EAST OF EDEN
“And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the East of Eden.”
—Genesis 4:16
“I could tell that Jimmy could be easily castrated, so I had to juggle his balls with great delicacy.”
—Elia Kazan, Director of East of Eden
East of Eden has claimed an important niche in the history of cinema. Critic Marceau Devillers wrote: “Before Dean, the adolescent was portrayed as a psychological cypher—inferior, stupid, weak, or ignorant: the ultimate ‘foil’ to the older generation. With the advent of East of Eden, the adolescent became a person in his own right. East of Eden was a turning point in the history of the movies. Dean made the adolescent, with his complexities, his uneasiness, traits worthy of a hero.”
It also transformed a young James Dean, with only one picture under his belt, into a superstar.
Screenwriter Paul Osborn had seen Jimmy in The Immoralist, and had been mesmerized by his performance. At the time, he was working on a screenplay, East of Eden, based on the novel by John Steinbeck. His most ambitious saga since Grapes of Wrath, it had been originally published in 1952 to rather lackluster sales.
East of Eden was the three-generation saga of the Trask and Hamilton families, archetypal settlers in California’s Salinas Valley, following their evolution from the mid-19th century until the outbreak of World War I.
Because of the monumental size of Steinbook’s original, Osborn could only base his screenplay on its final section, which The New York Times did not consider the best part. The screenplay condensed the saga into the story of one “bad” brother, Cal Trask, conflicting with his “good” brother, Aron. Both would vie for the love of a coquettish Abra, as played in the film by Julie Harris.
John Steinbeck...wants a quarter of the profits from the film version of the book he wrote.
The hottest director in Hollywood at the time was Elia Kazan, who had scored a huge success with On the Waterfront. Based on that success, and on the fact that its male lead, Marlon Brando, had won an Oscar for his performance in it, Jack Warner had designated Kazan as both producer and director of East of Eden. It would be shot in CinemaScope and WarnerColor, with a musical score composed by Jimmy’s intimate friend, Leonard Rosenman.
Osborn urged Kazan to attend a performance of The Immoralist, knowing that he was already familiar with Jimmy from their days together at the Actors Studio.
Consequently, Kazan, too, was mesmerized watching Jimmy as the blackmailing homosexual Arab opposite Louis Jourdan and Geraldine Page.
The next day, he called Jane Deacy, Jimmy’s agent, and asked that the actor come and visit him. She already knew that the role of Cal was up for grabs, and in reference to that, had placed a call to Kazan four days before, which he had not bothered to return.
“When Dean came in for an interview, he was a heap of twisted legs and denim rags, looking resentful for no particular reason,” Kazan remembered. “I made him wait outside for half an hour, thinking that might drop that belligerent pose. When he walked in, I knew immediately that he was right for the role of Cal. He was guarded, sullen, suspicious, and he seemed to have a great deal of concealed emotion. He looked and spoke like a character in East of Eden, even though I learned later he had not read the novel.”
“I also knew that making a picture with this guy would be a great challenge for me. I would have to cajole and comfort him. Need I say, pamper the baby and change his diapers. I would have to inspire him, challenge him, and, if the scene called for it, even provoke him to violence. And I’d have to indulge him. From what I’d heard, I might even have to let him suck my cock if it meant getting the picture made. My belief is that a director has to do any and everything to make a good film.”
“After my interview, if it could be called that—Dean did not believe in communication—he invited me for a hair-raising, definitely hellraising, motorcycle ride through the canyons of Manhattan. That we survived that journey is miraculous. But obviously, I lived to tell about it.”
“The next day, I took him to Steinbeck’s apartment to see what he thought of him,” Kazan said.
[The popular novelist had sold the movie rights to East of Eden in 1952 for $125,000, a goodly price for a literary property at mid-century. He had also contracted for twenty-five percent of the profits.]
Steinbeck reserved his opinion of Jimmy until he could deliver it discreetly and privately. He telephoned the director the next day to tell him, “He’s a god damn snotty kid, but, by God, he is Cal. Good luck working with a shithead like that neurotic boy. Whereas before, I thought Clift and Brando would have been the ideal casting, I no longer believe that after meeting this Dean character.”
***
Kazan invited Jimmy to fly with him to Los Angeles for a screen test, although he was virtually certain he’d get the role. A few hours before the scheduled departure of their flight, a long black limousine, with Kazan inside, pulled up in front of Jimmy’s brownstone. Disheveled, Jimmy raced down the steps carrying two grocery bags filled with clothing and tied with string.
It was his first ride on an airplane, and Kazan noted with amusement that he spent most of the flight with his nose pressed against the glass of the window adjacent to his seat.
After their arrival in California, Jimmy asked Kazan if they could stop at a hospital where his father worked as a dental technician in a lab.
Kazan remained in the back of the limousine, and Winton Dean emerged ten minutes later. “I sensed the tension between those two,” Kazan said. “I think Jimmy’s father hated him. He did not seem impressed, either with the limo or with Dean’s chance of starring in a major motion picture. He told me that he had wanted Jimmy to study law at U.C.L.A. They stood side by side without anything to say to each other. I ordered Jimmy into the car and we moved on.”
“But at least I realized how deeply Dean could identify with the errant son, Cal, who was alienated from his father,” Kazan said. “It would be a slice from his own life.”
Because Kazan had already demonstrated his knack for Oscar-winning success, Jack Warner at Warner Brothers had more or less given him free rein in casting. Kazan had already alerted Warner that the role called for a nineteen-year-old-version of Brando or Monty Clift. He had also warned the studio boss that Jimmy was idiosyncratic and somewhat eccentric.
