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Spooky James Dean
- Thread starter KeyserXSoze
- Start date
MrRING
Android Futureman
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Didja know the James Dean - Vampira connection?
In the evenings, Dean could usually be found at the Hamburger Hamlet, located at 8931 Sunset Boulevard, or at its next-door neighbor, Googie's, a low-price restaurant that was frequented by young actors. Like Dean, Googie's had a personality all its own. With its zigzaggy roof and bright decor, it epitomized a style known as Coffeeshop Modern---one of the all-night oases that dotted the Southern California landscape in the 1950s. Dressed in blue jeans and a leather jacket, Dean slumped in a booth in the rear, surrounded by a faithful group of friends. "He was like the maypole, and they were all tied to him," Sidney Skolsky claimed. Since even a few beers made him woozy, Dean drank cup after cup of coffee and chain-smoked (Chesterfields) through the night.
"Regardless of how much money he was making, he'd only pay for his own coffee," a crony recalled. "No tax, no tip, and no treating. He was a miser and he hung onto [his] money."
Among the regulars in the group, known as the Night Watch, was an attractive brunette actress named Mila Nurmi. A former exotic dancer and bit player, the lady had a flair for self_promotion that rivaled, and sometimes surpassed, Dean's own. Under the name Vampira she had become well known playing Charles Addams-like characters on a local television show.
One writer called her "the ghoul who gave people right in their own homes their daily creeps." Dean explained their friend_ship by saying, "I have a fairly adequate knowledge of satanic forces and I was interested to find out if this girl was obsessed with such a force." Vampira put their mutual interests more simply: "We have the same neuroses," she explained.
They had a weird, even macabre, relationship. At their first meeting, Dean took her to his apartment and gave her a Ray Bradbury story to read about a boy who had hanged himself in a garage. When he visited her house, he would climb in through the window. Once he cut up a studio publicity shot of himself, made a montage out of its eyes and ears, and pinned it on her wall as a calling card. (In 1959, Miss Nurmi finally went on to star in a movie, Plan 9 From Outer Space. The film garnered a cult following of its own---sometimes respectfully referred to as "the worst movie ever made.")
FULL STORY
In the evenings, Dean could usually be found at the Hamburger Hamlet, located at 8931 Sunset Boulevard, or at its next-door neighbor, Googie's, a low-price restaurant that was frequented by young actors. Like Dean, Googie's had a personality all its own. With its zigzaggy roof and bright decor, it epitomized a style known as Coffeeshop Modern---one of the all-night oases that dotted the Southern California landscape in the 1950s. Dressed in blue jeans and a leather jacket, Dean slumped in a booth in the rear, surrounded by a faithful group of friends. "He was like the maypole, and they were all tied to him," Sidney Skolsky claimed. Since even a few beers made him woozy, Dean drank cup after cup of coffee and chain-smoked (Chesterfields) through the night.
"Regardless of how much money he was making, he'd only pay for his own coffee," a crony recalled. "No tax, no tip, and no treating. He was a miser and he hung onto [his] money."
Among the regulars in the group, known as the Night Watch, was an attractive brunette actress named Mila Nurmi. A former exotic dancer and bit player, the lady had a flair for self_promotion that rivaled, and sometimes surpassed, Dean's own. Under the name Vampira she had become well known playing Charles Addams-like characters on a local television show.
One writer called her "the ghoul who gave people right in their own homes their daily creeps." Dean explained their friend_ship by saying, "I have a fairly adequate knowledge of satanic forces and I was interested to find out if this girl was obsessed with such a force." Vampira put their mutual interests more simply: "We have the same neuroses," she explained.
They had a weird, even macabre, relationship. At their first meeting, Dean took her to his apartment and gave her a Ray Bradbury story to read about a boy who had hanged himself in a garage. When he visited her house, he would climb in through the window. Once he cut up a studio publicity shot of himself, made a montage out of its eyes and ears, and pinned it on her wall as a calling card. (In 1959, Miss Nurmi finally went on to star in a movie, Plan 9 From Outer Space. The film garnered a cult following of its own---sometimes respectfully referred to as "the worst movie ever made.")
FULL STORY
Last edited by a moderator:
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Apparently his chest was covered in cigarette burns because of his masochistic tendencies. At one club he was known as the human ash tray.
Did I read that in FT or was it in a documentary?
Did I read that in FT or was it in a documentary?
ignatiusII
Ephemeral Spectre
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I think that may have been in Hollywood Babylon...seeing this thread reminded me of sifting through a huge pile of old 'movie-star' magazines from the 40's to the late 60's when I was a kid. They'd belonged to a friend of the family and a bunch of us kids were commissioned to clean the old girl's garage. Anyway - on the back of one of the old, moldy rags was an advertisement for a life-size replica of James Dean's head with 'realistic skin-like plastic covering' and 'dreamy' blue eyes. The ad promised that the purchase of one of these heads would be akin to having Jimmy Dean stay with you forever. Aside from the issues of bad taste and rampant consumerism ( yes! now you too can possess a piece of your favorite celebrity...for a price! ) can you imagine keeping such a creepy friggin' thing in your house, much less your bedroom, waking up in the night to discover it staring at you with it's dead plastic eyes?
