Internet Debris
A collection by Neal McKenna
McKenna Ink Thesis Editing Service
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Internet Debris
A collection by Neal McKenna
McKenna Ink Thesis Editing Service
To add your comments,
click here.
NOTHING posted here is mine!
Internet Debris does not claim rights
to any of the photos or media content posted to the site.
No copyright infringement is intended.
A collection by Neal McKenna
McKenna Ink Thesis Editing Service
To add your comments,
click here.
NOTHING posted here is mine!
Internet Debris does not claim rights
to any of the photos or media content posted to the site.
No copyright infringement is intended.
The Gay Blades of Hollywood II
Mad about the boy
James Dean was the embodiment of young male vulnerability, heroism and torment.
Who would have guessed he was gay?
Nearly sixty years after his death,
it's all too obvious, argues Germaine Greer
Looking back over half a century and more to the meteoric career of James Dean, the one thing that now seems obvious is that the boy was as queer as a coot. It wouldn't matter a scrap if he hadn't also been groomed to perform vulnerable young male innocence, tormented by inchoate yearnings for heroism, freedom, and true love with the right girl. The studio made sure that he acted it out in real life by supplying him with starlets to be seen with in public.After he wrote himself off, nearly 60 years ago, in his new Porsche 550 Spyder at the age of 24 on a highway near Salinas, there was no reality left to intrude on the myth. Robert Altman, then a naive outsider in Hollywood, was given the job of making a black-and-white pseudo-documentary based on the account of Dean's life, fashioned by William Bast, Dean's "closest friend and room-mate for five years." Altman's film presents Dean as the studios wanted him to be remembered. He is adolescent torment personified, his the loneliness of every male trapped between childhood and manhood. Dean would be forever the boy who "belonged to no one."When he knew Dean, Bast was a would-be actor; he is now one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood and well out of the closet. Bast has successfully reworked the Dean myth several times. On his website he now threatens to write a new book to be called Surviving James Dean. "In it among other things I am including everything the law and my faint heart didn't allow me to say in 1956, when I published my first bio of Dean - the one Gore Vidal refers to as my 'baby-book'."In the 1950s homosexuality was so far off the suburban radar that Jimmy Dean could give us all the visual clues, and we would see nothing. He could flirt outrageously with the camera, and get away with it. There was no gay establishment. Young men growing up "different" had no easy way of identifying what it was that troubled them or why it was that they couldn't fit in with teen culture of dating and necking and boasting. A friend of mine, obsessed with the movies, trained himself to walk like John Wayne, straight-backed, shoulders wide, head immobile on a stiff neck, rolling on the balls of his feet. He still walks that way, in all a living caricature of screen masculinity. Before he came rocketing out of the closet in the late 1960s, he even asked me to marry him. A good many marriages were made that way in the old days, and a great deal of grief and destruction they caused.
Image via FlavorWireDean projected a new, sensitive masculinity, with a broad streak of brutality running across it. He didn't invent it. The credit for that goes to Marlon Brando. At the end of 1947 on stage in New York, 23-year-old Brando had created a new style of sensitive-brutal, working-class hero. As Stanley Kowalski, in A Streetcar Named Desire, he was the original thug who cried. Director Elia Kazan would hone that performance of young masculinity in On the Waterfront. Everything that would later be said of James Dean was first said about the young Brando, whom Kazan saw as challenging "the whole system of politeness and good nature and good ethics and everything else... There's a helluva lot of turmoil there. He's uncertain about himself and he's passionate, both at the same time." The role and the player morphed into one. The same slippage would happen with James Dean; he would actually be the rebel without a cause.If boy heroes had not taken centre stage it is doubtful whether little Jimmy Dean could ever have become an actor, let alone a star. The publication of The Catcher in the Rye and East of Eden in the early 1950s was accompanied by a host of TV dramas about vulnerable country boys falling into the clutches of city slickers and organised crime.It wouldn't have done much for the box office if it had turned out that the sole cause of the incomprehensible behaviour of the rebel without a cause was his own unslaked need for transgressive sex. At the beginning and for most of his short life there's every reason to believe that Dean hadn't understood what his problem was either, because until he was 18 years old Jimmy Dean was a short, nerdy, basketball-playing redneck, with bottle-glass spectacles and a hayseed hairstyle.The underlying cause of Dean's teenage misery and restlessness was understood by his hagiographers and his stern conformist grandparents to have been the death of his mother when he was nine years old. The boy was born in Marion, Indiana; a few years later his father's work took the family to California, where his mother became ill and died. Her body and the boy were sent back to Indiana on the same train. His father promised to attend the funeral and never showed up.