Warner’s spies soon reported to him that Jimmy was extremely temperamental and hard to control. Kazan received a telegram from Warner. “I hope this Dean fellow isn’t too odd. It’s getting to the point now where if we make a picture with someone who is odd, the whole machine is thrown out of order, not to mention the expense to the studio as pictures fall behind schedules. You know it takes only one odd spark to make the motor miss. I am fed up with people who are too odd. But I’ll take your word that you can control this little talented upstart.”
Kazan dreaded introducing Jimmy to Warner. “He was used to such male stars as Errol Flynn, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Gary Cooper,” Kazan said. “Now I show up at his doorstep with this fidgety kid from New York. Warner was pleasant enough, but skeptical of my judgment. As Jimmy waited for me outside, Warner kept me in his office.”
“Is it true that this kid is a cocksucker?” he demanded to know.
“It’s just a rumor,” Kazan replied. He went on to assure him that the role called for a young man who could combine masculine virility with feminine softness and insecurity.
Over lunch in Warners’ commissary, Kazan ordered Jimmy to drink a pint of cream every day to put on some weight and “for God’s sake, get a suntan. You’re as pale as the Queen of England, and I want you to look like a healthy farmboy who works in the fields.”
That afternoon, Jimmy’s first reunion was with his former roommate, William Bast. Barging into his apartment, he gave Bast a deep and passionate kiss. “Come on, guy,” he said. “Let’s hit the road. I’ve rented a car. I’ve been cast in East of Eden, and Gadge [Kazan] wants me suntanned. Nut brown, please.”
Bast seemed overjoyed for Jimmy and somehow managed to conceal his jealousy.
Within the hour, the two men were heading east to the Anza-Borrego Desert, an hour’s drive from Palm Springs.
Bast had never seen Jimmy this enthusiastic. “When I was out here before, I took a lot of crap, kissed a lot of asses. No more! I danced to the fiddle of these Caligula wannabes, but not this time around. The bastards need me, they want me, and I’m gonna make them lick the dust off my boots.”
At a small, rustic resort, they rented a modest cabin for a week. It contained two double beds and a private shower.
That night, over dinner, Jimmy told Bast, “I’m gonna fuck those Tinseltown bastards like they’ve never been fucked before.”
Bast later concluded that he “knew that Jimmy had the tenacity of a Gila monster, but even a Gila monster has to roll over on his back to allow the poison in his jaws to flow.”
“Hollywood hasn’t changed,” he told Bast. “It is still the same hostile, predatory place it always was, with a lot of hungry mouths looking for a pretty boy with a big cock.”
That first night in their cabin, after the lights were off, Jimmy whispered to Bast, “Are you still awake?”
Bast later wrote, “El momento de verdad had arrived.”
He answered Jimmy’s siren call in the dark, crawling naked into his separate bed. He later told friends, “Then the inevitable happened. We made love all night. It was amazing it hadn’t happened before. I mean, at our penthouse in Hollywood, we’d shared a double bed, and on many occasions, I’d felt Jimmy’s erection pressing up against me. But this time, in his bed at that desert resort, that erection would do a lot more than ‘press.’”
Jimmy’s pursuit of a suntan, as demanded by Jack Warner and Kazan, evolved into a sort of honeymoon for the actor and actor turned writer. “I knew it wouldn’t last,” Bast said. “And as our lazy days went by, I feared a return to the real world, knowing I was bound to lose Jimmy to a dozen temptations, maybe more.”
During their final day in the desert, Jimmy told Bast, “I am the sun.”
“And so he was for me,” Bast wrote in a memoir.
***
Back in Hollywood, Jimmy invited Bast to meet his agent, Dick Clayton. Jane Deacy did not have a West Coast Office, so she had designated Clayton, from the Famous Artists Corporation, to represent his and their movie interests.
Jimmy had known Clayton since the days they had appeared together in bit parts in Sailor Beware!
Clayton helped hammer out the details of Jimmy’s movie contract with Warners. Finalized on April 7, 1954, it stipulated Jimmy’s receipt of $1,000 a week during the shooting of East of Eden. To tide him over until the beginning of filming, the studio advanced him $700.
[In October of 1954, Warners renewed the contract with a six-month option. The contract was renewed again and expanded on April 2, 1955, into a long-term commitment. It called for him to earn $3,000 a week by his ninth film. However, from New York, Jane Deacy negotiated a better deal that would have granted him $100,000 for every film. “He was the hottest property we had,” Jack Warner said. “We had big plans for him. I mean big plans.”]
As an agent, Clayton would later represent such high-profile clients as Jane Fonda, Farrah Fawcett, Harrison Ford, Nick Nolte, and Angie Dickinson. For twenty-two years, he functioned as the personal manager of Burt Reynolds. In time, he would build and occupy a home with Jimmy’s rival, Tab Hunter.
After signing the contract with Warner Brothers, as funneled through Clayton, Jimmy invited Bast as a visitor onto the studio lot. He introduced Bast to Kazan, with the boast that, “Gadge, you’re shaking the hand of the best writer in Hollywood.”
En route to the commissary for a meal together, Bast and Jimmy encountered Paul Newman, who was preparing himself for his leading role (one that Jimmy had previously rejected) in The Silver Chalice.
Newman told Bast, “Jimmy got the role of Cal that I wanted so bad I could taste it.”
Despite their rivalry, Newman and Jimmy maintained an easy going relationship, almost like lovers, in the view of Bast, who suspected that some passion had flared between them back in New York. “They were just too god damn good looking for something not to have happened during the time they hung out together.”
Over food, Newman attacked the script of The Silver Chalice, and their conversation remained pleasant until Newman said, “There isn’t a single bastard in this lousy business who made it by himself. No matter who they are, someone was there to open the door for them.”
Jimmy almost exploded in rage. Obviously, Newman had touched a nerve. “No one ever did anything for me. I did it myself. I don’t owe nothing to nobody. Not a god damn cent,” he said, slamming his fist against the tabletop.
