James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  It was rumored that Donahue’s motivation for hooking up with Kardell was entirely based on the fact that she’d once been “Jimmy’s girl.”

  Donahue and Kardell never married. One night, she was rushed to the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, suffering from a severe beating. When she recovered, she sued Donahue for $60,000 for assault and battery. The case was settled out of court.]

  Actors Eager to Fill the Shoes of

  JAMES DEAN

  In the wake of the death of James Dean, studios both in the United States and Europe would market some emerging actor as “The New James Dean.”

  Of all the inheritors of the throne, Christopher Jones, who for a while was married to Susan Strasberg, came the closest to physically resembling Jimmy, based on his blonde hair and slender yet strapping physicality. He reigned briefly in the 1960s as the reincarnation of Jimmy.

  For a while, the extraordinarily handsome Maxwell Caulfield, who once appeared frontally nude in a play in New York, was also promoted as another James Dean. Caulfield’s well-muscled physique elicited more praise than his acting in any film he made. He was truly a rebel without a good movie role.

  In West Germany, the bisexual Horst Buchholz was hailed as the next James Dean. He was known for his brooding intensity, his tousled hair, and his sexy appeal. He wasn’t really Jimmy, although he did wrap his car around a tree one day. Unlike Jimmy, he survived.

  Maxwell Caulfield...Perhaps the body of a Greek god was not enough.

  For a period in the 60s, Alain Delon was sometimes marketed as “The James Dean of France.” He rose to stardom in Purple Noon (1960), a Franco-Italian production based on Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.

  In the immediate aftermath of Jimmy’s death in 1955, the executives at Paramount decided that Tony Perkins, Jimmy’s sometimes lover, should be defined as their reincarnation of James Dean. Alert to the public hysteria that followed in the wake of Jimmy’s death, the studio wanted someone to pick up his mantle. Tony seemed their best candidate.

  Along with many others, Paul Newman was taken aback by the false claims that Tony Perkins was making about the closeness of his relationship with Jimmy. He even asserted to reporters from fan magazines that he and Jimmy had roomed together in his apartment on Sunset Plaza Drive, which was not true.

  Alain Delon...The French had their own James Dean.

  Jack Simmons, who had actually been Jimmy’s roommate, was very resentful. “No one can replace Jimmy Dean,” he said. “Certainly not Tony Perkins. Jimmy was all internal and driven, while Perkins is sort of mechanical, physically plotted, and contrived. There is no comparison to Jimmy, except in Perkins’ own head.”

  Photoplay magazine disagreed: “We need an actor to fill the shoes of James Dean. Tony Perkins is an ideal candidate to fill those shoes. He does offbeat things like Dean and makes good copy.”

  Tony Perkins, as he appeared in Psycho.

  Ultimately, it wasn’t Perkins, but Newman who moved in to take over roles that had been slated and conceived for Jimmy. The first of the lot was a boxing picture, Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), the cinematic saga of Rocky Graziano.

  Newman complained to Rod Steiger, “Whereas Perkins is courting it, I’m having this new James Dean image thrust upon me. I’m the unwilling actor taking over his roles both in the movies and on TV. When will the newspapers stop making these stupid comparisons between Jimmy and me?”

  “When the next Paul Newman comes along,” the veteran actor told him, cynically.

  In Somebody Up There Likes Me, Newman found himself co-starring with two of Jimmy’s former lovers, each of them of different genders—Sal Mineo and Pier Angeli. Newman himself had already been sexually intimate with Pier during their work together in The Silver Chalice.

  When they came together on the set, she said to him, “We both loved Jimmy, and now we’ve lost him. Fortunately, I have Vic Damone, and you have Joanne Woodward.”

  Both of them found it ironic that in The Silver Chalice, Newman was a Jew playing an Italian-American, and she, a bona fide Italian, was playing his Jewish girlfriend.

  When Newman had first encountered her, she was suffering from a broken ankle, the result of a fall in the stairwell of her home. Until she recovered, he sometimes carried her between her dressing room and lunch in the studio commissary.

  After he’d done that two days in a row, he lingered for a few hours after their return to her dressing room, since neither of them was due that afternoon on the set.