Dean lived with his grandparents on their 350-acre farm in Fairmount, Indiana, until he was 18, and did his best to fit in with small-town America. He busted 15 pairs of glasses and got his front teeth knocked out in his struggle to become the star basketball player of Fairmount High School. At the same time, he was modelling knobby objects in clay and giving them names like Self, and painting moody pictures of trees standing in bleak cropland. His hard-working, God-fearing kinsfolk considered him deep, sensitive and hard to understand, but what would you expect of a boy who lost his mother so young and was ignored by his father? He liked to tell women who tried to get close to him that he was still grieving for his mother. It made a good alibi.Everyone who knew James Byron Dean in real life called him Jimmy; the diminutive was unavoidable because he was small in stature. He looked junior. He would be referred to as "boy" and "kid" all his short life. At a crucial point he realised that if he grew himself a tall quiff, left the glasses off and pouted a little, he could look really tasty. He also realised something else; through a camera lens nobody need look small. That was probably some time after he left Indiana for California and moved in with his father and his new wife in Santa Monica. Jimmy was supposed to be going to business school; when he told his father he had decided to become an actor, his father kicked him out of the house. The funny thing is that Dean père was probably following the universal prejudice that acting was no job for a real man, that actors were sissies, fags even, and yet nobody doubted the genuineness of any matinee idol's heterosexual credentials. Now that Errol Flynn and Rock Hudson have been outed, we are wiser.
James Dean in a clinch
Image via Golden FleecingOnce he had fashioned himself in his new toothsome boy image, Dean fell in love with it. He learned to do sexy things with cigarettes, rolling them along the lips of his half-open mouth, looking up at the viewer from under his eyebrows or slouching crotch forward, broodingly. For the next five years he was seldom far from a camera. If there was no one else to photograph him, he photographed himself. Usually the camera was held by another man, not always a professional. There is a photograph of Dean, stark naked, squatting in a tree above the photographer, knees apart, presenting with a radiant smile what appears to be a truly enormous erection. - Sometimes there are pictorial advantages in being a small man. - I saw this picture in an art gallery some time in the mid-1970s. What's become of it since, I don't know; if anyone out there has a copy I'd love one.In 1951 Dean earned enough from a Pepsi TV commercial to pay his car fare to New York. He got into the Actors' Studio, which had already produced Marlon Brando. He studied the mannerisms of the street people he saw around him, and reproduced them on stage and television, with rather curious results. Among the 40-odd TV dramas he played in his two years in New York, Something for an Empty Briefcase from the Campbell Sound Stage series has survived. The story is as mawkish and moralistic as most such popular entertainment in the 1950s. Dean, dressed in black stovepipe trousers and turtleneck, produces different complicated hand movements to accompany every utterance, distracting the viewers' attention from everything else that is said or done. If he had continued in this vein, he would never have become the iconic actor of East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. The difference was made by Elia Kazan, who managed to discipline the young actor who had never willingly accepted direction. In his last TV role as Jeffrey Latham in The Unlighted Road, aired in 1955, Dean's acting style has been cleansed and slimmed down; he is still playing a confused and guileless kid but now doing it without archness.
