In Santa Monica, Dean made his home with his father, Winton, and stepmother, Ethel Case Dean, at 814-B Sixth Street. According to his friend Jonathan Gilmore, Dean knew “within five minutes” of being back with his father that it had been a “miserable, rotten mistake … Jimmy said his stepmother told him his father felt it was ‘a shame’ that Jimmy ‘had been duped’ into thinking he could earn a living in the movies. Winton said being an actor wasn’t a ‘manly profession’ and ‘the movies were full of pantywaists.’ ” Complicating things further, Dean did not like his stepmother and spent little time at home. But he said nothing about these matters in his letters to the Winslows and his grandparents, mentioning only that he and his father had gone bowling and golfing.
Halfway through June 1949, Dean discovered a welcome diversion to life at his father’s apartment. He joined the experimental wing of the Santa Monica Theater Guild, which was presenting a series of four one-act plays at the Miles Playhouse. Writing to his grandparents, he called himself “a full-fledged member of the troop [sic ]” Although he hadn’t joined soon enough to be cast in any of the plays, he wrote that his high school experience in designing and painting sets qualified him to become head stage manager as of Thursday, June 23. What he didn’t tell his grandparents was that, at least for the duration of the one-act festival, he had dropped his, and their, surname and was billing himself on the program as Byron James.
Beginning with his teens and intermittently thereafter, Dean toyed with the idea of changing his name to sound more like a celebrity. In high school he had “rushed” into Adeline Brookshire’s classroom one day and said, “I have a brilliant idea. I’m going to change my name to Marcus Dean. My aunt and uncle will like that.” The Winslows were flattered, but they dissuaded him. Later an agent talked him out of a similar scheme. His first summer in Santa Monica was the only time he used a stage name.
What really made Dean’s summer was the arrival in Los Angeles of Bette McPherson, whose teaching contract at Fairmount High had not been renewed. “I had been told that an apartment over a cocktail lounge was not a good place for a teacher to live,” she explained. “Then on weekends I would go with my boss, Joe Payne — who also happened to be president of the school board — to paint churches. Rumors started about him and me, and the superintendent called me in about it. I said, ‘Do you think I’m that hard up?’ and that sounded worse than it was. This was my undoing. I was fired by the end of the 1949 school year.”
To recuperate from her dismissal, she decided to spend the summer in Los Angeles with two other young women, Julia Barron and Donna Jean Morris, friends from her hometown who were also schoolteachers. Her cousin, Marjorie Armstrong, already lived there. “Bette loved to go to bars,” Armstrong related. “She just wanted to have a beer and talk. She wasn’t promiscuous. I can assure you she wasn’t an alcoholic.”
McPherson said when she notified Dean she was coming, he was happy “because he would know someone with a car. When I arrived, my cousin was away for the weekend. So I called Jim and he found a place for us to stay that Sunday night. He took Julia and me to the place, drove my car on home, and came back for us the next morning.
“Jim didn’t have anything to do that summer, so he went around with us. He showed us a lot — Alvarado Drive, Forest Lawn Cemetery, with lots of famous people buried there. I remember admiring the stained glass. I don’t know how on earth he knew so many places. He hadn’t been in L.A. too much longer than I, and Winton certainly hadn’t shown him.
“My friend Julia met the actor Don Ameche’s mother, Babe, at Catholic fellowship one Sunday and was invited to go over to the family home in the San Fernando Valley. Jim and all of us went with her. He was thrilled to see Don Ameche’s house.
“He had a job making signs for someone. Once when he got paid, we got beer, drove to the beach, and had a beer party. Then there was a friend of mine, originally from Indiana but living in L.A., who would have parties, and Jim and I would go. We went to dances; I taught him to dance. Once we got stopped by the police on the way to Lake Arrowhead, early in the morning, for running a stop sign. Another time, we got stopped for having the lights on bright.”
Marjorie Armstrong had a cabin on Lake Arrowhead’s Emerald Bay. Dean and McPherson went there to water ski a few times. “Bette said he scared her spitless as he drove up to Arrowhead, and Bette didn’t scare easily,” Armstrong remembered. “My husband didn’t mind the girls, but he didn’t like the boys. There was more than one — Jimmy Dean brought his friends along. In fact, I don’t remember which one of them he was. Since they hadn’t been invited and didn’t strike us as high-classed, they slept on the lawn or in the car. They didn’t look respectable. They looked sloppy — hippie, before hippies were in style.”