A
Anonymous
Guest
Certainly a lot weirder than some old mystic claiming that Jimmy Dean has been living with her. What were the company thinking of? Jeez!:eek!!!!:
Bigphoot2
Not sprouts! I hate sprouts.
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GNC
King-Sized Canary
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And it's not as if anyone was creeped out by CGI Peter Cushing or CGI Carrie Fisher, was it?
Apparently it's a Vietnam War drama - why not go the full Roger Rabbit and put Bugs Bunny in there as well?
Plus they need an impersonator to do the Dean voice - I suggest Tommy Wiseau.
Apparently it's a Vietnam War drama - why not go the full Roger Rabbit and put Bugs Bunny in there as well?
Plus they need an impersonator to do the Dean voice - I suggest Tommy Wiseau.
ramonmercado
CyberPunk
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Was the spooky stuff all part of a publicity campaign?
by Jason Colavito
Given my particular interest in conspiracy theories and the supernatural, I naturally have been fascinated by the various conspiracy theories that swirled around James Dean, who is the subject of the book I have been writing. One of these conspiracies alleged that Warner Bros. intentionally fabricated an urban legend that Dean had not died in the Sept. 1955 crash that killed him but instead lived on disfigured in some secret sanitarium. For nearly seven decades, writers have shrugged and passed it off as another tabloid craze. The claim of Dean’s continued life is, of course, false, and likely originated as a spontaneously generated bit teenager mythology, but it turns out there is a compelling story about how and why the media got hold of these rumors.
Interestingly, almost every book and article presents information about the media coverage of Dean’s “afterlife” out of chronological order, making it hard to see the development and patterns. That’s probably because the patterns undercut the story authors like to tell. Robert Tysl discovered as much in the 1960s when, as a doctoral student, he encountered great resistance from Warner Bros., Hollywood, the media at large, and Dean’s friends and colleagues while trying to assemble a comprehensive list (we’d call it a database today) of media coverage of Dean to track how Warner Bros. shaped his “heroic” image. Tysl’s efforts, published in his 1965 700-page (!) dissertation, help us to see what really happened. ...
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/resurrecting-james-dean
Resurrecting James Dean
An analysis of 1956 press coverage finds the fingerprints of a publicity campaign behind the promotion of paranormal and conspiracy claims.
by Jason Colavito
Given my particular interest in conspiracy theories and the supernatural, I naturally have been fascinated by the various conspiracy theories that swirled around James Dean, who is the subject of the book I have been writing. One of these conspiracies alleged that Warner Bros. intentionally fabricated an urban legend that Dean had not died in the Sept. 1955 crash that killed him but instead lived on disfigured in some secret sanitarium. For nearly seven decades, writers have shrugged and passed it off as another tabloid craze. The claim of Dean’s continued life is, of course, false, and likely originated as a spontaneously generated bit teenager mythology, but it turns out there is a compelling story about how and why the media got hold of these rumors.
Interestingly, almost every book and article presents information about the media coverage of Dean’s “afterlife” out of chronological order, making it hard to see the development and patterns. That’s probably because the patterns undercut the story authors like to tell. Robert Tysl discovered as much in the 1960s when, as a doctoral student, he encountered great resistance from Warner Bros., Hollywood, the media at large, and Dean’s friends and colleagues while trying to assemble a comprehensive list (we’d call it a database today) of media coverage of Dean to track how Warner Bros. shaped his “heroic” image. Tysl’s efforts, published in his 1965 700-page (!) dissertation, help us to see what really happened. ...
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/resurrecting-james-dean
ramonmercado
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A bizarre stage show raising Dean from the dead.
by Jason Colavito
In one of the biographies/memoirs about James Dean, there was a passing reference to a stage show that purported to call up James Dean’s ghost. I found a 1957 advertisement for this show, and it is so much weirder and more Gothically bizarre than the brief reference deigned to indicate. Take a look at this:
Now that is an absolutely bonkers show full of dancing skeletons, horror-movie reenactments, and the standard spiritualist nonsense that so-called mediums continue to deploy today. But that advertisement! It’s like William Castle and TMZ had some unholy love child. The late 1950s saw dozens of so-called “Spook Shows” with names like “Dr. Macabre’s Frightmare of Movie Monsters,” “Dr. Evil,” “Dr. Satan,” and so on, but this is the only one that hailed James Dean as a paranormal entity on par with vampires, zombies, and space aliens, or advertised Dean alongside cannibalism, mutilation, and gore.
There is rather little published information about the show, which ran for several years and toured the United States several times, beginning (in its James Dean form) around 1957 and running until 1960. According to Billboard magazine’s coverage over the years, the “International Mystery Show and Magical Revue” began in Europe, toured America from 1947 to 1949, and returned permanently to the United States in 1955, where its Polish producer, Kara Kum (or Kara-Kum, real name Wladyslaw Michalvk, or Michalvuk—journalists gave different spellings) played movie theaters and auditoriums, mostly in the south, with a mixture of standard spiritualist stage magic (“supernatural illusions,” he called them) and horror movie evocations, usually matched with a second-run creature-feature movie. The show went by various names, most famously the “Crawling Thing of Planet 13” and “Cannibals of Curitiba.”
