Spooky James Dean

I know there are many rumors about James Dean being gay, but this book by actress Liz Sheridan claims she and Dean lived together in New York City before he hit it big:

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Liz Sheridan was the actress who played Jerry Seinfeld's mother on his hit show 'Seinfeld'.

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ramonmercado said:
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.
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We've had a discussion on'ere about papers being destroyed after the deaths of prominent people.
Queen Victoria's diaries, including accounts of her many pregnancies, were destroyed according to her wishes.

As @asparagus mentioned a while back, Franz Kafka's papers were due to be destroyed after his death but his heir Max Brod kept it all. The world is a better place thanks to Max.
 
Ronnie Jersey said:
I know there are many rumors about James Dean being gay, but this book by actress Liz Sheridan claims she and Dean lived together in New York City before he hit it big:

View attachment 66106

Liz Sheridan was the actress who played Jerry Seinfeld's mother on his hit show 'Seinfeld'.

View attachment 66108
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Liz-Sheridan-James-Dean.png


Liz Sheridan & James Dean (apparently).

maximus otter
 
maximus otter said:
That'll teach me to trust Interclown captions...

maximus otter
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I was searching for a photo of Sheridan and Dean together, and that photo kept coming up, that and Dean with Pier Angeli -
Couldn't find one with Sheridan.
But their relationship was in the time before he became famous, so I'm assuming that's why no photos of them together -
I want to read her book though, she probably has photos of them in the book.
She did pass away in 2022.
 
An interesting auction.

The largest ever auction of James Dean’s legal, business, and personal documents from the estate of his agent, Jane Deacy, closed last night (May 25) with mixed results.

A few high-profile items sold for high prices, notably Dean’s East of Eden contract, which went for $23,000, his handwritten letters, which sold for $11,000 each, and an autographed photo, which brought $15,000 (prices include the 25% buyer’s premium). Many of the lots, however, sold close to the minimum bid, and a large number, including many items autographed by Dean, did not sell at all. (They are currently for sale in a post-auction clearance at the minimum bid price.) ...


https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/james-dean-auction-scatters-historic
 
Just finished this book, it was a lovely romance, Liz Sheridan met Jimmy Dean when he was 21 years old and new in New York City, she was 23 and a professional dancer and he was going on acting auditions.
She describes Dean as extremely shy and awkward and sweet, just a nerdy kid who got lucky getting the attention of casting directors and got a part in a play, and then his career took off, which ended their romance.
But there are no photos of the two of them together in her book, surprisingly. She did give names of those who were aware of their romance though.
I think Dean was just so different from anyone else that he stood out, and he had talent.

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Ronnie Jersey said:
I know there are many rumors about James Dean being gay, but this book by actress Liz Sheridan claims she and Dean lived together in New York City before he hit it big:

View attachment 66106

Liz Sheridan was the actress who played Jerry Seinfeld's mother on his hit show 'Seinfeld'.

View attachment 66108
Click to expand...
He could have been bisexual. A lot of people assume that there's only gay and straight, whilst plenty of people swing around somewhere in the middle. Even Freddie Mercury had a girlfriend before he got famous.
 
More horseplay.

Last week, I came across a newly released YouTube video of horse trainer Monty Roberts claiming that he had been like “brothers” with James Dean during the four months they shared a house in the spring of 1954.

Roberts made the claims during a 2015 interview, which had not been made public until last week, and I had only a vague recollection of the name from reading Joe Hyams’s biography of Dean several years ago. I tried to look up more about this unusual claim, which seems at odds with everything I know about the period in question, and that’s when I stumbled down an unpleasant rabbit hole that fell somewhere between a conspiracy of silence and outright promotion of an improbable claim.

Marvin “Monty” Roberts was 19 years old in 1954 when he and his future wife Pat shot a couple of bit parts for East of Eden near their homes in Salinas, California. They can be seen very briefly in the film, and there is one set photograph where Roberts can be seen in proximity to James Dean during some location shooting. Roberts provided some horses for use in the movie. That much is beyond dispute. The rest of the story, however, is another matter.

As late as 1988, Monty Roberts had not made any public mention of any sort of friendship with James Dean, as far as I can tell. In a 1988 newspaper article telling his life story, he merely mentioned that he had been in East of Eden with his then-girlfriend. “The couple also had parts in the now classic movie, East of Eden, starring James Dean,” the Lompoc Record reported on November 27, in a lengthy profile. (Roberts and his wife married in 1956, according to Roberts.)

