Consequently, costume designer Moss Mabry scrambled to redesign Jimmy’s wardrobe, replacing Jim Stark’s original black leather jacket with a red nylon windbreaker. It became one of the most enduring costumes in film history, rivaled—among male stars, at least—by Charlie Chaplin’s bowler and Humphrey Bogart’s trenchcoat.
[Mabry dressed not only Jimmy and the other stars of Rebel, but would go on to design Elizabeth Taylor’s outfits in Giant, for which he received an Oscar nomination in 1956.]
During the filming of Rebel, Jimmy’s reputation from East of Eden grew rapidly, as did his fan base. Letters poured in from across America, including bags of mail from gay men. Many other handsome, well-built male stars, including Rock Hudson, also received gay fan letters, but none with the volume of what was sent to Jimmy.
As regards Jimmy’s friends, journalist George Scullin noted some changes: “He collected a group of sycophants who performed what gaucheries they could think of—party crashing, drunken binges, drug excesses, and offending for the sake of offending. What a pack of bastards!”
Early in Rebel, three troubled teenagers, as portrayed by Jimmy, Natalie, and Sal Mineo meet, at random and for unrelated transgressions at the local police station.
[In that scene, a drunken Jim Stark slams his fist into the side of a desk with a force greater than what the script had called for. When the scene was over, Jimmy was rushed to the hospital, since Ray feared he’d broken some bones. As it turned out, he was only badly bruised. “Too much Method acting,” Ray told him.]
Plato (Mineo), a mentally disturbed youth, had been hauled into the station for killing a litter of puppies for reasons he cannot explain. Judy was there for having violated some unexplained curfew.
Later, all three encounter each other again on the first day of school. As the camera focuses on Plato, an object of derision and ridicule by his peers, Mineo opens his locker to reveal a handsome publicity photo of his movie idol, Alan Ladd. Based on this cinematic clue, whereas gays across America immediately recognized Plato as one of their own, straight audiences of that day hardly took notice of the signal being (discreetly) projected.
In Manhattan, years later, Jay Garon, a notoriously well-known literary and film rights agent, proposed that Mineo write a memoir, for which Mineo would receive an advance of $40,000. Garon designated his client, Darwin Porter, co-author of this book, as its ghost writer.
According to Mineo, as relayed to Porter, “Late one night, after Rebel was released, I got a call from Alan Ladd.” Mineo said. “He sounded drunk.
“Thanks, kid,” he said, “for using my picture as your dreamboat in that locker scene in Rebel. I need all the publicity I can get.”
“They wanted me to use Burt Lancaster, but I went for you,” Mineo said. “My all-time favorite.”
“As a reward, I’d like any fantasy you might have to come true tonight. I’m home alone if you care to drop in.”
“Did you accept the invitation?” Porter asked.
Alan Ladd...Plato’s “dreamboat.”
“What do you think?” Mineo replied. “I’ll tell you this much. Alan was not short all over.”
[Since the early 1940s, Hollywood insiders knew that Alan Ladd led a secret bisexual lifestyle.]
Mineo’s autobiography collapsed when he refused to out himself as a homosexual. Without that revelation, no publisher wanted a “vanilla view” of his life.
“I just couldn’t break all those female hearts, who sent me all those adoring letters in the 1950s,” Mineo said. “The money would sure have been nice, though.”
***
“The repressive censorship of films, originating in the 1930s, was on life support when Rebel Without a Cause was made,” Ray said. “But it would have been an even more powerful film if the original script had been used.”
He was referring to the underlying homosexual context of the dynamic between Plato and Jim Stark. “Homosexuality was still the love that dared no speak its name on the screen. And Judy was supposed to be a teenaged trollop. But we gave in to the demands of the censor, much to my regret.”
“Jimmy wanted to do other, more daring scenes that were not in the script. In one episode, he wanted to be shown lying in bed on his belly, with his naked ass showing. Of course, in a few years to come, such a scene would be considered typical, but not in 1955. European films had already broken through most of these taboos, but Hollywood was slow to catch on.”
