Fifties (79 page)

In those days, Serling thought television was well ahead of Hollywood in social and cultural adventurousness. Movies, he believed, were lodged in another time, in an outdated reality; and when, for example, they dealt with the young, with few exceptions they still showed teenage girls as cheerleaders and bobby-soxers, and teenage boys as high school athletic heroes in letter sweaters. Serling was convinced the young had begun to change, were significantly more alienated from the values of their parents. In
A Long Time Till Dawn,
the hero or antihero was, in the author’s words, “a terribly upset, psyched-out kid, a precursor to the hooked generation of the sixties, the type that became part of the drug/rock culture ...” Serling understood immediately that Dean was perfect for the role, and indeed he went on to play it brilliantly. To Serling, Dean was one of the first manifestations of a youth culture just surfacing and which Hollywood did not yet understand. “There was a postwar mystification of the young, a gradual erosion of confidence in their elders, in the so-called truths, in the whole litany of moral codes,” Serling said. “They just didn’t believe in them anymore. In television we were more aware of this and more in touch with what was happening. We could portray it immediately too—write a script one week and have it on the air the next.”

For Dean, playing a rebel was effortless; being conventional was much harder. He seemed to have figured out during this period that his future lay in being the outsider. David Dalton points out a portfolio of photos taken of him in New York that reveal a young man in metamorphosis. In the early photos he appears to be eager to please, someone who might still be able to play an all-American boy;
in the later photos, his face and his eyes have darkened and he is clearly a rebel.

During that period Kazan, then at the height of his fame, was in the process of turning John Steinbeck’s novel
East of Eden
into a film. The script was a contemporary retelling of the Cain/Abel story from the Bible. The older actors were already lined up, Raymond Massey and Jo Van Fleet as the father and mother. But casting the two boys was critical. At first Kazan had wanted Brando and Montgomery Clift as the twins, one good, the other bad. But they could not decide on who would play the bad brother. Besides, both Brando and Clift were getting a little long in the tooth for these roles. Kazan started searching for even younger talent—something he liked to do anyway, because to his mind, young actors were hungrier and had more of an edge, something they lost with success. “They’re like fighters on their way up. It’s a life or death struggle for them and they give their utmost to the role. This quality disappears later,” he once said. “They become civilized and normal.”

A friend told Kazan about Dean, whom he remembered from the Actors Studio as sullen and not very productive. At their first meeting Kazan, wanting to provoke Dean, deliberately kept him waiting; when he finally arrived, Kazan found Dean slouched down in his seat—rude, disrespectful, and shabbily dressed. The two of them were engaging in a certain kind of theatrical gamesmanship, Kazan decided. They did not talk much—conversation was not James Dean’s strong suit, particularly with someone so powerful in the theater and whose good opinion he so desperately wanted. Dean offered Kazan a ride on his motorbike, and off they went. “He was showing off,” Kazan later wrote, “a country boy not impressed with big city traffic.”

Fortunately for Dean, his act worked. To Kazan, who bore his own resentments against
his
father, Dean
was
Cal Trask. “There was no point in trying to cast it better or nicer. Jimmy was it. He had a grudge against all fathers. He was vengeful; he had a sense of aloneness and of being persecuted. And he was uncommonly suspicious.” Before heading west, Dean did one screen test with the young Paul Newman. Kazan asked Newman: “Paul, do you think Jimmy will appeal to the bobby-soxers?” Newman answered, “I don’t know. Is he going to be a sex symbol?” Then, playing along with the director’s question, Newman gave Dean a long flirtatious look: “I don’t usually go out with boys. But with his looks, sure, sure, I think they’ll flip over him.” The technicians working on the set, though, were so
unimpressed by him that they thought Dean was the stand-in for the real star.

Kazan scooped Dean up and flew him out to California for shooting. Dean had never been in a plane before. He carried his clothes in two packages wrapped in paper and tied together by string. When they got to Los Angeles, Dean asked if they could stop in at the suburban Los Angeles lab where his father worked. That delighted Kazan, who was always in search of life as art; Kazan remembered Dean’s father as a “man [who] had no definition and made no impression except that he had no definition. Obviously there was a strong tension between the two, and it was not friendly. I sensed the father disliked his son.” Soon Dean and Kazan drove on.