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/did-the-real-life-horse-whisperer
 
From Jason Colavito's e-Newsletter • Vol. 23 • Issue 2 • July 9, 2023 •

Meanwhile, a literary agent contacted me unsolicited with an offer to represent my book because he said publishers were looking for a James Dean book in advance of the 2025 70th anniversary of Dean’s death. However, he attached a condition—because he said publishers aren’t interested in queer themes, believing no audience will read about them, I would need to basically trash the book I wrote and write what they want, a celebratory review of Dean’s influence on pop culture, including fashion and movies. My feeling is that he described a completely separate book with no connection to what I wrote, substituting the posthumous cartoon character for the real person.
 
Uncovering the source for Anger's gossip about Dean

The late filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s reference in Hollywood Babylon (French ed. 1959, English trans. 1965), his scandalous (and scandalously inaccurate) collection of celebrity gossip, to James Dean’s alleged penchant for sadomasochistic sex has been extremely influential in shaping perceptions of Dean over the past six decades. However, no source for Anger’s claims has ever come to light, leading many to conclude that Anger fabricated the allegation from whole cloth. However, I think I found the most plausible point of origin for Anger’s allegations.

Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylone, First French J.J. Pauvert Paperback Edition (1959)​
Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylone (1959)
In Hollywood Babylon, Anger wrote about men who enjoyed S&M and would

“dig” sex assorted with beatings, boots, belts and bondage, like James Dean—spiced with knowing cigarette burns (which gave Jimmy his underground nickname: The Human Ashtray) . . . (ellipses in original)
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From this brief allusion, Venable Hernon, a later Dean biographer, searched New York S&M clubs in the 1970s for evidence of Dean’s BDSM activities and heard from aging patrons that Dean had engaged in public fist-fucking and other extreme acts—a chronological impossibility, given that anthropologists believe fisting wasn’t invented until the 1960s and wasn’t popularized among gay men until the 1970s. Anger later drew on Herndon and other 1970s Dean biographies to expand his salacious profile of James Dean for 1984’s Hollywood Babylon II, but as that information is entirely derivative, we can ignore it.

Dean biographer David Dalton wrote that Anger, who was gay and had a crush on Dean, had “created” the story from a “rumor” and quoted Dean’s friend and onetime lover Bill Bast on what he considered the origin of the story:

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/beatings-boots-belts-and-bondage
 
When Disney ducked the issue.

When James Dean Was Too Queer for Disney​

A documentary producer alleged the House of Mouse refused to be the first to mention Dean's sexuality--decades after it was common knowledge.​


JASON COLAVITO AUG 31, 2023


This week, a rare film archive uploaded a long-forgotten 1995 Disney Channel documentary, James Dean: A Portrait, a hagiographic biography of Dean produced by Gary Legon from a script by Legon and Dean biographer David Dalton, narrated by Rip Torn. The documentary, which aired on the fortieth anniversary of Dean’s death, is no great shakes—it’s almost uncomfortably worshipful, with some rather striking omissions and fabrications to suit the heroic narrative Legon wanted to create. But what struck me was something that Disney didn’t intend for you to know.
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The uploaded copy wasn’t the original Sept. 30, 1995 Disney Channel broadcast but a May 15, 1996 Australian Broadcasting Corporation rebroadcast on the Wednesday World documentary series. The ABC produced a wraparound for the documentary featuring one of their hosts discussing the film. The Australian host offered a rather shocking confession from the producer about Disney’s meddling to suppress discussion of James Dean’s sexuality, for a truly absurd reason:

Some people have thought that this portrait of James Dean was a little coy about some aspects of his private life, in particular his sexuality. When I put this to the producer-director Gary Legon, he said, “Most of these stories are untrue and full of exaggeration. The one, though, which appears to be true would be the affair he had with a New York advertising executive who helped his career along when he was a starving actor looking for a break.” Gary Legon also told me there had been a point in the production when they were going to touch on Dean’s sexuality, and the Disney company, who were the broadcasters in the U.S., were initially OK about this. However, they eventually changed their minds in the light of the fact that, in all the other bios on Dean, the subject was never mentioned.
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I
n 1995, this was simply untrue. David Dalton’s own James Dean: The Mutant King from 1975 had mentioned it, if only to deny most of it. Royston Ellis in 1961, Venable Herndon in 1974, and Ronald Martinetti in 1975 had all centered their biographies around the “shock” of discovering Dean had had sex with men, particularly onetime advertising executive Rogers Brackett. The American Broadcasting Company hosted a televised Wide World Special debating it in 1974. (I know: How bizarre!) Kenneth Anger had made wild accusations about gay S&M sex in 1959 and again in 1984 in his two Hollywood Babylon books, and more than a year before the release of James Dean: A Portrait, Paul Alexander published Boulevard of Broken Dreams, his factually dubious but nonetheless analytically accurate 1994 account of the role homosexuality played in shaping James Dean.

I was taken aback to find someone actually admitting to corporate interference to suppress discussion of Dean’s sexuality, something that was long rumored and could be inferred from the fingerprints left behind. My feeling is that the change in the documentary partway through is another echo of the impact of Boulevard of Broken Dreams. As I have previously discussed, the book’s massive—and negative—news coverage in 1994 appears to have led to the collapse of what Warner Bros. had planned to be a prestigious Oscar-baiting James Dean biopic. The project’s failure was later blamed on an inability to find the right actor, or a director, but at the time the producer was angrily explaining why he would not include any queer “innuendo and rumor” in his film. News reports at the time wrote of how top actors worried that playing Dean would cause them to be seen as gay.

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/when-james-dean-was-too-queer-for
 
Colavito's James Dean book has a publisher.

I am delighted to announce that I have partnered with Applause Books to publish my biography of James Dean next year.

I am deeply appreciative of the tireless work of my agent, Lee Sobel, in helping to find my book the best possible home, and for the support and enthusiasm of my editor at Applause, Chris Chappell. Publication of the book is the culmination of a years-long journey that began when I happened upon Rebel without a Cause on Turner Classic Movies one day during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and involved the largest and most comprehensive literature and archival research into James Dean’s life and legacy ever conducted. I am so thankful to have found a team that believes in my book and my work and wants to help me share with the world a story that needs to be told.

You may think there is nothing left to say about James Dean, but drawing on more than four hundred previously secret pages of Dean’s personal and business records, this book will serve as a necessary and essential correction to seven decades of literature grounded in the homophobia and toxic masculinity of twentieth-century society. A modern, twenty-first century approach, informed by contemporary ideas about sexual diversity transforms our understanding James Dean’s story, and his impact on America. ...

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/...4533&isFreemail=true&r=j83kl&utm_medium=email
 
Dean may not have been homosexual at all, but simply was compliant with those who could help him get into acting.
Very common in Hollywood, for both men and women.
 
The never ending mysteries continue.

Was Werner Muensterburger Really "James Dean's Analyst"?​

A passing reference in a 2013 biography gave the German-born psychoanalyst a new moniker, but the truth is less clear.​


JASON COLAVITO

This past weekend, my local library held its annual book sale in which it disposes of unwanted books from its collection. This year, they liquidated their James Dean collection, so I picked up some of the few books I did not have in physical copy for a dollar apiece. One was a book I didn’t pay much attention to when writing my own because of its skimpy bibliography and narrow focus on Dean’s death. (I won’t embarrass the author by naming the book.) However, in skimming through it, I came across a claim I had not previously encountered. The author wrote that a certain Werner Muensterburger claimed to have been James Dean’s psychoanalyst. This was quite surprising.

For many years, Dean’s therapy was more or less a rumor known only from friends’ contradictory claims about whether it had occurred. In 1992, gossip writer and Dean biographer Joe Hyams reported on bills from Beverly Hills analyst Dr. Carl Van Der Heide for sessions held with Dean, along with a letter in which Van Der Heide discusses Dean continuing his therapy with a New York therapist. Earlier this year, the collection of documents from Dean’s talent agent that were made public for the first time included a bill from a New York therapist, Dr. Bela Mittleman, as well as letters to and from Dean discussing his desire to seek therapy, which he began in late summer/early fall 1954 and continued into the summer of 1955. All these documents are internally consistent and tell the same story.

Muensterburger’s claims did not seem to fit into what was otherwise a coherent narrative. But due to the aforementioned skimpy bibliography, I learned nothing more from the book, so I was forced to do some research to explore the claim. ...