“I watched Jimmy and Sal fall in love right on camera,” Ray recalled. “Jimmy even issued a director’s cue to Sal, telling him, ‘Pretend you want to run your fingers through my hair, but you’re too shy. Make believe you want to throw yourself in my arms and kiss me passionately. I want Nick to film us kissing and see what the blue noses say about that. They’re all mother fuckers anyway. Art should not be censored. Neither should love. It’s all right for films to depict men brutally killing each other. But to love a man? That’s out!”
So spoke James Dean.
Rebel, in addition to same-sex attraction, contained very oblique references to yet another theme of forbidden love too—incest.
Stern’s script called for William Hopper and Natalie’s characters to suggest an undercurrent of incest. An early version had called for her to sit on his lap, as she’d done for years in her capacity as his adolescent daughter. Without getting embarrassingly graphic, Stern had hoped to portray Hopper becoming sexually aroused, with the understanding that when he ultimately rejected her, it would be as a punishment for his own sexual feelings toward her.
In a pivotal scene that made the final cut, when Judy repeatedly tries to kiss her father, Hopper, with barely concealed fury, rebuffs her, saying “You’re getting too old for that kind of stuff, kiddo.” In reaction, she kisses him anyway, receiving a vicious slap in response. As her mother passively (and naïvely) observes this dynamic, Judy, sobbing, storms out of the house.
***
Based on the rave reviews being generated for East of Eden, Jimmy felt entitled to direct the other actors. Consequently, he instructed Dennis Hopper, “Don’t act like you’re smoking a cigarette. Smoke it! When you know there’s something more that should go into a character, and you’re not sure what it is, you just have to go after it! Walk on a tightrope!”
Jim Backus, in his own words, was Jimmy’s “henpecked father in an apron, mentally flabby and shillyshally.”
“He was a self-deprecating weakling of a man whose wife had long ago cut off his balls,” he claimed.
“I wish my character had been rewritten. I felt that, like my Mr. Magoo, Mr. Stark was also a cartoon character, not three-dimensional at all. I struggled to do the best I could, but the fault was with the script.”
“Actually, I never knew it would become such a legendary picture,” Backus said. “We started out to make a sort of Ozzie and Harriet sitcom with venom until Dean suddenly became an overnight sensation on our hands.”
***
Rebel’s soon-to-be-famous knife fight (Jim Stark vs. Buzz) was shot at the Griffith Planetarium, high in the hills above the Hollywood Bowl. With Jimmy and Corey Allen, Ray attempted to film the scene eight times, but none of them looked realistic. Finally, the two young actors got it right, although at one point, Allen’s switchblade slashed the skin of Jimmy’s throat. Although it was a surface wound, the cut drew blood.
Genuinely alarmed, and in his capacity as the film’s director, Ray yelled “cut” and frantically summoned the on-site nurse.
Bleeding from the throat, Jimmy denounced Ray for halting the action. “Just when we were getting real, you fucked it up, you bastard!”
When Method acting gets out of hand: the knife fight in Rebel.
The cast had rarely, if ever, heard an actor address his director like that.
The nurse bandaged Jimmy, and he didn’t need to go to the hospital. After that, Ray instructed Rod Amate, a young stuntman, to double for Jimmy during the scene’s final moments, with the understanding that his face would
not be visible.
Amate would also double for Jimmy in his souped-up ’46 Ford for the “chickie run” scene.
Days before the knife fight scene, Jimmy and Allen had each been carefully coached and rehearsed by “Mushy” Callahan, a former welterweight boxing champion, and a former street fighter.
***
Rebel’s most hair-raising scene involved the infamous “chickie run.” As a means of flaunting their nerves of steel (or their “yellow bellies,” depending on the outcome) Buzz confronts and challenges Jim Stark to a deadly and motorized game of “chicken.” Each of them agrees to race (stolen) cars to the edge of a cliff. The “coward” will be defined as the one who loses his nerve and jumps out first.
Allen was one of the longest-lived members of Rebel’s cast, surviving many of film’s other actors by decades, until his death in 2010. It took him years to be able to discuss the events that transpired between Jimmy and himself.
