IT’S DANGEROUS to call anyone the new James Dean, because even the old one found being himself somewhat impossible. You don’t fly around town on a motorcycle, drink and whatever else, earn a reputation for being difficult to work with, and acquire your death-Porsche—all by the age of twenty-three—if you’re not bent on departing young.
That’s why we love James Dean—he died before we even knew we were in love with him, before he could be found wanting, before the studios could cramp his style and turn him into an eight-by-ten glossy. The studio actually forbade anyone but its own photographers to shoot him, but fortunately lots of pictures were taken, leaving a legacy of incredibly elegant posing in New York–ish and western ways. We knew, both from stills and from the way he moved in his movies, that he was bad. Rock and roll. If he were still alive, James Dean would be cinema’s version of Bob Dylan, if not Neil Young.
Martin Scorsese is an Italian James Dean, and early Clint Eastwood was as James Dean as a Republican can get. Even Woody Allen might be James Dean if James Dean were a scrawny, Jewish New Yorker. Like Dean, Allen’s got the whine and the hunched shoulders. Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot was James Dean, and Sid Vicious was James Dean as a dead fool. Anything in the mainstream that is beautiful and rebellious and tragic is James Dean—rodeo stars, Jennifer Jason Leigh, beatniks, Magic Johnson now. James Woods is James Dean with a stinger. James Dean is what’s going on inside, underneath, while old men in suits lie from the podium.
In L.A. there are tons of unemployed teen idols, so actors with even a Hail Mary hope of being compared to James Dean are glad to play along.
James Dean was not a good role model, and yet all over America his posters still hang in girls’ dorms. Nobody could wear jeans like James Dean—not all the Calvin ads on earth will ever touch James Dean in Giant. Nor will anyone come close to James Dean on a motorcycle, even though today everyone is up to their ears in jeans and motorcycles. What the sixties proved was that the decade’s dreams didn’t work, because if they did, things wouldn’t be the way they now are. But we do still have Bob Dylan and Neil Young, and maybe the capitalist rampage here has been slowed and stalled by the James Dean element—maybe the reason America is nowhere near as bad, ecologically, as the Eastern Bloc countries have turned out to be is that James Dean was among us, promoting contempt for hypocrisy, encouraging the sentiment that led his contemporary, Allen Ginsberg, to write, “America, go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.”
Luke Perry says, “Being connected to James Dean is the scariest thing. He’s such a strong image, and it makes him look like the object of a game for me. And it’s not what I’m shooting for. I’ll try and be an artist, I don’t always want to be the brooding guy in the T-shirt, I want to play pimps and doctors and lawyers, cowboys. If only people will let me be an artist and not the next James Dean.”
Of all the young men being heralded as New James Deans, Luke Perry and Jason Priestley of Beverly Hills 90210 are the major teenage heartthrobs, mainly because of the characters they play on the show—the way they’re lit, and their sideburns. After seeing what happened with Johnny Depp, the Fox network has figured out that you can’t have too many teen idols. These two are total crush material—though the story line is always some do-good plot, who can notice when you’re in a love trance?
Perry says, “For whatever reason, we’ve all been hurled into the spotlight. I can’t go to the market to get anything to eat. Luckily, McDonald’s has drive-through.”
On the show, Priestley plays a supersensitive, down-to-earth, unbelievably sweet guy, Brandon. He’s the one you most want to be. The fact that in person he seems to be the same kind of man isn’t to say that he’s not a good actor. Like Michael J. Fox, he’s short and Canadian, but unlike Fox he refers to “priapism” in public. He bragged in an interview in Sassy, the magazine for juicy teenage girls, that unlike his character, he’s not the least bit innocent, that he smokes and drinks like any other twenty-two-year-old, and that he’s been living in L.A. for five years—enough to put an end to anyone’s innocence. He smokes and drinks like the old James Dean.
