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Summary
Summary
This is the first biography of James Dean to look beyond the Hollywood-manufactured cliché to the volatile polarities, conflicted sexuality, and childhood trauma of the person himself. James Dean's legendary status as a Hollywood icon is reconsidered in Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which explores the process by which he became the electric and exciting actor who came to stand for a whole generation's feelings of rebellion.What no one knew at the highlight of his career was that Dean had suffered agonies of torment over his own sexual ambivalence and the concealment that Hollywood studio mores made necessary. Author Paul Alexander talks to Dean's contemporaries, unearths all available source material, and re-creates not only the closed and closeted world of Hollywood in the '50s but the bucolic serenity of Dean's hometown in Indiana as well.This revisionist, passionate portrait, based on many new and documented sources and featuring shocking photographs, argues that Dean's angst-ridden compliance--in public--with rigid sexual expectations helped fuel the fury and electricity of his acting. Its conclusions will be a revelation to film buffs, gay readers, pop-culture aficionados, and everyone concerned with the ethics of image versus reality.
Author Notes
Paul Alexander has published two books about Sylvia Plath and regularly contributes to The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, The Nation, Cosmopolitan, Premiere, The Village Voice, ARTnews, and The Guardian. He lives in New York City.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This is a juicy biography that looks at the events that shaped Dean's (1931-1955) homosexuality. The death of his mother left Dean to be raised by relatives in Indiana, where he enjoyed an adolescence filled with basketball, 4-H Clubs and fast motorcycles. During this idyllic time he lost his virginity--to the local minister. After graduation from high school, Dean moved to L.A. to attend acting classes at UCLA. Unable to find film work, he slept with men (including, purportedly, Clifton Webb) who could help him to get acting jobs. Moving to Manhattan, he joined the Actors Studio to study under Lee Strasberg. After appearing on TV and Broadway, Dean returned to Hollywood to make East of Eden . Rebel Without a Cause and Giant followed, but Dean died in a car accident before their premieres. No movie critic, Alexander ( Rough Magic ) instead has written a graphic sexual biography that's likely to shock Dean fans. Photos not seen by PW. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Alexander, whose last book was a biography of Sylvia Plath (Rough Magic, 1991), takes on another promising but doomed artist- icon. Dean, Alexander claims in the first of many debatable assertions, ``brought something new to sex--an ambiguity, an openness, an androgyny that had not been there with other Hollywood stars.'' In no small part, he argues, that quality grew out of Dean's own conflicted feelings about his sexuality, which Alexander says was predominantly that of a homosexual. He recounts the by-now familiar story of Dean's brief life: his out-of-wedlock conception leading to his parents' marriage six months before his birth; his mother's death when he was nine; his father's handing him over to cousins who raised him as a son; his attraction to acting; his difficult relationship with his father; his struggles in Hollywood and New York; and his gradual rise to stardom, cut short by his death at 24 in an auto accident, leaving a legacy of three starring roles and a veritable cult of worshiping fans. What Alexander adds to this story is some potted and misleading social history, explicit tales of sexual encounters, and a great deal of unsubstantiated and highly speculative psychobiography recounted in tedious, overheated prose. The book is riddled with errors, calling Robert Lindner's Rebel Without a Cause a novel (it was a nonfiction book about psychopathic murderers), misidentifying Gary Cooper as the star of Shane, and calling Dos Passos's USA an ``epic poem.'' Alexander is unenlightening about Dean's acting style, his films, or his enduring appeal. The book has nothing new to say, and says it badly. (65 b&w photos, not seen)
Booklist Review
The interesting thing about James Dean is the fact that, almost 40 years after his death, he remains an icon of American pop culture. In the last chapter of this tell-all biography, Alexander takes a stab at accounting for Dean's continuing popularity, but his real interest throughout the book is in the actor's sex life. Although he devotes some attention to Dean's work as an actor and to his heterosexual liaisons, Alexander's contribution to the Dean legend is to label him as homosexual. The early death of Dean's mother; abandonment by his father; a close teenage "friendship" with an older, more worldly man; trips to the Hollywood casting couch (male version); testimony from numerous of Dean's self-proclaimed male lovers (one of whom provides a diary, complete with pillow talk)--these are only a few of the brush strokes that make up Alexander's portrait of Dean as a gay man. Contradictory evidence,like Dean's romance with actress Pier Angelli--considered by many to be the love his life--gets perfunctory treatment: ". . . the affair developed so quickly it would be hard to imagine that the love was lasting or substantial." That clears the way neatly for Alexander's conclusion: "James Dean used this sense of angst, caused by his inability to live the life he wanted to lead, to spur him on as he relentlessly pushed the boundaries of his art." Well, maybe, but by Alexander's reckoning, Dean didn't suffer from all that much repression, despite living in a 1950s closet. The point about revealing the secret sexual histories of dead celebrities, after all, isn't to prove the case as much as to raise a ruckus. Alexander ought to do just fine. (Reviewed Apr. 15, 1994)0670849510Ilene Cooper