For most of the summer, McPherson, Julia Barron, and Donna Jean Morris lived in the front half of a UCLA professor’s home on the Hollywood — Beverly Hills line. “Jimmy had a motorcycle,” Morris remembers. “He came to our place because he seemed very lonesome, and was always in blue jeans. He talked little. It was hard to carry on a conversation with him. I would only say hi.”
With his foot already in the door of the Santa Monica Theater Guild, Dean was a prime candidate for its annual production of The Romance of Scarlet Gulch , a melodrama with a California gold rush motif. Once again billing himself as Byron James, he played Charlie Smooch, a habitual drunk. Other stock characters included a hero, a handsome sheriff, a Spanish villainess, a gambler, and a judge. The melodrama opened on August 11 and ran until September 17.
Extolling Dean’s contributions to the production, the florid program notes said, “The management has procured all the elegant scenic designs from the hand of the director, lavishly decorated by Mr. Byron James (who did the outdoor scene), and Mr. Byron James, ably assisted by all the actors, who also assisted in the construction.” Dean had recruited Bette McPherson to help him paint scenery for the melodrama. “He wanted me to be in the play,” she said. “I took him to rehearsals a lot. He didn’t have a car, so we used mine. By this time, we were arguing a lot — all day.”
Dean’s feelings for McPherson had grown intense. In spite of their eleven-year age difference, he asked her to marry him. “I said no,” she recalled. “So he said we could just live together. He was hurt.” In 1989, McPherson said she had lingering mixed emotions about discussing Dean. “It still makes me sad,” she confessed. “Maybe if I would have stayed in L.A., he would still be alive, but not famous. Who knows?”
After Scarlet Gulch began its run, Dean wrote to the Winslows to inform them that the melodrama’s first three performances had been a success. He said he was enjoying the experience and was trying to view it as an inexpensive stage education, even if in reality he disliked melodrama-style acting.
He complained about the behavior of his fellow thespians, saying they were usually bickering with each other unless someone outside their group criticized them, which made them forget their quarrels and unite. It made him nostalgic for the simpler life he had left behind. He reminisced about his small motorcycle that had remained behind in Indiana, saying he thought of it as a friend or even a blood relative, and that he couldn’t imagine ever selling it.
Dean was also doing some sort of work that summer in an unidentified television studio. He wrote that it was simple and the opportunities for promotion were great, even if the remuneration was marginal or nil. Realizing that breaking into the film and television world was an arduous process, he was trying to be patient while actors and actresses such as David Bruce, Barbara Brown, Hal Price, and Joan Leslie gave him pointers about their craft. [7] Some of them, he noted, hadn’t got their breaks until they were middle-aged.
Significantly, Dean said nothing in his letter about Bette McPherson. Despite his wounded feelings at her rejection of his marriage proposal, the two of them parted as friends when she returned to Indiana. “We kept in touch. He wrote — I didn’t keep the letters,” she later said. “I was supposed to meet him when he was back in Indiana the following summer, but couldn’t make it. Actually, I never saw him again. But we stayed in contact, because I called him in Texas, during the filming of Giant , because I happened to be in Albuquerque. Unfortunately, it was a weekend and the cast was on a break. We were planning to get together at my cousin’s place in the summer of 1956.”
Over the years there had been enough migration from Fairmount to southern California to justify an annual “Fairmount Picnic.” The 1949 festivities were held on September 25 in Whittier, another Quaker stronghold, and as usual was written up in the Fairmount News . Pains were taken to list every guest, and Winton and James Dean were not among them — in 1949 or any succeeding year. Perhaps they felt no strong connection to the other expatriates.
On many occasions Dean had told the folks in Indiana that he was bound for UCLA. He even wrote to his grandparents in June that he would be taking an English exam there and was already registered for summer and fall classes. But at summer’s end, whatever tentative inquiries he had made to UCLA were moot. Somehow it was decided that he would attend Santa Monica City College, a two-year institution. Perhaps UCLA’s out-of-state tuition rates were beyond Winton Dean’s ability to pay. Larry Swindell, Dean’s pal at SMCC, recalled, “More than once Jimmy told me that he went to Santa Monica to get residency to qualify for UCLA’s in-state fees.”