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/was-werner-muensterburger-really
 
James Dean had ongoing problems with the Draft Board.

When I wrote last week about James Dean’s alleged therapist (who probably wasn’t), I mentioned the issue of Dean’s draft summons and the conflicting views on when that occurred.

When I was researching my book, I found an impossible array of opinions, including (a) it never happened, (b) he was drafted in spring 1951, (c) he was drafted in fall 1951, (d) he was drafted in fall 1952, (e) he was drafted in spring 1955, (f) or he was drafted twice, with various combinations of the previous dates. Similarly, various authorities have differing opinions on whether Dean claimed homosexuality to avoid the draft, ranging from rumors that he asserted it in his 1949 draft registration to claims he declared his sexuality in 1951 or 1952, or that he had to appeal to the Defense Department when his local draft board rejected the claim, to assertions that none of this ever happened because he never claimed to be gay.

During the writing process, the National Archives was closed due to the pandemic and had months-long queues after they reopened, so I did not have access to Dean’s files, and eventually I pushed to the backburner the need to go back and get them while I was busy trying to get a publisher. But last week’s post prompted me to get the official documents.

I received Dean’s Selective Service records this week, and it seems that no other researcher has reviewed them since biographer Val Holley obtained a copy for his 1995 study James Dean: The Biography. Subsequent writers have relied on Holley as the authority. Holley had claimed that Dean received a draft eligibility questionnaire in April 1950 and was called for induction in April 1951. Following a medical exam, Holley said, Dean appealed to the national board and was called back for an unprecedented second exam in October 1951, at which point he must have presented evidence of homosexuality. He was then granted 4-F status in November 1951. ...

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/when-was-james-dean-drafted
 
Not a phantom Porsche.

No, James Dean's Porsche Was Not Cursed​

Supernatural stories about Dean's Spyder abound, but the ghostly tales are little more than profitable fiction. Here's the real story of how a legend grew out of tragedy.​


JASON COLAVITO JAN 16, 2024

It’s been called the most cursed car in history, responsible for a trail of death and injury stretching across the twentieth century. But is James Dean’s Porsche Spyder really possessed by a supernatural evil? I didn’t think it would be necessary to explain why the so-called “curse” of Dean’s Porsche isn’t real, but the persistence of the myth across TV, YouTube, podcasting, and social media, where it is the most popular topic associated with James Dean, suggests that we need a clear explanation of where this false claim came from and why it isn’t true. I’ve discussed elements of the “curse” in various essays and articles, but it’s time to tie it all together and explain how a modern hoax turned into an ancient evil.

(Note: This essay contains some material originally published in my previous Substack essays and on my website.) ...

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/no-james-deans-porsche-was-not-cursed
 
Amongst others, Otash

The Implausible Revelations of a Hollywood Fixer

A new book rehashes the sensational claims of L.A. private eye Fred Otash, but there's just one problem: There's a very good chance he made many of them up.
JASON COLAVITO

In April, Grand Central Publishing will release The Fixer: Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars and Marilyn, a new biography of midcentury private investigator Frank Otash by Josh Young, who coauthors book professionally, and Manfred Westphal, an entertainment industry PR executive who has been attempting to write a book about Otash since 1990. A onetime vice squad cop, Otash became infamous as a fixer for Confidential magazine and later claimed to have spied on everyone from Rock Hudson to Marilyn Monroe, alleging that he was present when Hudson admitted to being gay and when Monroe died minutes after a physical altercation with Bobby Kennedy. The book promises to reveal the contents of Otash’s private files, which Westphal shared with the Hollywood Reporter in 2013.

At the time, the “secret” files created a media frenzy when Westphal revealed that Rock Hudson’s wife, Phyllis Gates, hired Otash to secretly record the couple while she attempted to coerce him into admitting he was gay. Westphal provided excerpts in which Gates asked Hudson why sex with him went so fast and whether he made love to boys for longer sessions. “Well, boys don’t fit,” Hudson somewhat implausibly was said to have replied. “So, this is why it lasts longer.” However, Westphal’s revelations weren’t actually revelations. In his 1976 memoir Investigation Hollywood! (a book ghostwritten by a press agent with a record of publishing defamatory material), Otash published the same transcript of that alleged recording. (He does not use Hudson’s name, to avoid a libel suit, but it is obviously him.) The “new” material isn’t new. It’s simply the raw notes Otash used in assembling his memoir.