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/the-magician-who-raised-james-dean
The Magician Who Raised James Dean from the Dead
Kara Kum was one of the most exploitative magicians of the 1950s, relying in sex, celebrities, and scares to sell his minor-league spook show.
by Jason Colavito
In one of the biographies/memoirs about James Dean, there was a passing reference to a stage show that purported to call up James Dean’s ghost. I found a 1957 advertisement for this show, and it is so much weirder and more Gothically bizarre than the brief reference deigned to indicate. Take a look at this:
Now that is an absolutely bonkers show full of dancing skeletons, horror-movie reenactments, and the standard spiritualist nonsense that so-called mediums continue to deploy today. But that advertisement! It’s like William Castle and TMZ had some unholy love child. The late 1950s saw dozens of so-called “Spook Shows” with names like “Dr. Macabre’s Frightmare of Movie Monsters,” “Dr. Evil,” “Dr. Satan,” and so on, but this is the only one that hailed James Dean as a paranormal entity on par with vampires, zombies, and space aliens, or advertised Dean alongside cannibalism, mutilation, and gore.
There is rather little published information about the show, which ran for several years and toured the United States several times, beginning (in its James Dean form) around 1957 and running until 1960. According to Billboard magazine’s coverage over the years, the “International Mystery Show and Magical Revue” began in Europe, toured America from 1947 to 1949, and returned permanently to the United States in 1955, where its Polish producer, Kara Kum (or Kara-Kum, real name Wladyslaw Michalvk, or Michalvuk—journalists gave different spellings) played movie theaters and auditoriums, mostly in the south, with a mixture of standard spiritualist stage magic (“supernatural illusions,” he called them) and horror movie evocations, usually matched with a second-run creature-feature movie. The show went by various names, most famously the “Crawling Thing of Planet 13” and “Cannibals of Curitiba.”
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/the-magician-who-raised-james-dean
ramonmercado
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Review by Jason Colavito.
Adoration and Pilgrimage: James Dean and Fairmount
The current issue of Mojo, a music magazine, features an illustration of James Dean driving toward the reader in the Porsche Spyder in which he died. The singer Weyes Blood sits beside him as he speeds away from a flying saucer, its tractor beam chasing them toward Dean’s inevitable death. The striking image illustrates a line from Blood’s new song “Grapevine,” but the unusual portrait also suggests a longing to follow Dean into death, as though his demise were an act of transcendence, an event of cosmic importance. It’s not the kind of image you find associated with most celebrities. You don’t see much fan art of political junkies depicting themselves riding through Dealey Plaza alongside JFK, nor are there many beatific images of Marilyn Monroe as a psychopomp guiding fans to heaven.
James Dean and Weyes Blood in a 2022 Mojo magazine illustration.
And yet, as anthropologist James F. Hopgood explores in his new book Adoration and Pilgrimage: James Dean and Fairmount, such imagery is common among James Dean fans. In what he describes as the first ethnographic study of its kind to be performed within the framework of anthropology rather than media studies, Hopgood seeks to understand why Dean fans seem uniquely dedicated to their idol and whether their devotion to a long-dead movie star constitutes a religious cult. He has spent more than three decades looking for the answer, and the resulting book is something of a shrug, an incomplete, sometimes insightful and often frustrating exploration of the line between fandom and religious worship.
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/the-god-that-wasnt
Adoration and Pilgrimage: James Dean and Fairmount
James F. Hopgood | Luminare Press | 2022 | 282 pages | 979-8886790108 | $18.95
The current issue of Mojo, a music magazine, features an illustration of James Dean driving toward the reader in the Porsche Spyder in which he died. The singer Weyes Blood sits beside him as he speeds away from a flying saucer, its tractor beam chasing them toward Dean’s inevitable death. The striking image illustrates a line from Blood’s new song “Grapevine,” but the unusual portrait also suggests a longing to follow Dean into death, as though his demise were an act of transcendence, an event of cosmic importance. It’s not the kind of image you find associated with most celebrities. You don’t see much fan art of political junkies depicting themselves riding through Dealey Plaza alongside JFK, nor are there many beatific images of Marilyn Monroe as a psychopomp guiding fans to heaven.
James Dean and Weyes Blood in a 2022 Mojo magazine illustration.
And yet, as anthropologist James F. Hopgood explores in his new book Adoration and Pilgrimage: James Dean and Fairmount, such imagery is common among James Dean fans. In what he describes as the first ethnographic study of its kind to be performed within the framework of anthropology rather than media studies, Hopgood seeks to understand why Dean fans seem uniquely dedicated to their idol and whether their devotion to a long-dead movie star constitutes a religious cult. He has spent more than three decades looking for the answer, and the resulting book is something of a shrug, an incomplete, sometimes insightful and often frustrating exploration of the line between fandom and religious worship.
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/the-god-that-wasnt
Lord Lucan
Justified & Ancient
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Dead Famous - James Dean.
Psychic Chris Fleming & Gail Porter (skeptic) go in search of his spirit and visit the places he frequented.
Psychic Chris Fleming & Gail Porter (skeptic) go in search of his spirit and visit the places he frequented.
ramonmercado
CyberPunk
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James Dean, the ongoing saga about his life and loves.
