Screen test for Rebel Without a Cause.

jamesdeandaily:

Marlon Brando on his experience with James Dean, from his autobiography “Songs My Mother Taught Me”:

After we met on the set of East of Eden, Jimmy began calling for advice or to suggest a night out. We talked on the phone and ran into each other at parties, but never became close. I think he regarded me as a kind of older brother or mentor, and I suppose  responded to him as if I was. I felt a kinship for him and was sorry for him. He was hypersensitive, and I could see in his eyes and in the way he moved and spoke that he had suffered a lot. He was tortured by insecurities, the origin of which I never determined, though he said he’d had a difficult childhood and a lot of problems with his father. I urged him to seek assistance, perhaps go into therapy. I have no idea whether he ever did, but I did know it can be hard for a troubled kid like him to have to live up to sudden fame and the ballyhoo Hollywood created around him. I saw it happen to Marilyn, and I also knew it from my own experience. In trying to copy me, I think Jimmy was only attempting to deal with these insecurities, but I told him it was a mistake. Once he showed up at a party and I saw him take off his jacket, roll it into a ball and throw it onto the floor. It struck me that he was imitating something I had done and I took him aside and said, “Don’t do that, Jimmy. Just hang your coat up like everybody else. You don’t have to throw your coat in the corner. It’s much easier to hang it up than pick it up off the floor.”

Another time, I told him I thought he was foolish to try to copy me as an actor. “Jimmy, you have to be who you are, not who I am. You mustn’t try to copy me. Emulate the best aspects of yourself.” I said it was a dead-end street to try to be somebody else. In retrospect, I realize it’s not unusual for people to borrow some else’s form until they find their own, and in time Jimmy did. He was still developing when I first met him, but by the time he made Giant, he was no longer trying to imitate me. He still had his insecurities, but he had become his own man. He was awfully good in that last picture, and people identified with his pain and made him a cult hero. We can only guess what kind of actor he would have become in another twenty years. I think he could have become a great one. Instead he died and was forever entombed in his myth.

James Dean at his apartment in New York, 1955

One evening after a photo session at my place, the usual crew and I sat around over sandwiches and drinks. It was a while before we noticed that Jim had left us.‘Hey, Jimmy,’ we yelled. No response… The next thing we knew there was a hell of a racket out in the street, complete with horns blowing and people yelling. We ran to the window and opened the venetian blind. There, in the middle of the street, sitting cross-legged in my chair, smoking a cigarette, was our boy, holding up traffic. As we flew out the front door, we looked beyond the chair and saw a long string of headlights and people getting out of cars. Marty and I grabbed Dean from the chair - and also from a tall, angry-looking guy with big hands who looked ready to pummel him. Jim acted like a rag doll when we pulled him from a chair, his arms and head flopping around, the rest of him just dead weight. Bob and Billy picked up the chair.  Once inside, we all looked at the grinning Dean. ‘God damn it, Jim,’ I yelled… After I calmed down, I asked him, ‘Why, Jim, why?’ He took a fresh cigarette and sat in the chair that had been put back in its place. He lighted up and looked at all of us. ‘Don’t you sons of bitches ever get bored? I just wanted to spark things, man, that’s all.’ He got up and began bonging the side table. ‘Look at you. Before I did it, we were all sitting quietly eating and drinking, and outside a lot of nine-to-fivers were going home to their wives, like they do every night. Now you’re all juiced up, and so are they, man. They’ll talk about it for years.’

- Roy Schatt, James Dean: a Portrait

While living in New York in the early 50’s, James Dean wrote his cousin Marcus to draw him some pictures that he could hang in his apartment. Markie sent him some drawings, and Jimmy wrote this letter back to him.

jamesdeandaily:

Andy Warhol looking at Phil Stern’s photographs of James Dean, 1986.

He is not our hero because he was perfect, but because he perfectly represented the damaged but beautiful soul of our time.

- Andy Warhol