James Dean

...He only lived there for a few years until his father, a dental technician, was transferred to a VA hospital in Los Angeles...

...And his real personality was in almost constant torment...

...He made three movies within less than twelve months, and barely a year after achieving stardom, lay dead in a roadside gully, inside a Porsche Spyder...

...He moved to New York City, got some small parts in theatrical productions and live television drama, then got into the prestigious Actor's Studio...

...He learned to draw, to play the violin and the piano, and to feel loved...

...The former, James Dean: A Short Life by Venable Herndon, is, ounce for ounce, far better than the latter, James Dean: The Mutant King by David Dalton, for what it lacks, rather than for what it has...

...It has something to do with the feeling of torment that one gets out of his face...

...Why is James Dean a legend...

...If they meant the God of millions of teenagers of every age from 1955 to the present moment, then the answer is that JAMES DEAN IS NOT DEAD...

...When viewers saw him as the jealous and violent Cal Trask in East of Eden, the ambivalent, confused, and groping Jim Stark in Rebel Without A Cause, and the grasping, vindictive, and self-destructive Jett Rink in Giant, they were seeing the real James Dean...

...While those escapades do not add or detract from Dean's talent and attraction as a cult figure, they are certainly interesting and important as parts of the life of a sex symbol...

...He had the gift of not hiding his real personality when he appeared before an audience...

...In the three movies he made before his death in a flaming crash in Paso Robles, California, James Dean established himself as the Angel of Youth personified, so powerful and magnetic that death could not make him die...

...His mother had great artistic ambitions for him, and taught him that he was special, that he was talented, that he could do anything...

...From that moment, he was a meteor...

...After reading both books, the reader knows a great deal about James Dean and has each biographer's theory about why James Dean is a cult figure...

...It all adds up to powerful advice to skip his book and go for the thinner but far more substantial tome of Venable Herndon...

...In another place, Dalton tells us about a poorly defined photograph of Dean, but refuses to stop there: "The almost total absence of detail in this photograph gives it the spectral quality of a psychic event, as if this thing of indeterminate mass and frequency had nosed up to the glass to look at its fleeting reflection, an opalescent image wandering through insubstantial space, which then departed back into its murky magnetic world and rubbed a white shadow of James Dean from the screen to leave us a ghastly orthicon image on the pane of time...

...He looks like all those medieval portraits of the suffering Christ...

...He went back on the train to Fairmountwith the casket and stayed there to live with his aunt and uncle...

...He went into athletics in a big way...

...It was not just blind coincidence...

...Dalton has this capsule summation of Indiana: "...plainness is a native virtue of Indiana...

...Some of this hyperbole is authentically comic...

...He would be forty-four today if he had lived, and perhaps he would be doing $100,000 a week shows at the International in Las Vegas instead of being a living god...

...Herndon also examines Dean's life far more closely in the crucial time when he was just starting out as an actor than does Dalton...

...But for this reader at least, the mystery lingers on...

...Both books adequately explain how James Dean could symbolize youth's anguish, sense of loss, bitterness, hope, and despair, (and other good things) in terms of his psychological scarring as a child...

...He got larger parts as a young man kept in a cage, and as a homosexual Arab, then was discovered by Elia Kazan and cast for East of Eden...

...He has the look, the feel of an angel who, through no fault of his own, has been made to suffer and has become a little twisted by it...

...James Dean had within his life the elements to make himself a great actor, a tortured and tormented person who could put it across on the stage, on television, and on the silver screen...

...He had first started drawing fans in California when he was nineteen years old (he played John the Baptist in a television drama and a local Catholic girls' school formed a fan club) and hekept attracting them at a geometric rate until and after his death...

...He first got no parts, then tiny parts in Hollywood...

...He was then nineteen, and from then on, he bent every effort to making himself a star...

...But the Dalton book tends to wax poetic and ridiculous to cover up for just having the same old facts that Photoplay readers knew all along...

...Dalton says that he was the first "mutant,"a creature belonging neither to the old generation nor to the children of the old generation, but rather a new species, and that the teenagers of the 1950s were also mutants and they recognized him as their leader...

...But after that, although he lived in the most all-American, wholesome type of environment imaginable, he became fixated on attracting attention...

...Despite his relative shortness [5' 8"j, his high school yearbook noted, "Jim is our regular basketball guy, and when you're around him time will fly...

...Of all the popular cultural figures of the postwar period, none comes so close to being the living Holy Ghost as James Byron Dean...

...Then his mother contracted cancer and died...

...Evidence that the cult is far from moribund comes in two new books about James Dean...

...After a few months, he moved to a small farming town, Fairmount, Indiana...

...After he graduated from high school, he went out to Sunny Cal to live with his father and stepmother...

...He became a championship debater, dramatic reader, and actor...

...Perhaps the connection is so obvious between James Dean and our own self-pity that we idealize our self-pity in him...

...It was a supertrauma for James, from which he never recovered...

...He lived there, an only child, the apple of his mother's eye, until he was nine...

...But that's show business...

...Why, even in the fall and winter of 1974, do popularsingers use him in their lyrics...

...It means that by Your roots you 'grow up straight and strong' (as Alan Ladd advised Brandon de Wilde in Shane...

...In any event, the cult of James Dean lives on...

...Although Herndon somehow manages to blame Dean's death on Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, he at least takes the time to make sure that there are no pomposities or spelling errors such as those which stud every other page of Dalton's work (my favorite was Dalton's misuse of "exoterically speaking...

...Unfortunately, this is typical of Dalton's style...

...He became severely manic-depressive, loving, withdrawn, angry, and desperate to stand out...

...Why does he electrify one generation after another of viewers...

...Perhaps it is a feeling that we have about ourselves and James Dean is an idealized version of ourselves, and that is why we love him so...

...Herndon says that Dean, like other great cult figures, was obsessed with pushing things to their limits and that the crowd loves to see a daredevil—whether in daring to bare his emotions and needs or to drive his Porsche along Route 5 at over 100 miles per hour...

...Both came out at the end of the summer, both are selling well, both are chock full of information, but one is merely a mediocre biography, while the other is a pretentious, hero-worshipping bad joke...

...Such writing adds literally nothing but the all too clear image of a pretentious, artsy-craftsy writer saying nothing with a great deal of wind...

...James Dean was born in 1931 in Marion, Indiana, making him, almost certainly, the most famous Hoosier of the rock generation...

...He does not hide Dean's many homosexual adventures, for example, how he offered his body to homosexual big wheels in the entertainment business in exchange for help in his career...