THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 24, 1996 TAG: 9607240028
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book review
SOURCE: BY ROGER K. MILLER
LENGTH: 72 lines
NO FAITH is stronger than that of the followers of James Dean, as Donald Spoto shows in ``Rebel: The Life and Legend of James Dean.''
Nearly 41 years after the actor's death on Sept. 30, 1955, they literally still follow him: teenage girls, women in their 20s, grandmothers, young men, middle-aged businessmen. Every year they come in the thousands from every state and many foreign countries to his gravesite in Fairmount, Ind., to worship him and sing his praises.
Dean is as good an example as you can find of the fatalistic injunction to live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse - though, since he died in a horrible automobile crash, you can't be sure of the last part. While alive, he certainly was good-looking, in that androgynous way of so many great movie stars. He lived - and drove - very fast in the short time he was a celebrity; and he died young, at 24.
Dean starred in only three films, two of which - ``East of Eden'' and ``Rebel Without a Cause'' - were his personal vehicles. In the third, ``Giant,'' he was secondary to Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. Previous to that, his acting experience was negligible. Elia Kazan, who directed him in ``East of Eden,'' said he ``was never more than a limited actor.'' A roommate said Dean ``was not an extraordinary person in real life; if anything, he was rather bothersome.''
Then why oh why has he meant so much to so many people for so long? Spoto builds up an answer through incidents and remembrances of those who knew him, but it is summed up best by an occurrence in a high school play, when Dean ``evoked and established something that would be part of his later trademark - an amalgam of tenderness and confusion that never failed to touch audiences.''
What Spoto says about Dean's audiences is of as much value as what he says about Dean himself. The attraction ``had less to do with the real James Dean than with the really obsessive fans, who projected onto his image all their own confusions'' and for whom he could be anything - and everything.
It also had to do with the rise of the teen culture after World War II and with its continuation through generations since then. The core of his admirers has always been white middle-class American boys and girls: He is the ``perfect patron for comfortable loners.''
As for the older set (most of whom are carrying a torch lighted earlier in life), ``it is very safe to fall in love with a dead person, for there can be no responsibility, no threat of loss, no challenge, no change,'' Spoto writes.
Moreover, ``Dean died before he could fail, before he lost his hair or his boyish figure, before he grew up.'' He could always be the same, now and forever, ``the hero of a new generation.''
As Humphrey Bogart said, ``Dean died at just the right time. Had he lived, he'd never have been able to live up to his publicity.''
He often was a surly, uncooperative, attention-seeking little snot in both his professional and personal lives. Spoto makes a good case that this was the result of his mother's death when he was child and of his absent father's rejection (Dean was raised by a doting aunt and uncle). Most of what he did seems to have been an attempt to impress a father who didn't give a damn, and who, ironically, received all of Dean's estate when he died.
Spoto, who is something of a biographer to the stars, with books on Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier, has produced a handy little volume. It is not the model of an exhaustively researched celebrity biography, but for those who want to understand this strange fellow named James Dean, it is sufficient. MEMO: Roger K. Miller, former book editor for The Milwaukee Journal, is
a free-lance writer in Grafton, Wis. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
BOOK REVIEW
``Rebel: The Life and Legend of James Dean''
Author: Donald Spoto
Publisher: HarperCollins
Price: $25 by CNB