Craig Brown - One on One

Marfa, Texas

June 6th 1955

She is the former child star, now Queen of Hollywood. He is the up-and-coming method actor, surly and unpredictable. Though Elizabeth Taylor is a year younger than James Dean, she belongs to an earlier generation of old-fashioned, glamorous, self-confident, untouchable stars, whereas he heralds a new generation: scruffy, grunting, brooding, callow. They are to act together in Giant, Elizabeth Taylor as the wife of a Texas cattle baron, James Dean as the troublesome ranch-hand who strikes oil.

They are introduced a few days before filming begins. To everyone’s surprise, he charms her, and takes her for a ride in his brand-new Porsche. Taylor ends the day convinced that he is a perfect gentleman, and that others have tarred him with the wrong brush.

The following day, Taylor, expecting a warm welcome after their pleasant introduction, goes up to Dean and says hello. He glares at her over the rims of his glasses, mutters something incomprehensible to himself and strides off as though he hasn’t seen her. It dawns on her that, after all, his reputation for moodiness may be justified.

Their first four weeks are to be spent on location in the small, sleepy town of Marfa, Texas, where the temperatures frequently rise to 120 degrees in the shade. On their first day of filming, his friend Dennis Hopper has never seen James Dean so nervous on a set.

Their first scene involves Dean firing a shot at a water tower, Taylor stopping her car, and Dean asking her in for tea. But Dean is so nervous that he can barely get the words out. ‘At that time there wasn’t anybody who didn’t think she was queen of the movies, and Jimmy was really fuckin’ nervous. They did take after take, and it just wasn’t going right. He was really getting fucked up. Really nervous,’ recalls Hopper. ‘Well, there were around four thousand people watching the scene from a hundred yards away, local people and visitors. And all of a sudden Jimmy turned and walked off towards them. He wasn’t relating to them or anything. He got half-way, unzipped his pants, took out his cock, and took a piss. Then he dripped off, put his cock back, zipped up his pants, and walked back to the set and said, “OK, shoot.”’

This is not the sort of behaviour to which Elizabeth Taylor is accustomed. On the way back from the location, Hopper says to Dean, ‘Jimmy, I’ve seen you do some way-out things before, but what was that?’

‘I was nervous,’ explains Dean. ‘I’m a method actor. I work through my senses. If you’re nervous, your senses can’t reach your subconscious and that’s that – you just can’t work. So I figured if I could piss in front of these two thousand people, man, and I could be cool, I figured if I could do that, I could get in front of that camera and do just anything, anything at all.’

As the filming continues, Dean irritates the cast and crew with his habit of coming to a halt in the middle of a take and shouting, ‘Cut – I fucked up!’ He attributes it to the perfectionism required of a method actor. His co-star Rock Hudson, one of the old school, is less forgiving of the solipsistic neurosis that powers Dean’s acting. The director, George Stevens, also grows irritated by Dean’s random behaviour, regarding it as unprofessional. ‘I’d get so mad at him, and he’d stand there, blinking behind his glasses after having been guilty of some bit of preposterous behaviour, and revealing by his very cast of defiance that he felt some sense of unworthiness.’ Stevens is equally annoyed by Taylor’s obsession with her looks. ‘Until you tone down your veneer, you’ll never be an actress,’ he tells her.

Their shared sense of directorial persecution may help forge a bond between Taylor and Dean: in time, the two stars grow to like each other. ‘We were like brother and sister really; kidding all the time, whatever it was we were talking about. One felt he was a boy one had to take care of, but even that was probably his joke. I don’t think he needed anybody or anything – except his acting.’

Both Dean and Taylor are reliant on drugs of one sort or another: he smokes marijuana, while Taylor takes medications for her plentiful ailments, which Stevens regards as psychosomatic. ‘When Jimmy was eleven and his mother passed away, he began to be molested by his minister. I think that haunted him the rest of his life. In fact, I know it did. We talked about it a lot. During Giant we’d stay up nights and talk and talk and that was one of the things he confessed to me,’ Taylor says forty-two years later. *

‘He would tell me about his past life, some of the grief and unhappiness he had experienced, and some of his loves and tragedies. Then, the next day on set, I would say, “Hi, Jimmy,” and he would give me a cursory nod of his head. It was almost as if he didn’t want to recognise me, as if he was ashamed of having revealed so much of himself the night before. It would take maybe a day or two for him to become my friend again.’

One day in September, with only a few scenes left to shoot, the director, crew members and actors assemble in the screening room to view the day’s rushes. In the middle of the screening, Stevens takes a call, then orders the lights up. James Dean, he announces, has been killed in a car crash.

The following day, Taylor is summoned to film reaction shots for a scene in which she acted with Dean a few days ago. She realises with a start that she is being asked to react to a young man whose corpse is now lying on a slab in a funeral home at Paso Robles, but she goes ahead with it just the same.

IS FOREWARNED BY

The Villa Capri, Hollywood

September 23rd 1955

A week before he is due to die, James Dean is sitting at a table in his favourite little restaurant in Hollywood, the Villa Capri. He is very chummy with Nikkos, its maître d’, from whom he has started renting a log house in Sherman Oaks.

Looking towards the entrance, he spots a familiar figure attempting to get a table, then being turned away. He recognises him as the English actor Alec Guinness, the star of so many of his favourite Ealing comedies, like Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Guinness has always been more than a touch superstitious, and in a few minutes he will be applying his sixth sense to James Dean. He regularly visits fortune tellers, and has even indulged in a little table-turning. At one time in his life he became obsessed with tarot cards, until all of a sudden one evening, ‘I got the horrors about them and impetuously threw cards and books on a blazing log fire.’

Guinness delights in recounting his psychic powers. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, 1943, he had been resting in the cabin of the naval ship of which he was a lieutenant, when he had apparently heard a sinister voice saying, ‘Tomorrow.’ He was convinced that this was a premonition of death.

That night, sailing from Sicily to the Yugoslav island of Vis, his ship hit a hurricane. An electrical discharge caused ribbons of blue fluorescent light, ‘until the whole ship was lit up like some dizzying fairground sideshow’. Convinced that he was going to die, Guinness found the spectacle ‘beautiful and strangely comforting’.

The ship was dashed against the rocks as it entered the small Italian port of Termoli, and he gave the order to abandon ship. He had, it seems, outwitted the sinister voice – or had it been delivering less of a judgement than a warning?

In March this year, he and his wife were on holiday in the Trossachs in Scotland when their car had a bad puncture. ‘Couldn’t get the wheel off,’ he recalls in his diary. ‘After nearly an hour’s effort said a little prayer to St Anthony and the nuts came loose the very next time I tried – and with only a small effort.’