James Dean

 

Since his tragic early death in 1955, James Dean has remained the iconic teenager of American cinema. He embodied the image of the angry, angst-ridden young man and the role that he played with such intensity in Rebel Without a Cause focussed on many aspects of his real life, such as his conflicts with his father. Dean was, of course, very attractive to women, but what was less well known at the time of his fame was that he was almost certainly bisexual. The moral climate of the time made it very difficult for Dean to be honest about his sexuality; and the problems were compounded by the fact that he also seemed very unsure of his sexual orientation. Thus, throughout his years as a star, studio heads in Hollywood were always worried that a scandal would break, and did their best to keep the homoerotic elements of his movies under strict control.

Since his death, however, a number of biographies about his life have been written by people he came into contact with, and it seems clear that he was to some degree bisexual. Some have alleged that Dean dispensed his sexual favours so as to advance his career and that he was, therefore, only homosexual ‘for trade reasons’. Others, including one of his former lovers, have described him as being attracted to both men and women, and as a person who, in many ways, did not fit in with the conventions of the restrictive society he lived in.

 

Sexual favours

 

Dean was born on 8 February 1931. His father Winton and mother Mildren lived in Marion, Indiana, before moving to Santa Monica, California. When he was nine years old, his mother died of cancer, which was a major emotional trauma for the young boy. Dean had been very close to his mother and had got on with her a great deal better than he did with his father. In fact, she was later described as being the only person who could understand him, and it seems that throughout his life Dean, in all his adult relationships with women, was constantly trying to reproduce that sense of understanding, but he was never able to succeed.

After his mother’s death, young James was sent to live with his aunt Ortense and uncle Marcus, Quakers who lived on a farm in Indiana. During his high school years, he made friends with a Methodist pastor, Dr James DeWeerd, and became very close to him. Academically, Dean did not do particularly well at school, but he did excel at sports. When he finished high school, he moved back to California to live with his father, who by this time had remarried, and began to study law, but then changed course and transferred to drama lessons. This move resulted in tremendous conflict with his father, so much so that the two eventually became estranged.

However, despite the opposition from his father, it soon became clear that Dean had made the right choice. He seemed to have a natural ability for acting and worked hard on the technical aspects of his new career. Before long, he had dropped out of college to work as a professional actor. To begin with he struggled, gaining only small parts on advertisements and had to earn his living by working as a car park attendant at CBS studios. It was during this time that he allegedly began to exchange sexual favours in exchange for work opportunities in Hollywood, and sometimes so as to have a place to sleep at night. Accounts as to what exactly happened vary; some say that Dean used to boast that he had had sex with five of the major (male) Hollywood stars; others that he was working as a street hustler during this poverty-stricken period of his life. Another commentator, Ron Martinetti, describes Dean as having a homosexual relationship with a radio advertising director, Rogers Brackett, whom he had met while working at the car park. It was allegedly Martinetti who was to help Dean break out of the cycle of failure that he was trapped in.

 

Stardom beckons

 

Whatever the truth of these stories, one thing was clear, Dean was not making much headway as an actor in Hollywood. The parts he gained in films were very small, and eventually he left California to try his luck in New York. His aim was to forge a career as a stage actor and after auditioning for the prestigious Lee Strasberg Actors Studio, he gained a place to study there. He was ecstatic and wrote letters to his family telling them how proud he was of being accepted at the studio, which had produced such great actors as Marlon Brando.

Dean began to take on TV roles, and then landed a part in Andre Gide’s The Immoralist. He received rave reviews and it was then that Hollywood started to sit up and take notice. At last Dean was able to return to California, having at last made a success of his career. His first major role there was for director Elia Kazan, in the film version of John Steinbeck’s novel, East of Eden. He played the role of Cal Trask, the rebel son of an authoritarian father and a prostitute mother. Drawing on his actor’s studio training, Dean put in an extraordinary performance, often bringing in completely unscripted improvisations, such as the pivotal moment when his father rejects a gift of money. Instead of leaving, as the script required, Dean threw his arms round his screen father in a final attempt to gain his affection. Kazan was so impressed by Dean’s performance that he kept the sequence in, which gained added impact because of the other actor’s look of surprise when Dean departed from the script.

 

Homoerotic tension

 

Dean’s next film, Rebel Without a Cause, truly established his iconic status in the history of American cinema. He played opposite Natalie Wood as his leading lady in the film directed by Nicholas Ray. It was a story of a new generation of young men and women bored and frustrated by small-town America, trying to escape from the misery of their family life and engaging in all manner of illegal, dangerous and anti-social activities, from drinking underage, to stealing cars, to knife fighting and drag racing. Dean and Ray clashed in the making of the film as Dean began to take control, directing his own scenes, and becoming intensely involved in portraying the central emotional conflict of his life – his battle with his father. In one scene Dean almost looked as though he was choking the actor playing his father to death. To add to the intensity, the director played on the homoerotic tension between Dean and the actor playing his young sidekick, Sal Mineo, even suggesting at one stage that they kiss, although this was banned by the studio heads.

After the success of Rebel Without a Cause, Dean sought to extend his acting career by playing a completely different kind of role, that of a bad-tempered, racist Southerner given to drinking and violence. For this part, Dean dyed his hair grey to look older, and shaved his hairline so that it would look as though he was going bald. He gave another intense performance, though in one scene, his drunken mumbling was so incoherent that it had to be re-recorded later, but he never lived long enough to see the reviews of the film.

 

Head-on crash

 

On 30 September 1955, Dean set out with his mechanic Rolf Wutherich in his Porsche 550 Spyder to compete in a sports car race at Salinas, California. Now a hugely wealthy Hollywood star, Dean had taken up car racing, although he had been banned from doing so while filming. Having finished his work on Giant, an epic film directed by George Stevens covering the life of a Texas cattle rancher and his family, Dean celebrated by driving his car down to the rally, gaining a speeding ticket while doing so. On the way there, a car driven by a 23-year-old university student crossed into his lane on the highway and although Dean tried to take evasive action, it was too late. The two cars crashed head on. An ambulance arrived on the scene and rushed Dean to hospital, but by the time he got there, he was already dead. The student, Donald Turnupseed, escaped with his life and only sustained minor injuries.

After his death, Dean became a legend of American cinema. His status was undoubtedly enhanced by the fact that he had died early, in a manner befitting the careless young daredevil of Rebel Without a Cause. Not surprisingly, in the years to come, a lot of biographies were written about him, many of them focussing on his ambivalent sexuality. He became a major gay icon, and his films were constantly reanalysed, particularly the scenes between him and Sal Mineo, in which he shows a touching tenderness and love towards his young admirer.

In 2006 William Bast, who was at one time Dean’s college room mate and close friend, finally admitted that he and Dean had had a homosexual relationship in his book Surviving James Dean. Bast describes the problems they had in pursuing the relationship in the moralistic culture of 1950s America, and also writes about Dean’s relationship with producer Rogers Brackett, who was very important in helping Dean to forge his career in the movie industry. Some commentators, such as journalist Joe Hyams, maintain that Dean only involved himself in homosexual relationships to advance his career, but Bast disputes this, pointing out that in many cases, Dean’s homosexual lovers were not able to help him in that way. Others who knew Dean, such as Gavin Lambert, Nicholas Ray and Elia Kazan, have described him as bisexual. Moreover, several women who had affairs with him, such as actress Liz Sheridan, confirm this, and it seems likely that, had Dean lived longer, the scandals about his sexuality would have seriously damaged his career.