Byron Meets Billy Budd

By RICHARD CORLISS

In Fairmount, Indiana, in the early 1940s, James Dean would "dream out loud about getting in the movies." Ortense Winslow, the aunt who raised him after his mother died of cervical cancer at 29, thought it an odd ambition for a farm boy. "I mean," she says, "there wasn't anything very different about him -- except he had this strange ability to take you along with his feelings."

In just three films, Dean took America along with him. He walked into Hollywood and with East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant created a trilogy of youthful alienation. Then, at 24, he crashed his Porsche Spyder 550 on a California highway and died. That was nearly 40 years ago, and it marked the birth of Saint Jimmy, Punk Martyr. His life and death have inspired films (September 30, 1955), plays (Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) and dozens of songs. Visits to Dean's Fairmount gravesite have become as much a part of celebrity mythology as trips to Graceland or Jim Morrison's plot in Paris' Pere-Lachaise cemetery. Next year there will be a big-time Hollywood biopic; every male star under 30 pines to play the lead.

And, it seems, every journalist over 30 wants to mine that life for meaning. Or at least gossip. In Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Viking; $22.95), Paul Alexander, who has written books on Andy Warhol and Sylvia Plath, argues that Dean was a homosexual whose romances with starlets were so much unfelt publicity. Alexander scavenges for tatty, tattly tidbits, like the story about the night Dean and a pal picked up a one-legged girl at a bar and ... well, the curious may turn to page 203 for the punch line. And to page 286 for a photograph of a naked young man, supposedly Dean, fondling himself in a tree.

This dish, much of it spilled long ago in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon (where Dean is dubbed "the human ashtray"), should not stop the presses of any tabloid. For that matter, they should not have started any presses at Viking. Stuffed with exotic by-products and lots of filler, the book could be sold in supermarkets as Jimmy Dean pork sausage.

Dean was not, as Alexander posits, the first movie star to project androgyny. (See the early films of Gary Cooper and Cary Grant.) It's true that in East of Eden a whore calls out to Dean, "Hello, pretty boy." And yes, he was pretty: slight and muscular, his body compact, his face beautiful, seraphic, smudged, sleepy-eyed and quite American. Yet his appeal was not the girlish winsomeness of a catamite. It was the lost soul of the postwar teen, glamourized for the movies. In '50s film, that looked revolutionary. Today it just looks brilliant. Dean was important not only for what he represented but also for what he achieved: a delicacy that grounded his anger, a supple craft forged at the Actors Studio and on live TV dramas, a charisma that drew all eyes to him and the characters he created.

James Byron Dean had the Byronic touch; he was a sexy poet who would do much and die young. But for Byron's verbal brilliance Dean substituted eloquent muteness. Like Melville's Billy Budd, he felt obliged to stammer out the truth when enraged by the lies of his superiors. This made Dean (who felt abandoned when his father sent him to live with relatives) the spokesman for a generation that rejected their parents' evasions. Dean's strangulated murmurings, like Marlon Brando's cruddy diction, was an impediment that became a hip mannerism -- part of the modernist liturgy. The two made rudeness a political statement, a sacrament in the new Church of Teen.

Dean idolized Brando, and no wonder. Brando was there first with the most: three defining films (A Streetcar Named Desire, The Wild One, On the Waterfront) and a surly, pensive sexuality. If Brando had died in 1955, he might be the icon today. Instead it was Dean who flamed into immortality, pop- style. "If Marlon Brando changed the way people acted," Martin Sheen said at a 1980 service in Fairmount, "James Dean changed the way people lived."

That's true, if by people we mean kids. It was Dean who escorted kids into the primacy of '50s culture and who made withdrawal their fashionable political statement. In East of Eden, his best film, he is often simmering, skulking in the background like an orphan or a guilty conscience or the family psychopath. His genius was to suggest he could be any of these things or all of them at once. In that movie, Julie Harris says of Dean, "he's scary. He looks at you, sort of like an animal." That was the actor's image: a shivering faun who could rear up in rage -- Bambi with cigarette, torn T shirt and blue jeans.

Like so many '50s movies, East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause inhabit Freud's little acre. In the first film, Dean's character reconciles with his whore-mother; in the second, he effectively disowns his emotionally impotent dad and becomes the head of his own improvised teen family, father to Sal Mineo, lover to Natalie Wood. In both films, Dean ends up teaching his parents, if only by screaming, "You're tearing me apart!" Dean's was a lesson that kids and adults would not forget: the young know better.

Alexander's inferences about Dean's private life may make for cocktail-party chatter, but finally they are irrelevant. So is the cult; in the end, only the work remains. And for a young man who was still creating himself and his craft when he died, James Dean did stupendous work. He lived in the only place that matters for an actor: onscreen. He still does, in fact.