god damn part.”

  During the course of filming, Kazan had ordered him not to ride his motorcycle. “Try to understand,” Kazan told him. “If you’re determined to kill yourself as a daredevil on the road, don’t do it during the filming of Eden. Be as reckless as you want, but only after the film is wrapped.”

  As a means of chaperoning and “handling” him, Kazan ordered that Jimmy live in the bungalow he’d been assigned, an area positioned directly adjacent to his own bungalow on the Warners’ lot. Jimmy’s was luxuriously configured as a two-room suite, with its own kitchen and bathroom. It had once been occupied by Bette Davis when she reigned as the Queen of Warner Brothers. It had also been occupied by Errol Flynn, who, when he wasn’t needed on the set, sometimes entertained three young girls there at the same time.

  ***

  On May 15, 1954, Kazan ordered cast and crew, including Jimmy, to transfer to Mendocino, about 150 miles north of San Francisco, for the filming of some outdoor
scenes. For a while, Jimmy lodged at the Little River Inn, but complained that the noise from early-morning trucks kept him awake. Consequently, during the remainder of his time there, he opted to sleep in a railroad car on the film set.

  With a population of only 800 people, Mendocino warmly welcomed the film’s cast and crew. Some of the local women prepared lavish meals for them. In gratitude for their hospitality, when the film was complete, Kazan arranged a special screening of East of Eden for them. Businesses shut down for the day.

  One of the scenes filmed in Mendocino featured Jo Van Fleet, as Kate, at the local bank depositing the previous night’s earnings from her whorehouse. The bank teller suggests that she sure did run a profitable enterprise to be saving so much money. In response, stone-faced, Kate emits a glacial chill.

  After two days in Mendocino, both Davalos and Jimmy came down with severe cases of poison ivy. Kazan had to delay production until their skins healed.

  On June 4, the cast and creed moved south to central California’s town of Salinas. [The home town of John Steinbeck, and known as “the salad bowl of the world,” Salinas was and is the focal point for the production of huge amounts of lettuce, grapes, and vegetables. It was there that the famous scene associated with the failed attempt to freeze and transport lettuce was shot. One of the most memorable moments involved Jimmy dancing through his newly sprouted bean crop. It was not in the script, but Kazan gave him free reign. That creative freedom resulted in a clip that symbolized the epitome of enterprising youth, as represented by Cal.]

  Meanwhile, back in Burbank, set designers Malcolm Bert and James Base had been laboring to re-create the town of Salinas as it looked in 1917. For the carnival scene, a full-scale amusement park was erected, complete with an operable Ferris wheel.

  In one of the most famous scenes in the movie, Harris and Jimmy take a ride on that wheel.

  Kazan instructed Rosenman to craft the kind of musical score for the scene that might have prefaced “the birth of angels.”

  ***

  Pier Angeli visited Jimmy frequently on the set of East of Eden. From his dressing room immediately next door, separated from Jimmy’s with only a thin wall, Kazan could hear them “boffing—that is, when they weren’t arguing, which was most of the time. I hate to admit it, but I was glad when she ran off with Vic Damone. Now I had Jimmy where I wanted him on camera—alone and miserable.”

  “I noticed that with Angeli out of the picture, Rosenman was making long, extended visits to Jimmy’s dressing room. I won’t describe what I heard between those two queers.”

  ***

  After being invited onto the set by Kazan, Marlon Brando, on July 13, paid a visit to the set of East of Eden. His arrival came as a surprise and shock to Jimmy.

  Most of the cast and crew weren’t aware that Brando and Jimmy had become intimately acquainted in New York, and both actors promoted the myth that their paths had never crossed before.

  Arriving late in the morning, Brando stayed around for the night shoot, eventually heading home at around 4AM.

  A famous photo was snapped to document Brando’s visit. Kazan appears dour, but Brando smiles into the camera, as Julie Harris stares adoringly at him. In the frame’s far right stands a bewildered-looking Jimmy.

  Because he’d received reports that Jimmy delivered onscreen performances that imitated his style, Brando wanted to see Jimmy at work.

  “I’m directing him and he’ll probably, based on my guidance, be a big hit,” said Kazan. “The boy does have something. Call it star quality for lack of a better description. My deepest regret is that I’m not directing you in the movie. Come on, fucker, it’s the story of your life. You could play it brilliantly. You’ve lived it. The story of a young man abandoned by his mother—read that Dodie—and starved for the love of a rigid, puritanical bastard of a father—read that Marlon, Sr.”

  When Kazan called a break for lunch, Jimmy invited Brando into his dressing room. There, Brando warned him that by appearing in East of Eden, “You’re courting fame, and nothing is more destructive than being famous. I can’t walk down the street any more but what I’m followed. I can’t go see a movie any more but that a line of girls follow me into the theater. The other day, I went into a deli to order a hot pastrami on rye and a cream soda, and at least five faggots were suddenly behind me, yelling, ‘Marlon, can we have your autograph?’ You know what I did? I pulled down my jeans and mooned them. I told them, ‘Autograph this, boys!” Write ‘Marlon’ on one cheek, and ‘Brando’ on the other.”

