The Full Biography
James Dean. Actor. The Marion, Indiana, kid who made three pictures into a century’s idea of a young man, then died on a California road before the third had even opened.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a red jacket, a slouch, a cigarette, a face that looks like it has already left the room. Rebel Without a Cause. What the still cannot show is James Byron Dean of Marion and Fairmount, Indiana, a mother dead when he was nine, a Quaker aunt and uncle’s farm, and a fame that is almost entirely posthumous because a Porsche and another car met on September 30, 1955, near Cholame.
He was born on February 8, 1931, in Marion, to Winton Dean, a dental technician, and Mildred Wilson. The family went to Santa Monica when he was a small boy. In 1940 Mildred died of cancer. He was nine. Winton sent him back to Indiana, to the farm of Marcus and Ortense Winslow in Fairmount — Quaker kin, a household that treated work and church as weather. The myth treats the farm as a prologue. It was the house. He played basketball. He learned to debate. He rode a motorcycle. He acted in school plays because the instrument was already there and the town was small enough to let him use it. He graduated Fairmount High in 1949 and went back to California, to Santa Monica College and then UCLA, where he appeared in a Pepsi commercial and a bit in Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952). The campus did not hold him. New York did.
He worked as a tester for the stunts on the game show Beat the Clock. He studied at the Actors Studio, where Lee Strasberg’s room treated feeling as a job. He took live television the way a hungry actor takes live television: Studio One, Kraft Television Theatre, Robert Montgomery Presents, more than two dozen credits in two years. In 1954 he played the Arab houseboy in The Immoralist on Broadway, opposite Louis Jourdan and Geraldine Page. The notices were strong. Elia Kazan, casting John Steinbeck’s East of Eden for Warner Bros., saw the hunger and put him on a train west. The door was not a sudden Rebel. It was a wait in New York and then a director who knew what to do with a boy who would not look at a father.
East of Eden (1955) made him Cal Trask, a son in the Salinas Valley who cannot get his father to look. Raymond Massey is Adam. Julie Harris is Abra. Richard Davalos is the brother the father prefers. Kazan shot the need, not the pose. Dean was nominated for Best Actor — the first of two nominations he would not live to hear. The picture opened in March. He was already shooting the next one. Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955) put him in a red windbreaker as Jim Stark, a new kid in Los Angeles who cannot find a father who will stay in the room. Natalie Wood is Judy. Sal Mineo is Plato. Jim Backus is the father in an apron. The planetarium, the chickie run off the cliff, “You’re tearing me apart!” — a civic theology of adolescence the country still uses when it needs a young man who will not stay. He did his own danger. He treated the camera as a person who might leave. The picture opened on October 27, 1955. He had already been dead for twenty-seven days.
George Stevens had him for a third. Giant, from Edna Ferber, is a Texas ranch epic: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and Dean as Jett Rink, a ranch hand who becomes an oil millionaire and then a drunk at his own banquet. Dean lost weight, learned a lope, aged the character twenty years in the same face. Principal photography wrapped in September 1955. He never saw a cut. The picture opened in 1956 and brought the second posthumous nomination. Three features. Two he could have sat in a theater and watched. One he could not. A whole industry of posters has been inventing a fourth ever since.
He had already, before the jacket, been a working television actor in a way the poster people skip. The Unlighted Road. The Thief. A turn on General Electric Theater. He studied the way a hungry man studies a kitchen. He kept a motorcycle in New York and then in Los Angeles. He photographed. He played the bongos. He was impossible on a set and then suddenly exact, a combination Kazan knew how to use and Ray learned to weather. The three features sit on that shop, not on a sudden slouch.
He raced. That is not a costume. He ran a Porsche Speedster in Sports Car Club of America events at Palm Springs, Bakersfield, Santa Barbara. He bought a Porsche 550 Spyder, chassis 550-0055, and had George Barris letter LITTLE BASTARD on the tail. On the afternoon of September 30, 1955, he was driving that car to a race at Salinas, with his mechanic Rolf Wütherich in the passenger seat. On U.S. 466 near Cholame, at the junction with State Route 41, Donald Turnupseed turned left in a Ford. The Spyder hit the Ford. Dean died. Wütherich lived, badly, and would spend the rest of a hard life being asked about a passenger seat. Dean was twenty-four. A complete life does not make the wreck a sacrament. It says: three pictures, a farm, a mother, a speed he did not have to use that afternoon, and a fame that had to invent a next chapter because there was not one.
If a man can bridge the gap between life and death, if he can live on after he’s dead, then maybe he was a great man.James Dean, in a 1955 interview
The turn never arrived. That is the fact a Wolper hour has to hold. There is no second act in which he becomes a character actor, a director, a man who outgrows the jacket. There is Fairmount, three pictures, and a road. The industry around the name is other people’s. The file is his.
Six things most people never knew
- Fairmount, after Mildred’s death, is the house. A Quaker farm. The slouch sits on a boy who had already lost a mother.
- Television and the Studio came before the jacket. Not a sudden Rebel. A wait in New York.
- Three features, only two released while he could have seen them. Giant opened after Cholame. The trilogy is an invention of order.
