James dean the mutant king

By David Dalton

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 1974 David Dalton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55652-398-4

Contents

Introduction to the Revised Edition,
Chapter One: The Double World (1931-1940),
Chapter Two: The Omphalos of Normalcy (1940-1949),
Chapter Three: School Daze (1940-1949),
Chapter Four: The '49-er (1949-1951),
Chapter Five: Persistence of the White Bear (1951),
Chapter Six: An Orthicon Ghost (1952-1954),
Chapter Seven: Diary of a Face (1952-1954),
Chapter Eight: I'm Just a Human Bean (May-August 1954),
Chapter Nine: Hollywood Babbles On (1954-1955),
Chapter Ten: No Different Flesh (Fall 1954-Spring 1955),
Chapter Eleven: Rebel Without a Cause (March-May 1955),
Chapter Twelve: Wall of Air (May-September 30, 1955),
Chapter Thirteen: Lone Star State (May — September 1955),
Chapter Fourteen: Osiris Rising (1955–1974),
The Mutant King,
Bibliography,
Discography,
Index,


CHAPTER 1

The Double World 1931-1940

Jimmy is born in a small Midwestern town;
the Deans move to California;
Jim's mother and her death;
he is sent back alone to Indiana.

James Byron Dean was born on February 8, 1931 in a small town in Indiana. He was delivered at home and given the first name of the attending physician, James Emmick, and his middle name, it is said, for the poet Lord Byron.

Jimmy was born under the influence of the planet Uranus, a symbol of light. Light is the nature of fire, mist, phosphorescent insects, lightning, crystals and the moon. It is also the medium of a star and the element into which James Dean transformed himself. On the screen, his presence shines with inexhaustible illumination through his eyes, his mouth, radiating in luminous traces like the firefly's glowing arc. "The poetry in a man's life," said Emerson, "is the light which shines on a man's hat and in a child's spoon ..." As an actor, James Dean revealed the subtle light which rests so eloquently on everyone, and as we follow his sleight of hand, we wonder how it ever managed to be so elusive. Like everything intimate, remote and transforming, when all was nearly apparent, he disappeared, leaving only his iridescent traces. This was James Dean's magical capacity.

Marion, Indiana, where Jimmy was born, is an industrial town about fifty miles north of Indianapolis, and he lived there for four years until his parents moved to Santa Monica, California. Winton and Mildred Dean were both native Indianans-Mildred (nee Wilson) from a Methodist family that Jimmy said was part Indian, and Winton a Quaker from a line of original settlers that could be traced back to the Mayflower.

The doctor's fee for delivering Jimmy was fifteen dollars, a little less than half the thirty-nine dollars originally paid to the Miami Indians for the entire city of Marion. Considering its present tawdry appearance, it seems appropriate that Marion should have been bought at a discount and that its major contribution to civilization is the invention of the paper plate. It is the typical disposable city.

Here in Marion, Jimmy lived for the first few years of his life in the Green Gables Apartments, a rambling building put up in the late twenties that might now pass as an antique in the rapidly dissolving fabric of the city. When Jimmy was almost three, his father quit his job as a dental technician at the Marion Veterans' Hospital, and the Deans moved to Fairmount, a small farming community about ten miles to the south, wh