Crazy for Dean.

Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause * Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel * Touchstone, $24.95

Easily the best "making of" since Picture, Live Fast, Die Young recounts the tumultuous production of Rebel Without a Cause with scrupulous scholarship that's only possible when gay writers are in the driver's seat.

Conceived as a minor stopover between East of Eden and Giant, Rebel came to subsume its classier "bookends." To this day it's regarded as the seminal cinematic expression of adolescent angst and homoerotic desire.

In this book we get the usual stories about Dean's affairs with Liz "Dizzy" Sheridan (Jerry's mom on Seinfeld) and Betsy Palmer. But Pier Angeli and Ursula Andress were largely publicity for a man who rated a 5 on the Kinsey scale. Dean wasn't interested in Natalie Wood (who was busy with both Ray and Dennis Hopper.) And while seriously attracted to Dean on-screen and off, Mineo (who gets a chapter to himself titled "The First Gay Teenager") was said by some to be having an affair with Ray too.

As for Dean, he was busy with Jack Simmons, a personal slave whom he wanted for the Mineo part. Ray wouldn't have it, and neither would screenwriter Stewart Stern: "I thought it would put a different coloration on the relationship that might not be healthy."

We dig.

One night Dean and Simmons ran into Jack Larson (then boy reporter Jimmy Olsen on the Superman series) and proposed a three-way. A wary Larson turned them down--to the considerable annoyance of poet Frank O'Hara, a friend of his. When he told O'Hara he'd said no, Larson remembers, the Dean-besotted poet %vas shocked and it almost ruined our friendship."

But there's a much bigger "might have been" in that Ray wanted to have an on-screen kiss between Dean and Mineo. Alas, it was a tad too early for Brokeback Mountain. But it can still play in the movie palace of our dreams.