At 24, his death conferred on him a marketable immortality. Even now his image — like that of those other icons, Monroe and Presley — continues to adorn posters, calendars, key rings, T-shirts and thousands of other items of merchandise. But there are other images and fragments of his life, many published here for the first time, that are rarely seen but give a greater depth to his story.
When Dean died, his career was in a soaring trajectory and he had not had time to fail. Elvis and Marilyn both endured deprived childhoods, but it was not the case with Dean. Though his mother, Mildred, had died at 29 when he was nine, his upbringing had been relatively comfortable. Ten years earlier she had met Winton Dean, a 23-year-old dental technician, in Marion, Indiana. They married, and little Jimmy was born on February 8, 1931. In 1935, Winton answered the federal government's call for dental technicians to move to California, accepting a post at the Veterans' Administration hospital in Westwood. Mildred delightedly moved to a bungalow in the ocean city of Santa Monica. In 1938, strange abdominal pains developed and she began wasting away. At that time, cancer was unmentionable, and Jimmy was never told that her illness was terminal.
On her death, Winton faced a terrible choice. What money he had had been used up, and he felt he could not give his young son the best environment in which to grow up. Jimmy's grandmother Emma had come from Indiana to be with her daughter for the last weeks of her life, and it was with her that Jimmy went back, with his mother's coffin in a boxcar on the same train. Winton's sister, Ortense, married to Marcus Winslow, a farmer in Fairmount, a small town south of Marion, would take him in and raise him in their 14-room farmhouse as though he was their own child.
The Winslows doted on Jimmy. He became a farmer's boy, and Marcus taught him how to handle a tractor long before he was old enough to drive on the highway, igniting his fascination for mechanised wheels. When Marcus Jr was born in 1943, it was as if he had gained a little brother.
At Fairmount High School, Jimmy was popular and energetic, and given to bursts of intense enthusiasm. A perceptive teacher, Adeline Brookshire, spotted his interest in drama. He appeared in many school plays, and he even represented his state in the National Forensic League contest in Colorado, but he upset the judges by allowing his performance to overrun the allotted time. He took criticism badly, and sulked all the way back to Fairmount.
At 18 he took off for California to live with his father, who had remarried and had secured him a place at Santa Monica City College in the hope that he would prepare for a career in law. Dean was actually hellbent on becoming an actor; he managed to secure a place in the theatre-arts department of UCLA, and moved out. Initially he was seen by the well-connected students as a weedy hick with an Indiana twang. He persevered, lost his accent, and went to a workshop run by the actor James Whitmore, who told him to go east and try for the famous Actors Studio.
Dean dropped out of UCLA and made his way to New York. He did the rounds, existed penuriously, watched his idols Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift on screen, and was admitted to the Actors Studio as its youngest member. But after a reading, Lee Strasberg subjected him to a savage critique and he walked out. Dean slogged on, getting a key role in a Broadway play. Sadly, after poor notices, it closed that Saturday night. His second and last Broadway appearance, in an adaptation of André Gide's The Immoralist, earned rave reviews, but almost immediately he quit the cast. The reason was that Kazan, who had met him at the Actors Studio, offered him the part of Cal in East of Eden. Dean, clutching his belongings in a brown paper bag, was taken by the director to Los Angeles and the start of his brief Warner Brothers career. He had 18 months left to live.
The James Dean story has become riddled with myth over the years. Many fanzines after his death claimed he was still alive, either in a vegetative state or disfigured and under treatment in a secret sanatorium. Kenneth Anger claimed in Hollywood Babylon he liked to have cigarettes stubbed out on his naked torso. Another myth was that he worked in the porn trade. Though it is often claimed he was gay, he had an impressive number of girlfriends, including Ursula Andress and Pier Angeli. But most misconceptions concern his relationship with Winton. It was alleged the death of his sweet, caring mother and abandonment by his selfish father seared Dean's soul. When Kazan saw Jimmy and Winton meet, he discerned that there was little rapport between them. But Dean himself often encouraged this perception.
What has to be remembered is that Dean was an actor. Not just on stage or in front of the camera, but all the time. He would infuriate his UCLA roommate and friend Bill Bast by acting to him when there was no other audience. "He sapped the minds of his friends as a bloodsucker saps the strength of an unsuspecting man," said Bast.
Jimmy Dean had an unquenchable curiosity for the human condition. In Marfa, the hot, bleak town in Texas that was the location for Giant, he spent endless time talking to the locals while his co-stars Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor remained in their air-conditioned trailers.
The farmhouse on the Jonesboro road two miles north of Fairmount in which Jimmy spent his formative years is now the home of Marcus Winslow Jr, who administers the James Dean estate. In his sixties now, he was "little Marky" to Jimmy. I had subscribed to the general view of the long-dead Winton and his "abandonment" of his son. Marcus always denied it, and cynically I accepted that of course he would: it suited the image he was projecting of Jimmy. Then, last year, Marcus produced a sheaf of letters that Dean had written from New York and LA to Marcus's parents, Marcus Sr and Ortense, and to Winton. They had never been seen outside the family. What shone through was the very natural warmth of the relationship between father and son. Could Dad fix up Jimmy's teeth next time he saw him? Be sure to watch NBC on Sunday because Jimmy was in a play. And to Ethel, Winton's second wife: "You take good care of Dad! You and Dad have worked hard all your lives. Now please go and play!" So, where was the animosity, the estrangement, the distance?
"It was never true," said Marcus. "Jimmy's dad really didn't want to give him up, but he had sold his car and done everything he could to raise money for doctor's bills, so he decided it would be best to have Jimmy come back here and live until he could get things straightened out. Of course, in 1941, America got involved in the second world war and Winton was drafted, and he was in service until 1945 or 1946. Uncle Winton said he never, ever, really thought when he lost his wife he would also lose his son."
What would have happened had Dean not crashed his Porsche Spyder at Cholame, California, on September 30, 1955? He was known to have been planning a creative partnership with Nicholas Ray, the director of Rebel without a Cause, and may well have turned to directing. His fearlessness on the track, and the trophies he acquired, suggested he could have made a big name in motor sports, had he so wished. On the other hand, his live-fast, die-young yen for speed might have finished him sooner or later.
Having visited the crash site, and seen computer simulations from the police diagrams, I am convinced the accident was not his fault, and the inquest verdict (that he caused the crash by "excessive speed") was wrong. The driver of the oncoming car turned in front of his Spyder. It was Dean's right of way. The jury preferred to believe that a reckless, overpaid young man in an overpriced, flimsy, imported sports car should be blamed, rather than a local boy at the wheel of a solidly built American Ford sedan. Jimmy was a hairy driver, to be sure, but in this instance he was not culpable. Perhaps the Paso Robles coroner's office could, 50 years on, consider a posthumous exoneration?
James Dean, by George Perry, is published by Dorling Kindersley, price £20. To order it from The Sunday Times Books Direct for the special price of £16 plus £2.25 p&p, telephone: 0870 165 8585