  When an assistant came to summon Pier to the set, he found Newman in his jockey shorts with Pier, together in the shower.

  “The first day Newman met Sal Mineo on the set, the young man was still mourning the loss of his friend. Mineo had been cast in Somebody as Graziano’s friend, Romolo.

  Fourteen years older than the Bronx-born Sicilian-American, Newman congratulated him on his Oscar nomination for Rebel Without a Cause. “I thought you and Dean were terrific,” he said. “I’m sorry he’s gone.”

  “Not as sorry as I am,” Mineo said, appearing on the verge of tears. “I noticed you work out every day. I’d like to join you”

  Getting sudsy with Sal Mineo.

  Aware of Mineo’s gender preference, Newman warned him, “Okay, but working out is all we’re going to do. I don’t intend to replace Dean in your life.”

  At the gym, the two men worked out for more than 90 minutes before Mineo joined Newman in the shower. “You can look, but don’t touch!”

  “I promise.”

  As Mineo later confessed, “I didn’t keep my promise. As Paul was showering, before he knew what was happening, he found me on my knees. He told me to leave him alone, but I didn’t. Finally, he said, ‘Go for it, kid. I’m too far gone to stop you.’”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

  “YOU’RE TEARING ME APART!” JIMMY SCREAMS, IGNITING THE ANGST OF TEENAGERS EVERYWHERE

  Live Fast, Die Young and Violently

  THE JINXED CURSE OF REBEL:

  NICK ADAMS, SAL MINEO, & NATALIE WOOD

  “Who’s Sleeping with Jimmy Tonight?”

  Long before he met Jimmy, director Nicholas Ray had filmed They Live by Night (1949), co-starring Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, a film noir story of teenage lovers fleeing from the law.

  Rebel’s 1949 predecessor–noir, with a focus on juvenile delinquents, with direction by Nick Ray and starring bobbysox heartthrob Farley Granger.

  Since then, he had wanted to create another “youth-in-angst” saga. Originally entitled The Blind Run, it was later renamed Rebel Without a Cause.

  In the late 1940s, he’d screen tested Marlon Brando for the role, but never got a green light to film a script inspired by a case study researched and written by Dr. Robert Lindner, Rebel Without A Cause: The Hypnoanalysis Of A Criminal Psychopath. It had been researched during his stint as a staff psychiatrist at the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisberg, Pennsylvania. Warners had acquired the film rights to Lindner’s book back in 1943, but the property just languished on the shelf until it was reactivated in 1954, an era when juvenile delinquency was making headlines across the country.

  Ray had just filmed what became one of the most notorious westerns of all time, Johnny Guitar (1954), co-starring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge. “I fucked Crawford and got to suck off Scott Brady, who is very well hung,” Ray later told Jimmy Dean shortly after they met. “I got to see Sterling Hayden, a Viking god, in the nude, and what a whopper, but he made it clear to me he was off limits.”

  Nicholas Ray’s film project had impressively scholastic origins: written by the resident psychiatriast at a Federal penitentiary, it was subtitled, The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychpath.

  When James Dean was cast into the male lead, his enemies and detractors made note of the original title.

  Ray went through two distinguished writers, Leon Uris and Irving Shulman, rejecting each of their scripts.

  Ray finally hired Stewa
rt Stern, the cousin of Jimmy’s lover, Arthur Loew, Jr. He’d written the script for Pier Angeli’s debut film, Teresa (1951). In Stern’s version of the script, seventeen-year-old Jim Stark is the new kid on the block, arriving at Dawson High, where he is immediately menaced by a tough gang.

  “We get going with a bang,” Ray said. “Stark gets into trouble with the cops, the girl next door snubs him, and a young homosexual develops a crush on him.”

  It was a screening in New York of East of Eden that had convinced Ray that Jimmy would make the ideal Jim Stark. He immediately got in touch with Jimmy’s New York agent, Jane Deacy, and a meeting was scheduled.

  The two men bonded almost from the first. Although Jimmy had already turned twenty-four, Ray thought he looked young enough to pass for a teenager.