Last week, a Hollywood trade publication passed along an announcement from a Los Angeles literary agency that an Emmy-nominated TV producer had begun scripting an adaptation of Surviving James Dean, a 2006 memoir by the late TV writer William Bast chronicling his stormy friendship and sort-of romance with Dean, along with Dean’s various same-sex relationships. That such a project is still something of a shock fascinates me because it wouldn’t have been as much of one forty years ago as it is today. I am always interested in how narratives take hold and take shape, so I can’t help but be interested in the process of how what was, for a time, a well-known story has become a secret again, or, more bluntly, how big money stuffed James Dean back into the closet.
Rumors about Dean’s sexuality already circulated in his own lifetime, and scattered hints appeared in tabloid magazines, novels, and biographies in the years after his 1955 death. However, due to the tenor of the age and the Warner Bros. publicity department, it wasn’t the kind of thing discussed in polite circles. By the 1970s, however, writers had become remarkably frank about discussing it. Gay publications simply stated it outright. “James Dean was a homosexual,” Gay News wrote in 1975. Mainstream media were not far behind. Ronald Martinetti’s 1975 Dean biography featured a lengthy interview with Dean’s first (known) male lover and asked on the cover, “Was he a closet homosexual?” Venable Herndon’s 1974 biography, with cooperation from Warner Bros. and Dean’s onetime friends, depicted him as an S&M male prostitute trolling gay leather bars. John Gilmore’s 1975 biography The Real James Dean claimed on its cover to present Dean “as he actually was—a lover of men as well as women.” William Bast’s 1976 James Dean NBC-TV movie included a remarkably frank scene in which Dean talks about sexually experimenting with men and encourages Bast to go to a gay bar.
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/dont-ask-dont-tell
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
The strange story of how a bad book pushed James Dean back into the posthumous closet.
Jason ColavitoLast week, a Hollywood trade publication passed along an announcement from a Los Angeles literary agency that an Emmy-nominated TV producer had begun scripting an adaptation of Surviving James Dean, a 2006 memoir by the late TV writer William Bast chronicling his stormy friendship and sort-of romance with Dean, along with Dean’s various same-sex relationships. That such a project is still something of a shock fascinates me because it wouldn’t have been as much of one forty years ago as it is today. I am always interested in how narratives take hold and take shape, so I can’t help but be interested in the process of how what was, for a time, a well-known story has become a secret again, or, more bluntly, how big money stuffed James Dean back into the closet.
Rumors about Dean’s sexuality already circulated in his own lifetime, and scattered hints appeared in tabloid magazines, novels, and biographies in the years after his 1955 death. However, due to the tenor of the age and the Warner Bros. publicity department, it wasn’t the kind of thing discussed in polite circles. By the 1970s, however, writers had become remarkably frank about discussing it. Gay publications simply stated it outright. “James Dean was a homosexual,” Gay News wrote in 1975. Mainstream media were not far behind. Ronald Martinetti’s 1975 Dean biography featured a lengthy interview with Dean’s first (known) male lover and asked on the cover, “Was he a closet homosexual?” Venable Herndon’s 1974 biography, with cooperation from Warner Bros. and Dean’s onetime friends, depicted him as an S&M male prostitute trolling gay leather bars. John Gilmore’s 1975 biography The Real James Dean claimed on its cover to present Dean “as he actually was—a lover of men as well as women.” William Bast’s 1976 James Dean NBC-TV movie included a remarkably frank scene in which Dean talks about sexually experimenting with men and encourages Bast to go to a gay bar.
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/dont-ask-dont-tell
ramonmercado
CyberPunk
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Airbrushing Sal Mineo out of Rebel without a Cause
In a few weeks’ time, Warner Bros. will release a new 4K Ultra-HD Blu-Ray edition of Rebel without a Cause to celebrate the studio’s 100th anniversary.
The deluxe new packaging features two of the movie’s stars, James Dean and Natalie Wood, on the slipcover, the special edition metal tin, and the exterior and interior of the box holding the discs. One thing missing from the packaging is co-star Sal Mineo, who was nominated for an Oscar for his role as Plato, alongside Wood. The omission is at one level understandable—Warner Bros. wants to foreground the most famous names, and they are simply tweaking the earlier DVD packaging—but it is also a continuation of a decades-long effort to minimize the queer character in order to recast Rebel without a Cause as a traditional teen romance.
The studio’s discomfort with the film’s themes has always been quite plain, from the falsified plot summaries the publicity department provided to film critics, to the studio’s own notes demanding changes to excise any hint of homosexuality. What they meant, however, was an elimination of any sympathetic hint. An earlier version of the film’s script had a much darker take on the same theme and, apparently, didn’t cause nearly as much concern—and was even turned into a novel, which publisher Henry Holt promoted as the real story of Rebel without a Cause.
The short version is that Rebel without a Cause when through many abortive attempts to make a movie to match the title of Robert Lindner’s psychological study of a psychopathic adolescent, whose rights Warner Bros. had bought in the 1940s, before Nicolas Ray inherited the cursed movie title in 1954 for his own juvenile delinquency film. Even Dr. Seuss took a turn at writing a script, and failed. ...
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/shedding-light-on-children-of-the
In a few weeks’ time, Warner Bros. will release a new 4K Ultra-HD Blu-Ray edition of Rebel without a Cause to celebrate the studio’s 100th anniversary.
