When it was over: “I want to do Hamlet soon. Only a young man can play him as he was—with the naïveté. Laurence Olivier played it safe. Something is lost when the older men play him. They anticipate his answers. You don’t feel that Hamlet is thinking—just declaiming.
“Sonority of voice and technique the older men have. But this kind of Hamlet isn’t the stumbling, feeling, reaching, searching boy that he really was. They compensate for the lack of youth by declamation. Between their body responses and reaction on one hand and the beauty of the words on the other, there is a void.”
At that point he casually dropped his cigarette onto a rug and said: “Call the cops.” He went over to the mantelpiece, raised the lid of one of my green Bristol glass boxes that stand there, and, as if speaking into a microphone, said hollowly: “Send up Mr. Dean’s car.”
As he left I told him: “If you get into any kind of trouble, I’d like to be your friend.”
“I’d like you to be,” he said.
“I’ll give you my telephone number, and if you want to talk at any time, day or night, you call me.”
“You mean that?”
“I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
I learned a lot about James Byron Dean, some from him, some from his friends. He acquired his middle name in honor of the poet, Lord Byron, whom his mother idolized. She was a little slip of a thing, a farmer’s daughter, who spoiled Jimmy from the day he was born in Marion, Indiana. Five years later, in 1936, Winton Dean, a dental technician, took his wife, Mildred, and their only child to live in a furnished flat in Los Angeles.
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