The youngest among the NJDs is Bojesse Christopher, who is only twenty-one and already a member of the Actor’s Studio, not bad for a kid from a small town outside Santa Cruz. He’s the only NJD who sounds grateful for the inspiration that comes with the James Dean comparisons. “He left a lasting impression on people because he took a lot of chances,” Christopher said. “You need to spark new things—as long as when you fall it’s on your face, you’re going forward. If you don’t find any lumps on the back of your head, you’re OK.” It’s easy to see why he was cast to play Patrick Swayze’s brother in Point Break—he looks a lot like Swayze, except cherubic. Next he’s doing “a movie called Dark Horse, with Ed Begley and Mimi Rogers. I play a supersensitive, nice, down-to-earth, unbelievably sweet guy—believe it or not, it’s a stretch to play a nice guy.”
Dana Ashbrook is the NJD who is most dazzling in person. On Twin Peaks he was so dark and brooding as Bobby you couldn’t tell that in the flesh he looks like that weird-streak English actor, Rupert Everett the Beautiful. Ashbrook arrived at the photo shoot shrouded in baggy black clothes with a black baseball cap over the Best Hair in the West, and dark glasses over the Eyes, which are so freakishly blue that all the makeup women, stylists, and photo assistants—grown women used to great looks—were left engorged, in creamed-out oblivion. If I weren’t old enough to be . . . well, I’m glad I saw him before I was too old to appreciate it.
The Twin Peaks feature film will include Ashbrook as Bobby again, but in the meantime, being one of the new breed of Hollywood kids, the twenty-four-year-old has his own production company and is trying to produce movies no one else will do. “We’re trying to make small, moralistic films,” he said, “to further universal spirituality.” He just finished a short film called The Coriolis Effect, which, he said, “is about love, infidelity, and bad weather.”
Jamie Walters, who costarred with John Travolta in Shout (and therefore went virtually unseen, such is the Travolta-loathing in the air), is the NJD who looks most like the McCoy. He’s also the least Hollywood showbiz of these guys, having moved from Boston to New York to attend NYU film school. “I got a job at the Canal Bar as a waiter and as a bartender. A customer came in and said he could get me a job doing commercials, so I went on a Levi’s audition and I got it. Then I began getting acting jobs and decided to take lessons.”
He’s the only NJD without a publicist and the only one I could actually talk to without feeling his career agenda pulsing beneath the surface. He’s not so much “on” as he is along for the ride.
“Since I’ve come to L.A.,” he said, “I’ve experienced tons of rejection and learned how to cook. Part of the fun of being in L.A. is not liking it. Not liking it builds character.” He plays Frank James on the Young Riders TV series and will assume a small part in a Cameron Crowe movie called Singles. He and Luke Perry knew each other in New York and on auditions were often mistaken for each other, though they are nothing alike. Perry has an almost Edwardian quality about him, an elegance that would work in a hero from any age, whereas Walters could only have happened après James Dean. Maybe we just always want more James Deans. Especially now, when there are so many suits lying from so many podiums.
The young actors with even a Hail Mary hope of being likened to James Dean are happy, of course, to play along with our fantasy. In L.A. right now there are cubic tons of unemployed teen-idol material, all of whom believe sincerely that if they got a chance to be on a show like 90210, they’d damn well put up with any comparison and not do anything to endanger their careers. Once it actually happens, who you become moves beyond your control, which—let’s face it—is a cold shower. James Dean himself probably had no idea he was the New Frank Sinatra (or was it the New Rudolph Valentino?), but that’s where things were leading.
We need these young, beautiful men to remind us that there’s something besides the liars in suits. We need these wonderful boys to seem misunderstood. As the Rolling Stones sang, “the little girls understand.” In a mall in Florida the little girls, ten thousand strong, mobbed Luke Perry, breaking plate glass and injuring twenty-one of their number in the stampede.
James Dean was rock and roll before anyone knew it wasn’t a fad, and he was rock and roll before it was Disneyized and turned into role-model material. He was the role model for people who hated role models, and what we still want is more James Deans, and no one will ever be James Dean enough.
Even James Dean hardly was the artist long enough to live anything approaching a full life. But anytime someone slinky in a T-shirt and jeans with messy hair comes by, we’ll think he’s the latest one, and though others might think he’s nothing but a soap star with a look, or the newest fad—well, maybe one of these new James Deans will last long enough to become someone else.
Esquire
May 1992