Newman gracefully changed the subject. As he was leaving, he told Jimmy, “We’ll meet at seven like we agreed.”
That more or less confirmed Bast’s suspicions that they were secret lovers.
***
Other “blasts from the past” (Jimmy’s words), also reappeared in his life after his return to L.A. for East of Eden. One of them was Nick Adams, Jimmy’s hustler buddy and sometimes lover.
Having heard that Jimmy was in L.A. and starring in a major-league movie, Adams arranged a reunion with him, through Bast. Access to Jimmy was getting more competitive, thanks to renewed competition from Bast and now, from Paul Newman.
“How can any guy compete with that fucking Paul Newman?” Adams asked.
Nevertheless, Jimmy agreed to see him from time to time, eventually promising him a role in his upcoming film.
Adams later said: “For most of the time, Jimmy was straight with himself. He’d never known the good life, and he wanted to know what it was like. He made his own way in life, and on his own terms. Whatever didn’t fit into his new life, he dropped. I hoped it wasn’t going to include me.”
***
Dick Davalos was cast in East of Eden as Jimmy’s “good” brother, Aron.
Before he was awarded the part, he, with Jimmy, submitted to a series of screen tests, in which Jimmy was paired alongside Joanne Woodward, even though Kazan, by this point, had more or less determined that Julie Harris would be the female lead.
“I remember rehearsing at his apartment the night before the screen test, and really assimilating our characters and developing our brotherly relationship as best we could,” Davalos said. “I remember we were extremely tired the next day when we went to the studio.”
Kazan later said to Harris, “I wonder if Davalos and Dean are tired from rehearsing all night, or from something else.”
“Boys will be boys,” Harris said, “especially if you have two handsome young men spending the night together. They do have strong urges at that age, you know.”
“I remember it well,” Kazan said.
On the Warner’s lot, Jimmy survived both the screen tests and the wardrobe fittings, and even got a review from the boss himself, Jack Warner. Warner told the cinematographer assigned to East of Eden, Tim McCord, “Kazan brought this sad-eyed pretty boy with almond eyes and brown hair into my office. A rotten dresser. He’s small—too short, really—slight, and looks as vulnerable as a lost puppy dog. God help us.”
Warner had made a wise choice in his selection of McCord, whose almost monochrome cinematography captured the charm of an old-fashioned photo album from 1917, the year in which the story is set.
***
In the final lineup, top billing would go to Julie Harris in the lead role of Abra. In the beginning of the film, she is Aron’s girlfriend, but later falls for Cal.
Raymond Massey was cast as the judgmental, puritanical, Bible-quoting father, Adam Trask, a lettuce farmer who clearly favors Aron. Jo Van Fleet plays Kate, who was once married to Adam but abandoned him and her two sons. She is now the deeply embittered owner of a bordello in a neighboring town.
The cast was augmented with Burl Ives as the sheriff; Albert Dekker as Will; and Barbara Baxley as a sadistic nurse. Months earlier, Jimmy had had a brief fling with Baxley when they each resided at the Iroquois Hotel in Manhattan.
James Dean with Julie Harris, his brother’s fiancé in East of Eden. Is their embrace an allegory for a biblical sin? (“Thou shalt not covet thy brother’s wife”)
On the set of East of Eden, she tried to renew their affair, but was brutally rejected by him. “Why do I need you now?” he responded. “Since I arrived in Hollywood, my phone’s been ringing off the wall.”
One by one, Jimmy met the cast. He already knew Harris from the Actors Studio in New York, and he had already prepared for and been evaluated in screen tests with Davalos.
***
Growing up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Harris had been enrolled for a year at the Yale School of Drama. In 1954, she’d won a Tony for her interpretation of Sally Bowles in the original Broadway version of I Am a Camera, in which Jimmy had unsuccessfully competed for the role inspired by Christopher Isherwood. In time, Harris would receive ten Tony nominations.
She had made her screen debut in 1952, repeating her Broadway success as the lonely teenaged girl, Frankie, in the film adaptation of Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding, for which she was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress.
A complicated triangle that gets increasingly complicated as the movie progresses: Dean (left), Davalos (center) and Harris (right)
Jimmy maintained fond memories of her. “Her voice was like the gentle rainfall on a summer night. Her eyes reflected the depths of her tender heart.”
Harris later stated that “Jimmy and I were almost killed before filming began. One night he knocked on my door right after I’d arrived in Hollywood. He invited me to ‘go for a spin’ in the Hollywood Hills. He had just bought a new scarlet red MG.”
“We rode into the night at top speed. At one point, he had trouble lighting a cigarette, and he almost ran off the road and down an embankment, which would have meant sudden death since it was so steep. I didn’t dare lecture him. That would have made him go much faster. I let him do whatever his heart desired. He was the kind of man who did whatever he wanted to.”
When he finally returned her to the pavement in front of her apartment, she gracefully turned down his invitation for a sleepover. “He was Tom Sawyer to me, a very wicked but adorable Tom Sawyer. He manipulated people, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He was mercurial, unpredictable, and very beguiling.”
“I did not suffer the misfortune of falling in love with Jimmy,” Harris said. “It would have been a destructive relationship. Instead of seducing me, he went for Pier Angeli, who was starring in The Silver Chalice opposite that divine Paul Newman.”
“Hollywood was nothing but a rumor factory. There was talk on the set that Paul and Pier were involved, and even that Paul and Jimmy were an item. I got left out of all these complicated sleeping arrangements.”
“I remember Jimmy showing me this locket. In it, he had a lock of Pier’s hair and a scrap from the dress she’d worn when he met her. It was all so romantic.”