“He was practically directing the picture himself,” Allen said in his last interview. “Late one afternoon, he asked me if I’d ride off with him for the weekend. I didn’t want to, so I turned him down. He almost begged me to change my mind, and I finally gave in to him. I didn’t want to antagonize him. He invited me to this rental home he had, which looked like a hunting lodge.”
“I’d heard stories that he was gay, so I suspected what was coming. I was straight, and I felt that all I had to do was let him blow me. But after some weed and a few drinks, he made his request very explicit: ‘I want you to ride me like you’re Brando’s son,’ Jimmy said. ‘Really fuck the hell out of me.’ Believe it or not, I actually enjoyed it. Very tight. Great sex, I stayed all weekend, and he did things to me like no gal ever did. I don’t want to get specific, but there are some things a whore might do, but in most cases, not a girlfriend.”
“Before the end of the weekend, he told me what he really wanted from me as an actor during the final moments of the chickie run. He wanted me to convey that under different circumstances, instead of enemies, we might have been lovers. I understood that, and I tried my best to convey that on the night we shot the scene.”
“The character I played turned to him and said, ‘You know something? I like you.’”
“Why do we do this?” Jim Stark asks.
Allen, as Buzz, answers, “We gotta do something, don’t we?”
“It was a tender moment between the two men, one of whom will careen in his car off the cliff, crashing to a fiery death onto the rocky beach below. “I get my jacket caught, and can’t escape from my car in time. Those were my final words to Jim Stark. My character has only moments to live.”
When Jimmy jumps from his car before it plunges over the cliff, he was supposed to land on a mattress, with the understanding that as a prop and safety device, it would not be shown on camera. He ordered the prop man to take it away. “Okay, kid,” the man said. “It’s okay with me if you want to bust your nuts. But it’s the same mattress Errol Flynn used to land on out of camera range in one of his swashbuckling movies. It came from Warner’s prop department.”
“I said to move the god damn thing!” Jimmy ordered.
Allen later said, “That scene became iconic. It was a classic, the underlying question of each generation. ‘Here we are. What do we do?’”
After Buzz disappeared over the cliff and burst into flames on the beach, Judy (almost unbelievably and perhaps opportunistically) shifts the focus of her love away from the deceased gang leader and onto Jim Stark.
Another classic scene occurred after the death of Buzz, when Jimmy returns home to confront his parents, as played by Doran and Backus. He wants to go to the police and tell them the whole story.
Years after Jimmy’s death Doran, with a sense of admiration for his raw, intuitive talent as an actor, noted how Jimmy prepared for one of his scenes: “He’d drop to the floor in a fetal position for the longest time, chin and knees together, but still on his feet. He’d get as close to the floor as he could without lying on it. Finally came this weak little whistle from him, and he stood up, ready to do the scene, which he’d do in a single take.”
A big scene between Backus and Jimmy, with his mother looking on, occurs at the foot of a staircase. “A boy—a kid—was killed tonight!” Jim cries. He wants to report the incident to the police, but Mrs. Stark aggressively opposes that. “A foolish decision like that could wreck your whole life!”
In response, Jimmy pleads with his father: “Dad, stand up for me!”
At that point, Jimmy broke from the script and devised the action on his own. Backus wasn’t prepared for what happened next: Jimmy leaped at him like a wild animal released from its cage. He grabbed the beefy actor by his lapels and dragged him down the stairs and across the living room. The violence continued at a whirlwind pace as he threw Backus onto a chair, which fell over backward. Jimmy than wrapped his hands around Backus’ throat in a choke hold.
“He choked me until I thought I was a goner,” Backus said.
Doran, as Mrs. Stark, screamed, “You’re killing him! Do you want to kill your own father?”
The screenplay’s author, Stern, said, “I didn’t mean for the scene to be that violent. In my script, I expressed my own feelings about my own father. I wanted him wiped out, but I also wanted him saved.”
As one critic wrote, “In that dramatic scene, James Dean channels a young generation’s frustration and emotional claustrophobia.”
***
Near the end of the film, a decaying mansion became the setting for the most evocative scene in the movie. It involved Jim Stark, Judy, and Plato in a kind of love triangle, with Jimmy as the object of the others’ affections. It laid the groundwork for the film’s tragic ending.
