Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

other skulking around a small town, seeking love
and affection but unable to express his need to fill
the void in his guts. Like Marlon Brando, James
Dean made psychic pain and social
disenfranchisement seem romantic, even desirable.
He “said it all so clean,” as the Eagles noted in their
1974 ode to him. An icon in America, Dean
articulated the same sentiments for millions of British
youths encouraged to be voiceless, rewarded for a
politesse that clashed with every roiling impulse they
were feeling. If possible, he was bigger in England
than in America because of such institutionalized
repression.
“Dean’s impact among British youth was huge,”
writer William Bast says. Now in his late seventies,
Bast was Dean’s friend and roommate in the early
1950s. After the actor’s death in 1955, his Deaninspired
play The Myth Makers would be broadcast
on the UK’s Granada TV network, and he would
observe the intense English James Dean cult
firsthand. “He was a huge movie star there,” he
continues. “There were large fan clubs. People could
relate to his farm boy origins. They have farms, first
of all. But with regard to American culture and
teenage culture, the feeling of being displaced is not
just an American thing.”
Dean’s father was a Quaker with a lineage that
could be traced to the Pilgrims. He had Native
American blood on his mother’s side. She died
when he was eight, and he never really recovered
from the loss. Fast, sexed-up, palpably sad and