America’s Rebel James Dean Biography Explores Our Fascination With The Mystique And Mistakes Of Alienated Actor His Audience Adored

“Rebel: The Life and Legend of James Dean” By Donald Spoto (HarperCollins, 306 pp., illustrated, $25)

On Sept. 30, 1955, 24-year-old actor James Dean smashed his sleek Porsche Spyder into a common Ford at a remote intersection near Paso Robles in southern California. His life ended, but his legend was only beginning.

Legions of fans make the annual pilgrimage to his birthplace in Fairmount, Ind., to celebrate his memory. His publicity photos bring big bucks in the collectible marketplace and his image is still sold on posters, sweat shirts, pens, key chains, coffee mugs and, in the ultimate tribute, refrigerator magnets.

Why? In “Rebel,” a well-written, superbly researched biography, Donald Spoto seeks the answers to Dean’s legend. Although he doesn’t come up with any startling conclusions, he does bring a new clarity to the fog that has enveloped the Dean mystique.

Spoto dismisses lies about Dean as a male hustler and digs deep into the Dean mythology. He finds the roots of the actor’s alienated persona deep in his childhood and in his bisexuality. His mother, who doted on him and encouraged his artistic bent, died when Dean was a young child. His father, desperate to escape from the Midwest, left Dean with relatives and lit out for California. As Dean grew up, alone and isolated, his self-loathing grew as fast as his celebrity.

After reading the accounts of the anguished actor by most of his friends, lovers and colleagues, one marvels that anyone wanted to have anything to do with him. As a young adult, he was mean, selfish, egotistical and manipulative. As a high school student, he lost a statewide oral interpretation event because the length of his presentation exceeded the time allowed. Even though his teacher had warned him, Dean blamed her for his defeat.

During theater and live television rehearsals, he regularly threw his fellow actors off their marks by showing up late for work, improvising dialogue and adding bits of business that drew attention toward him and away from the work. He borrowed money that he had no intention of repaying, imposed on others’ generosity and ended long friendships when it suited his purposes.

But all that happened offscreen. Onscreen was a different matter. When Dean died, he left three memorable motion pictures - Elia Kazan’s “East of Eden” (1954), Nicholas Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955) and George Stevens’ “Giant” (1956).

Kazan, who never forgave Dean for his obdurate behavior on the set of “Eden,” set the Dean legend in motion. He had cast the surly, inexperienced actor as Cal, the rebellious son of a patriarchal, Old Testament icon played by Raymond Massey. Dean essentially plays himself. He doesn’t need the Actor’s Studio or Lee Strasberg to tell him how to play a teenager whose father is hard and diffident and whose mother is lost to him.

In Dean’s first scene on film - as Cal in “East of Eden” - he watches his mother, dressed in black, as she goes from the bank to the brothel. He begs the guard at the brothel door to let him talk to her. When the bouncer denies Cal entrance, he screams, “I just want to talk to her! You - you tell her I hate her.”

From that moment on, Dean was a star. Like no one before him, he captured the inevitable, desperate agony of an alienated kid needing love and acceptance. It was a persona authentic to Dean, who developed it in “Rebel” through Jim Stark, the kid who sees his Dad in an apron and goes berserk, and developed it further through the longer life of Jett Rink, the poor boy who makes it big in “Giant.”

Dean, at least as far his professional life was concerned, was lucky. Few actors had the good fortune to play roles so perfectly molded to their personalities so early in their careers.

Midway through the book, Donald Spoto observes that like Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Dean was “quite simply a boy whose desire for good work got confused with the lure of instant celebrity.” While the comparison of James to Jay is appropriate, Spoto doesn’t go far enough. Like the enigmatic Gatsby, the mysterious Dean remains a tabula rasa for Americans. Perhaps more than any other movie star, Dean personifies America’s nearly religious fascination with celebrity. He was, after all, a martyr to the cause.