“But he was always upsetting Pier,” Harris continued. “She was so prim and proper, so perfectly made up, and so well dressed. She invited friends of hers for lunch in the commissary so that they could meet Jimmy. He showed up without his shirt, his body smeared with a mechanic’s grease. He wore a dirty pair of blue jeans with a big hole in the rear revealing bare skin and the fact that he wore no underwear. She burst into tears and went a week without speaking to him.”
***
Richard (“Dick”) Davalos, born in the Bronx a year before Jimmy and just as good looking, was of Finnish and Spanish descent. His career never lived up to its early promise. [Coincidentally, he did play opposite Paul Newman as the convict, “Blind Dick,” in Cool Hand Luke (1967), a role that might have gone to Jimmy had he lived.]
Unlike Jimmy’s flamboyantly non-conformist character, Cal, Davalos, as Aron, had to be sober, diligent, God-fearing, hard-working, humorless, and the obvious favorite of his moralistic father.
As part of a plan to improve their ability as actors to portray brothers, Kazan decided to house Davalos and Jimmy together as roommates in a one-room studio apartment across the street from the entrance to the Warner lot in Burbank.
Although there has never been any direct confirmation, word soon spread that Davalos and Jimmy were lovers.
According to Davalos, “As roommates, Jimmy and I became ‘Cal & Aron’ off screen. I was Mr. Goody Two-Shoes. Consistent with the character of Cal, Jimmy usually left our place in a mess, and I was always tidying up, à la Aron. Jimmy was very heavy into Cal.”
“He asked me what my previous experience had been,” Davalos said. “I told him I’d been an usher at the Trans-Lux Theater in Manhattan. But I let him know I’d beaten Newman out for the role.”
“I beat Newman out for more than one role,” Jimmy bragged.
On screen, Jimmy’s scenes with Davalos carried a suggestion of latent homosexuality. One scene was so provocative that Jack Warner ordered that it be cut because of its hint of brotherly incest. Davalos was shown presumably nude in bed while Jimmy, wearing pants but shirtless, played a horn nearby. “The censors will never go for that,” Warner said.
Many brothers have shared the same bedroom, but this sequence in East of Eden was ordered cut by Jack Warner even before it faced censorship. The studio mogul told Kazan, “They’re half nude and look like they’ve been fucking all night.”
After two weeks, Davalos told Kazan that he’d grown tired of Jimmy’s constant mood swings and sloppiness, and moved out into better lodgings. After that, the rumor mill went into overdrive once again when the story spread that one night Jimmy “tried to rape the actor playing his brother.”
“Working with Jimmy was a mind-blower,” Davalos recalled years later. “We were so into those roles, me and Jimmy. Without going into too much detail, let me put it this way: It took me two years to get over working with him.”
***
A Canadian actor from Toronto, veteran star Raymond Massey, born in 1896, was known for his stage-trained voice. He’d made his first stage appearance in London in 1922, and his first movie role, in High Treason, in 1927. His greatest Broadway triumph had been in Robert E. Sherwood’s play, Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Later, he repeated his performance in the film adaptation, for which he was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor. He would go on to portray Lincoln again and again, and became so associated with the dead president that a fellow actor once quipped that Massey wouldn’t ever be satisfied with his impersonation of Lincoln until someone assassinated him.
Filial Anguish: James Dean, playing the less favored son, interacting with his screen father, Raymond Massey, who genuinely detested him.
Right from the beginning, Jimmy and Massey detested each other with a hatred that might even have surpassed the on-Broadway loathing between Jimmy and Louis Jourdan.
“Ray couldn’t stand the sight of the kid, dreading every day he had to do a scene with him,” Kazan claimed. “He never knew what Jimmy was going to say or do. He knew only one thing to expect: Whatever Jimmy did would not be in the script.”
“Our boy was fully aware of how much he was scorned by Ray,” Kazan said. “He was sullen and surly around Ray, not disguising his contempt for the older actor. This was an antagonism I didn’t try to heal. I almost encouraged it. It would make their portrayals of alienated father and son more effective.”
During an especially bitter exchange, Jimmy yelled at Massey, “Gary Cooper wanted to play my father, but an old fart like you got the job, much to my regret.”
According to Massey, “Dean approached everything with a chip on his shoulder. The Method had encouraged this truculent spirit. He never knew his lines before he walked onto the set, rarely had command of them when the camera rolled, and even if he had, he was inaudible. He went away alone after a scene was rehearsed. He would disappear and leave the rest of us to cool off in our chairs while he communed with himself somewhere out of sight.”
In his memoir, A Hundred Different Lives, Massey wrote, “Simple technicalities, such as moving on cue and finding his mark, were beneath Dean’s consideration.”
Troublemaker: Set in the rough-and-tumble boom years of early 20th-Century California, Jimmy, as Cal, is caught between the Sheriff, as played by Burl Ives (left), and his morally obsessed father, Raymond Massey (right).
[Coincidentally, Massey went on to become one of the leading contenders for the role of Uncle Bawley in Giant, which meant he would have had to work with Jimmy again. Eventually, however, the part went to Chill Wills.]
***
Jo Van Fleet was a very talented, California-born theater and movie actress. Jimmy met her after she’d won a Tony for her portrayal of the abusive daughter-in-law in the 1953 Broadway adaptation of Horton Foote’s teleplay The Trip to Bountiful. [Its plot revolved around an elderly woman, played in 1953 by Lillian Gish, who lives with a daughter-in-law (Jo Van Fleet) who loathes her, and a weak-willed son who is afraid to defend her.]
In East of Eden, Jimmy learned that his mother, played by Jo Van Fleet (depicted above), is the owner of a profitable bordello in a neighboring town. He desperately wants to connect with her, but until he virtually forces her to recognize him, she shuns him.
The role of Jimmy’s prostitute mother in East of Eden was Van Fleet’s first film role. [After finishing it, she’d go on to star in The Rose Tattoo and I’ll Cry Tomorrow, both released in 1955.]
