Dean shared with some of the greatest stars of the past—Olivier, Garbo, Gary Cooper, Dietrich, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn—an androgynous image. But Dean took it a step further, blurring the boundaries not only between male and female but between adult and child. He was a lusty twenty-four-year-old man playing a fumbling teenager, impelled by the polymorphous desires of an infant.
“Girls really run after you,” Julie Harris says to him twice in East of Eden; and so, for the first time almost openly, did boys. Sal Mineo’s Plato in Rebel Without a Cause idolizes him with something more than the comradely admiration with which his namesake is associated. Dean turns the same lost, yearning look on everyone because, for him, everyone is a potential mother. As with Brando, another androgynous actor, Dean’s fusion of male and female qualities may have resulted from being the child of an artistic mother (Dean’s died when he was eight) and a remote businessman father. Unlike Brando, however, Dean seems more at ease with his feminine side and therefore with women.
Dean seems to have defined a generation, and indeed, male “softness” has become commonplace, so much so that stoicism may be making a comeback in such refreshingly stiff-upper-lipped types as Kevin Costner and Harrison Ford. But “soft” may be the wrong word for Dean. Vulnerable, yes, but shrewd and tyrannical with his genius. He knew how to keep everyone off balance, to reach into the depths of his psyche, and to get the last word, as the actors he upstaged can tell you. Onscreen and off. Remember when his sweetheart, Pier Angeli, spurned the unstable romantic for Vic Damone? Dean came to the church, waited outside on his motorcycle, and, when the bride and groom emerged, gunned his machine noisily as they kissed. Our hearts were broken, but could it have been otherwise? Dean in Damone’s shoes, embarking on a ’fifties marriage—with stardom, children, maturity, old age? Wasn’t he far happier out in the streets, a Byronic figure, gunning his motorcycle, enjoying the drama of his rejection—and stealing the scene completely from his ladylove?