Dean was his own worst enemy, often alienating those around him. “Must I always be miserable? I try so hard to make people reject me. Why? I don’t want to write this letter. It would be better to remain silent. Wow! Am I fucked up,” he wrote a girlfriend when he had reached California to shoot
Eden.
He resented the older actors on the set. Raymond Massey, the veteran actor who played the father, could not stand Dean’s sullen manner and his tendency to improvise with the script. Rather than try to heal the breach, Kazan aggravated the tension in order to show it on screen. Kazan kept Dean moody and resentful. There was a brief affair with Pier Angeli, the young actress, but it ended soon. That pleased Kazan: “Now I had Jimmy as I wanted him, alone and miserable.”

With Ms. Angeli gone on to a romance with Vic Damone, in Kazan’s words, “Narcissism took over.” Dean had a camera and took endless pictures of himself standing in front of a mirror, changing his expression only slightly. “He’d show me the goddamn contact sheets and ask which one I liked best,” Kazan wrote. “I thought they were all the same picture, but I said nothing.” Kazan used that suffocating self-absorption to good effect in Dean’s performance.

The success of
Eden
was stunning. It might have been perhaps Kazan’s best film. Dean’s performance was a sensation. “There is a new image in American films,” wrote Pauline Kael, “the young boy as beautiful, disturbed animal, so full of love he’s defenseless. Maybe the father doesn’t love him, but the camera does and we’re supposed to; we’re thrust into upsetting angles, caught in infatuated close-ups, and prodded, ‘Look at all that beautiful desperation.’” After a screening of
Eden,
Dean was interviewed by Howard Thompson of
The New York Times.
It was his first interview.

Even Kazan was surprised by Dean’s impact, which surpassed that of the young Brando. Dean himself was acutely aware of the
niche he occupied and of why his persona worked. On the set of
Giant
he told Dennis Hopper, who had become his friend: “Y’know, I think I’ve got a chance to really make it because in this hand I’m holding Marlon Brando, saying, ‘Fuck you!’ and in the other hand, saying, ‘Please forgive me,’ is Montgomery Clift. ‘Please forgive me.’ ‘Fuck you!’ ‘Please forgive me.’ ‘Fuck you!’ And somewhere in between is James Dean.”

He went on quickly to do
Rebel Without a Cause.
When it had first been purchased by Warner in 1946, it was thought of as a vehicle for Brando, but Brando had not been interested, so the script was put aside. Then Nicholas Ray, the director, picked up on
Rebel
because juvenile delinquency was becoming such a hot issue. The script was written and rewritten by a seemingly endless stream of writers, but in the end it was a vehicle for Dean, who was to play the son of a weak father and a nagging, complaining mother. According to the notes in the screenplay for his part, Dean was to be “the angry victim” of insensitive, careless parents: “At seventeen he is filled with confusion about his role in life. Because of his ‘nowhere’ father, he does not know how to be a man. Because of his wounding mother, he anticipates destruction in all women. And yet he wants to find a girl who will be willing to receive his tenderness.” Dean is, once again, the tender but misunderstood young man, not getting a fair chance, and his character muses: “If I could have just one day when I wasn’t all confused ... I wasn’t ashamed of everything. If I felt I belonged some place.” The screenplay is weak; what power the movie has is in the performance. If Dean’s acting reputation rests on
East of Eden,
his myth is largely entwined with his role in
Rebel.
The role is the prototype for the alienated youth blaming all injustice on parents and their generation.

Years later Kazan had some doubts about the image of youthful alienation that he and Ray had fostered; Dean had cast a spell over the youth of America, he said. It was not something he approved of, though he accepted his share of the responsibility: “Its essence was that all parents were insensitive idiots, who didn’t understand or appreciate their kids and weren’t able to help them. Parents were the enemy.... In contrast to these parent figures, all youngsters were supposed to be sensitive and full of ‘soul.’” The more Kazan thought about it, the less he liked the character of the self-pitying, self-dramatizing youth. Nor was he happy when an endless number of Dean fans wrote him letters thanking him for what he had done for Jimmy. In truth, he was not fond of Dean and did not think him a major talent; as far as Kazan was concerned, Dean had gotten
through the movie largely because of the kindness and professionalism of Julie Harris. Kazan was convinced he had gotten Dean’s best work out of him.