  “Jim Stark and Jimmy shared one thing in common,” Ray said. “Both of them wanted to belong, yet feared belonging. Dean understood the character, and Stark’s conflict of violent eagerness and mistrust, the intensity of his desires, his fear, all of which could make him at times arrogant and egocentric. I felt Dean could capture the character behind all this and depict Stark’s desperate vulnerability.”

  Ray spent two weeks in New York with Jimmy, concluding that he encapsulated many of Jim Stark’s characteristics, as laid out in the script. “He was both the boy and the man, the gay and the straight, the tender and the violent.”

  Ray told Elia Kazan, “I lived for a while with Jimmy in that little apartment of his, cluttered with books and other junk, including a matador’s cape on the wall. We went to a lot of movies. We got drunk a lot. Jimmy let me fuck him…a lot. He was better than my former wife, that whore, Gloria Grahame.”

  “Actually, I needed Dean to help me flesh in Stark’s character and bring him to life on the screen. The script had not been fully developed. I wanted Dean to probe his own experiences in life and apply them when needed.”

  As Ray told Kazan, who had helmed Jimmy in East of Eden, “You know I walk on both sides of the sidewalk. I not only screwed Jimmy in New York, and I plan to take director’s privilege and keep plugging him as long as we’re making Rebel. I’m looking forward to it.”

  “I’d rather fuck Marilyn Monroe, which I do,” Kazan said.

  After returning to Los Angeles, Jimmy hit some of the rougher streets, hanging out with alienated young men and often with their “gang molls,” as he called their girlfriends. “They wore leather jackets and roamed the streets at night, looking for a faggot to beat up. Not all of them were poor. Some were from rich families. Boy, those guys scared me. One night, I got gang raped by three guys. But I’m not going to go into that.” [He made this revelation to Ray, who had already flown back to Hollywood.]

  Jimmy signed on to the film shortly before Christmas of 1954. At the time, he had serious reservations about it, interpreting it as a Grade B movie typical of the type being cranked out by producer Roger Corman.

  Originally, Stern had told Jimmy that he envisioned Rebel “as a modern version of Peter Pan, three troubled kids inventing a world of their own. I want to say something about the nature of loneliness.”

  “I set for myself a big goal,” Stern said. “Within a period of only twenty-four hours, I wanted to tell the story of a young generation coming into maturity.”

  Stern later said, “It was obvious to me that Jimmy did not want to play the role I wrote. He wanted to play himself.”

  Before shooting began, Ray asked Jimmy about his draft status. “I was rejected for bad eyes, flat feet, and butt plugging.”

  For his work on the film, Jimmy would receive only $12,500.

  [That compared with 20th Century Fox giving Marilyn Monroe $15,000 for her co-starring role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).

  [The James Dean Foundation takes in $6 million annually, including licensing agreements for such products as jogging suits, T-shirts, pillowcases, and sunglasses. In Japan, a customer can buy a life-size mannequin of Dean to take to bed for whatever pleasure one desires.]

  ***

  Author Gore Vidal was living at the Château Marmont with his longtime companion, Howard Austen. His friend, Paul Newman, had turned him onto the place. Grace Kelly occupied one of its bungalows, as did Nicholas Ray. One Sunday, Vidal met Ray by the pool, where he introduced himself, thinking that perhaps he might buy one of the film scripts he was writing at the time.

  Nicholas Ray in 1961. Gore Vidal described him as “a silver haired, chain-smoking auteur cursed with a romantic nature and a taste for vice.”

  Within thirty minutes, Vidal and Ray argued, Vidal maintaining that the scriptwriter was more vital to the film than its director. Ray responded with, “If it’s all in the script, why film it?”

  Despite their disagreement, Ray invited Vidal to a party that he was hosting later in his bungalow. He told Vidal that he was casting a film called The Blind Run about juvenile delinquents and starring James Dean.

  “I’ve seen Dean before,” Vidal said. “At the Actors Studio. He’s always hanging around sucking up to Tennessee Williams, hoping he’ll write another great part like he did for Brando.”

  Vidal attended the party with every intention of “putting the make on Dean.” But it didn’t work out that way. “I found him arrogant and insulting to me. What a prick he was. We hated each other on sight.”

  Vidal later described his negative impression of Dean to Ray: “The first thing he said to me was, ‘I never heard of you.’ He knew damn well who I was. I should have told him, ‘I never heard of you, either, punk.’”

