As the films of James Dean are released on DVD, John Banville writes about the business of dying young.
Talented people who die young become just that: talented people who die young. They are immediately elevated to an elite and semi-divine status, their dying as important as, or more important than, their talent. We hear of their deaths, by their own hands, by the hideous accident of an overdose, in the blazing inferno of a car smash, and we think, yes, of course, it had to be: he was, she was, fated to burn out early.
But that is only so if we believe in the jealous gods gathering back Elysium's brightest stars while still in their youth. It is perfectly possible, if dispiriting, to imagine James Dean as a silver-haired masterpiece of the plastic surgeon's art, stepping up to the microphone to accept one of those hideous "special tributes" that Hollywood confers on its oldsters as they teeter on the lip of the grave. Would Dean have turned bloated and bitter, like Brando, or thrown up the whole thing and backed away into a Garboesque limelight? It is the impossibility of knowing that makes the legend.
Well, not quite. James Byron Dean possessed a remarkable talent. He was born in 1931 on a farm in Indiana and moved with his family to California when he was still a child. He studied law at college, then switched to drama, which led to a family fight and expulsion from the parental home, an experience that surely fed into his most famous role, as Jim Stark in Rebel without a Cause.
His first role was in a television commercial. He moved to New York in 1952 and studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, who taught him method acting. He landed several roles in television drama and had a medium-sized success in an adaptation of Gide's The Immoralist, reviews of which brought him to the attention of Hollywood. He moved back to California, acted, uncredited, in four films now long forgotten, and then was cast as Cal Trask in East of Eden, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, which would turn out to be posthumous, the first such in Oscars history. Then came another starring role - one falls inevitably into the jargon - in Rebel without a Cause, and a less than glorious appearance in Giant.
All this happened in less than a year. He began work on Rebel in February 1955, in April Eden was released, and that summer he made Giant. With his earnings from Eden he bought his first Porsche, and entered a number of races on the California circuit. On September 30th, near Cholame, California, as he was en route to compete in a race in Salinas, his Porsche 550 Spyder smashed head-on into another car, driven by the unfortunate Donald Turnupseed, whose name would have seemed enough misfortune for one man to have had to bear. Dean was 24. His mangled car was taken on a countrywide tour, to be wept over by grief-stricken fans and, not incidentally, to boost greatly the sale of Porsches.
Dean's reputation, earned by his performances in two or at most two and a half films, has survived him by 50 years, and it looks likely to remain high for as long as movies continue to obsess and enchant us. How good an actor was he? Does it matter?