In New York Dean also studied ballet, and moved in with Leonard Rosenman, one of Schoenberg's American students. This friendship seems to have endured; Rosenmann would compose the incidental music for East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. As well as these male friendships, Dean buddied up with taxi drivers and bar-keeps. The official wisdom was that he needed a mother but his behaviour, in New York or Hollywood, suggests that he was seeking a father, a father to love and protect him, a father to imitate and to quarrel with.In 1952 Dean had his first Broadway success in the stage version of Gide's L'Immoraliste, playing an Arab street boy who seduces both a husband and his wife. As a bisexual tart he was utterly convincing. The reviews were great, but two weeks after the opening Dean walked out and went back to Hollywood. He had landed the part of Cal Trask in Kazan's production of East of Eden. The rest is history.Both women and men fell in love with Dean in real life. In Altman's version, a starlet called Arlene Sachs reveals in a scripted interchange that when she told Dean she loved him, he said, "You can't love me, because I'm bad," which was as near as Altman could let himself get to the truth in 1957. Which brings us to Dean's curiously insubstantial love affair with Pier Angeli, who is supposed to have broken his heart when she married Vic Damone in 1954. The 23-year-old "boy" who is being groomed for mega-stardom now comes before the public as the hero of his own tragedy, which began long ago when his angel mother abandoned him and broke his heart. He yearns and grieves all his young life till another angel appears, mends his aching heart, puts an end to his nightly dreams of his mother - according to William Bast and Robert Altman - and then dumps him.
James Dean and Pier Angeli
In 1957 Altman couldn't name her; these days the affair with Pier Angeli is part of Dean's official biography. They met when Dean was working on East of Eden and are supposed to have become engaged; the engagement was broken, supposedly by Angeli's Italian mother, on the grounds that Dean was not a Catholic. One can think of other reasons. Before her suicide in 1971 Angeli apparently said that Dean was the only man she ever loved. And so the myth of doomed youth rolls on.In New York, Dean had been an efficient professional actor, never in trouble, never out of work. In Hollywood he was unpredictable, temperamental, practically hysterical. The other actors on the set of East of Eden found his behaviour intolerable, and complained that he never said the lines as they were written or did a scene the same way twice. He monopolised Kazan's attention, as if he was playing Kazan's needy son, "acting like a kid", behaving years younger than his age. He was actually learning everything he could from the man who had directed the performance that would win Marlon Brando an Oscar, and he was competing with Brando for Kazan's affection, just as Cal competes with his brother Aron for their father's attention in the film. The confusion of the role with the player was a deliberate and calculated strategy. It's hard to see now how the quintessential boy-hero could ever have been allowed to grow up. Steve McQueen and Paul Newman would both negotiate the transition between boy and man better than Jimmy Dean ever could have. Text via The GuardianJAMES DEAN: 1950s STUDIO RENT BOY?BY: SCOTT RAGAN
The Gay Blades of Hollywood II
The Gay Blades of Hollywood II
Mad about the boy
James Dean was the embodiment of young male vulnerability, heroism and torment.
Who would have guessed he was gay?
Nearly sixty years after his death,
it's all too obvious, argues Germaine Greer
Looking back over half a century and more to the meteoric career of James Dean, the one thing that now seems obvious is that the boy was as queer as a coot. It wouldn't matter a scrap if he hadn't also been groomed to perform vulnerable young male innocence, tormented by inchoate yearnings for heroism, freedom, and true love with the right girl. The studio made sure that he acted it out in real life by supplying him with starlets to be seen with in public.
After he wrote himself off, nearly 60 years ago, in his new Porsche 550 Spyder at the age of 24 on a highway near Salinas, there was no reality left to intrude on the myth. Robert Altman, then a naive outsider in Hollywood, was given the job of making a black-and-white pseudo-documentary based on the account of Dean's life, fashioned by William Bast, Dean's "closest friend and room-mate for five years." Altman's film presents Dean as the studios wanted him to be remembered. He is adolescent torment personified, his the loneliness of every male trapped between childhood and manhood. Dean would be forever the boy who "belonged to no one."
When he knew Dean, Bast was a would-be actor; he is now one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood and well out of the closet. Bast has successfully reworked the Dean myth several times. On his website he now threatens to write a new book to be called Surviving James Dean. "In it among other things I am including everything the law and my faint heart didn't allow me to say in 1956, when I published my first bio of Dean - the one Gore Vidal refers to as my 'baby-book'."
In the 1950s homosexuality was so far off the suburban radar that Jimmy Dean could give us all the visual clues, and we would see nothing. He could flirt outrageously with the camera, and get away with it. There was no gay establishment. Young men growing up "different" had no easy way of identifying what it was that troubled them or why it was that they couldn't fit in with teen culture of dating and necking and boasting.