The deluxe new packaging features two of the movie’s stars, James Dean and Natalie Wood, on the slipcover, the special edition metal tin, and the exterior and interior of the box holding the discs. One thing missing from the packaging is co-star Sal Mineo, who was nominated for an Oscar for his role as Plato, alongside Wood. The omission is at one level understandable—Warner Bros. wants to foreground the most famous names, and they are simply tweaking the earlier DVD packaging—but it is also a continuation of a decades-long effort to minimize the queer character in order to recast Rebel without a Cause as a traditional teen romance.
The studio’s discomfort with the film’s themes has always been quite plain, from the falsified plot summaries the publicity department provided to film critics, to the studio’s own notes demanding changes to excise any hint of homosexuality. What they meant, however, was an elimination of any sympathetic hint. An earlier version of the film’s script had a much darker take on the same theme and, apparently, didn’t cause nearly as much concern—and was even turned into a novel, which publisher Henry Holt promoted as the real story of Rebel without a Cause.
The short version is that Rebel without a Cause when through many abortive attempts to make a movie to match the title of Robert Lindner’s psychological study of a psychopathic adolescent, whose rights Warner Bros. had bought in the 1940s, before Nicolas Ray inherited the cursed movie title in 1954 for his own juvenile delinquency film. Even Dr. Seuss took a turn at writing a script, and failed. ...
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/shedding-light-on-children-of-the
Ronnie Jersey
Justified & Ancient
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- 3,043
Strange that the top three actors in 'Rebel Without A Cause' died terribly -
James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo.
James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo.
ramonmercado
CyberPunk
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- Eblana
Colavito casts a caustic eye over another Dean Bio.
“It shocks in a staggering fashion”—or so said the publisher of Rebel, poet Royston Ellis’s 1962 biography of James Dean, and the first to report his homosexual encounters.
I was deeply disappointed to discover that Ellis died last month, four weeks before I finally got a copy of Rebel. It’s a shame because after reading the deeply strange book, the last important book about Dean I had not yet read, I have questions I wish I could have asked him. Notably, I really want to know how he managed to produce a full, and mostly accurate, account of James Dean’s same-sex relations a full decade before anyone else, all without apparently doing any original research.
Ellis’s book is extremely rare and difficult to obtain. Although it is listed in the bibliographies of several James Dean biographies, none betrays any knowledge of its contents beyond a single phrase, calling Dean a “bisexual psychopath.” Only one book, a decades-old academic study of gay audiences and their parasocial relationships with celebrities, mentions anything of the book’s contents, and even then knows it only secondhand.
So, even though I can’t answer all of the questions I have about Ellis’s account, it seems worth writing something about it for the historical record, if only to save future researchers effort.
Royston Ellis was 21 years old at the time that he wrote Rebel, having come to prominence as a teenaged Beat poet. He was a friend of the Beatles, and in time would inspire their song “Paperback Writer.” In 1962, however, he coming off the success of a book he published the previous year on pop music and took for his next subject the icon who had inspired both the Beats and the Beatles.
Royston Ellis (center) with the Beatles.
Rebel is not a good book. Instead of writing a traditional chronological biography, Ellis instead produced a thematic biography, with four ill-defined chapters organized into irregular sections by character trait. It’s unusual, but also confusing, obscuring the chronology of Dean’s life in order to blend the whole of it into an undifferentiated mass. Ellis is also a hypocrite. Ellis’s opening passage (prefaced by his own poetry) delivers a lengthy diatribe about the contradictory “facts” about James Dean reported in the fan magazines and gossip rags, and claiming that the “Hollywood-manufactured swaddling clothes can be torn from filmdom’s illegitimate son” to uncover the real man beneath Warner Brothers’ publicity campaign.
That sounds nice, but Ellis’s books is, with the exception of two sections of one chapter, entirely composed of summaries of the very fan magazine and gossip rag stories about James Dean he claims to despise, repeated uncritically, with no effort at resolving contradictions that Ellis’s fractured chronology renders invisible. Indeed, when he attempts to be critical, he is wrong. He asserts that Dean was not moody as magazines claimed, but was quite happy. Dean’s private letters are filled with laments about loneliness, depression, and wanting to die. Ellis cites no sources other that William Bast’s 1956 biography of Dean, but the quotations he uses are identifiable, and his close paraphrasing of the articles he uses rendered his sources immediately recognizable to me, since I have read them all, too.
And so, stipulating that nothing original can be found in all but one chapter of Ellis’s book and his only contribution to his sequential summaries is to glue them together with some insufferable existentialist / Beat analysis, section VI of chapter 3, “Girls,” and VII, “Sex,” are all the more surprising.
“Girls,” is a largely standard account of Dean’s reported relationships with various starlets. The stories are copied from fan magazines, with Ellis expressing no concern about how much of this material was simply P.R. He does conclude—remarkably, since this was not otherwise reported in print prior to the middle 1970s—that James Dean had no interest in sex with women, primarily engaging in sex with women as a way of securing their companionship. “Frankly, he just wasn’t interested,” Ellis wrote. ...
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/it-shocks-in-a-staggering-fashion
“It shocks in a staggering fashion”—or so said the publisher of Rebel, poet Royston Ellis’s 1962 biography of James Dean, and the first to report his homosexual encounters.
I was deeply disappointed to discover that Ellis died last month, four weeks before I finally got a copy of Rebel. It’s a shame because after reading the deeply strange book, the last important book about Dean I had not yet read, I have questions I wish I could have asked him. Notably, I really want to know how he managed to produce a full, and mostly accurate, account of James Dean’s same-sex relations a full decade before anyone else, all without apparently doing any original research.
