A Word In Edgewise: ‘Round the Edges of Eden

Shortly before I turned 14, “East of Eden” was released on April 10, 1955. One among scores of other viewers, I was transfixed by 24-year-old James Dean’s Cal Trask, the anguished, less-favored son of a demanding father, fruitlessly seeking approval and affection through unsparing Depression losses.

Author Jason Colavito, researching “Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean,” sifted through vast amounts of Deaniana penned after that fatal September 30 crash, much of it written to defend the young actor’s hetero- or homosexuality, as though determining that single fact would elevate the winner to the apex of some “gotcha!” podium. Neither certainty, however, would in any way explain how maverick James Byron Dean was able, once lights blazed the cameras rolled, to mesmerize audiences.

Dean’s own fears, if that is what they were, often made him impossible to like. In public, he slung a-sociability about his shoulders like his pilfered, blood-spattered bullfighter’s cape, daring friendship to approach; clothed in another’s persona, he released his demons of loneliness, despair and unlovability in a lacerating torrent.

Dean already believed God had punished him by taking away his mother when he was nine, and Colavito stresses the influence Wesleyan Methodist Minister Reverend James DeWeerd had on the high school student. The reverend’s words might easily wound a boy far less sensitive than Jimmy Dean. It was DeWeerd who taught the boy most people are the “Square root of Zero” and stated publicly, “I taught him he was depraved and vile.”

It’s hard to imagine any teen, boy or girl, of whatever sexual leaning, emerging unscathed from such volleys. Yet the two remained in contact for years, neither speaking about their (still undefined) relationship while Dean lived. As rumors spread in the later 1950s, DeWeerd left the Wesleyan church for another denomination.

There was no doubt young Dean was troubled, and the times themselves dismissed any male who wasn’t the rough-and-tumble, two-fisted epitome of manhood required during the ‘40s and ‘50s. The McCarthy hearings were in full swing, searching out hidden communists and, by extension, any “c—s—–s,” to use the senator’s term.

Dean’s very ability to let sorrow and loneliness and emotion — any emotion — flow was a large part of what distressed critics. A “real man” wasn’t supposed to do that. Stoicism. Spartanism; the hidden fox gnawing at one’s vitals; the repressed, clutching-at-the-chest heart attacks at 49 or 56, was what real men should do, did do, and gladly. Dean’s departed father held the arts suspect and unmasculine, while Fairmonters in rural Indiana, where Dean was raised by his uncle Marcus Winslow and aunt Ortense, considered the theater the “province of queers.” At that time, Fairmount’s population of 2,600 boasted fifteen churches and one weekly newspaper.

Which was Dean? Does it matter against the work he left? A different way of looking at “masculinity”? Must it be defined? In his short life, Dean left no fiats, and the emotion that poured through his films was a need to be loved; by that lost mother, by the distant father. By one not a “Square root of Zero;” one who would speak to his heart.

I was still fourteen when “Rebel Without a Cause” was released on October 27, three days short of a month after his death at the intersection of Routes 466 and 41 in Cholane en route to Salinas to enter his beloved Porsche Spyder in a race. Hearing the news, I cut out a full-page photo from the New York Daily News of Jimmy in his signature white T-shirt and red windbreaker, thinking, “Better save this because he’ll soon be forgotten.

I was wrong. Seventy years along, and you’re still getting ink. I apologize, Jimmy. You go, Man!