If Dean had learned from Brando, now others would copy Dean. Elvis Presley, for one, wanted to be known as the James Dean of rock and roll. A line was beginning to run through the generations. Suddenly,
alienation
was a word that was falling lightly from his own lips and those of his friends, noted the writer Richard Schickel in an essay on the importance of Marlon Brando as a cultural figure: “
The Lonely Crowd
was anatomized in 1950, and the fear of drifting into its clutches was lively in us.
White Collar
was on our brick and board bookshelves, and we saw how the eponymous object seemed to be choking the life out of earlier generations.
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
stalked our nightmares and soon enough
The Organization Man
would join him there, though of course, even as we read about these cautionary figures, many of us were talking to corporate recruiters about entry-level emulation of them.”

THIRTY-TWO

N
O ONE AT GM
could ever have dared forecast so much prosperity over such a long period of time. It was a brilliant moment, unparalleled in American corporate history. Success begat success; each year the profit expectations went higher and higher. The postwar economic boom may have benefited many Americans, but no one benefited more than General Motors. By rough estimates, 49.3 million motor vehicles were registered when the decade began, 73.8 when it ended; by some estimates, an average of 4.5 million cars, many of them that might have stayed on the road in a less prosperous economy, were scrapped annually. That means as many as 68 to 70 million cars, ever larger, ever heavier, ever more expensive, were sold, and General Motors sold virtually half of them. The average car, which had cost $1,270 at the beginning of the decade, had risen to $1,822 by the end of it; that rate, Edward Cray
noted in his book
Chrome Colossus,
was twice as fast as the rest of the wholesale cost index.

There was in all of this success for General Motors a certain arrogance of power. This was not only an institution apart; it was so big, so rich, and so powerful that it was regarded in the collective psyche of the nation as something more than a mere corporation: It was like a nation unto itself, a separate entity, with laws and a culture all its own: Loyalty among employees was more important than individual brilliance. Team players were valued more highly than mavericks. It was the duty of the rare exceptional GM employee to accept the limits on his individual fame; he would be known within the company and perhaps within the larger automotive industry as a man of talent, but the rest of the country would not know his name; the corporation came first and the corporation bestowed wealth but anonymity on its most valued employees. The individual was always subordinated to the greater good of the company.

The men who ran the corporation, almost without exception, came from small towns in America and were by and large middle class, white, and Protestant or, occasionally, Catholic. If they had gone to four-year colleges they were usually land-grant colleges. They were square and proud of it, instinctively suspicious of all that was different and foreign. They were American, and above all else Americans knew cars. Everything about them reflected their confidence that they had achieved virtually all there was to achieve in life. Never knowing anyone very different from themselves when they had grown up (or certainly anyone very different from themselves worth emulating), they believed they represented what everyone else aspired to. They were sure of their accomplishments and of their taste. Others, critics, outside Detroit, might believe that these men were not such giants and might believe that they did not so much create that vast postwar economic wave as they had the good fortune to ride it; be that as it may, no one contradicted the men of GM to their faces. As for the intellectuals, if they wanted to drive small foreign cars, live in small houses, and make small salaries, why even bother to argue with them?

General Motors was Republican, not Eastern sophisticated Republican but heartland conservative Republican—insular, suspicious of anything different. Zora Arkus-Duntov, a top GM designer and an émigré, once complained to a friend of the insularity of the culture and noted that the problem in the company was that it was run in every department by men “who believe that the world is bordered on the East by Lake Huron, and on the West by Lake
Michigan.” (In those days, when the nation’s anti-Communism was at its height, Arkus-Duntov, the son of a White Russian engineer who had lived briefly in Belgium before coming to the United States, was described in GM promotional material as being of Belgian extraction.) Arthur Summerfield, one of the largest Chevy dealers in the country, had always seen the company, the country, and the Republican party as one and the same thing. A leading figure in the Michigan Republican party, Summerfield in the late forties devised a plan by which all Michigan GM dealers paid one dollar to the Republican party for each car they sold, upon fear of not receiving their regular shipment of cars from the company if they held back. For such loyalty Summerfield was eventually rewarded with the job of postmaster general in Eisenhower’s cabinet.