- He was a real amateur racer, not a costume. The Spyder was a choice. The sacrament around the wreck is other people’s.
- Two posthumous Oscar nominations are an Academy first of a kind. The envelope cannot complete a life. It can only nod.
- Wütherich lived. The wreck-as-romance often skips the passenger. The file should not.
He did not leave an official marriage. The house that remains is Fairmount’s museum and a grave the tourists find. Friends from the sets describe a professional who could be impossible and suddenly exact. The Dean on a poster is a climate. The Dean in Kazan’s picture is a performance. The performance is the life.
The later years
There was not a long second act, and the heading still has to be filled, because the months after the door opened were a life, not a trailer. In 1955 he moved through three features the way a man moves through rooms he does not know he is leaving. He kept an apartment in Los Angeles. He kept the motorcycle. He sat for Warner’s publicity stills in the red jacket that would outlive the body. He dated, in the columns’ telling, Pier Angeli, and the town made a romance of it; the file is thinner than the columns. He went home to Fairmount when he could and was photographed in a coffin in a farmhouse parlor for a magazine spread that now reads like a dare the future accepted. He was already racing on weekends. The Speedster. Then the Spyder. The last week of September was a wrap on Giant, a ticket to Salinas, a conversation with a highway patrolman who told him to slow down, and a junction at Cholame.
The years of the name began before the body was buried. Warner rushed Rebel Without a Cause into theaters in October 1955. Teenagers stood in lines that were also wakes. Giant opened in October 1956 and made Jett Rink a posthumous fact; Stevens had already had to finish the picture without its third lead sitting in a screening room. The Academy nominated him for East of Eden at the 1956 Oscars and for Giant at the 1957 Oscars — the only actor to receive two posthumous Best Actor nominations. He won neither. Fairmount buried him at Park Cemetery on October 8, 1955. Two thousand people came to a town that had not asked to be a shrine. The Winslow farm became a pilgrimage. A memorial went up near the Cholame junction, a stainless tree of a sculpture by Seita Ohnishi that people still photograph as if a road could explain itself. The jacket became a costume-shop item. The slouch became a way of standing.
Warner and the magazines did the rest of the living. Photo books. A death car the columns would not leave alone. A museum in Fairmount that treats a Quaker farm as a station of the cross. The James Dean Gallery. The festival the town still holds. Wütherich, the passenger, lived until 1981 and never got clean of the afternoon. Turnupseed lived a private life in Tulare County and was asked about a left turn until he died. The sacrament has always been other people’s. The file is three pictures, a farm, and a junction.
What those first years after the crash actually were is a town in Indiana learning to be a shrine, a studio learning to sell a ghost, and a passenger, Wütherich, learning to live inside other people’s sacrament. There was no companion of record, no last quiet job, no house he chose for old age. There was a farm that had already been the house, three pictures, and a culture that still uses the jacket when it needs a young man who will not stay. He died at twenty-four. The pictures did not. The name did the living he did not get to do.
A Wolper hour that stops at the wreck is doing the poster’s job. The months of 1955 are the chapter: Kazan, Ray, Stevens, the Speedster, the Spyder, the last highway, the two envelopes that arrived after the grave. Fairmount kept the body. Hollywood kept the face. The tourist kept the slouch. All three are true. None is the whole throat. The life is shorter than the slogan. The work is three pictures and a farm.
The last jobs were specific. He wrapped Giant at Warner and in Marfa, Texas, a ranch hand aged twenty years in one face. He sat for the stills in the red jacket. He took the Spyder north on the 30th because there was a race at Salinas and he had entered it. A highway patrolman, O.V. Hunter, stopped him and Wütherich near Mettler and told them to slow down. They did not stay slow. At the Cholame junction the Ford turned. The rest is other people’s sacrament. What the name did next — the October lines, the 1956 premiere of Giant, the two envelopes, the farm that became a station of the cross — is the chapter he did not get to live and the chapter the heading still has to hold. Fairmount still takes the visitors. The jacket still does the work of a century. The three pictures are the life.
After he was gone
Every rebel still pays him a tax in slouch. Every dead-young-star industry still steals Cholame. Kazan still arrives in the same sentence. The sentence is the work. The slogan is the climate. Fairmount is the house. The James Dean Gallery and the Winslow farm still take visitors. Rebel still plays on a Friday. Giant still surprises people who thought he was only a jacket.
He came out of Marion, lost a mother, learned a farm, took three pictures, bought a Spyder, and died on a road before the third opened. If you only remember the jacket, you have the still. If you remember Fairmount, Kazan, the two envelopes, and Wütherich, you have him.
The Winslow farm still takes visitors. Park Cemetery still takes the tourists. The Cholame memorial still photographs as if a road could explain itself. East of Eden still teaches a son who cannot get a father to look. Rebel still teaches a jacket. Giant still teaches a banquet a man does not survive with dignity. Three pictures. A farm. A junction. That is the whole throat. The slogan is extra. Fairmount still knows the difference. The poster does not. Keep the farm.
Portrait: Warner Bros. publicity still · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons