James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  ***

  Jimmy was shopping around for a heroic sports hero to show his versatility. He had agreed to star as Rocky Graziano in the boxing film, Somebody Up There Likes Me, but died before the picture was made. In the aftermath, the role went to Paul Newman.

  ***

  Jimmy also gave serious consideration to starring in Fear Strikes Out, the story of the mentally disturbed baseball player, Jim Piersall, who cracked under the pressure of a domineering father. Piersall was the baseball center fielder who played seventeen seasons in the Major League from 1950 to 1967.

  Tony Perkins, as an emotionally unbalanced baseball player, a role rejected by James Dean, in Fear Strikes Out.

  The movie would deal with the baseball great’s bipolar disorder, not a subject guaranteed to lure 1950s audiences to their local movie houses. In 1957, the role went to Tony Perkins, Jimmy’s rival and sometimes lover, still being billed as “The New James Dean.”

  ***

  After Giant, Jimmy didn’t want to be cast in another Western, although he was vastly intrigued at the thought of playing Billy the Kid, which had been brought to the screen many times, even by Robert Taylor. Instead of some idolized figure from the Old West, Jimmy wanted to play him as a baby-faced, cold-blooded killer.

  At the Château Marmont, Gore Vidal told him that he was working on a very different script. All of his reading about Billy the Kid had convinced him that the bandit was a homosexual.

  Paul Newman in a role offered to but rejected by James Dean, The Left Handed Gun.

  Once again, Jimmy’s death would prevent him from taking a role he truly wanted to play. And once again, the role went to Paul Newman. Word buzzed around Hollywood that Newman was going to “play Gore Vidal’s fag cowboy.”

  Newman seemingly went through very few struggles about playing a subtly gay role. He once said, “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve never been able to understand attacks on the gay community.”

  Even Vidal’s title, The Left Handed Gun, was a code for being gay. [The historical figure of Billy the Kid, born Henry McCarty, also known as William H. Bonney (1859 – 1881), was actually right-handed.]

  Jack Warner objected to Vidal’s script. “When movie-goers hear that Newman is going gay, they’ll stay away from the theaters in droves.”

  Leslie A Stevens III was called in to revise Vidal’s script, turning Billy the Kid from a repressed homosexual into more of a surrogate father-son drama with a Freudian subtext.

  Newman later referred to the revised version, released in 1958, as “The Left Handed Jockstrap.”

  Arthur Penn, a young Turk from TV land, directed the picture. He later claimed that “Paul Method-acted his way through the entire film. At one point, he curls up in a ball on the floor, a scene and acting style that was pure James Dean.”

  Newman confided to Fred Coe, the producer, “I feel Dean could have done a better job than me. That thought is driving me crazy, leading to an extra three beers every night.”

  Edna Ferber Doesn’t Like Texas

  AND THEY DON’T LIKE HER

  Born in 1885 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Edna Ferber was a best-selling novelist and playwright, author of such celebrated works as So Big (1924); Show Boat (1926), Cimarron (1929), and Giant (1952). The daughter of a Hungarian-born Jewish storekeeper, she was a lesbian who never married.

  Edna Ferber with James Dean, unconvincingly made up to resemble an aging Jett Rink. Note his new hairline.

  Ivan Moffat and Fred Guiol were assigned the difficult task of reducing her 447-page novel into a 178-page script, which they completed in April of 1955.

  Before tackling it, they read various comments from critics about her novel. John Barkham in The New York Times noted, “Miss Ferber makes it very clear she doesn’t like the Texas she writes about, and it’s a cinch that when Texans read about what she has written about them, they won’t like her either.”

  Marghanita Laski in the Spectator claimed that “Edna Ferber can always be relied on for a good story interwoven with fascinating information and sound moral judgments on the shortcomings as well as the virtues of her country and its history.”

  Moffat was a British screenwriter and the grandson of the famous Edwardian actor and theatrical producer, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917). [A brilliant actor long associated with London’s Haymarket Theatre, and an influential visionary in the entertainment industry of his day, he arranged some of the first filmed versions of segments of Shakespearean plays.]

  As such, Moffat was an odd choice as author of a screenplay about Texas. He’d met George Stevens in World War II during his filming of the activities of the U.S. Army in Europe. After the war, Moffat followed Stevens to Hollywood, assisting him at Paramount.

  There, he became known for his high-profile affairs, notably with Elizabeth Taylor and later with Lady Caroline Blackwood. His gay friend, author Christopher Isherwood, said, “He’s so pretty and bright-eyed, it’s no wonder he’s in bed with some woman every night.”

  Another odd choice to adapt Ferber to the screen was Guiol, who had worked at the Hal Roach Studios for several years and was known for directing many of the Laurel and Hardy movies. Although a sort of “odd couple” writing team, Moffat and Guiol would be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay of 1955.

  Although many films had already been adapted from novels by Edna Ferber, the first time she actually visited a movie set was in Marfa, Texas.

  She arrived there in time to see Elizabeth emoting in front of the camera. She later interpreted that day’s depiction of Leslie as “simpering.” When the completed film was finally released, she did not approve of her, but kept quiet, because her contract called for her to share in the profits.

  During Ferber’s second day on the set, she met Jimmy. In a memoir, A Kind of Magic, she wrote: “He was an original. Impish, compelling, magnetic, utterly winning one moment, obnoxious the next. Definitely gifted, frequently maddening.”

  She sized him up, telling him, “Your profile is startlingly like that of John Barrymore, but then, I know your motorcycle racing or one thing or another will fix that.”

  Before she flew out of Texas, Jimmy took a picture of her. Days before he died, he was working on a sculpture of her back at his studio in Hollywood.

  ***

  Just an hour after completing his post-recording of Rebel Without a Cause, Jimmy, in early June of 1955, was aboard a train headed to Marfa in the high desert of the Trans-Pecos of West Texas. Founded in the early 1880s as a waterstop, the bleak little outpost was located between the Davis mountain range and Big Bend National Park.

  The Benedict Mansion, a studio prop, under construction on the Evans Ranch in Marfa.

  What he found when he got there was a drought-stricken town where daytime temperatures sometimes rose to 120° F. It was a three-hour drive from El Paso, and some sixty miles north of the Mexican border.

  The cast and crew of Giant had swelled the population of Marfa to 3,000. Many locals rented their homes to them and camped out in tents during the filming.

  On Main Street stood one hotel and two movie houses, each showing Mexican films. Technicians had produced the façade of a three-story Victorian mansion, the abode of the Benedicts. It had been built in Burbank and shipped east to Texas. Since Marfa lies in a part of West Texas without oil wells, Warners had to erect derricks that gushed ersatz crude.

  George Stevens set about creating harmony in the town by employing some 200 locals, thereby easing tensions between the town and its invaders. The local newspaper, The Big Sentinel, had denounced Ferber’s novel, defining it as “superficial and derogatory to Texans.”

  For the big barbecue scene, Stevens invited a lot of Texas millionaires to participate, winning their support, since they wanted to see themselves in the film, not realizing that it was mocking and satirizing them.

  One of the cast members, crusty Chill Wills, knew Marfa well, having made a film there in 1950 called High Lonesome, in which he co-starred
with John Drew Barrymore.

  During the course of Giant’s 198 minutes, it moves through the rise and failing fortunes of Texans, with side detours into moral dissipation, racism, miscegenation, the oppression of women, oil well conflicts, and the changing social scenario of Texas itself. The movie’s subplot involves the war between the longtime Texas aristocracy and the nouveau riche wildcatters whose oil wells have “come in big.”

  For Elizabeth, after suffering through all those “rubbish” movies at MGM, Giant became a milestone in her life. Other than being saddled with a husband she didn’t want, her biggest problem involved having to postpone her flourishing romance with Kevin McClory, a production assistant to Mike Todd, who would become her next husband.

