Dean would give only four major interviews. The first was to Philip Scheuer, appearing on November 7, 1954, in the Los Angeles Times; the second was to Howard Thompson of The New York Times and published just after the world premiere of East of Eden. Both of these would be widely plagarized by all varieties of gossipmongers in the months to come:
Hedda Hopper's interview, conducted at her home, probably in early December 1954, was extensive, but she waited a few months to publish it. Then, owing to syndication and different cut-and-paste jobs by editors all across America, its innumerable incarnations differed in varying degrees from one another, making it difficult to know exactly what Dean said. The interview was never printed in its entirety until Hopper's 1963 autobiography, and by then it had been heavily altered.
Finally. in August 1955, Mike Connolly spent several hours chatting with Dean at the latter's rented Sherman Oaks home. The resulting piece came out posthumously in Modern Screen in December 1955.
Although these four substantial interviews contain stretches of the truth, by and large Dean seemed to speak with thoughtfulness and candor. To Scheuer, he made his famous remark that "I'm a serious-minded and intense little devil, terribly gauche...and so tense I don't see how people stay in the same room with me. I know I wouldn't tolerate myself!"
In the same interview, Dean made an uncharacteristic political remark-a momentary lapse in his heeding of Rochlen's advice not to talk politics: He denounced communism as "the most limiting factor of all." The context for the statement was Dean's avowed hatred of anything that limits progress and growth, whether a school of thought, a school of acting, or an institutional policy.
The interview with Howard Thompson was the least honest Dean ever gave. First, he made his notorious but untruthful claim that in high school he had begun his winning rendition of "A Madman's Manuscript" with a scream. He allowed Thompson to propagate the myth that he had won the Donaldson and Perry awards for his role in The Immoralist. Then, by lionizing Lee Strasberg as "an incredible man, a walking encyclopedia, with fantastic insight," he left the false impression that he had flourished at the Actors Studio.
But the Thompson interview contained some good statements on Dean's approach to acting. The most interesting was his analysis of stage versus screen. "The camera," he mused, "is a very truthful medium because the camera doesn't let you get away with anything. On stage, you can even loaf a little, if you're so inclined. Technique, on the other hand, is more important. My aim, my real goal, is to achieve something I call camera-functioning on stage."
Dean twice lamely denied being a Hollywood-basher, reeling off some of his favorite movies to prove it. He conceded that if one looked hard enough, one could find human beings in Hollywood who were "sensitive to fertility."
In the Hopper interview, Dean made a rare public utterance about his mother. "When I was four or five, my mother had me playing violin....My family came to California and before it was over my mother had me tap-dancing." (He called himself a child prodigy.) "My mother died when I was eight-and the violin was buried, too. Then I left California. I was anemic...." Hopper noted Dean's hesitation at this point, and his next crack may have been to fight back tears: "What this story needs is a background of music."
Dean's ramblings to Hopper ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. The latter came in the false assertion that he had won the Indiana state championship in pole vaulting. But there was something ineffable in his response to Hopper's query as to how someone as young as he could know, as shown in his East of Eden performance, so much about character and people. "This gift astonishes me," he confessed.
At their session's conclusion, Hopper said she wanted to be his friend if he ever encountered trouble. "I'd like you to be," he responded. She gave him her phone number, telling him he could call at any time of day or night. "You mean that?" he asked. "I don't say things I don't mean," she assured him. According to Joe Hyams, Dean didn't like Hopper but found her useful as an advocate, so he did what he had to do to secure her favor.
Mike Connolly conducted his interview in the first week of August 1955. Dean was docile and charming, offering his guest freshly brewed coffee and raisin bread with cream cheese. He may have been impressed by Connolly's eminence at the Hollywood Reporter; or he may have known, instinctively or through the grapevine, that Connolly was homosexual. In any case, Dean wanted to demonstrate his hi-fi equipment, which was state of the art. He played several of his favorite opera records; judging from the tone of the ensuing discussion of favorite divas, either man could have held his own among opera buffs. Here Dean reflected the influence of both Leonard Rosenman and Frank Corsaro as he dropped comments about vocal modulation and the soundness of atonal music.
By the end of the interview, Dean had Connolly eating out of his hand. The journalist had noticed all the doors and windows open as he approached the house; later, when four neighborhood children dropped by, Dean welcomed them in and invited them to look around the house and backyard. "And this is the James Dean they've been calling a hermit!" Connolly fawned. When Dean sensed Connolly was pumping him about women (or "girls," as Connolly and everyone else talked in the fifties), he merely grinned and recounted how three gossip columnists propagated three versions of his being out with three different women on the same night, when "all the time I was sitting in the Villa Capri with my insurance agent!" Had the same probing been done by a less luminous reporter, Dean might not have tolerated it.
In response to Connolly's asking whether he had lost anything after East of Eden made him famous, Dean was positively angelic. "I fought it for a long time," he admitted. "But after a while I think I started learning what so many actors have learned-about that certain communicative power we have that so few people are privileged to have. We find that we can reach not only the people with whom we work on the soundstages here in Hollywood but people all over the world! And then we start thinking, "I'm famous, all right, and I guess this is what I wanted, so now how do I face it?" And then the responsibilities come. And you have to fight against becoming egotistical."
All in all, the Connolly interview is the most remarkable
Dean ever gave. Dean's facility with highbrow topics demonstrated
that his lifelong campaign to soak up human experience like a sponge and
to sap the knowledge of learned friends had paid off. After the interview,
according to Connolly's researcher, Joe Russell, Dean sent Connolly an
autographed photo with the inscription, "I know, Mike, we all march to
a different drumbeat."