James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  “Listen, junior,” she said, icily. “I’ve been around a long time, and you’re new. Don’t tell me how to do it. Let me make my own mistakes.”

  Despite their early confrontation, the two actors bonded, and soon he was referring to her as “Mom.”

  Prior to his casting as Jimmy’s henpecked screen father, Jim Backus, beginning in 1949, had been known mainly as the voice of the cartoon character, “Mr. Magoo.” Later, he was indelibly association with his characterization of a wealthy, out-of-his-depth eccentric, Thurston Howell III, on the widely syndicated TV sitcom, Gilligan’s Island (1964-1967)

  He was astonished to see Jimmy directing the picture. “Never in the history of motion pictures had an inexperienced 24-year-old become, in essence, a co-director, especially with one as established as Nicholas Ray. He gave Jimmy full reign.”

  Cast against type, character actor Jim Backus appeared with James Dean in one of the most iconic scenes of Rebel Without a Cause.

  As the cameras rolled, Jimmy shocked Backus by accelerating their confrontation, unannounced and unrehearsed, into a fistfight, as Ann Doran (Jimmy’s film mother), looks on.

  Judy’s parents were to be played by William Hopper and Rochelle Hudson. Hopper had appeared in more than 80 feature films during the 1930s and 1940s, although he’d obtained his greatest fame as Paul Drake to Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason in a TV series (1957-1966). Although married, Hopper pursed a closeted homosexual lifestyle. Stanley Haggart, Jimmy’s friend, had known Hopper back in the 1930s.

  “Bill appeared in more than ten films with Ronald Reagan,” Haggart said. “He had a big crush on Reagan, but apparently, he never scored, even though they shared a bedroom together on location. He got to see Reagan in the nude—and that’s about it.”

  Blinkered, naive, uncomprehending 1950s-era domestic hell: William Hopper and Rochelle Hudson, portraying Judy’s parents.

  “Alas,” Hopper said. “Ronnie was saving it for Lana Turner or Susan Hayward.”

  In Rebel, Rochelle Hudson was hired to portray Natalie Wood’s mother. A star in the 1930s, she’d begun making pictures when she was sixteen as an attractive ingénue. She’d already appeared in such films as She Done Him Wrong (1933) with Mae West and Cary Grant, and she had starred as Claudette Colbert’s daughter in Imitation of Life (1934). Jimmy knew nothing of her movie career, but wanted to hear about her espionage work for Naval intelligence when she was stationed in Central America during World War II.

  For Hudson, a woman who’d starred in major movies, her role in Rebel wasn’t much. One reviewer noted, “She is nothing but a cardboard cutout of a 1950s sitcom mom.”

  As juvenile delinquents, Ray rounded up a cast that included Corey Allen, Beverly Long, Frank Mazzola, Steffi Sidney, Jack Simmons, and Dennis Hopper.

  For a while, Steffi Sidney held out the hope that she might be cast as Judy. However, Ray decided instead to give her the lesser role of Millie, one of the “gang molls.” Steffi was the daughter of the famous Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, who had written extensively about Jimmy. His “office” was Schwab’s Drugstore, where Jimmy often hung out.

  According to Steffi, “My character always carried a hairbrush with her, and I was a very insecure girl who desperately wanted to belong to the gang.”

  Some of the other cast members resented her, charging nepotism, claiming that Steffi got the part only because of her influential father. The same charge was leveled against William Hopper, son of Hedda Hopper, who was cast as Natalie’s angry father.

  Steffi was disappointed with Rebel’s final cut. “My scenes were eliminated. I was left with one line and a sneeze.”

  She said that the first time she saw Jimmy, which was during a wardrobe test, “He came up to me, and he just swaggered, and then he hit me real hard. I thought, ‘Why in hell did he do that to me?’ The next time he wandered over, I said, ‘What, you’re not going to hit me again?’ He said, ‘No, no, my name is Jimmy Dean.’”

  MORE THAN A BROMANCE:

  Dennis Hopper

  Of all the gang members, only Dennis Hopper was being groomed for stardom at Warners. “I tried to get to know Jimmy. I started by saying ‘hello.’ No answer. He wouldn’t talk to people on the set. He would go into his dressing room. He would be into himself, into his thing. He’d lock himself away.”