“I had always been told that Dean was a homosexual,” Van Fleet said. “But I didn’t get that impression. Word reached us that he strayed over to the set of A Star is Born to service Judy Garland. Pier Angeli also showed up almost every day, panting at the mouth.”
***
Burl Ives, also known as a singer and banjo player, was cast in Eden as Sam, the town’s tough, wise, and burly sheriff. Ives would later appear, brilliantly, as Big Daddy in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. In Eden, as a law enforcement agent, Ives is relatively benign. Consoling Jimmy, he gives him information and advice about his mother, who deserted him and his brother so long ago.
***
Cast as a secondary character named Will, Albert Dekker was a veteran actor from Brooklyn. He had previously appeared on Broadway as Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and on the screen in such hits as the mad scientist in the 1940 horror film, Dr. Cyclops. Off screen, he’d entered politics, winning a seat in the California State Assembly, where he served from 1944 to 1946.
[Dekker, like Jimmy himself, was destined for a violent death. On May 5, 1968, under suspicious circumstances, Dekker was found dead, perhaps murdered, in his Hollywood home. Naked, his body was discovered in a bathtub. A noose had been tightened around his neck and attached, tautly, to a shower curtain rod. He had been blindfolded, his wrists were handcuffed, and a ball gag had been inserted into his mouth. Two hypodermic needles dangled from one arm, and his body had been covered with vulgarities that included the word FUCK scrawled upon his skin with red lipstick. Money and valuable equipment were missing, but there was no sign of forced entry.
Despite skepticism and widespread protests, the coroner ruled out the possibility of murder, claiming that Dekker’s death had been the accidental aftereffect of autoerotic asphyxiation.]
Albert Dekker...He’d face a noose in his future.
***
Lois Smith who, like Jimmy, had studied at the Actors Studio, had snagged a small role as one of the “bar slaves” in Jo Van Fleet’s bordello. Her character throws herself at Jimmy when he invades the forbidden premises. She was not the right weight before filming began, and lost many pounds, fast, by eating nothing but raw carrots, lettuce, an occasional slice of bread, and lots of black coffee.
Kazan had discovered her in New York based on her appearance in the Broadway comedy, Time Out for Ginger (1952). After the release of East of Eden, she was designated by The Film Daily as one of the industry’s top juvenile actresses.
For a while, she stood a good chance of winning the ingénue role of Lux Benedict II in Jimmy’s later film, Giant (released in 1956, after Jimmy’s death), but the part eventually went to Carroll Baker. Smith did appear years later in Five Easy Pieces (1970) with Jack Nicholson.
***
On the set, Jimmy was frequently late for work, a result of his frequent late-night partying along the Sunset Strip. According to Kazan, “He didn’t accept the fact that movie stars, when they’re working, have to get up early. He started showing up looking like he needed a two-by-four to prop up the bags under his eyes—hardly the image of a California farmboy working the fields. I demanded that he give up the nightlife, get to bed early, and look the god damn part.”
During the course of filming, Kazan had ordered him not to ride his motorcycle. “Try to understand,” Kazan told him. “If you’re determined to kill yourself as a daredevil on the road, don’t do it during the filming of Eden. Be as reckless as you want, but only after the film is wrapped.”
As a means of chaperoning and “handling” him, Kazan ordered that Jimmy live in the bungalow he’d been assigned, an area positioned directly adjacent to his own bungalow on the Warners’ lot. Jimmy’s was luxuriously configured as a two-room suite, with its own kitchen and bathroom. It had once been occupied by Bette Davis when she reigned as the Queen of Warner Brothers. It had also been occupied by Errol Flynn, who, when he wasn’t needed on the set, sometimes entertained three young girls there at the same time.
***
On May 15, 1954, Kazan ordered cast and crew, including Jimmy, to transfer to Mendocino, about 150 miles north of San Francisco, for the filming of some outdoor scenes. For a while, Jimmy lodged at the Little River Inn, but complained that the noise from early-morning trucks kept him awake. Consequently, during the remainder of his time there, he opted to sleep in a railroad car on the film set.
With a population of only 800 people, Mendocino warmly welcomed the film’s cast and crew. Some of the local women prepared lavish meals for them. In gratitude for their hospitality, when the film was complete, Kazan arranged a special screening of East of Eden for them. Businesses shut down for the day.
One of the scenes filmed in Mendocino featured Jo Van Fleet, as Kate, at the local bank depositing the previous night’s earnings from her whorehouse. The bank teller suggests that she sure did run a profitable enterprise to be saving so much money. In response, stone-faced, Kate emits a glacial chill.
After two days in Mendocino, both Davalos and Jimmy came down with severe cases of poison ivy. Kazan had to delay production until their skins healed.
On June 4, the cast and creed moved south to central California’s town of Salinas. [The home town of John Steinbeck, and known as “the salad bowl of the world,” Salinas was and is the focal point for the production of huge amounts of lettuce, grapes, and vegetables. It was there that the famous scene associated with the failed attempt to freeze and transport lettuce was shot. One of the most memorable moments involved Jimmy dancing through his newly sprouted bean crop. It was not in the script, but Kazan gave him free reign. That creative freedom resulted in a clip that symbolized the epitome of enterprising youth, as represented by Cal.]
Meanwhile, back in Burbank, set designers Malcolm Bert and James Base had been laboring to re-create the town of Salinas as it looked in 1917. For the carnival scene, a full-scale amusement park was erected, complete with an operable Ferris wheel.
In one of the most famous scenes in the movie, Harris and Jimmy take a ride on that wheel.
Kazan instructed Rosenman to craft the kind of musical score for the scene that might have prefaced “the birth of angels.”
