James Dean just couldn't help it. He was talent on a spree. He smouldered and ruptured, made only three movies of any account and awoke the nerve-ends of a generation of pent-up recalcitrant youth. James Dean was big - ascending fast - but he should have been huge. His story ended with a jump-cut to oblivion.
Born in small-town Indiana on February 8th, 1931, he would have been 70 this week had he lived. It is hard to picture him rheumy-eyed, less fleet of foot, a dues-paid pensioner flicking his bus-pass in disgust in the face of officialdom, or shuffling into the burnt-out, drooping fag-end of his life, towards the waiting zimmer frame: a rebel in search of Steradent, a toupe and a truss.
A lifetime loner, Dean was born the only child of Winton Dean, a dental technician, and Mildred, the mother who was to die when Dean was just nine. When Jimmy was five, they left Indiana for Santa Monica, California, a disruption that paved the way for the major quake of James Dean's life: his mother's untimely death from cancer. His sense of abandonment was compounded by rejection.
His father packed him off to relatives in Fairmount, Indiana, to life on a farm. There, he lived a free-range version of the all-American boyhood: pet pigs and cows; a first, gleaming motorbike; then a sports career at high school, where the five foot, seven inch Dean became county champion in the pole vault. By all accounts he was shy and secretive, tough to know.
Aged 18, he shifted to college in Santa Monica and studied law (to please his father, with whom he lived briefly), taking up acting as a sideline. Later he moved to UCLA and the acting burgeoned. He played John the Baptist in Hill Number One, a TV drama. No one noticed, except for a bunch of tremulous high school girls, ignited by what they saw. They launched the first Deany-bopper fan club.
What they'd discerned was his biting intensity, his inwardness - Dean hallmarks - along with a footloose, petulant, stray-cat vulnerability. The stray cat was next seen in New York, when he hit Times Square in search of a life, in search of a break. If you look at the bunch of black and white stills that exist from that era, you'll see he already had the pout, the mussed up surf-wave of brushed-back hair, the flipped-up collar. And he gazed like a guy intent on ridding the world of all that soft-in-the-middle candy: those polished, dandified leading men who filled the screens in the 1930s, 1940s and on through the 1950s. They all wore the curse of parental approval, the Garys, the Carys, the Clarks and Errols. Lotharios older than your parents. A hard rap for kids.
Dean was different, dossing down in makeshift apartments, bumming fags or a bite to eat, banging the bongos in a restaurant, living by night. He got his break at the Actors' Studio, rubbing egos with Marlon Brando and Monty Clift, his hotshot heroes. This was the home of the "method" school, run by Lee Strasberg. Dean blew that too.
Strasberg criticised a scene in which Dean played. Always great at improvisation, Dean stormed out. But then he got lucky, landing a part in The Immoralist on Broadway, playing a homosexual Arab boy. He was universally hailed as "a brilliant and promising young star". But once more he fought with the producer, quitting the show two weeks after opening. He seemed hell bent on self-denial, refusing the pleasures of success - just as, privately, he refuted the love of a woman, Arlene Sachs. "I told him I loved him," she said. "He pretended he didn't hear."
"No-one can love me," he told her later. "At least not yet."
Elia Kazan snapped him up to star in East of Eden, a slice of allegorical mulch inspired by the furies of the Old Testament. Dean played the disaffected Cal Trask, but the newspaper gossip mongers made whoopee out of his love affair with Pier Angeli. When their relationship fell apart Dean bought a Porsche and entered a motor race at Palm Springs. "Racing is the only time I feel whole," he said. He won. It merely encouraged his daredevil nature.
In a bio-documentary, The James Dean Story, made after his death, the lugubrious voice-over thus explained him: "To test the limits of his life he had to approach the borders of death". But in East of Eden, the youthful fans saw pure gut pain that brimmed with excruciating life, that bayed from inside him like every broken teenage heart had ever done in a zillion years. Pure lonesome angst.
In his next two movies, the timely Rebel Without a Cause, and his swansong, Giant, in which he played Jet Rink, a ranch hand who hits an unexpected oil strike, he proved he could act. He commanded the screen. He packaged the potent combination of sex and little-boy outlandishness. He did not hang around for the plaudits. A female acquaintance of mine, a Dean groupie, remembers thinking: "He was a fella could make your da have sleepless nights." In a seminal sense, he was the precursor to rock 'n' roll, the first true epitome of "cool".
On September 30th, 1955, en route to Salinas, where he planned to race his Porsche the following day, he was clocked at - and booked for - driving at 65 mph. Two hours later, undeterred, pushing twice that speed, with the setting sun knifing through his vision, Dean's luck emptied. His body was pulverised in a side-swipe head-on collision. Immortality, in an instant, guaranteed.
Like Elvis, John Lennon and Buddy Holly, death has ensured him perpetual life. Had he survived he might have fulfilled his expressed desire to become a movie director or mogul. Chances are the youthful meteor would have cooled, dropped out, or found himself eclipsed by brighter talents. Instead, he remains a posthumous industry, ever iconic, forever young.