Spoto's `Rebel': Chasing The James Dean Legend

Just last fall, Val Holley's "James Dean: The Biography" (St. Martin's Press) claimed to be the definitive study of the teen idol and film legend who starred in three classic movies and died at 24 on Sept. 30, 1955.

Now Donald Spoto's "Rebel: The Life and Legend of James Dean" (Harper Collins, $25) digs up still more information about Dean's Indiana upbringing, the shotgun marriage of his parents, his rise in Hollywood, and his obsessions with Montgomery Clift (who was hounded by Dean on the phone) and Marlon Brando (who thought he should see a psychiatrist).

Spoto wrote his own Dean book because Julie Harris, Elia Kazan and others who worked with the actor were tired of what he calls "the rubbish" that's been printed about Dean during the past 40 years - especially a series of recent biographies that claimed Dean was a seduced by an Indiana minister, then became a sado-masochistic hustler in New York.

"There is not a shred of evidence for any of this," said Spoto during a Seattle visit. "They're the fulminations of unscrupulous writers. Dean was wrongly deified, then torn down."

He also chose to pursue the Dean story because he accidentally uncovered new evidence. While working on one of his previous books, "A Passion For Life: A Biography of Elizabeth Taylor," Spoto ran across material about Dean in the Warner Bros. archives.

"There was an enormous amount of material that seemed to condradict the conventional wisdom about Dean," said Spoto. Based on these new sources, he believes that director Nicholas Ray allowed Dean to co-direct "Rebel Without a Cause," perhaps partly to get him to the set on time, but also to make the film a true collaboration.

When he died, Dean had plans to direct his own movies about Billy the Kid and "The Little Prince," and to mount a stage production of "Hamlet."

Spoto also tracked down information in the Indiana public record, which contradicted the notion that Dean's father (who died last year), couldn't afford to raise him. After the boy's mother died when he was 9, he was raised by an uncle.

"He was simply a negligent father," said Spoto. He presents Dean as an unwanted child, always longing for his father's approval, much like the character he played in his first major film, Kazan's "East of Eden."

The book also presents Dean as a closeted bisexual who had affairs with Pier Angeli and Ursula Andress but also slept with a gay advertising executive, Rogers Brackett, who helped him make Hollywood connections. Much of this could not be published in earlier Dean biographies, Spoto said, because Brackett was still alive.

"It was a mutually helpful relationship," said Spoto, who believes Dean was never a kept man. In the book, he writes: "There is no evidence that Jimmy was kidnapped or forced into sexual enslavement against his will - much less that he was hurt in any way by the relationship."

He also claims that Dean's pining for Angeli, who eventually married Vic Damone, is largely a myth. Dean was apparently not even in town when he was supposed to have jealously watched their wedding from a motorcycle across the street.

Spoto thinks Dean is "endlessly appealing to each generation of confused youth" because he's giving out two signals. On the one hand, he's saying "Please cuddle me." On the other, it's "Don't come any closer."

He believes that many Dean fans are more interested in his image than his achievement, and that each generation creates its own James Dean.

In the 1950s, he was the boy on the motorcycle. In the 1960s, he was the political rebel, though in fact Dean had little interest in politics. In the 1970s, he was the brilliant theorist from the Actors' Studio. In the 1980s, he was the sado-masochistic gay hustler.

If Dean seems to have become more popular than ever during the past decade, Spoto believes it's because of the media's insatiable need for icons.

"Celebrity and fame is the most virulent disease that has afflicted this society," he said. "We're living in an age that doesn't believe in heroes and saints. Because of this, we have nothing left to do but distort."

Every few months, there's a rumor of a new movie about Dean, to be played by Leonardo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt. Spoto is skeptical that such a film will be made, though "Rebel" is available as a source for a new script - if Spoto can have some control over how it's done.

"This is a crazy, mixed-up country. Our Puritan roots are still strangling us. I don't know that we're ready for a movie about an icon who had emotionally intimate relationships with both men and women."

He points out that "when he died, we knew absolutely nothing about him. Forty-one years after his death, we're addicted to the legend of James Dean." He thinks Dean was an ordinary boy with an extraordinary talent that was not fully realized.

"He was 24 going on 16 when he died."