THE clergyman at the funeral spoke with more oracular force than he could have guessed. "The career of James Dean has not ended," he told the congregation in Fairmount, Indiana. "It has just begun. And remember, God himself is directing the production."
Up there, maybe. Downs here, Mammon had a biggish hand in it.
It was 1955, and James Dean, a 24-year-old adolescent, had died in the wreck of his Porsche racing car after a collision on a lonely road in California. He had been in Hollywood for only lb months, slouching towards stardom in three movies - East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant - in all of which he had played lightly disguised versions of his sullen self. Now, overnight, the marketing men would make him an international icon.
"It was his miserable and oddly good fortune to die young," Spoto observes. Humphrey Bogart provided a blunter verdict: "Dean died at just the right time. Had he lived, he'd never have been able to live up to his own publicity".
When Dean arrived in Hollywood in the spring of 1954 his luggage consisted of two paper bags stuffed with his clothes and tied with string. In a matter of weeks he had acquired an MG sportscar, a sleek European motorcycle and a Palomino, as well as a haughty way with wardrobe and make-up staffs and an unerring knack of getting up the nose of his co-star, the experienced Raymond Massey. As his biographer has it, he had begun to barter in the cheapest currency in Hollywood, the sense of one's own importance.
He was a selfish and unpredictable actor, constantly changing his lines in rehearsal and resorting to outrageous behaviour as he clamoured for attention. A favourite device was to urinate on the set. He once took a chair from a party and sat in the middle of a busy road, challenging drivers to run him down.
"He was never more than a limited actor," according to Elia Kazan, who had given him his first big break in East of Eden. "He was a highly neurotic young man, obviously sick. . . directing him was like directing the faithful Lassie."
So what made him sick? Spoto, in this rather soulless portrait, puts it down to childhood trauma. He was the child of a shotgun marriage, doted n by a mother who introduced him to books and music, but unwanted by a bitter, unimaginative father. He was seven when the family moved to Los Angeles and two years later he watched his mother die of cancer. Then - and Spoto sees it as a defining moment - the father shipped the child back to Indiana with his mother's coffin. "It seemed to me worse than dying itself," he said of the experience.
The abandoned boy was pampered by a well-meaning aunt and uncle, but never recovered from the loss of the only person he had ever trusted. He turned to acting to escape himself - "to wrap Jimmie Dean in another personality and simultaneously to astonish, to shock, to control the emotions of others before they controlled him."
Spoto has done some deep digging on Dean's struggling career in theatre and TV drama in New York. Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift became role models and he pestered and embarrassed them with phone calls. Of 200 applicants who auditioned for the Actors' Studio in 1951 he was one of only two selected; then he petulantly abandoned the course after a solo performance was savaged by Lee Strasberg.
When it came to sex, Dean could find pleasure on either side of the street, but Spoto dismisses the more lurid rumours that he hustled as a homosexual to try to advance his career. What is clear is that as a friend or sexual partner he was arrogant and unpredictable, dropping people inexplicably as he moved on to someone new.
Forty-one years on, it is hard to see why pilgrims still flock to Fairmount or why that surly image looks down from posters on the walls of our sons' and daughters' bedrooms. After all, crafty salesmen fobbed us off with a damaged teddy bear as a near-perfect rebel?