A friend of mine, obsessed with the movies, trained himself to walk like John Wayne, straight-backed, shoulders wide, head immobile on a stiff neck, rolling on the balls of his feet. He still walks that way, in all a living caricature of screen masculinity. Before he came rocketing out of the closet in the late 1960s, he even asked me to marry him. A good many marriages were made that way in the old days, and a great deal of grief and destruction they caused.
Image via FlavorWire
Dean projected a new, sensitive masculinity, with a broad streak of brutality running across it. He didn't invent it. The credit for that goes to Marlon Brando. At the end of 1947 on stage in New York, 23-year-old Brando had created a new style of sensitive-brutal, working-class hero. As Stanley Kowalski, in A Streetcar Named Desire, he was the original thug who cried.
Director Elia Kazan would hone that performance of young masculinity in On the Waterfront. Everything that would later be said of James Dean was first said about the young Brando, whom Kazan saw as challenging "the whole system of politeness and good nature and good ethics and everything else... There's a helluva lot of turmoil there. He's uncertain about himself and he's passionate, both at the same time." The role and the player morphed into one. The same slippage would happen with James Dean; he would actually be the rebel without a cause.If boy heroes had not taken centre stage it is doubtful whether little Jimmy Dean could ever have become an actor, let alone a star. The publication of The Catcher in the Rye and East of Eden in the early 1950s was accompanied by a host of TV dramas about vulnerable country boys falling into the clutches of city slickers and organised crime.
It wouldn't have done much for the box office if it had turned out that the sole cause of the incomprehensible behaviour of the rebel without a cause was his own unslaked need for transgressive sex. At the beginning and for most of his short life there's every reason to believe that Dean hadn't understood what his problem was either, because until he was 18 years old Jimmy Dean was a short, nerdy, basketball-playing redneck, with bottle-glass spectacles and a hayseed hairstyle.
The underlying cause of Dean's teenage misery and restlessness was understood by his hagiographers and his stern conformist grandparents to have been the death of his mother when he was nine years old. The boy was born in Marion, Indiana; a few years later his father's work took the family to California, where his mother became ill and died. Her body and the boy were sent back to Indiana on the same train. His father promised to attend the funeral and never showed up.
Dean lived with his grandparents on their 350-acre farm in Fairmount, Indiana, until he was 18, and did his best to fit in with small-town America. He busted 15 pairs of glasses and got his front teeth knocked out in his struggle to become the star basketball player of Fairmount High School. At the same time, he was modelling knobby objects in clay and giving them names like Self, and painting moody pictures of trees standing in bleak cropland. His hard-working, God-fearing kinsfolk considered him deep, sensitive and hard to understand, but what would you expect of a boy who lost his mother so young and was ignored by his father? He liked to tell women who tried to get close to him that he was still grieving for his mother. It made a good alibi.
Everyone who knew James Byron Dean in real life called him Jimmy; the diminutive was unavoidable because he was small in stature. He looked junior. He would be referred to as "boy" and "kid" all his short life. At a crucial point he realised that if he grew himself a tall quiff, left the glasses off and pouted a little, he could look really tasty.
He also realised something else; through a camera lens nobody need look small. That was probably some time after he left Indiana for California and moved in with his father and his new wife in Santa Monica. Jimmy was supposed to be going to business school; when he told his father he had decided to become an actor, his father kicked him out of the house. The funny thing is that Dean père was probably following the universal prejudice that acting was no job for a real man, that actors were sissies, fags even, and yet nobody doubted the genuineness of any matinee idol's heterosexual credentials. Now that Errol Flynn and Rock Hudson have been outed, we are wiser.James Dean in a clinch
Image via Golden Fleecing
Once he had fashioned himself in his new toothsome boy image, Dean fell in love with it. He learned to do sexy things with cigarettes, rolling them along the lips of his half-open mouth, looking up at the viewer from under his eyebrows or slouching crotch forward, broodingly. For the next five years he was seldom far from a camera. If there was no one else to photograph him, he photographed himself. Usually the camera was held by another man, not always a professional. There is a photograph of Dean, stark naked, squatting in a tree above the photographer, knees apart, presenting with a radiant smile what appears to be a truly enormous erection. - Sometimes there are pictorial advantages in being a small man. - I saw this picture in an art gallery some time in the mid-1970s. What's become of it since, I don't know; if anyone out there has a copy I'd love one.