***
Pier Angeli visited Jimmy frequently on the set of East of Eden. From his dressing room immediately next door, separated from Jimmy’s with only a thin wall, Kazan could hear them “boffing—that is, when they weren’t arguing, which was most of the time. I hate to admit it, but I was glad when she ran off with Vic Damone. Now I had Jimmy where I wanted him on camera—alone and miserable.”
“I noticed that with Angeli out of the picture, Rosenman was making long, extended visits to Jimmy’s dressing room. I won’t describe what I heard between those two queers.”
***
After being invited onto the set by Kazan, Marlon Brando, on July 13, paid a visit to the set of East of Eden. His arrival came as a surprise and shock to Jimmy.
Most of the cast and crew weren’t aware that Brando and Jimmy had become intimately acquainted in New York, and both actors promoted the myth that their paths had never crossed before.
Arriving late in the morning, Brando stayed around for the night shoot, eventually heading home at around 4AM.
A famous photo was snapped to document Brando’s visit. Kazan appears dour, but Brando smiles into the camera, as Julie Harris stares adoringly at him. In the frame’s far right stands a bewildered-looking Jimmy.
Because he’d received reports that Jimmy delivered onscreen performances that imitated his style, Brando wanted to see Jimmy at work.
“I’m directing him and he’ll probably, based on my guidance, be a big hit,” said Kazan. “The boy does have something. Call it star quality for lack of a better description. My deepest regret is that I’m not directing you in the movie. Come on, fucker, it’s the story of your life. You could play it brilliantly. You’ve lived it. The story of a young man abandoned by his mother—read that Dodie—and starved for the love of a rigid, puritanical bastard of a father—read that Marlon, Sr.”
When Kazan called a break for lunch, Jimmy invited Brando into his dressing room. There, Brando warned him that by appearing in East of Eden, “You’re courting fame, and nothing is more destructive than being famous. I can’t walk down the street any more but what I’m followed. I can’t go see a movie any more but that a line of girls follow me into the theater. The other day, I went into a deli to order a hot pastrami on rye and a cream soda, and at least five faggots were suddenly behind me, yelling, ‘Marlon, can we have your autograph?’ You know what I did? I pulled down my jeans and mooned them. I told them, ‘Autograph this, boys!” Write ‘Marlon’ on one cheek, and ‘Brando’ on the other.”
Tennessee Williams, at the time, America's most desirable and sought-after playwright. After Marlon Brando tired of his promises and erratic charm, he turned his attention toward Jimmy.
Jimmy responded by telling Brando about a recent visit he’d received from Tennessee Williams, who was in town and working on the outline for a new play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “He tried to persuade Kazan to direct the play on Broadway,” Jimmy said. “But after he laid his eyes on me, he didn’t have much time for Kazan. Tennessee told me he originally wanted you for the lead. It’s the story of a repressed homosexual. Think you can handle it?”
“There’s nothing repressed about me,” Brando said.
“Perhaps,” Jimmy said enigmatically. “Anyway, I invited Williams into my dressing room. I know he went down on you when you boys were on Cape Cod together. He was already a bit drunk when got here. But I took down my jeans and let him blow me. After that, he offered me the lead role in the Broadway production. I hear Kazan thinks Cat is going to be a major success. Bigger than Streetcar. Out with Brando. In with James Dean. The new boy on the block.”
If Jimmy were trying to either provoke or anger Brando with that, he didn’t succeed. Brando had already informed Tennessee that he planned to never venture onto a Broadway stage again, especially within the context of one of his plays. “We did it fine the first time, but once was enough for one life.”
Brando is alleged to have told his best friend, Carlo Fiori, “I took Dean to his dressing room between takes and screwed him royally with my noble tool, just to show him who’s boss, and still number one.”
Kazan refuted what at the time was a widely prevalent concept that Jimmy, as an actor, was very similar to Brando. “Unlike Dean,” he said, “Brando was a multi-talented person, a sort of stream of experience that could be tapped, then directed to flow as openly as if the actor were stripping himself psychologically and playing out, naked and vulnerable, before the world, the many facets of his personality.”
“Dean, in contrast, had very little pliability. His vulnerability was hidden behind a facial hurt, one that he played again and again. There was a muted aggression that could give way at any moment to destructiveness.”
According to Jimmy, “I don’t think people should be subservient to movie idols, and I do not idolize Marlon Brando. Brando! If I imitate him subconsciously, I don’t know about it, and if I do it consciously, I’d be a fool to admit it. I’d like to be a star in my own sense. I mean to be a very consummate actor, to have more difficult roles and to fill them to my satisfaction. But not to star on the basis of gold plating. A real star carries his own illumination and inward brightness.”
***
Kazan interpreted Jimmy’s performance as brilliant, a stunning presence, in the opening scene of East of Eden. He sat on a wooden sidewalk in the faux, studio-built town of Salinas, watching as his mother (Jo Van Fleet) walks by, without recognizing or acknowledging him, on her way to the bank.
Veiled, and draped in black, Jo Van Fleet was cast in East of Eden as an aging whore. In this scene near the beginning of the film, she walks past her son, as played by James Dean, whom she deserted years ago. She’s also walking into an Oscar win.
In London’s Sunday Express, Milton Shulman wrote, “Dean has the slouching grace of a tired cat and eyes that stare with the compelling magnetism of a deep and empty cave.”
On the screen, he appears petulant, with jerky movements, his eyes frightened slits in the glare of the California sun. He’s dressed in a babyknit sweater and a pair of white slacks, and looks five years younger than his actual age of twenty-three.
Later in the film, he hurls a rock at his alienated mother’s whorehouse before he’s chased away by her bouncer.
Kazan claimed that “Jimmy arrived on the set every day very easily hurt. He was sensitive and bewildered. I worked with him to build up is confidence and then pointed him in the right direction and watched the kid go for the gold. One time, I had to get him loaded on Chianti to get the result I wanted on the screen.”
