Long ago, in a former life, I edited a coffee-table book on James Dean called James Dean: Tribute to a Rebel. My favorite part of Dean’s life story was the time he spent in New York during the early days of live television. I thoroughly enjoyed fact-checking and researching his television career, which was not only more extensive than his movie appearances but far more diverse. This Friday, September 25, TCM offers a rare look at some of Dean’s live TV performances.
New York City was the hub of the television industry when Dean moved there to study at the Actors Studio in the fall of 1951. Prime-time programming consisted of weekly anthology dramas, meaning each installment was a new story with a different cast. Anthology series provided substantial work to young writers and a new generation of serious young actors whose careers were jump-started by live TV, including Rod Steiger, Anne Bancroft, Paul Newman, Martin Landau, Steve McQueen, Eva Marie Saint, and James Dean. The writers socialized together, compared notes, and created a community among themselves, while the actors represented a kind of repertory of talent for television producers and their casting agents.
JAMES DEAN IN HIS NEW YORK APARTMENT
However, there was a stigma attached to acting for television, and the casting process for live anthology dramas could be ruthless. Many opportunities began with mass auditions, or cattle calls, which most actors hated. Actors were given a number and then paraded across the rehearsal hall in front of the casting director. If the casting agent approved of an actor based on his looks, charisma, or appearance, the actor was called back for a reading. Actors found rejection after the walk-by to be particularly humiliating.
Dean, McQueen, and Newman found themselves competing with each other at casting calls for television and Broadway, because they were comparable in type. According to Dean biographer David Dalton, McQueen was jealous of Dean and his pals.
Dean first appeared on television on May 11, 1952 in an episode of the U.S. Steel Hour titled “Prologue to Glory.” The following year, he starred as the main character in at least 14 live dramas and made small appearances in many others. His last live appearance was on May 6, 1955, when he starred in “The Unlighted Road” on the Schlitz Playhouse.
MARILYN MONROE AND DEAN WERE IN NYC AT THE SAME TIME, LEARNING THEIR CRAFT.
Dean was studying the Method at the Actors’ Studio, an internal approach to acting that required a performer to recall emotionally charged experiences from his personal life that mirrored the emotions of his character in key scenes. The actor attempted to use these “sense memories” to better convey the emotion of his character. Also, small actions or bits of business were used to suggest the inner nature of the character. Dean used a number of Method techniques in his television performances beginning with his first starring role—the crazed juvenile delinquent in “A Long Time Till Dawn” for Kraft Theater. Rod Serling wrote the episode, and he recalled that Dean had played the role perfectly. The young actor used a repeated action to convey the anxiety inside the child-like character: He chewed on the tip of his shirt collar when his character was in emotional turmoil. Dean got the idea after working out his approach with friend and fellow Method actor Martin Landau, who told him that the character missed his mother’s nurturing. Watch Dean in “A Long Time Till Dawn” on Friday, when this episode airs at 9:30pm.
Sometimes, Dean’s Method-related ideas for his character went too far. In “Sentence of Death” for Studio One, he played a cocky young man falsely accused of murder and sent to Death Row. (“Sentence of One” airs at 9:00pm on Friday.) He offered to vomit on live television to convey the fear of his character, but the producers told him “no.” He countered with an offer to dry-retch, but they declined that suggestion as well.
MARY ASTOR DID NOT ALWAYS APPRECIATE DEAN’S METHOD ACTING.
Dean’s efforts to recreate real-life speech by verbally stumbling or pausing tended to infuriate actors from previous generations accustomed to speaking the lines as written. Mary Astor and Paul Lukas costarred with the young rebel in “The Thief” for the U.S. Steel Hour, and both were frustrated with Dean’s version of the Method. During dress rehearsal, the young actor mumbled so low that Astor could not hear what he was saying, and those words she could hear were not in the script. She threw up her hands in frustration. When the director asked her what the problem was, Lukas stepped in to complain that they could not tell what “the whippersnapper” was saying. But, the director stood up for the young actor. He told the older actors to do the best they could, because Dean was “marvelous” on camera. “The Thief” airs on Friday at 1:30am, so you can judge for yourself if Astor and Lukas were justified in their complaints, or if the director was right to back Dean.
DEAN AND BETSY PALMER IN “SENTENCE OF DEATH” FOR ‘STUDIO ONE’
During the production of “I’m a Fool,” in which Dean played a teenager caught in a lie, producer Mort Abrahams discovered that the actor liked to change his interpretation of the lines with each rehearsal. Again, this was frustrating for those not trained in the Method, and it occasionally made for tense interactions among the actors. But, Abrahams found him to be imaginative and spontaneous, and he appreciated that Dean put a lot of his personal issues into his interpretation of the character. “I’m a Fool,” which costarred Natalie Wood, was an episode of General Electric Theater. It plays at 12:30am as part of the TCM line-up on Friday.
Dean tended to grab the best notices in his television performances, even when his costars were well-known actors. In an episode of the series Danger titled “Death Is My Neighbor,” he played a psychotic young janitor. Variety compared his acting to Marlon Brando’s in A Streetcar Named Desire, noting that he had “quite a future ahead of him.”
Sadly, things did not work out that way for James Dean. After starring in three major films—East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant—Dean was killed in a car accident on September 30, 1955. TCM’s tribute to his early work commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of his death.