Archive for September, 2007
Meet your new favorite dude!
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Another installment from Morrissey’s ever engrossing book ‘James Dean is not dead!’. You may be wondering why I’m bothering to post this shit up, no? Well, it’s easier than actually writing entries yourself. I’m busy. I have a life, man. This next tid-bit tells of Jimmy’s arrival in New York City and landing a part in East of Eden. Chronology be damned.
But first a word from the author himself-
“I saw Rebel Without A Cause quite by accident when I was about 6. I was entirely enveloped. I did research about him and it was like unearthing Tutankhamen’s tomb. His entire life seemed so magnificently perfect. What he did on film didn’t stir me that much but as a person he was immensely valuable.” – Le Mozz.
At 20, James Dean arrived in Manhattan for the first time.
Dean: “New York overwhelmed me. For the first few weeks I only strayed a couple of blocks from my hotel off Times Square.”
Dean spent most of his money seeing movies. He moved into a room at the YMCA but lived in isolation, his only contact with people being at the drug store where he found a job as a counter-man. Rogers Brackett suggested that his friend pursue TV director James Sheldon. Dean did so, and Sheldon passed the budding actor on to the Louis Schurr Agency. Here he was interviewed by Jane Deacy, who decided to take him on as a client.
Deacy gave Dean great encouragement and found him the part of Bachir in Billy Rose’s play The Immortalist, which told the story of a man who marries only to discover on his wedding night that he is homosexual. The man discovers this with the help of Bachir (Dean), an Arab boy, who decides to seduce his older friend. Dean was singled out by critics for special praise. Elia Kazan saw The Immortalist and realised that Jimmy was ideal for the role of Cal in an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden which would be Kazan’s next venture.
Night and day Jimmy walked the city, never holding down a romance, but flitting in and out of people’s lives. He had no need for ‘love’, and indeed saw no real need for the permanent affections of anyone. By now he was living in a set of rooms at the top of an old building on West 68th street. Here he spent many nights of solitude, listening to his jazz records, or reading his books. He never bought clothes, spending most of his money on records and books. He would never eat at expensive restaurants, but frequented Cromwell’s coffee bar.
What will happen next? In other news: Don’t pick mushrooms in Australia! What a total Bummer. Come on mate, bit of a laugh mate.
Did you know about this? Neither did we! It seems Mr. Steven Morrissey wrote a James Dean biography back in ’83! How very peculiar! We have a copy at the office now thanks to Chris the business development dude (who added an ‘S’ to his last name by the way), and we thought we’d publish a few choice passages for you because the chances of you ever reading this rarity yourself are super slim. Have a look on Ebay.
This first installment from Morrissey’s ‘James Dean is not Dead.’ concerns Jimmy’s bad behavior on the set of ‘East of Eden’, and his subsequent breakdown at shootings end.
Bon app’etit!
East of Eden is the story of a son aching for the affection of a disapproving father. Jimmy as the son (Cal) and Raymond Massey as the father, found the Steinbeck characters creeping into their daily lives on the set. Julie Harris (playing Abra) would often bridge the gap between Massey and Dean.
Harris: “Jimmy would say a lot of, would swear, I remember some of what he’d say – ‘fuck’ , or something like that, and Raymond Massey would turn scarlet and finally had to say once: ‘You mustn’t talk like that, there are ladies present’, which just egged Jimmy on more.”
In one scene with Massey, Dean was to read a passage from the Bible before supper. Instead of the expected ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want’, Dean in a deliberate effort to enrage Massey, who was devoted to the Bible, recited: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not suck cock.” Massey’s heart nearly stopped. He stormed from the set and refused to continue working with Dean, a decision he was forced to retract.
On the set Dean tagged after Richard Davalos who played Cal’s angelic brother Aron. Aron was perfection in his father’s eyes, but his stainless nature had cunning tendencies. Davalos was not over-keen on Dean, and was unwilling to share an apartment with him when Kazan suggested they should.
For most of the film, Cal is projected as little more than a confused boy, unable to understand his straightlaced father, yet identifying with his mother (Jo Van Fleet), a whorehouse madam. On the set, Dean was as troublesome and complicated as possible. He drank violently and abusively and Julie Harris was the only one with an understanding.
Julie Harris: “The first time I met Jimmy at some party down in the Village. We were introduced and he looked at me kind of quizzically and he said: ‘Well,, how do you like playing in The Moon is Blue?’. and I thought, what’s he doing? Is he putting me on? And I said, ‘I wasn’t in The Moon is Blue, and he kind of looked at me and smiled. He didn’t say much after that.”
In the film, Harris (as Abra) is Aron’s girlfriend but is distracted by her fascination for the other brother, Cal. Abra realises that until Cal receives the approval he deserves from his self-righteous father, he shall always feel incomplete.
Julie Harris: “I remember the last day of filming. It was terrible for me. You always feel that you’re alone in these feelings, whatever you feel. You feel that nobody else can possibly feel that. The last scene was shot – I don’t know what scene we were working on. It was the exterior of the house, I know that. And there was to be a party that night. It was awful for me that last day to think it had all gone away, that life we’d been leading for two and a half months. You wouldn’t see anybody again. You wouldn’t come there every day. You wouldn’t look forward to it. And I remember looking around and thinking, I’ve got to say goodbye to Jimmy. And suddenly, all the set was just deserted, and everybody had just gone. And he had a dressing room, a portable dressing room, on the set, and I went up to the caravan and knocked on the door and I thought I heard something like a sob. I said, ‘Jimmy’, and then knocked again. So then I was sure it was a sob and I opened the door and he was just in tears, his eyes – and I said ‘what’s the matter’, and he said, ‘It’s over, it’s over’, and he was just like a little boy. So lovely.”
Good stuff Mozz!
Thank god Morrissey is coming back! If you don’t have tickets for his Hammerstein shows I’d get on it now because they are selling faster than you can say ‘Fuck-me! Those Morrissey tickets are selling fast!’.
Here’s Ol’ Dirty Mozzle being asked some really good questions by someone who cares to ask such questions.
In other news, this is how I used do interviews way back when (three years ago). It’s a tie-mic taped to a telephone and then plugged into a minidisc player, remember those little piles of klickety shit? Dreadful. I had to use a rubber band to keep it closed. Such merde!
Here’s your hair inspiration pic for the week…
And heres a song to play while you wait for the next issue of WOOOOO. It’s coming so shut up.
This is your new favorite dude. His name is Dylan Morrison and his bio says it all- “No one is really sure how and when Dylan Morrison became myth and enigma; nobody is even really sure who he is or where he came from. One day he just showed up, and he seemed like an old friend like he had been around since time immemorial; like he had been singing the blues ever since the world began.” Testify.
Man! Gardar’s dad got really aggressive after the sex change! Cha-cha-cha-cha!
These guys are throwing a party to raise money for a copy of Adobe InDesign. Bumrocks is going to ‘burn up the wheels of steel and get all the bitches horny’… thats what he told me anyway. See you there.
Tweaker killing it.
