Sleeping with Strangers by David Thomson

Author:David Thomson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

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There was so much we wanted from the movies and so much we didn’t know. I spoke earlier about watching James Dean as a teenager. This was a strong attraction, one of the two most powerful that I felt for movie men. On seeing Rebel Without a Cause I fantasized about the lives that might be lived by the Dean and Natalie Wood characters after the close of the film, and that lapped over into daydreams in which her Judy was my girlfriend. Dean might be inarticulate on screen, troubled, moody, and awkward, but he had a dark grace that left no doubt about why girls wanted him. And in the mid-1950s, in circles I knew, girls were sleepwalkers for Dean or a Deaner type just as boys bought red windbreakers to be like Jim in Rebel and combed their hair in a Deanish way. (A wayward high school kid, still he has a fantastic, groomed haircut—but he has a sedan to get to school in, too!) Few fans guessed or wanted to hear that Dean had a bisexual life—until he was dead, and then the legend of his gayness bloomed along with the male reservation that he had just been kidding.

Insiders knew much more. In searching for an actor to play the lead in East of Eden, director Elia Kazan went to New York to see Dean on stage: he was playing a homosexual Arab servant in a play taken from André Gide’s novel The Immoralist. It was agreed that Dean was exceptional in the role (he won prizes for it, even if he was fired from the show for rudeness to costar Louis Jourdan; the other star, Geraldine Page, tried to defend him), but he seemed torn by the experience. Was he nervous about playing the gay role? Was he drawn to it? Or was he simply acting out the part of a difficult or impossible actor? He won East of Eden as a result, and the problems never stopped. Dean was apparently engaged to the Italian actress Pier Angeli, a model of romantic sweetness. Kazan heard their lovemaking and their terrible fights in a dressing room next to his office. (That great eavesdropper wanted to be close.) No one could read Dean: Was he a young mess, like the parts he was asked to play? Was he struggling with a bisexual identity? Or was he trying to imitate the turmoil he believed was expected in a Brandoesque actor? He did not live to provide answers.

It is apparent now that Dean, dead in 1955, aged twenty-four, had “experimented” with homosexual relationships. That is still the word used about him, though no one would think to say that he was “experimenting” with driving a Porsche Spyder at high speeds on the highway at Cholame, California. We are all experimenting a lot of the time: men and women happily married for thirty and forty years may still be looking to see what tomorrow brings. In other

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