  “Finally, about halfway through filming, during a break in the nighttime filming of ‘the chickie run’ scene, I grabbed him and threw him into the car. I said, ‘Look, I want to be an actor, too, and I wanna know what you’re doing, what your secret is.”

  Dennis wrote those words in James Dean: The First American Teenager. After that night, the ice was broken, and they became intimate friends.

  Peter Winkler, who wrote a biography of Dennis Hopper (depicted above), said, “It is difficult to overstate the importance of James Dean’s influence and the impact it had on Hopper’s life. He once spoke of Dean as if recalling the love of his life.”

  Cast as “Goon,” Dennis was four years younger than Jimmy and looked even younger. Like Jimmy, he had grown up in the Middle West, in his case, Kansas. He told Jimmy, “When I was a kid, I used to get off sniffing gasoline from my grandfather’s truck.”

  “There will never be another man like Dean,” Dennis said after his friend died. “In a strange way, I had a closer friendship with him than most men have with each other. It wasn’t the kind of friendship where you say, ‘Let’s go out and tear up the town.’ Sometimes, we’d just have a quiet dinner together and share our darkest secrets. Also, Jimmy and I were into peyote and grass before anybody else caught on.”

  “I was with him almost every day for the last eight months of his life,” Hopper claimed. “I was haunted by his death, which had been the greatest emotional shock of my life. When he died, I felt cheated. I had my dreams tied up with him. His death blew my mind.”

  When pressed about whether his relationship with Jimmy turned sexual, he said, “What in the fuck do you think? How much do I have to spell it out? Do you want a blow-by-blow description?”

  Movie historian David Thomson wrote, “Dennis Hopper was an ardent young man fatally unlucky to cross the path of James Dean—in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. He believed he was the heir to something. He knew he wanted to act, and he believed that rebellion was some proof of his artistic integrity. Much of Hollywood found Hopper a pain in the ass, strident, staring, and monotonous.”

  ***

  Corey Allen was cast as the gang’s leader, “Buzz,” who tangles with Jimmy in an ego-driven conflict that ends in a knife fight.

  He claimed, “I was twenty, inexperienced, and I had a very high kind of voice. I felt unmasculine. I was awed to be working with Jimmy after seeing him in East of Eden. When I met him, we got off on a bad start. I came up to him where he was sitting, surrounded by a bunch of kids fawning over him. I told him I was going to be his adversary in Rebel. Without looking up, he said, ‘Yeah, hi.’ And then he turned back to chatting with those adoring kids.”

  Three years younger than Jimmy, Allen bore an amazing resemblance to a young Marlon Brando. “On the second day, when Jimmy talked to me and looked at me, I felt that instead of indifference, he was really turned on by me. He felt I looked like either Brando’s son or else his younger brother. He brought that up time and time again.”

  James Dean with Corey Allen: “Gay directors were known for ‘auditioning’ young actors on the casting couch. But in the case of Jimmy, he auditioned me.”

  Ray warned Allen not to get carried away and to try to imitate Jimmy’s style.

  To that, Allen responded, “Jimmy was like a kind of black hole, with magnetism so great that nothing can go in the other direction.”

  Ray recruited a real, “from the streets” gang leader, Frank Mazzola, to play “Crunch,” a member of the gang in Rebel. As a child, he had worked on the Bogie film, Casablanca. At Hollywood High, he’d led the Athenians, the most infamous gang in the city.

  “Our major a
ctivity was strolling the streets at night, trying to pick a fight with some punk,” he said. “We were real tough guys, football players, boxers. One time, I punched this guy and threw him out of a second-story window. He survived, with a few broken bones.”

  “I played the right-hand man to Buzz, the leader of the pack, but I should have been the Big Cheese.”

  Mazzola got to know Jimmy and even took him shopping to show him how a contemporary teenager dressed. “Jimmy was allowed to attend secret meetings of the Athenians. Sometimes he’d spar with me, but mostly we just hung out. He was a good basketball player.”

  Beverly Long had been in the Pepsi Cola commercial that’s acknowledged today as Jimmy’s first appearance on TV, and was said to have dated him for a while.

  Long was cast as Helen, a tough, pony-tailed blonde bimbo.