In some ways, Dean’s freshman year was simply an extension of high school; once again he would have a nurturing drama teacher and go out for basketball and field events. He was still thoroughly Indianan that fall but would continue the process of social and intellectual climbing that had started with his emulation of James DeWeerd. He would pursue and date the homecoming queen, campaign for and win membership in the Opheleos (an elite male service organization), and fraternize with students whose sophistication he hoped would rub off. “The Jim Dean we knew at Santa Monica,” said Larry Swindell, “was entirely different from the Dean of legend, suggesting a personal evolution that has never really been tracked.”
The Santa Monica City College of Dean’s day was not at all like today’s attractive campus on Pico Boulevard. Located at Seventh Street and Michigan Avenue, the old campus was a series of World War I barracks — Splinterville was one of its nicknames — intended only as temporary quarters until the anticipated 1941 construction of a new campus. But World War II forced the indefinite postponement of those plans. When Dean arrived, the college was still adjacent to Santa Monica High School; the two institutions shared many facilities, including the athletic field and theater.
Larry Swindell first met Dean through the Schenk brothers, Herb and Dick, at their home at 2619 Fifth Street in Ocean Park. “Jimmy was writing a radio script with Herb Schenk,” Swindell remembers. “He was fresh from Indiana, and it was immediately clear that he was never going to make it as any kind of writer. Or as an actor, we all thought.
“I mean no disrespect in saying that the Dean I knew was in no way impressive. He was an ordinary guy, showing no special promise scholastically, professionally, or socially. He was friendly in an aggressive way. He attained a modest popularity on campus because he worked for it. He knew everyone, and everyone knew Jim Dean, but perhaps that was not unusual at a junior college whose total enrollment was sixteen hundred. I knew everyone, too.”
Not surprisingly, talk at the Schenk home turned to things sexual. “Jimmy said his main priority of the school term was to lose his virginity,” says Swindell. If he was not being disingenuous, his declaration implied that his relationship with Bette McPherson had stopped short of penetration. Swindell reflects, “He openly wanted to lose his virginity, as opposed to getting laid. He wanted to know what it was all about.”
A few months later, Dean was still pursuing the same goal. “Some of us planned a ski trip at Mount Waterman, which never materialized,” Swindell relates. “One of our classmates had a place there; we would stay there and take girls. Jimmy was determined he was going to ‘find his manhood’ there. It was early 1950. I don’t know why it fell through.
“Jim went after my friendship,” Swindell continues. “He thought I was smart — and I was — in ways that he wanted to be. It’s unlikely we would have had any close association at all, if not for his instigation. He must have sensed his deficiencies, because he latched onto people who possessed the traits he coveted — the Schenk brothers, Jim Wasson [later in Macbeth with him at UCLA]. There was also Dianne Hixon, a toothy, willowy blonde, taller than he, who was the homecoming queen. That’s probably why he went after her, as a talisman of his upward mobility.
“Dick Schenk and I instituted rooters’ buses to football games. Jimmy went with us to San Diego. We would sing ‘Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,’ that kind of song, and if it’s true he couldn’t carry a tune, that was the perfect situation for him to sing. And if there were ever a time when Jimmy was in his element, it was during the singing.”
Dean had relatively little time to be a football fan because he was intent on making Santa Monica’s basketball team. The school had won the conference championship the previous year, but the coach was now faced with the challenge of maintaining a formidable reputation with mostly new players. Practice sessions began in mid-October, and within three weeks fifty candidates had been winnowed down to fifteen. Dean was among them but would spend most of the season, which began December 2, on the bench. His best friend on the squad was Gordon Hein, a first-string forward .
“Dean was a third-stringer,” remembers Hein. “His two goals at Santa Monica were to be a disc jockey and to drive in the Indy 500. I lined him up with a gal who would go with us to Dodgers games. Her father was a sportswriter, and she knew more about baseball than either of us.
“I also introduced him to Dianne Hixon, the homecoming queen. He told me he wanted to go out with her, I asked her if she wanted to, and she said it would be okay. Dianne used to walk around campus carrying a shoebox with a pet garter snake in it. She would take it out, curl it around her arm, and pet it. The homecoming queen contest was held at the high school. She stepped up on the pedestal and touched her elbows behind her back so her breasts would flex — and she had ’em. The audience ate it up, so she won.
“The college shared the cafeteria at the high school, and Dean and I ate there often. One day something happened that was right out of Rebel Without a Cause . Part of that movie was filmed at the same high school, of course, and the school seal imbedded in the sidewalk is really there. We walked on it and a couple of burly lettermen told us you weren’t allowed to step on it.”
