A Tenderness Lost—James Dean

For nearly two decades tall, affable George Stevens has been a force for artistry in Hollywood. From Gunga Din to A Place In The Sun he has contributed some of the best movies we have had. At this moment he is putting the finishing touches to his latest picture, Edna Ferber’s Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and the late James Byron Dean, of whom he wrote this moving story.

I spent six hours today with Jimmy Dean, as I have most of the days in these past two months. He is always up there on the projection-room screen in front of me, challenging me not to like any part of him in the picture. And there is no part of Jimmy I don’t like, no part of him that hasn’t always the attraction that goes with complete naturalness. Maybe it is the way he sidles next to someone, chin hugging his chest, then squints up out of the corner of his eye, mumbling a greeting. Or maybe the way he can run a boyish giggle right through his words or, without losing an iota of expressiveness, violate all the dramatic precepts and persistently present only his back to the camera.

JAMES DEAN: “He had an intense, special enthusiasm,” says close friend Roy Schatt who taught Jim photography, took these revealing pictures.

 

Parties at Roy’s found Jim, glasses off, beating the bongos with grim determination, happy but never quite relaxed.

He was always looking for special effects, crouching in difficult corners, peering around chairs for that odd, off-beat effect that characterized his life. He posed with Roy in rehearsal halls, the street, anywhere. No one stared at him then. He was just one of New York’s theatre kids, living it up on a shoestring of talent and hope.

When there is this much distinction and force to a personality you can’t believe it can ever be destroyed. Certainly for me, as I put together his last picture, Giant, the Dean who drove to his death on a cool September evening in northern California is unreal. The real one is the Jimmy I knew and am living with.

“Hey, you know something, Mr. Stevens,” I can hear him say, “that part of Jett Rink in Giant—that’s for me.” That was nearly a year ago, when he first read the script and then came searching for me. Now he casts me sidelong glances from the projection room screen, as if saying, “I told you it was for me, didn’t I? Man, I just knew!”

Jimmy was youth

There are some people who fit themselves colorfully against any sort of background, who always seem to move along a trail of interest so that the eye follows them constantly, speculating on their motives, wondering. Jimmy was like that. On location in Texas I noticed that photographers always kept watch on Jim, knowing that sooner or later he would reward them with a fine picture—maybe silhouetted, lithe and lean on his horse, against a gold and buttermilk sky, or perhaps fooling with a length of rope, making it loop and unloop itself as he talked. Jimmy wasn’t a Texan. Jimmy was Indiana born and bred. But Jimmy was youth and he had the free faculty of youth to belong anywhere.

Where do these young people come from, to win identity as our country’s best known actors and actresses? Take the three who were together in Giant—Elizabeth, Rock and Jimmy. Elizabeth Taylor, a cameo of a girl, gentle and uncomplicated. Rock Hudson—big, handsome, considerate, blending easily into the teamwork of movie-making. And Jimmy Dean. Jimmy, not flattered at all to be considered cooperative. Jimmy, in a hurry about life and career, needing to cut corners. Jimmy, strangely impractical about saying and doing the right things—yet in every word and gesture a poetical presence with an individualized approach that I know is opening up a new tradition of acting in Hollywood.

An odd sweetness

Where do they come from and what gives them the sensitivity to bring life to the characters writers imagine and set down on paper? So many have called Jimmy nothing but a small boy with a big ego—and never have so many over-simplified. I used to feel that he was a disturbed boy, tremendously dedicated to some intangible beacon of his own and neither he nor anyone else might ever know what it was. I used to feel this because at times when he fell quiet and thoughtful as if inner-bidden to dream about something, an odd and unconscious sweetness would light up his countenance. At such times, and because I knew he had been motherless since early childhood and had missed a lot of the love that makes boyhood jell right, I would come to believe that he was still waiting for some lost tenderness.

There is a side to Jimmy which may surprise many who have met and known him, an unsuspected, simple relationship to his time and heritage. He harkened to the kind of mementoes old-fashioned sentimentalism feeds on. A friend of mine has seen a scrapbook Jimmy kept. In it were pasted the usual things about the theatre, a review of Hamlet (it didn’t matter who played Hamlet or where it was given—anything pertaining to it he loved), a quotation from another play, a line about himself. But the bulk of the scrapbook was made up of other things altogether, some of them in color. Pasted on one page, the complete marriage ceremony and marriage vows, on another the lyrics to “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” A full-page picture of a baby’s face and under it the following legend: “Watch a child’s eye and you will see limitless hope’s expectancy.” The words to Robert Burns’ My Lure Is Like A Red, Red Rose. The verses of Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee.

In Hollywood his last date was with starlet Ursula Andress

 

Date photos by Darlene Hammond

Their relationship was stormy, unlike Jim’s quiet, deep love for Pier Angeli. “Ursula and I fight like cats and dogs,” he said. But just before his death they split, and afterward Ursula wept, “He was a lonely boy . . . Perhaps, if I had said something . . .”

So long

Jimmy lost not only a mother’s love when she died, but a young mother’s love. He was nine and she was only twenty-nine. And Jimmy grew up sentimental, with an intrinsic sadness to him despite all the foolery and wild gags and loud dashing to and fro. I can see him now, blinking behind his glasses after having been guilty of some bit of preposterous behavior, and revealing by his very cast of defiance that he felt some sense of unworthiness. Yet the very next second the glasses come off, a smile flashes and his whole being is transformed. You were disturbed by him. Now you are dedicated to him. It might be because he had a strong sense of fairness, and a deep regard for performance value. He wanted to do all things well even to spitting a cherry pit further than the next fellow—but he bowed to that fellow if to him belonged the victory. Once, on a set, he did an imitation of Charlie Chaplin and afterward a friend of his, Nick Adams, did an impersonation of Marlon Brando. Jimmy roared at Nick’s, waved aside his own Chaplin takeoff and begged Nick to repeat his. Once, before his start in pictures, he found himself on Hollywood’s Western Avenue and only fifty cents away from missing an already long-delayed meal. But on the way to a hash house he passed a movie showing a re-run of John Ford’s The Informer and he couldn’t resist going in to feed his emotional rather than his physical hunger. The thought of performing, or of seeing someone else perform was a compelling motivation in Jimmy’s life. It so caught his mind that I wondered sometimes if he lived unconsciously in resentment of a life thrust at one with the injunction that you had to live it. He was fascinated at the thought rather of being able to select a life to live.

What would he have chosen? I can’t describe it exactly, but no one who ever met Jimmy can forget feeling that he was on his way to that life. I knew it the day we first talked and I knew it the last day I saw him. He blinked at me a couple of times, waved and called out, “So long, I think I’ll let the Spyder out.” The Spyder was the model name for the fleeting silver scarab that was his beloved Porsche, the car in which he was killed.

THE END

—BY GEORGE STEVENS

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE JANUARY 1956