“As filming progressed, he became increasingly difficult, not getting along with the cast, except for Harris.” Kazan said. “At times, he was just impossible. He had this damn camera, and he could spend hours taking pictures of himself in the mirror.”
As the shooting progressed, Jimmy began to show up later and later, and sometimes, even if he had reported on time, he would just disappear and no one could find him.
On one occasion, after a search, two of Kazan’s grips found him in Judy Garland’s dressing room on another part of Warners’ lot, the one devoted to filming A Star is Born (1954). Coincidentally, the title of her film was the same as the label that the press had begun attributing to Jimmy.
He’d seduced Garland once before, along with his friend and lover, John Carlyle, who had been given a small role in A Star is Born. The handsome young actor would, years later and despite his gender preference as a gay man, would become Garland’s companion and her sometimes lover.
Carlyle would later write a memoir about his involvement with the singer.
Escorted back to the set, Jimmy faced an angry director. “What was I to do?” Jimmy asked Kazan. “Judy wanted a little loving. You don’t turn down the Judy Garland! No way!”
“He had a violent streak in him,” Kazan said. “He seemed threatening, as if any minute he could turn into a serial killer. He was a little nuts, maybe a lot nuts. He was actually the Cal he projected in Eden.”
In one scene with Massey, Kazan was not getting the reaction he wanted from the expression on Massey’s face. He came up with a plan, telling Jimmy to pick up a Bible and to start reading from it, but to throw in a lot of words to shock and offend Massey.
After Kazan quietly ordered the camera to focus on Massey, Jimmy picked up a Bible from a nearby table. “The Lord is my shepherd,” Jimmy read, improvising. “I shall not suck cock, put anything up your ass, fuck you, shit, or piss on you, fucker,” he said.
Massey exploded and stormed off the set. Kazan chased after him. “I will not play opposite this freak,” Massey shouted at him. “Talk to my lawyers. I quit.”
“Jimmy had gotten Ray mad, and I got the shot I wanted,” Kazan said. “I explained to Massey that I had ordered Jimmy to do that. Finally, I persuaded him to come back to work.”
Some sections of East of Eden were filmed in sequences that strayed from, or ignored, or weren’t included in the original script. Examples included Jimmy’s dance in the bean field, and his fetal-like posturing atop a rail car after his return from an anguished search for his brothel-keeping mother. Both of those were pure improvisations on Jimmy’s part.
His most celebrated improvisation was when Cal’s father rejects his gift of $5,000 (money earned from that bean crop). Osborn’s script called for Jim to react by running away. Instead, he instinctively turned to Massey, and, in tears, embraced him. This scene, and Massey’s shocked and embarrassed reaction, were retained within the final cut.
Kazan summed it up: “Dean will appeal to women who will want to mother him, and to faggots who will want to fuck him. I think he comes across as a mixture of autistic child and baby-faced psychotic.”
After he’d seen the final cut, Kazan said, “I’ve never seen anything like it. Jimmy was that good, and that included Brando, whom I directed in Streetcar, and in On the Waterfront, as you well know.”
At the end of filming, Kazan threw a wrap party. At its peak, after three intense months of shooting, Harris kept looking for Jimmy to say goodbye, but she could not find him. When the party was over, she went to his bungalow to see if he were there.
Inside, she found him crying: “What’s the matter?” she asked. “You were wonderful in the picture.”
“It’s over,” he sobbed. “All over.”
She held him in her arms, forever remembering him as “a lost, lonely little boy.”
***
Before the film’s release, Hollywood was already treating Jimmy like a movie star. Word had gotten out. He told a reporter, “I guess I’m the flavor of the month.”
“Someday, I’d like to follow in the footsteps of my great idol, Elia Kazan,” Jimmy said. “You know, Kazan was an actor at Warner Brothers a number of years ago. Then he began to direct Broadway productions and went on to direct exceptional motion pictures.”
Two weeks after filming shut down, Kazan credited Harris—through patience and empathy—for being more helpful than he had been as a director. “Without her, Dean would not have made it to the end.”
***
Ted McCord later said, “With all this public buzz, Warners’ publicity department latched onto Jimmy and began pumping out releases to the press.”
One press agent told him, “You’re already a movie star. One night you went to bed as a struggling, unknown actor. The next morning you woke up a golden prince. So now, you’ll have to start acting and living like a prince.’”
“That’s bullshit!” Jimmy responded. “I came out here to act, not to be a prince, not some social fop—and not a gilded dandelion.”
“Maybe publicity is important,” Jimmy said. “But I just can’t make it, can’t get with it. I’ve been told by a lot of guys that it works. The newspapers give you a big build-up. Something happens, they tear you down. Who needs it? What counts for the artist is performance—not publicity. Guys who don’t know me already…they’ve already typed me as an odd ball.”
“I probably should have a press agent. But I don’t care what people write about me. I’ll talk to the ones I like. The others can print whatever they please.”
Columnist Mike Connolly asked Jimmy if he had lost anything during his process of becoming famous.
“I fought it for a long time. But after a while, I think I started learning what so many actors have already learned—something about that certain communicative power we have that so few people are privileged to have. We find that we can reach not only people with whom we work on the soundstages here in Hollywood, but people all over the world. And then we start thinking, ‘I’m famous, all right, and I guess this is what I wanted, so now how do I face it?’ And then the responsibilities come. And you have to fight against becoming egotistical.”
William Bast had a front row seat as he watched Jimmy, now only his part-time lover, rise within the constellation of Hollywood. “It was a gradual disintegration, a splintering of an already multi-faceted personality into a fragmented jigsaw puzzle.”
***
In January of 1955, Kazan arranged for the release of previews of East of Eden in Los Angeles. “The instant Jimmy appeared on the screen, hundreds of girls began to scream. They’d been waiting for him, it seemed. The response from the balcony reminded me of Niagara Falls spilling over. Their reaction spread to the audiences at other previews, and generated even more hysteria.”