  “You never knew what Jimmy’s attitude would be,” she said. “In the morning, he might speak to you, then again, he might not. He could look right through you like you didn’t exist.”

  “I was easy prey for his off-color jokes. One time, in one scene, while he was repairing a slit tire that Buzz had slashed, Dean handed me the tire iron. ‘Ever felt a thing so hard in your life?’ he asked me. He could twist and turn anything into an off-color joke.”

  Dennis said, “Jimmy captured the moment of youth, that moment where we’re desperately trying to find ourselves.”

  Mineo went a step farther: “Jimmy started the youth movement.”

  “Me Tarzan, You Jimmy”

  —Johnny Weissmuller

  Two weeks before actual shooting began on Rebel, Jimmy mysteriously disappeared. There were rumors that he’d been kidnapped by a gang of gay bikers, and that they were repeatedly sodomizing him at some remote desert outpost.

  Jack Warner phoned Jimmy’s West Coast agent, Dick Clayton, threatening him. “If that bastard kid doesn’t show up in the next forty-eight hours, I’m firing him from the picture and replacing him with Robert Wagner, if he’s available. If he’s not, then maybe John Kerr.”

  Thinking he might not return, Ray considered recasting Dennis Hopper as Jim Stark.

  “It would have been my first big break,” Dennis reflected, years later. “Alas, it was not meant to be. Thank god that Easy Rider later came along.”

  Jimmy’s mystery trip out of Hollywood may have had something to do with a casual chat he’d had with Stewart Stern, who was still revising the script. He wanted to signal to the world that Plato was gay, but not in any obvious way that would incite censors to cut it.

  He came up with the idea of Plato opening his locker at school. Inside their own lockers, the other boys often attached publicity photographs of their favorite pinup queens.

  “I wanted Plato to post a really handsome picture of his favorite hunk of beef. That will show viewers what turns him on.”

  Jimmy said that during his teenage years in Indiana, he had decorated the walls of his bedroom with pictures of screen Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller.

  “Why don’t you call him?” Stern asked.

  “Maybe he wouldn’t even talk to me,” Jimmy replied.

  “Wise up, kid,” Stern said. “You’re now a god damn movie star. One of the privileges of being a hot-shot star is that you can get to meet almost anyone you want. As I said, ring him up. I bet he’d meet with you any time you wanted.”

  “Maybe I’ll just do that,” Jimmy said. “See if the real thing lives up to my schoolboy crush.”

  Jimmy’s friend, Stanley Haggart, who had sometimes granted him access to one of his apartments in New York, and also to his guest cottage in Laurel Canyon for his sexual trysts, knew what Jimmy was up to.

  According to Haggart, “Just out of the blue, Jimmy, in New York, phoned and asked if he could come by with a friend. I told him that would be fine. When he showed up with this mysterious friend, I was shocked. It was the film industry’s most famous Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller. If Jimmy was known for anything, it was for his ‘odd couple’ matings.”

  “He later explained that as a kid, he had long fantasized about Tarzan in his loincloth.”

  “I understand that,” Haggart said. “I collected pictures of John Gilbert.” He welcomed both of them, and even fed them a late night supper with champagne.

  Jimmy claimed that he’d met his screen idol at his favorite restaurant, the Villa Capri. The owner had given the Austria-born former athlete permission to let out his ear-splitting jungle yell any time he came in for dinner. Weissmuller would thump his chest and bellow that maniacal yell.

  “I tried to imitate that yell as a kid,” Jimmy said. “But it never came out right.”

  As it turned out, Weissmuller was an amusing guest, not at all as inarticulate as Tarzan.

  “Jimmy and I discovered we have something in common,” he said. “We’ve both fucked Joan Crawford and Tallulah Bankhead. Tallulah once told me, ‘Dahling! You are the kind of man a woman like me must shanghai and keep under lock and key until both of us are entirely spent. Prepare for a leave of at least ten days.’”

  Weissmuller went on to relay other amusing stories based on his early days in Hollywood, some of them were spent traveling on promotional tours for the Tarzan series.

  “In Texas, during World War II, I was at a bond rally. I was auctioned off, presumably to deliver the Tarzan yell in private. The highest bidder was willing to pay $50,000. Some sources say only $5,000. But it was $50,000 big ones. A rich Texas oilman was the highest bidder.”

