By Stuart Mitchner

You’ve got that James Dean daydream look in your eyes.

—Taylor Swift

My feeling of fellowship with James Dean can be traced to our shared home state of Indiana and the fact that he wore glasses, like me, and apparently found them just as irritatingly invaluable. Donald Spoto’s biography Rebel (Harper Collins 1996) mentions a girl named Christine he met in June 1952 in his agent’s office. All she saw was a sloppy jerk who was “constantly pushing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. He did not look like a matinee idol.” When he tried to engage her in conversation, she brushed him off. When he suggested they go out for a cup of coffee, she felt “trapped — I didn’t want to be rude again, but I thought to myself, the last thing I want to do is walk down the street with this guy.”

Myopia also interfered when Dean was rehearsing for a student production of Macbeth at UCLA. According to a classmate, he needed glasses to read the script but “hated wearing them” and so was constantly fumbling for them, taking them off, putting them aside, and losing them. On top of that, his “Indiana twang” came “dangerously close” to transforming Macbeth into a comedy.

“A Madman’s Manuscript”

The twang actually may have enhanced his dramatic presentation of “A Madman’s Manuscript” (from Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers), the piece he performed his senior year at Fairmount High. As he read lines like “It’s a grand thing to be mad, to be peeped at like a wild lion through the iron bars, to gnash one’s teeth and howl through the long, still night,” his entire appearance altered, “his voice hard as steel, his teeth clenched, jaw set and eyes glazed with insane purpose… He leaped to a corner of the classroom and crouched with feral menace, his voice edged with fear and loathing.” When a student in the front row stood up and began mocking the performance, “Jimmy tore after him, caught him at the bottom of a stairwell, and began to throttle him…. It took the principal and two teachers to break up the fight.”

No matter, the bespectacled basketball player from Fairmount High went on to win first place in Dramatic Declamation at the High School Forensic Association State Finals in basketball-crazy Indiana, and the only reason he failed to make the final round of the Nationals was his refusal to cut the speech in order to stay within the 12 minute limit. Although he’d been warned by his coach and one of the judges, he insisted on the integrity of the Dickens text: “Every part of it is necessary.” No doubt he would say the same of his presentation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which took place at the Village Theatre in New York.

A photograph dated August 1, 1952 on timetoast.com shows a barefoot, strung-out-looking Dean accompanied by information about his “dramatic reading” of Kafka’s most famous work; later that year he played a lead role in the Broadway play See the Jaguar. A Facebook page headed “James Dean’s eclectic interests and hobbies” reports that “several works by Franz Kafka” were spotted in his library along with dozens of books about theater, Charlotte’s Web, and Death in Venice.

September 30, 1955

There’s a kind of Kafkaesque poetry in the idea of a 21-year-old midwesterner, a bespectacled nonentity with no acting credits to his name but a Pepsi commercial and some bit parts, rising to the challenge of an Off-Broadway dramatic reading of Kafka’s 60-page-long novella. I’ve been all over the Net searching in vain for some background, some reviews, some explanation. Spoto’s account of Dean’s reading of “A Madman’s Manuscript” offers an indication of the possibilities more cogent than any of Dean’s most extreme on-screen moments, except perhaps his drunken, infamously incoherent, deserted-banquet-hall speech at the end of Giant, which most of the world saw in the shadow of the actor’s sudden death on a California highway on September 30, 1955.

Reading through Wikipedia’s inventory of events that occurred on the last day of September — battles, conquests, earthquakes, hurricanes, massacres, plane crashes, Jack the Ripper’s third and fourth killings, the first televised American football game — no date resonates with me as powerfully as the one marking the sudden, ugly, violent death of James Dean.

Daydream Poetry

In “Style” on her album 1989, named after the year of her birth and released in 2014, when Taylor Swift sings, “You’ve got that James Dean daydream look in your eyes, / and I got that red lip classic thing that you like,” she’s hinting at the death of the actor and the birth of the legend, especially as she adds, “And when we go crashing down, we come back every time ’cause we never go out of style.”

In fact, “the daydream look” suggests that Dean’s poetry is not in the histrionics but in the quiet moments with Julie Harris in Elia Kazan’s East of Eden and Natalie Wood (and Sal Mineo) in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, where his presence, after all the melodrama, seems to envelop them, with Mineo the lost soul they saved.

Cal and Abra

In Eden you see Dean’s moody, spectacularly conflicted character Cal through the eyes of Harris’s Abra, your affection for her mellowing your fascination with his misery. It’s the quality of her eventual devotion to Cal that lends emotional credibility to Dean’s over-the-top performance. Cal’s groveling, wretched travesty of an embrace as he sinks to the floor at his father’s feet was not in the script. Today’s audiences may laugh at the scene or wince or roll their eyes, while others may still respond the way those of us guided by Abra’s loving understanding did. Julie Harris had our hearts in her hand and her heart was with Cal. If she hadn’t felt for him in that horrible moment, neither would we, so that when he hurls himself into the night baying like a wounded animal, we’re with her as she goes to console him, and though we can’t see them in the shadows, we can hear her sweet soothing loving voice and his moaning misery. Kazan keeps the scene hidden, but we know what’s happening, that it’s love taken to the limit now, she’s his, he’s hers, and the “good brother” Aron knows it, too.

James Byron Dean

Remember Christine, the girl who didn’t like Dean’s glasses and didn’t want to be seen walking down the street with him? Two hours later, according to Spoto’s Rebel, they’re in a deli off 42nd street “talking about their pasts, sharing their thoughts about the theater…. By the time they left, she found his candor and his wide range of interests rather attractive. He might, she thought, be a friend. What was his name? “ When he gave it in full — James Byron Dean — she said, “Like the poet?” and suggested “James Byron” would look better on a marquee. When they found that they were both hoping to join the Actors Studio, she showed him pages from a play she was writing and he suggested they should do a scene from the play for their audition. “You play the girl and I’ll be the boy.”

There’s poetry in that simple statement and the way it reflects his best moments with Julie Harris and Natalie Wood. And three years later it was all over. I saw him as Cal Trask in March 1955 and as Jim Stark in October of the same year. Probably everyone following his career should have known that Jett Rink in Giant was the last we’d see of James Dean.

“Should Have Known”

Those three forever resonant words serve as the title of a book of poetry by former Town Topics staff member and Princeton Magazine writer Linda Arntzenius. An event is set for Sunday, November 8, at the Lawrenceville Library on Darrah Lane, just off Route 1.