  Tennessee Williams, at the time, America's most desirable and sought-after playwright. After Marlon Brando tired of his promises and erratic charm, he turned his attention toward Jimmy.

  Jimmy responded by telling Brando about a recent visit he’d received from Tennessee Williams, who was in town and working on the outline for a new play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “He tried to persuade Kazan to direct the play on Broadway,” Jimmy said. “But after he laid his eyes on me, he didn’t have much time for Kazan. Tennessee told me he originally wanted you for the lead. It’s the story of a repressed homosexual. Think you can handle it?”

  “There’s nothing repressed about me,” Brando said.

  “Perhaps,” Jimmy said enigmatically. “Anyway, I invited Williams into my dressing room. I know he went down on you when you boys were on Cape Cod together. He was already a bit drunk when got here. But I took down my jeans and let him blow me. After that, he offered me the lead role in the Broadway production. I hear Kazan thinks Cat is going to be a major success. Bigger than Streetcar. Out with Brando. In with James Dean. The new boy on the block.”

  If Jimmy were trying to either provoke or anger Brando with that, he didn’t succeed. Brando had already informed Tennessee that he planned to never venture onto a Broadway stage again, especially within the context of one of his plays. “We did it fine the first time, but once was enough for one life.”

  Brando is alleged to have told his best friend, Carlo Fiori, “I took Dean to his dressing room between takes and screwed him royally with my noble tool, just to show him who’s boss, and still number one.”

  Kazan refuted what at the time was a widely prevalent concept that Jimmy, as an actor, was very similar to Brando. “Unlike Dean,” he said, “Brando was a multi-talented person, a sort of stream of experience that could be tapped, then directed to flow as openly as if the actor were stripping himself psychologically and playing out, naked and vulnerable, before the world, the many facets of his personality.”

  “Dean, in contrast, had very little pliability. His vulnerability was hidden behind a facial hurt, one that he played again and again. There was a muted aggression that could give way at any moment to destructiveness.”

  According to Jimmy, “I don’t think people should be subservient to movie idols, and I do not idolize Marlon Brando. Brando! If I imitate him subconsciously, I don’t know about it, and if I do it consciously, I’d be a fool to admit it. I’d like to be a star in my own sense. I mean to be a very consummate actor, to have more difficult roles and to fill them to my satisfaction. But not to star on the basis of gold plating. A real star carries his own illumination and inward brightness.”

  ***

  Kazan interpreted Jimmy’s performance as brilliant, a stunning presence, in the opening scene of East of Eden. He sat on a wooden sidewalk in the faux, studio-built town of Salinas, watching as his mother (Jo Van Fleet) walks by, without recognizing or acknowledging him, on her way to the bank.

  Veiled, and draped in black, Jo Van Fleet was cast in East of Eden as an aging whore. In this scene near the beginning of the film, she walks past her son, as played by James Dean, whom she deserted years ago. She’s also walking into an Oscar win.

  In London’s Sunday Express, Milton Shulman wrote, “Dean has the slouching grace of a tired cat and eyes that stare with the compelling magnetism of a deep and empty cave.”

  On the screen, he appears petulant, with jerky movements, his eyes frightened s
lits in the glare of the California sun. He’s dressed in a babyknit sweater and a pair of white slacks, and looks five years younger than his actual age of twenty-three.

  Later in the film, he hurls a rock at his alienated mother’s whorehouse before he’s chased away by her bouncer.

  Kazan claimed that “Jimmy arrived on the set every day very easily hurt. He was sensitive and bewildered. I worked with him to build up is confidence and then pointed him in the right direction and watched the kid go for the gold. One time, I had to get him loaded on Chianti to get the result I wanted on the screen.”

  “As filming progressed, he became increasingly difficult, not getting along with the cast, except for Harris.” Kazan said. “At times, he was just impossible. He had this damn camera, and he could spend hours taking pictures of himself in the mirror.”

  As the shooting progressed, Jimmy began to show up later and later, and sometimes, even if he had reported on time, he would just disappear and no one could find him.

  On one occasion, after a search, two of Kazan’s grips found him in Judy Garland’s dressing room on another part of Warners’ lot, the one devoted to filming A Star is Born (1954). Coincidentally, the title of her film was the same as the label that the press had begun attributing to Jimmy.

  He’d seduced Garland once before, along with his friend and lover, John Carlyle, who had been given a small role in A Star is Born. The handsome young actor would, years later and despite his gender preference as a gay man, would become Garland’s companion and her sometimes lover.

  Carlyle would later write a memoir about his involvement with the singer.

  Escorted back to the set, Jimmy faced an angry director. “What was I to do?” Jimmy asked Kazan. “Judy wanted a little loving. You don’t turn down the Judy Garland! No way!”