Although SMCC’s speech and theater program was small, it could boast the services of an extraordinary teacher, Mrs. Gene Owen, whose history of theater and beginning acting classes Dean had in fall semester. At the time, Owen said, Dean was ordinary-looking, not one to attract a second glance. Her earliest memories of him in her class were of a quiet, shy, small college boy who always wore glasses. The glasses were always masking a pair of eyes that Owen would not realize were “arresting” until she saw him on television two years later.
The Indiana freshman’s speech, as she remembered, was even less auspicious. “His articulation was poor, he mashed his words, and he was somewhat difficult to understand,” she said. “In class, someone pointed this out and blamed it on his Hoosier accent.” But after class, Dean showed Owen his dental plate with the false front teeth attached, making her understand his difficulty in achieving the proper tongue positions for certain sounds.
To remedy these problems, Owen offered to work with Dean privately for the rest of the semester. “If anything would clear up fuzzy speech,” she said, “it would be the demanding soliloquies of Shakespeare.” When she suggested to Dean that they work on Hamlet , he enthusiastically agreed, wanting to delve right into the “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” speech. But Owen wisely told him he would have to start from the play’s beginning and work up to the renowned soliloquy.
“Early I found that Jimmy was not a very good reader, but if complicated parts of the play were explained to him, he would pursue the role of young Hamlet with intensity and originality,” Owen said. When their second weekly session came around, he had memorized the opening speech. Owen cued him and then sat back in amazement at what she heard. “In only a dozen lines, he had established a deeply disturbed young Hamlet who touched my heart,” she said. “I had seen the play with every great actor in both England and America in the role, and I had never heard those lines expressed quite so well.” That night she told her husband she had finally found the right student to play Hamlet as the Prince of Denmark ought to be played.
“On we went through the play,” she continued, “with Jimmy devouring every soliloquy, short and long, sharpening his articulation, and along the way developing and defining a vulnerable and troubled Hamlet that was artistry.” Dean apparently relished this exercise; Dianne Hixon said he was often hunched over Hamlet , reading it aloud.
Dean appreciated Owen’s friendship as well as the coaching. Sometimes he would wait for her in her office, sitting on the radiator until she returned from class, and they might talk for hours. However, his progress would for a time be apparent only to her. “He was not accused of being talented,” says Larry Swindell. “His professed ambition to be a stage and screen actor seemed unreasonable, especially in light of what most of us perceived as his physical shortcomings: short to begin with and thick eyeglasses. He was no Most Likely To Succeed candidate. Among theater majors that designation belonged to his good friend Jim Wasson, who had movie star looks and was a much better actor.
“Robert Ringer, who later wrote Looking Out for Number One , was a young stand-up comic; he gave a program in the high school auditorium. Jimmy introduced the program; in fact, he was warm-up man for Ringer. He was a rank amateur. He went over like the proverbial lead balloon. We didn’t think he was much of a comic.
“In Gene Owen’s class there were scenes from plays done, and students found out about them and would watch. I wandered into the class at Jimmy’s invitation to see a scene from William Saroyan’s Hello Out There . Jimmy played a man in jail; the scene was between him and a girl who took pity on him. He wasn’t good.”
Gordon Hein’s memories of Dean’s talents are more flattering. He relates, “Once Dean was in a skit about professional athletes being paid money under the table, a big topic in those days. He told me, ‘I’m going to get the biggest laugh.’ I asked him how. He got some Black Jack gum and used it to black out every other tooth. So, when he smiled in the skit and flashed his teeth, the audience howled. He knew what he had even then.”
A chance encounter off campus highlighted what even then was Dean’s gift of dramatic inventiveness. Charles Kersey, also an Indianan and Dean’s same age, was studying at the Max Geller Theater Workshop in Hollywood. One evening, Dean stopped by a friend’s apartment and heard show music blaring from a record player inside. The friend was not in, but Kersey, the friend’s roommate, let Dean in. Dean’s mild curiosity about the music gave way to an even greater curiosity about two chairs facing each other about five feet apart in the living room. Kersey explained this was supposed to be a make-believe window.
“Our instructor wants us to make four entrances into this room in four situations.” said Kersey. “Through this window, we’re supposed to see someone we like, someone we don’t like, an accident, and a sunset that a neighbor has just phoned about. The hard part is getting into the room. We just can’t walk in, go to the window, and react. Watching the sunset is easiest, because of the neighbor’s call. That gives a reason to go into the room.”