  “I’ll Never Work With the Cocky Little Bastard Ever Again”

  —Director George Stevens, in reference to James Dean

  Ever since he’d seen A Place in the Sun (1951), with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, Jimmy had nothing but praise for Stevens, its director. Before heading for Texas, he told the press: “George Stevens is the greatest director of them all, even better than Elia Kazan. He was born to make movies. Hollywood can, on occasion, make a great movie. I have a feeling that Giant will be up there with the best of them.”

  [Alas, after the first week of working with Stevens, he would have a radically different opinion.]

  “Stevens is so real, so unassuming,” Jimmy went on. “You’ll be talking to him, thinking he missed your point and then—bang!—he has it.”

  For the first two weeks of shooting, the location was in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Bick (Rock Hudson) meets and falls in love with his future bride, Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor). Jimmy stayed behind in Texas, working with Bob Hinkle, his dialogue coach. Hinkle was also teaching him rope tricks.

  In just two weeks, Jimmy seemed to have mastered the Texas drawl and its “lock-hipped swagger of a wrangler.” On weekends, he and Hinkle headed for the enveloping desert to shoot jack rabbits and coyotes.

  Pat Hinkle taught Jimmy how to walk and talk, Texan style.

  Nicknamed “Texas Bob,” Hinkle had grown up in Brownsville, Texas, at the state’s southernmost tip. “We were so poor, we could afford only a tumbleweed for a pet,” Hinkle claimed. Early stints in show business had included gigs as a rodeo rider and a diction coach. During the course of the shooting, he trained not only Jimmy, but Rock Hudson in the subtleties of portraying a “Texan.”

  For some fifty years, Hinkle remained active in show business as a diction coach, a director, a friend of movie stars, and occasionally, a film producer. In 1963, Paul Newman asked him “to do for me what you did for Dean in Giant.” At the time, Newman was preparing for his award-winning role in Hud, co-starring with Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas.

  After his return from filming the Maryland (as shot in Virginia) segments of Giant, Stevens learned that Jimmy had slipped away and had competed in a racecar rally in Bakersfield, California. In that race, Jack Drummond, a thirty-year-old ace driver, had been killed.

  Horrified at the implications of that, Stevens demanded that Jimmy “Give up car racing until this picture is wrapped. Then you can kill your fool self.”

  “I don’t have a death wish,” Jimmy protested. “I’m not risking my life, since I have too much to live for. There are too many things I want to do in this one life.”

  Before Giant, Stevens had worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year (1942); with Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in Talk of the Town (also 1942); and Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur in Shane (1953).

  Stevens was well acquainted with Elizabeth, having directed her in 1951’s A Place in the Sun, but he’d never helmed Hudson or Jimmy. He found Hudson relatively compliant, “always on the mark, always knowing his dialogue, and carrying out my instructions perfectly.”

  In contrast, he found his working relationship with Jimmy much more difficult, defining it as a “rapport of challenge.”

  Stevens was a perfectionist, demanding that a small scene be reshot sometimes as many as fifty times. Several times, Jimmy shouted back at him, “I got the god damn thing right on the first take.”

  [Weeks later, when Stevens was editing the final version, he realized that he’d shot 25,000 feet of film, and used only 7,500 feet of it, ultimately producing a movie with a running time of 198 minutes.

  In a memo to Jack Warner, Stevens complained about Jimmy, citing his “tardiness, his unmanageableness, his soaring resistance to reasonable demands, differing from what I have in mind, and his depleting the morale of the entire company. My impression is that is a George Stevens Production, not a James Dean Production.”

  In protest, Jimmy said, “I can’t get my ideas of Jett Rink over to Stevens. I know Jett better than Stevens does. He just won’t listen to me. He’s trying to keep me from making a truly great picture instead of a mediocre Western.”

  “The cocky little bastard accuses me of interfering with his work,” Stevens claimed. “I accuse him of jeopardizing my movie. I’m the son of a bitch running this show, not some snot-nosed cocksucker from Indiana who takes it up the ass.”

  Eartha Kitt remembered desperate phone calls from Marfa during the wee hours of the morning. “Jamie sounded like he was going out of his mind. He felt that Stevens was sacrificing his character and devoting all his attention to Rock Hudson or to Elizabeth Taylor, who had star billing over him.”