Ellis’s book is extremely rare and difficult to obtain. Although it is listed in the bibliographies of several James Dean biographies, none betrays any knowledge of its contents beyond a single phrase, calling Dean a “bisexual psychopath.” Only one book, a decades-old academic study of gay audiences and their parasocial relationships with celebrities, mentions anything of the book’s contents, and even then knows it only secondhand.
So, even though I can’t answer all of the questions I have about Ellis’s account, it seems worth writing something about it for the historical record, if only to save future researchers effort.
Royston Ellis was 21 years old at the time that he wrote Rebel, having come to prominence as a teenaged Beat poet. He was a friend of the Beatles, and in time would inspire their song “Paperback Writer.” In 1962, however, he coming off the success of a book he published the previous year on pop music and took for his next subject the icon who had inspired both the Beats and the Beatles.
Royston Ellis (center) with the Beatles.
Rebel is not a good book. Instead of writing a traditional chronological biography, Ellis instead produced a thematic biography, with four ill-defined chapters organized into irregular sections by character trait. It’s unusual, but also confusing, obscuring the chronology of Dean’s life in order to blend the whole of it into an undifferentiated mass. Ellis is also a hypocrite. Ellis’s opening passage (prefaced by his own poetry) delivers a lengthy diatribe about the contradictory “facts” about James Dean reported in the fan magazines and gossip rags, and claiming that the “Hollywood-manufactured swaddling clothes can be torn from filmdom’s illegitimate son” to uncover the real man beneath Warner Brothers’ publicity campaign.
That sounds nice, but Ellis’s books is, with the exception of two sections of one chapter, entirely composed of summaries of the very fan magazine and gossip rag stories about James Dean he claims to despise, repeated uncritically, with no effort at resolving contradictions that Ellis’s fractured chronology renders invisible. Indeed, when he attempts to be critical, he is wrong. He asserts that Dean was not moody as magazines claimed, but was quite happy. Dean’s private letters are filled with laments about loneliness, depression, and wanting to die. Ellis cites no sources other that William Bast’s 1956 biography of Dean, but the quotations he uses are identifiable, and his close paraphrasing of the articles he uses rendered his sources immediately recognizable to me, since I have read them all, too.
And so, stipulating that nothing original can be found in all but one chapter of Ellis’s book and his only contribution to his sequential summaries is to glue them together with some insufferable existentialist / Beat analysis, section VI of chapter 3, “Girls,” and VII, “Sex,” are all the more surprising.
“Girls,” is a largely standard account of Dean’s reported relationships with various starlets. The stories are copied from fan magazines, with Ellis expressing no concern about how much of this material was simply P.R. He does conclude—remarkably, since this was not otherwise reported in print prior to the middle 1970s—that James Dean had no interest in sex with women, primarily engaging in sex with women as a way of securing their companionship. “Frankly, he just wasn’t interested,” Ellis wrote. ...
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/it-shocks-in-a-staggering-fashion
Frideswide
Fortea Morgana :) PeteByrdie certificated Princess
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EXCELLENT post @ramonmercado Thank you 
Peripart
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To be fair, at least those characters were extensions of how they appeared in A New Hope, and so you could argue that it was justifiable artistically to have the likenesses of Cushing and Fisher in Rogue One. Recreating James Dean for an entirely new project, on the other hand, seems tacky and more than a bit morbid.
Also, in the examples you cite, Carrie Fisher was very much alive when Rogue One was filmed (though she died only a fortnight after its release), so while the CGI was a bit uncanny valley, it wasn't cinematic grave-robbing.
Floyd
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Not heard that one before? It was Paul's Auntie who gave him the idea for the song.
ramonmercado
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I'd heard it was about John Lennon after he wrote the book In His Own Write.
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This is similar to the version I heard
Why do you write songs about love all the time? Write a song about what Ringo is doing now. Ringo was thankfully reading a paperback book at the time.
Mythopoeika
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That should have been 'Paperback Reader', but I guess that doesn't carry the same 'frisson' as 'Paperback Writer'.
ramonmercado
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More on the Royston Ellis James dean biography and his sources.
Recently, I wrote about some of the surprising claims that appeared in Royston Ellis’s 1962 biography of James Dean, Rebel, particularly those about Dean’s sexual relationships with men.
His account, while imperfect, was mostly accurate and a more than a decade ahead of other authors. This week, I received copies of Ellis’s working notes for Rebel from the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin, and the papers shed light into how Ellis knew things he shouldn’t have known.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch...efa3-dec9-4eb4-ad28-acdee1e475bd_729x1195.png
It was a little confusing tracing Ellis’s sources. First, his handwriting is terrible. Second, he worked in an odd way. He took notes about sources he read as he read them and then used scissors to cut the pages into strips, which he then pasted in the order he intended to use them in his book. As a result, since he did not plan to use citations, only some things carry their original labels, while most notes are unlabeled. Nevertheless, he coded some of the notes and included a key listing his (paltry) sources, which made it discovering what came from where manageable.