Movie reviews of East of Eden were suddenly being broadcast nationwide on the radio. “Jimmy Dean appears with innocence and emotional candor, having a look of evil at times, creating a screen image of fiery intensity.”
After the preview, Jimmy summed up his public appeal as a movie star: “I guess Warner Brothers has discovered uranium.”
During an interview with Harold Thompson of The New York Times, Jimmy said that he still had not read the Steinbeck novel. “The way I work, I’d much rather justify myself with the adaptation rather than the original source. I felt I wouldn’t have any trouble—not too much, anyway—with this characterization once we started, because I think I understood Cal. I knew, too, that if I had any problems about the boy’s background, I could straighten it out with Kazan.”
The world premiere of East of Eden was scheduled for March 9, 1955 at the Astor Theater in Manhattan. It was configured as a benefit for the Actors Studio, eventually netting $34,000, and it was envisioned as a splashy, star-studded affair with Jimmy as the center of attention.
But he shocked and enraged his agent, Jane Deacy, by refusing to attend. “I can’t handle the scene,” was his excuse.
He also told his former girlfriend, Christine White, that he had no reason to go. “I know I was good. I don’t need a lot of people embarrassing me by telling me how good I was.”
At the premiere, Marilyn Monroe agreed to serve as an usher, thereby generating lots of publicity for herself. However, she upset the backers of the benefit by refusing to sing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” at the post-screening party. Up until the last minute, she had promised that she would.
Other ushers at the premiere included Marlene Dietrich and Eva Marie Saint.
After the screening, key members of the cast, including Julie Harris and Kazan, gathered at Sardi’s to await the reviews.
Time magazine referred to Jimmy as a product of the “tilted pelvis school of naturalistic acting. The picture is brilliant entertainment and more than that, it announces a new star, James Dean, whose prospects look as bright as any young actor’s since Marlon Brando. He has the presence of a young lion and the same sense of danger about him.”
The Hollywood Reporter wrote: “Dean is that rare thing, a young actor who is a great actor. The troubled eloquence with which he puts over the problems of misunderstood youth may lead to his being accepted by young audiences as a sort of symbol of their generation. He is no carbon copy of Marlon Brando. He is a completely individual screen personality.”
Daily Variety weighed in on the Brando vs. Dean similarities: “Dean plays the lead character as though he was straight out of the Marlon Brando mold. Just how flexible his talent is will have to be judged on future roles, although he has a basic appeal that manages to get through to the viewers despite carboning another’s acting style.”
Penelope Gillatt, in The Observer, wrote, “If ever an errant generation threw up an expression of itself, it was James Dean. Like Cain, he has the look of a fugitive and a vagabond on earth.”
John McCarten of the New Yorker, found that “Jimmy looked like a miniature Gregory Peck,” and the Library Journal hailed his performance as “one of the best of the year in a movie that is also one of the best of the year.”
Even the fabled French director, François Truffaut, weighed in: “East of Eden is the first film to give us a Baudelarian hero, fascinated by vice and contrast, loving the family and hating the family at one and the same time. James Dean is a freshly plucked ‘fleur du mal.’”
With a hint of venom, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times raised objections: “[James Dean is] a mass of histrionic gingerbread. He scuffs his feet, he whirls, he pouts, he sputters, he leans against walls, he rolls his eyes, he swallows his words, he ambles slack-kneed—all like Marlon Brando used to do. Never have we seen a performer so clearly following another’s style. Mr. Kazan should be spanked for allowing Dean to do such a sophomoric thing. East of Eden is a great, green iceberg, mammoth and imposing, but very cold.”
In response to Crowther’s critique, Pauline Kael of the New Yorker observed, “The Times’ critic can always be counted on to miss the point.”
Kazan said, “One reviewer seemed to catch on that Jimmy was full of piss, if not vinegar. He wrote that Jimmy looked like Baby Snooks reciting while waiting to go to the bathroom.”
When William Bast saw the film, he said: “There was so much of Jimmy in that movie, so much of the young man I had known for so long and had grown to love as a friend, so much of the lost, tormented, searching, gentle, enthusiastic little boy, so much of the bitter, self-abusive, testing, vengeful monster.”
Jimmy’s stunning performance foreshadowed his iconic role as Jim Stark in his subsequent film, Rebel Without a Cause. Both Cal Trask and Jim Stark are angst-ridden, misunderstood outcasts, desperately craving approval from a deeply flawed father figures.
At the 1956 Academy Awards ceremony, less than a year after Jimmy’s death, he received a posthumous nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performance in East of Eden. This was the first posthumous nomination for a male actor in the Academy’s history.
[Jeanne Eagels had been the first actress to be nominated posthumously for her role in The Letter (1929). The year it was released, she died of a drug overdose at the age of thirty-nine.)
Jimmy had competed for the prize with some of the biggest names in Hollywood. His rivals that year included Frank Sinatra for The Man With the Golden Arm; Spencer Tracy for Bad Day at Black Rock; and James Cagney for Love Me or Leave Me. The award went to Ernest Borgnine for his performance in Marty.
Of the other actors in Eden, only Jo Van Fleet carried an Oscar home as Best Supporting Actress. Kazan was nominated as Best Director, but lost to Delbert Mann for Marty. Paul Osborn also received a nomination for Best Screenplay.
With the release of East of Eden, James Dean was on the dawn of international fame. In time, newer generations, many from the 21st Century, would focus their celebrity attentions onto only two movie stars from the 1950s, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, virtually obliterating recognition of a forgotten galaxy of others. Both of them would end their young lives tragically and early.
Bast later speculated about what Jimmy would have said about all this posthumous attention:
“Hot damn! I’m a fucking legend!”