Dean asked how Kersey intended to react to the sunset. “Well, I’ll like it. I’ll think it’s pretty,” he answered.
“Because your neighbor said it was?” Dean challenged.
“Not entirely. I like sunsets, too,” said Kersey.
“Suppose,” Dean suggested, “you were asleep at the time he called or busy doing something and couldn’t be bothered?” Suddenly Kersey was impressed with Dean’s imagination.
Dean also had an idea for the entrance involving a glimpse of a disliked person. “Go to an imaginary bookshelf, run your finger over the titles, and pick a book. Then squint as if you can’t make out its title because the light’s too dim. Go to the window for more light.” Dean demonstrated the sequence as he went along. Pretending to hold a book at the imaginary window, he casually glanced as if at the outdoors. A dark look of hate spread across his face. “I was thinking of this guy I know at home,” he explained.
Dean’s friend arrived and the two had to leave for a movie. But as Dean left, he called out from the hall, “See you in the movies!” Kersey never got any major breaks as an actor, nor did he ever meet Dean again, but upon seeing East of Eden much later, he remembered those parting words.
At Christmastime, Dean sent earrings to Adeline Brookshire and a bracelet to Joyce Wigner back in Fairmount. To Bette McPherson, he sent a remembrance of a different nature: an empty beer bottle wrapped in a napkin on which he had written a few nostalgic and cryptic words about past shared beer-drinking sessions as well as wishes for a superb New Year.
A ten-day series of indoor camp meetings at Pasadena’s Bresee Church of the Nazarene brought the peripatetic James DeWeerd to southern California in late January 1950. Dean dropped by to hear one of the minister’s twice-daily sermons, and DeWeerd later cited his attendance as proof of a deeply religious nature that went unrecognized by the public.
The new semester began on February 1. From Gene Owen, Dean took voice and diction and radio workshop. Almost immediately he became one of the stars of the announcing crew at the college’s radio station. His first assignment of note was to host a program entitled “Student Shares His Interest” on February 23.
Basketball season continued through March. Dean chalked up a grand total of four points: one basket in a February 17 match with Harbor Junior College after Santa Monica was so far ahead that victory was assured, and another in a March 3 game with San Diego. He may have played briefly in other games without showing up in the statistics.
During March, SMCC’s newspaper, the Corsair , often mentioned Dean’s name. It reported on March 1 that he would announce all Friday afternoon radio programs in the coming month. Following the school’s annual variety show on March 9, the Corsair gossiped, there was a “terrific party” at a hangout called the Glen; among the couples in attendance were “Dean and Hixon.” (Perhaps to Dean’s dismay, the Corsair often noted Hixon’s other dates — she was the homecoming queen, after all — with a UCLA man.) Finally, noting the prospects for track and field season, it listed Dean among five pole-vaulters “in good shape.” That was his single notice as a vaulter; he apparently never placed in any meet.
In mid-March, the new members of the Opheleos were announced. Swindell explains, “Those of us who held over from fall semester — myself, the Schenk brothers, and others — were the ones who voted on who got in next time, and we got Jim in. The Opheleos supposedly were the outstanding twenty-one male students on campus, and for Jim ‘outstanding’ certainly implied something other than academic qualifications. He passed his courses, but it was a struggle.”
One of Dean’s private educational enterprises that year, entirely consistent with his publicly stated wish to lose his virginity, was to familiarize himself with the odysseys of memoirist Frank Harris. “I advised him who Frank Harris was — told him about My Reminiscences As a Cowboy ” says Larry Swindell, “and he began reading the autobiographical My Life and Loves . He then loaned his copy, with the bawdy passages underlined, out to several of his friends — Gordon Hein and Hans Holland, fellow basketball players, and some football players, too.
“Jimmy was just wild about Frank Harris’s life. Largely because of basketball, he hated his own shortness and wished he were six-foot-two or -three. He would go on and on about how Frank Harris was five-foot-three and how women he had bedded would say, ‘Oh, you big, strong man!’ and said this was his ideal.”