We’ll get to that in just a moment. First, the really weird stuff:
The working papers cleared up some other confusing claims that appear in Rebel. In the book, Ellis relates several stories about Dean freaking out after having sex with much older mother-substitutes. One of these stories involves a 14- or 15-year-old Dean being deflowered in the back of a car by an older woman who reveals that she has the same name as Dean’s dead mother, thus sending him into a tailspin. Another describes a 19- or 20-year-old Dean entering into sexual tutelage with a woman in her late 40s whom he calls “Mom.”
As I learned from Ellis’s notes, both stories came from a 1957 biography, I, James Dean, by T. T. Thomas. This book is almost never mentioned in any other source, save for an inaccurate description in The Unabridged James Dean and a misleading summary in Robert Tysl’s 1965 dissertation on Dean-themed media. The book is a lot weirder than any other author makes out.
I, James Dean is not what it seems. According to the U.S. Copyright Office’s registrations for 1957, the quicky biography put out by the Popular Library was actually the work of screenwriter and novelist Jay Dratler, best known for his Oscar-nominated screenplay for Laura (1944). At this point in his life, however, he was primarily a writer of erotic potboilers about such scintillating subjects as a doctor seducing his female patient or a trophy wife teaming up with a handsome young lawyer to off her husband. Dratler seemed to have a fascination with Freudian psychology and very few scruples. ...
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/creating-a-bisexual-psychopath
Recently, I wrote about some of the surprising claims that appeared in Royston Ellis’s 1962 biography of James Dean, Rebel, particularly those about Dean’s sexual relationships with men.
His account, while imperfect, was mostly accurate and a more than a decade ahead of other authors. This week, I received copies of Ellis’s working notes for Rebel from the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin, and the papers shed light into how Ellis knew things he shouldn’t have known.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch...efa3-dec9-4eb4-ad28-acdee1e475bd_729x1195.png
It was a little confusing tracing Ellis’s sources. First, his handwriting is terrible. Second, he worked in an odd way. He took notes about sources he read as he read them and then used scissors to cut the pages into strips, which he then pasted in the order he intended to use them in his book. As a result, since he did not plan to use citations, only some things carry their original labels, while most notes are unlabeled. Nevertheless, he coded some of the notes and included a key listing his (paltry) sources, which made it discovering what came from where manageable.
We’ll get to that in just a moment. First, the really weird stuff:
The working papers cleared up some other confusing claims that appear in Rebel. In the book, Ellis relates several stories about Dean freaking out after having sex with much older mother-substitutes. One of these stories involves a 14- or 15-year-old Dean being deflowered in the back of a car by an older woman who reveals that she has the same name as Dean’s dead mother, thus sending him into a tailspin. Another describes a 19- or 20-year-old Dean entering into sexual tutelage with a woman in her late 40s whom he calls “Mom.”
As I learned from Ellis’s notes, both stories came from a 1957 biography, I, James Dean, by T. T. Thomas. This book is almost never mentioned in any other source, save for an inaccurate description in The Unabridged James Dean and a misleading summary in Robert Tysl’s 1965 dissertation on Dean-themed media. The book is a lot weirder than any other author makes out.
I, James Dean is not what it seems. According to the U.S. Copyright Office’s registrations for 1957, the quicky biography put out by the Popular Library was actually the work of screenwriter and novelist Jay Dratler, best known for his Oscar-nominated screenplay for Laura (1944). At this point in his life, however, he was primarily a writer of erotic potboilers about such scintillating subjects as a doctor seducing his female patient or a trophy wife teaming up with a handsome young lawyer to off her husband. Dratler seemed to have a fascination with Freudian psychology and very few scruples. ...
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/creating-a-bisexual-psychopath
ramonmercado
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The never ending saga.
I recently came across yet another article asking if James Dean had been Marlon Brando’s “sex slave.”
This particular piece appeared in a French publication, but its origin was the same as every other, the fabricated 2016 biography James Dean: Tomorrow Never Comes by serial fabulists Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince. The massive tome—it stretches over 700 pages—is chock-a-block with unprovable claims dubiously sourced to unrecorded secret interviews with the dead. Indeed, the book opens with a note stating that the authors followed Truman Capote’s example in making up dialogue, citing the New York Times for proof that using “conversational storytelling” for “engaging reading” is “an acceptable literary device.” (That’s a lie, too: The story Prince quotes from doesn’t claim to justify unacknowledged fabrication.) Nevertheless, since this particular claim refuses to die, it’s probably worth explaining exactly how the two authors fabricated the claim from unrelated elements of the historical records. ...
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/no-james-dean-was-not-marlon-brandos
I recently came across yet another article asking if James Dean had been Marlon Brando’s “sex slave.”
This particular piece appeared in a French publication, but its origin was the same as every other, the fabricated 2016 biography James Dean: Tomorrow Never Comes by serial fabulists Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince. The massive tome—it stretches over 700 pages—is chock-a-block with unprovable claims dubiously sourced to unrecorded secret interviews with the dead. Indeed, the book opens with a note stating that the authors followed Truman Capote’s example in making up dialogue, citing the New York Times for proof that using “conversational storytelling” for “engaging reading” is “an acceptable literary device.” (That’s a lie, too: The story Prince quotes from doesn’t claim to justify unacknowledged fabrication.) Nevertheless, since this particular claim refuses to die, it’s probably worth explaining exactly how the two authors fabricated the claim from unrelated elements of the historical records. ...