The “love triangle” in Rebel was filmed within the decaying mansion, just before its demolition, which had been the setting for many of the scenes within Sunset Blvd.
In the photo above, Gloria Swanson, playing the demented movie star, Norma Desmond, delivers her most memorable closeup.
It was Stern who came up with the idea of renting it. Located at the intersection of Wilshire and Crenshaw Boulevards, and owned by J. Paul Getty, one of the era’s richest oilmen, it was slated for demolition. Its cinematic fame had derived from its setting as the home of the demented movie queen, Norma Desmond, as portrayed by Gloria Swanson, in Sunset Blvd. (1950).
Desperately, Stern and Ray tried to contact the oil magnate so that they could film there. They finally reached him, and he agreed, charging them only $250 a day. “I bet that’s what he pays for a lobster cocktail,” Ray said.
Dating from the flapper age of the mid-1920s, the mansion, with its Mediterranean-style porticoes, pool, balustrades, and gardens, had been built by William O. Jenkins, the sugar magnate. Its swimming pool was especially famous, thanks to the fact that in Sunset Blvd., William Holden’s body had fallen into it after the abandoned egomaniac (Norma) fatally shot him.
It had been dubbed “The Phantom House,” because for many years, no one had lived there.
After Getty granted his approval for the building’s use as Ray’s film set, the director said, “I’m ready to film our Walpurgis Night.”
[In Germanic folklore, Walpurgisnacht, the night of April 30th (May Day’s eve), is when witches congregate on the Brocken mountain in north-central Germany, and conduct sexual revels with their gods in anticipation of the arrival of Spring.]
Walpurgisnacht
“ALL THOSE KIDS IN REBEL WERE SLEEPING WITH EACH OTHER.
GENDER DIDN’T MATTER—AND NICK RAY WAS SEXUALLY INVOLVED WITH MOST OF THEM”
—Ann Doran
Celebrity psychic John Cohan was a friend and confidant of Hollywood stars for decades, including such luminaries as Elizabeth Taylor. In 2008, he shared some of those celebrity secrets in a memoir, Catch a Falling Star.
Cohan was privy to many of the behind-the-scenes dramas associated with the lives of Jimmy’s two co-stars, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. Cohan also beca
me close to Nick Adams.
Adams would later reveal that he had “an insatiable lust” for Jimmy and, later, for Elvis Presley, who befriended him after Jimmy died.
Natalie said that when she came together again with Jimmy in 1955, after having made a teleplay with him the year before, “I was older and more grown up, and I knew a lot more about sex than I did when we first met.”
“I liked talking to him more than to anybody else I knew. My whole life seemed to change completely when he walked in. I was in incredible awe of him. I also thought he was the sexiest boy I’d ever met. Of course, I said the same thing about this guy named Robert Wagner.”
One afternoon, Jimmy told Natalie that in the real world, each of them lived a variation of the alienation that was represented by the characters they were playing, Jim Stark and Judy.
Columnist Hedda Hopper wrote: During the making of Rebel Without a Cause, Natalie Wood fell hard for James Dean.”
Even though he stole scenes from her, Natalie claimed that, “Working with Jimmy is pulsating, as he generates a theatrical electricity. Anyone playing with him can’t help but feel his tempo and drive. Even if he doesn’t have a line to speak, I feel he’s talking to me. I can tell by the way he looks, the movement of his hands, the slight motion of his facial muscles. I’ve never felt so excited with an actor as I do with him.”
“It’s great working with her,” Jimmy said. “Gone are the pigtails. No more bobbysox. She has pep, real vitality, and all the attributes of a powerful performer. I’m sure that in her future, she’ll play such roles as a whore.”
In reference to what happened over the course of the next few weeks, author Gore Vidal—who, like Ray, was living at the Château Marmont at the time—made several very clear assertions in his memoir, Palimpsest. “Nick Ray was openly having an affair with the adolescent Sal Mineo while the sallow James Dean skulked in and out, unrecognizable behind thick glasses that distorted myopic eyes. Ray would soon be embroiled in a different affair with a sixteen-year-old girl, Natalie Wood herself. He was forty-three at the time.”
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