On the cultural side of Dean’s life was the campus jazz club. “I initiated Jimmy into the lore of Dixieland jazz; ‘trad’ was what we called it as opposed to the then-current bebop craze,” says Swindell. “Soon, he was more interested in trad than I was. With a few others we founded the SMCC jazz club in the spring of 1950. He and I made perhaps half a dozen trips to L.A. to listen to old jazz recordings at Ray Avery’s Record Roundup on La Cienega Boulevard.”
Although the Korean conflict had not yet started, there was a draft board office on the Santa Monica campus to enable convenient registration for men turning eighteen. “I knew of the draft office, but don’t know under what auspices it operated,” notes Swindell. “I went to it to apply for my student deferment. The Korean situation was about to erupt and it was a big, nagging worry. As I recall, there was no urgent sense of patriotism, nor was there any spirit of adventure, in contrast to the mood during World War II.”
Whether Dean had any contact with this office is unknown; presumably his draft board in Indiana was keeping tabs on him. According to surviving Selective Service records, the portentous first step in the process of being drafted — the classification questionnaire — was mailed to him on April 7.
SMCC’s annual May Day festivities came midway through the spring semester; by tradition the drama students presented a melodrama. In She Was Only a Farmer’s Daughter , Dean played a proud, aristocratic father. Wrapping up the semester were the Opheleos’ banquet, to which Dean came with Dianne Hixon; the annual spring sports banquet at the Elks Club; and final exams from June 5 through 14.
Dean is said to have spent the summer as an athletic instructor at a military academy in Glendora, which would have pleased his father — Gene Owen said Winton Dean expected his son to become a basketball coach. However, a three-week trip to Indiana with Winton and Ethel Dean interrupted the summer job. By this time, many of Dean’s high school classmates had entered the military. One exception was Dean’s good friend Rex Couch, one year his senior, who was studying premed at Indiana University in Bloomington. Dean and Couch drove down one day so Dean could visit Adeline Brookshire, who was working on her master’s degree in speech and theater.
Dean told Brookshire he didn’t feel his year at Santa Monica had been terribly useful in taking him where he wanted to go in acting. When he wondered aloud about coming to IU, Brookshire had a sudden idea. She took him to see Dr. Norvelle, chairman of the theater arts department. According to Brookshire, Norvelle said he would be delighted to welcome Dean to IU; that much of the interview Dean liked. But Norvelle stressed his belief that all theater arts majors should finish their degree and get a teaching certificate as a hedge against not succeeding as an actor. This was not what Dean wanted to hear, and his ambitions at IU never amounted to more than a whim.
Indiana University was not the only institution of higher learning Dean toured while on vacation. Within the previous year, James DeWeerd had been named president of Kletzing College, a Christian school in Oskaloosa, Iowa. Jennie Andrews Lee, a Kletzing professor, remembers DeWeerd’s bringing Dean to see the Iowa campus.
Back from Indiana, Dean hung out with his Santa Monica buddies. “I was perhaps closest to Jim in the summer break between SMCC and UCLA,” says Swindell. “When his car broke down and he couldn’t immediately afford to have it repaired, he had to resort to double-dating with me in my car, twice. Dianne Hixon was his lady on both occasions. When we double-dated, I’d pick him up at school, a curious thing. It seemed he didn’t want me to see where he lived.”
Dean, Swindell, and Dick Schenk went to a three-lecture series held in Santa Monica High School’s auditorium that summer, featuring anthropologist Margaret Mead, historian Will Durant, and author-folklorist Jesse Stuart. Durant’s topic was “Is Progress Real?” Swindell said Dean was “powerfully impressed” by Will Durant’s speech and “soon was often heard quoting Durant on the UCLA campus. Years later, when Jim was famous and we were entirely out of touch, I heard that he was still quoting Durant on the reality of progress.”
The Santa Monica Theater Guild announced tryouts for another annual production of The Romance of Scarlet Gulch , but Dean felt he had had enough melodrama for a lifetime.
Exactly when Dean obtained his father’s consent to transfer to UCLA is uncertain. He once mentioned the intended move to Gene Owen, and although she thought it would be a mistake, she kept her feelings to herself. Despite her instincts about Dean’s talent, she felt that at that point in his life he would be overwhelmed by the bigger school’s more rigorous academic standards. Even though Santa Monica lacked its own theater, she still felt Dean would be better served by its more intimate classroom settings and opportunities for individual help. She knew the cutthroat nature of UCLA’s theater arts department, and Dean didn’t seem secure enough to endure it. All of her premonitions would turn out to be right, but Dean had to find out for himself.