In 1951 Dean earned enough from a Pepsi TV commercial to pay his car fare to New York. He got into the Actors' Studio, which had already produced Marlon Brando. He studied the mannerisms of the street people he saw around him, and reproduced them on stage and television, with rather curious results. Among the 40-odd TV dramas he played in his two years in New York, Something for an Empty Briefcase from the Campbell Sound Stage series has survived.
The story is as mawkish and moralistic as most such popular entertainment in the 1950s. Dean, dressed in black stovepipe trousers and turtleneck, produces different complicated hand movements to accompany every utterance, distracting the viewers' attention from everything else that is said or done. If he had continued in this vein, he would never have become the iconic actor of East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. The difference was made by Elia Kazan, who managed to discipline the young actor who had never willingly accepted direction. In his last TV role as Jeffrey Latham in The Unlighted Road, aired in 1955, Dean's acting style has been cleansed and slimmed down; he is still playing a confused and guileless kid but now doing it without archness.
In New York Dean also studied ballet, and moved in with Leonard Rosenman, one of Schoenberg's American students. This friendship seems to have endured; Rosenmann would compose the incidental music for East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. As well as these male friendships, Dean buddied up with taxi drivers and bar-keeps. The official wisdom was that he needed a mother but his behaviour, in New York or Hollywood, suggests that he was seeking a father, a father to love and protect him, a father to imitate and to quarrel with.
In 1952 Dean had his first Broadway success in the stage version of Gide's L'Immoraliste, playing an Arab street boy who seduces both a husband and his wife. As a bisexual tart he was utterly convincing. The reviews were great, but two weeks after the opening Dean walked out and went back to Hollywood. He had landed the part of Cal Trask in Kazan's production of East of Eden. The rest is history.
Both women and men fell in love with Dean in real life. In Altman's version, a starlet called Arlene Sachs reveals in a scripted interchange that when she told Dean she loved him, he said, "You can't love me, because I'm bad," which was as near as Altman could let himself get to the truth in 1957. Which brings us to Dean's curiously insubstantial love affair with Pier Angeli, who is supposed to have broken his heart when she married Vic Damone in 1954. The 23-year-old "boy" who is being groomed for mega-stardom now comes before the public as the hero of his own tragedy, which began long ago when his angel mother abandoned him and broke his heart. He yearns and grieves all his young life till another angel appears, mends his aching heart, puts an end to his nightly dreams of his mother - according to William Bast and Robert Altman - and then dumps him.
James Dean and Pier Angeli
In 1957 Altman couldn't name her; these days the affair with Pier Angeli is part of Dean's official biography. They met when Dean was working on East of Eden and are supposed to have become engaged; the engagement was broken, supposedly by Angeli's Italian mother, on the grounds that Dean was not a Catholic. One can think of other reasons. Before her suicide in 1971 Angeli apparently said that Dean was the only man she ever loved. And so the myth of doomed youth rolls on.
In New York, Dean had been an efficient professional actor, never in trouble, never out of work. In Hollywood he was unpredictable, temperamental, practically hysterical. The other actors on the set of East of Eden found his behaviour intolerable, and complained that he never said the lines as they were written or did a scene the same way twice. He monopolised Kazan's attention, as if he was playing Kazan's needy son, "acting like a kid", behaving years younger than his age.
He was actually learning everything he could from the man who had directed the performance that would win Marlon Brando an Oscar, and he was competing with Brando for Kazan's affection, just as Cal competes with his brother Aron for their father's attention in the film. The confusion of the role with the player was a deliberate and calculated strategy. It's hard to see now how the quintessential boy-hero could ever have been allowed to grow up. Steve McQueen and Paul Newman would both negotiate the transition between boy and man better than Jimmy Dean ever could have. Text via The GuardianJAMES DEAN: 1950s STUDIO RENT BOY?BY: SCOTT RAGAN
James Preston as James Dean
What lies beneath...
Spoooky Reading
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