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/no-james-dean-was-not-marlon-brandos
Last edited:
Swifty
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Stirling research Ramon. I hope you can get this published somewhere.
ramonmercado
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Thanks but the research is by Jason Colavito! I think he;d be a bit peeved if it was published under my name!
catseye
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Just a question - what does protect the reputation of deceased 'stars' from treatment like this? What's to stop me writing a book about...oh, I dunno, Diana Dors, to take a random and blameless example, and saying things like 'friends say she was a rampant horse thief and had a barn full of stolen equines in Berkshire that she would visit weekly.'
The 'friends' wouldn't exist, they would be purely fictitious, none of the claims would be provable (or true) and the deceased can't sue for defamation or libel. So what laws exist to prevent people from creating entire fictitious claims about anyone in order to sell salacious books?
The 'friends' wouldn't exist, they would be purely fictitious, none of the claims would be provable (or true) and the deceased can't sue for defamation or libel. So what laws exist to prevent people from creating entire fictitious claims about anyone in order to sell salacious books?
ramonmercado
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A Blithe Spirit.
by JASON COLAVITO MAY 6, 2023
I had meant to write a bit about this a while back, but I got bogged down with work and then a car accident and never quite got to it. While I was doing a literature review, I came across a truly bizarre anecdote that needed much more investigation. In Boze Hadley’s 1986 book Conversations with My Elders, I read the following supernatural (and supernally ridiculous) anecdote about James Dean’s Rebel without a Cause costar Sal Mineo:
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/did-james-deans-ghost-turn-sal-mineo
Did James Dean's Ghost Turn Sal Mineo Gay?
A strange anecdote about queer ghosts reveals how homophobia shaped fake folklore.
by JASON COLAVITO MAY 6, 2023
I had meant to write a bit about this a while back, but I got bogged down with work and then a car accident and never quite got to it. While I was doing a literature review, I came across a truly bizarre anecdote that needed much more investigation. In Boze Hadley’s 1986 book Conversations with My Elders, I read the following supernatural (and supernally ridiculous) anecdote about James Dean’s Rebel without a Cause costar Sal Mineo:
Now, that is certainly the kind of ghost story I hadn’t heard before. James Dean’s evil ghost could turn people gay. Uh-huh. ...
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/did-james-deans-ghost-turn-sal-mineo
Floyd
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Random fact; Mineo was sharing a flat with Don Johnson at the time he was murdered.
Lord Lucan
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James Dean speaks from the grave...
ramonmercado
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Never ending saga!
Nearly seven decades after James Dean died, I would have thought that everything that could be known about him was known.
All but a small handful of people who knew him in life are now dead, and those left alive have had nothing new to say in decades. The magazine and newspaper articles have been raked through many times, and the scraps of archival materials picked clean. Then, to my amazement, Nate D. Sanders Auctions announced the sale later this month of more than 500 pages of James Dean’s business, legal, and personal correspondence and papers from the estate of his New York talent agent, Jane Deacy, who died in 2008. These papers, never before seen, are, frankly, astounding in what they reveal.
The auction site photographed and published 400 lots of Deacy’s Dean papers, totaling somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 pages of letters, telegrams, contracts, photographs, and other ephemera, covering the period from January 1952, when she officially took Dean on as a client (after several weeks of informal advice as Dean agent-shopped), to the period after Dean’s death, when his father assigned to her all of Dean’s copyrights and life rights in exchange for 50% of future royalties.
The documents for sale are not a complete record. Many pieces of correspondence referenced in the files are missing from the collection, specifically letters in which Dean almost certainly said things his heirs found embarrassing or indiscreet. I have no indication whether these have been withheld or whether they were destroyed after his death along with the rest of his papers that his father and friends felt could compromise his reputation. The descriptions from Nate D. Sanders make clear that the auction house did not see the missing correspondence, so it was not present when the collection was cataloged. ...
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/long-secret-james-dean-files-offer
Nearly seven decades after James Dean died, I would have thought that everything that could be known about him was known.
All but a small handful of people who knew him in life are now dead, and those left alive have had nothing new to say in decades. The magazine and newspaper articles have been raked through many times, and the scraps of archival materials picked clean. Then, to my amazement, Nate D. Sanders Auctions announced the sale later this month of more than 500 pages of James Dean’s business, legal, and personal correspondence and papers from the estate of his New York talent agent, Jane Deacy, who died in 2008. These papers, never before seen, are, frankly, astounding in what they reveal.
The auction site photographed and published 400 lots of Deacy’s Dean papers, totaling somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 pages of letters, telegrams, contracts, photographs, and other ephemera, covering the period from January 1952, when she officially took Dean on as a client (after several weeks of informal advice as Dean agent-shopped), to the period after Dean’s death, when his father assigned to her all of Dean’s copyrights and life rights in exchange for 50% of future royalties.
The documents for sale are not a complete record. Many pieces of correspondence referenced in the files are missing from the collection, specifically letters in which Dean almost certainly said things his heirs found embarrassing or indiscreet. I have no indication whether these have been withheld or whether they were destroyed after his death along with the rest of his papers that his father and friends felt could compromise his reputation. The descriptions from Nate D. Sanders make clear that the auction house did not see the missing correspondence, so it was not present when the collection was cataloged. ...
https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/long-secret-james-dean-files-offer