  Weissmuller with Frances Gifford in Tarzan Triumphs (RKO-1943).

  “He invited me for dinner in his hotel suite, and I went,” Weissmuller said. “When I got there, a lobster and Texas steak dinner, with lots of champagne, was sent up.”

  “After dinner, my host told me, ‘I don’t give a damn about that Tarzan yell. I’m not going to pay that kind of money for some yell. I brought you up here to find out what’s under that loincloth. Incidentally, you’ll soon find out that I’m the best cocksucker in Texas.’”

  “In case Johnny doesn’t show it tonight,” a drunken Jimmy said, “It’s ten inches, but the final inch is pure foreskin.”

  “When I first arrived on the MGM lot,” Weissmuller said, “I was sent for a costume fitting. This fucking sissy handed me a feathery-looking G-string and asked me if I knew how to climb a tree. He tried to fit this damn G-string on me. No way. I demanded a heavy duty jock strap.”

  “Johnny wasn’t what I was expecting,” Haggart said, later. “He was the last actor in Hollywood I thought Jimmy would hang out with. Most of Johnny’s references were far more sophisticated that that ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’ crap.”

  “As an art director on TV, I often had to fit stars into their outfits when the budget didn’t allow for a wardrobe master (or mistress). Johnny spotted some old fashion magazines in my living room. Before he left, that night, he asked me if he could take some of my old editions of Vogue. I agreed, of course.”

  “He surprised me by telling me that Vogue was one of his favorite magazines. He also thanked me for my lavish dinner, telling me with meals like that, he was going to have to come up with new devices to cover his expanding waistline.”

  “Johnny wasn’t the Tarzan that both Jimmy and I had once fantasized about from back in the late 1930s and ‘40s,” Haggart said. “After all, he was born in 1904 and was older than I was. Even so, he was still the hot stud that no one in a gay bar would turn down.”

  Vogue magazine had a most unlikely reader, the super macho Austrian athlete and screen Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, depicted above, reading the magazine.

  [Johnny Weissmuller lived until 1984. His last screen appearance was in Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976).]

  ***

  In Los Angeles, Stewart Stern picked up his phone at about two o’clock in the morning. Jimmy was on the other end of the line, calling from New York, where he’d stashed himself away, without permission, from Rebel, its director, and its scheduling.

  Stern warned him that i
f he didn’t fly back to Los Angeles at once, Warner was going to replace him with another actor. “You’ll be suspended. Without pay. Your career will be ruined.”

  “I want to come back, but I’m frightened,” Jimmy said. He sounded drugged. “I don’t think I can play Jim Stark—and I don’t trust Nicholas Ray as a director.

  Stern entreated him to return. “Jimmy, we’re ready to begin shooting. I’ve tried to fashion all my rewrites around Jim Stark, based on you. You can do it. You haven’t seen the final script. It’s Jimmy Dean! God damn it, you can play yourself, can’t you?”

  Two days later, at around midnight, Jimmy showed up on Ray’s doorstep at the Château Marmont. “He just walked in,” the director said, “and had absolutely no excuse for his running away. He wanted to spend the weekend in bed with me, making love until I forgave him. The kid got his wish.”

  Jimmy Rages

  THROUGH SOME OF THE MOST ICONIC FILM SEQUENCES IN THE HISTORY OF CINEMA

  At last, after almost a decade of delays, Rebel Without a Cause was set to go before the cameras. All sorts of problems had already been resolved, including censorship by Warners, casting problems, even Jimmy’s mysterious disappearance.

  Ray wanted a very dramatic opening, and both he and Jimmy worked together to create something unusual, even stunning, to launch their movie.

  As the title and opening credits of Rebel Without a Cause are flashed across the screen, a drunken Jim Stark lies on the sidewalk intoxicated, whimsically playing with a toy monkey. The scene might not have worked, but Jimmy made it memorable. The toy monkey was his idea.

  Within a week of shooting in black and white, Jack Warner halted the production after reading the acclaim that Jimmy’s performance had generated for East of Eden. “We’ve got a star on our hands,” he told Ray. “There’s big box office here. We’re going to shoot the damn picture in color.”