  “He told me that Giant was too big in an artificial way,” Stevens said. “He wanted his interpretation as an old man to be quite different from what it was turning out to be.”

  It would have been interesting to view an aging Jett Rink the way Jimmy wanted to play him. As it turned out, his interpretation of Jett Rink as a drunken senior citizen was his weakest characterization, eliciting the harshest criticism.

  During another call, Jimmy complained to Eartha about Hudson. “How can I create a character working with someone so plastic? I feel nothing from him. I also have no support from Elizabeth in her later incarnation as she’s maturing. They are not maturing with me. They are the same from beginning to end; only their hair has been grayed. You can’t be an old person by aging your face with makeup and by putting some gray stripes in your hair. You have to imagine old. You have to become old.”

  ***

  After the first two weeks of filming, Stevens said, “Dean never understands that Jett Rink is only part of the film, not the central figure. In his first two movies, he was the primary focus. But I have two other stars: Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor.”

  When Stevens attacked Jimmy’s performance in front of cast and crew, the actor became very sullen, addressing the director as “Fatso.” He also began to show up late, once going an entire day without making an appearance and holding up production which, of course, ran up costs for Warners.

  Reflecting later on the turmoil he suffered from Jimmy, Stevens said, “All in all, it was a headache to work with him. He was always pulling and hauling, and he had developed this cultivated, designed irresponsibility. It’s tough on you, he seemed to imply, but I’ve got to do it my way. From the director’s point of view, this is not the most delightful sort of fellow to work with. Anyway, he delivered his performance, and he cracked himself up, and I can’t say I’m happy about all that’s happening about that. There are some people involved in it who don’t show up well.”

  [When Stevens saw the final cut of Giant, he said, “I made the right decision in casting Dean, the little bastard, as Jett Rink. But he’ll never appear in another picture that I’ll direct.]

  “Rock Hudson Is Giving Me a Sore Ass”

  —James Dean

  Because of the severe housing shortage in Marfa, only a few members of the cast were granted the privilege of living alone, privately and without roommates, in a house of their own. The best of the rented homes went to Elizabeth Taylor. Her husband, Michael Wilding, remained, for the most part, in California with their childr
en.

  Jimmy was assigned lodgings in a rented house that he shared with Rock Hudson and Chill Wills. Wills had his own bedroom, and Hudson and Jimmy would sleep in a small room with twin beds. The building’s only bathroom was shared by all three of them.

  When Jimmy arrived there, he introduced himself to Wills, who invited him for a beer in the kitchen. He wasn’t familiar with the career of this actor and set out to learn what he could.

  The folksy, shaggy-haired actor had gotten his start singing in medicine and minstrel shows before abandoning them and heading to Hollywood.

  Soon, he was appearing as a sidekick cowboy in Westerns or else as a backwoods rustic equivalent to the role he’d been assigned in The Yearling (1946) with Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman. That same year, he appeared as a roughshod but good-natured “diamond in the rough” with Judy Garland in The Harvey Girls.

  Chill Wills in 1953. He was the roommate of Rock Hudson and James Dean in shared quarters in Marfa, Texas. “I heard a lot...a hell of a lot.” Later, he took Jimmy and Dennis Hopper “on a jaybird naked cruise off the coast of Catalina.”

  [He would go on to become the voice of Francis, the Talking Mule, in that series of pictures starring Donald O’Connor. Our favorite? Francis Joins the WACs (1954).]

  In his raspy, homespun voice, Wills enthralled Jimmy with tales of growing up in Texas, the effect of which deepened his understanding of the character he was playing.

  As they talked, Jimmy felt he was getting close to understanding the mentality of a dyed-in-the-wool Texan. Wills had been born in Seagoville (now a suburb of Dallas) in the hot summer of 1903. His views had never changed from those learned growing up. As Jimmy later said, “I liked him for some strange reason, but he was to the right of Joseph Goebbels, hating what he called ‘niggers, Mexicans, Hollywood Jews, and Indians.’”