  “Since you and Dean didn’t hit it off, I’ll introduce you to Dennis Hopper,” Ray said. “He’s just getting started as an actor. And he’s available—that is, if you’re not a size queen.”

  Searching for Judy

  ITS OUTCOME WAS DECIDED ON RAY’S CASTING COUCH

  After Jimmy’s casting as the male lead was finalized, Ray set about hiring the rest of the ensemble. The film’s other most important role was that of Judy.

  As a juvenile delinquent, she comes from a cold home and perhaps is in love with her father, who can’t stand for her to kiss him. Her character yearns for a utopian family that includes Jim and herself as central figures.

  Jimmy’s friend, Lew Bracker, left the impression in a memoir that starlet Lori Nelson had not made a favorable impression on Jimmy when they dated briefly. Actually, Jimmy may have been more impressed with her than Bracker thought. He recommended that Ray consider Lori for the role of Judy. His recommendation was backed up by an onslaught of letters from the Lori Nelson Fan Club, pleading with Ray to cast their favorite star as Judy.

  For a very brief period, Ray considered Margaret O’Brien, the former child actress of the 1940s, for the role. As a child, she had enthralled audiences of the World War II era, eventually replacing the fast- maturing (and increasingly syrupy) Shirley Temple as America’s favorite pre-adolescent.

  Margaret O’Brien as Tootie...adorable, but not right for the portrayal of a teenage trollop.

  After MGM let her go after she turned twelve, she complained to the press, “The public can’t accept me with a bosom.”

  Jimmy had seen her in only one film. When she was seven, she had played Judy Garland’s sister, Tootie, in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).

  When Ray auditioned Margaret, he asked her what she thought of her parents. “I love them,” she answered. That was not the response he wanted. “Judy is alienated from her parents,” Ray said.

  Jimmy told him, “I can’t emote with Little Tootie. Instead of Margaret, why not Shirley Temple?” he asked sarcastically. “Seriously, perhaps you’ll consider Carroll Baker.”

  Unconvincing as Juvenile Delinquents: Debbie Reynolds with Carleton Carpenter singing and dancing “Aba-Dabba Honeymoon”

  Margaret O’Brien was out the door.

  Jimmy pursued Baker, whom he knew from the Actors Studio. When she was contemplating a role in Giant, he approached her. “I’m going to do another film before Giant. The script is cra
p, but the characters are good. I think you’d be perfect in the female lead of Judy. The director, Nick Ray, is a good guy. I’ll take you to him, I bet his tongue is hanging out at the prospect of getting you. I’ve already pitched you for the lead.”

  Baker, however, was also rejected by Ray.

  Ray told Jimmy that MGM “is trying to push Debbie Reynolds onto me. I guess they don’t have anything for her to do. If it’s a musical, she’d have been perfect.”

  “I’ve met her,” Jimmy said. “She’s the least likely juvenile delinquent in Hollywood. Maybe you could recycle ‘Abba-Daba Honeymoon.’”

  [Relentlessly cheerful, and written and first recorded in 1914, “Aba-Daba Honeymoon” became a nationwide hit in 1950 when it was reprised in Two Weeks with Love (1950) as a song-and-soft shoe dance by Debbie Reynolds, Carleton Carpenter, and a banjo-strumming ensemble of Edwardian-era singers and dancers.]

  Jayne Mansfield

  JIMMY VS. THE “RELENTLESSLY PINK ”

  WORKING MAN’S MARILYN MONROE

  The next candidate for the role of Judy was Jayne Mansfield, whose widely publicized superstructure famously measured 40”-24”-36”.

  Jimmy said, “As Judy, she would be ‘busting’ out all over.”

  The studio was pushing Jayne onto Ray, who defined the idea of casting her as “the most outlandish suggestion of the decade.”

  Actually, Mansfield as Judy was not as outlandish as, in retrospect, it appears. Rebel had originally been conceived as a cheap and fast-produced black-and-white juvenile delinquent film of the genre so popular in the 1950s. Some of those featured Jayne’s major rival at the time, Mamie Van Doren, whose quickie genre flicks later included Untamed Youth (1957)