Otash’s allegation that he was spying on Marilyn Monroe in her last hours, when she had sex with JFK, fought with Bobby Kennedy, and expired, previously appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1985. Otash then expanded it with more detail and was writing a book about Monroe when he died. So, nothing new in these Monroe revelations either. ...

Otash, who died in 1992, was the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character in China Town and also for Russell Crowe’s character in L. A. Confidential. James Ellroy, who wrote the novel L. A. Confidential was based on, used a lightly fictionalized version of Otash by name as the protagonist of his 2021 novel Widespread Panic (expanded from an earlier novella), in which Otash narrates his life story from the afterlife. ...

Obviously, I can’t evaluate the whole corpus of Otash’s innumerable celebrity claims. But I can say something about Otash’s claimed connection to James Dean. Frankly, I think he made it all up.

In Investigation Hollywood! Otash relates a story about meeting and befriending James Dean, a story that Ellroy uses with some telling changes as the inciting incident in Widespread Panic. According to Otash, one vaguely defined day sometime in the middle 1950s (we’ll consider the exact date momentarily) Otash was working as a security guard for the Hollywood Ranch Market, a grocery store and bazaar located in Hollywood. It was later popular with young counterculture types and celebrities. Otash said that he caught James Dean shoplifting caviar and ham at the store. “I know he was some kind of idol,” Otash wrote, “but he wasn’t worth a damn to me the day I caught him shoplifting in the place. Here was a top draw star swiping stuff he could have paid for and never felt a dent in his pocketbook.” Otash claimed that he confronted Dean, threatened him, and then befriended the “panic”-stricken youth, turning him into his sidekick who would spend many days with him hunting for shoplifters behind a two-way mirror at the market. “He was one helluva bird dog,” Otash claimed.

Now, it seems odd that no one else ever mentioned this odd habit of Dean’s, but a closer examination reveals how Otash constructed his fanciful story. ...

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/the-implausible-revelations-of-a
 
More fables about Dean;' love life.

"The Best Possible Denial"​

Vogue magazine's new piece on James Dean's relationship with Pier Angeli tries too hard to rescue Dean from homosexuality.​

by JASON COLAVITO FEB 11, 2024

This week, various editions of Vogue magazine published a lengthy piece on the failed romance of James Dean and Pier Angeli, born Anna Maria Pierangeli. The original Italian article by journalist Giacomo Aricò, published on Wednesday, and the truncated English adaptation published on Friday contain a number of misrepresentations and errors that came from the telephone game of repetition and PR that passes for “celebrity” coverage in our media. But the broader purpose of the piece, as the author writes in Italian, is to deny that Dean was either homosexual or bisexual, a remarkable claim for a major magazine in 2024. Let’s take a look at some of the ways the Vogue pieces went wrong.

The two pieces, while similar in content, are rather different in writing and even begin with wholly different paragraphs. I will try to cover the major claims made in both as well as the significant differences between the two versions. I’m sure that Aricò was not involved in translating his story any more than I was involved in translating my Esquire piece on Dean for international editions, but as he is the credited author, I will refer to him as the author when describing each article. ...

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/the-best-possible-denial
 
No, not a Norfolk reference.

James Dean and the Story of Schoenberg's Sixth Finger​

How a mixed-up account of a 1937 interview became James Dean's favorite joke.​


by JASON COLAVITO


This week, the New Yorker published a retrospective on the Hollywood influence of atonal composer Arnold Schoenberg, who, among other things, briefly gave lesson in 1947 to Leonard Rosenman, the friend of James Dean who composed the scores to East of Eden and Rebel without a Cause in 1954 and 1955 respectively. The New Yorker tried to sex up its article by placing this very tendentious connection to Dean front and center in the subhead, and in the piece, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross offers an anecdote about Dean that has a truly convoluted history:
Rosenman wasn’t writing for the movies at the time; that transition came about when one of his piano students, James Dean, was cast in “East of Eden” and got his teacher hired along with him. (Dean, a modern-music fan, liked to tell an anecdote about Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto: after Jascha Heifetz complained that he would need to grow a sixth finger to master the piece, Schoenberg supposedly said, “I can wait.”)
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That Dean was familiar with Schoenberg is beyond dispute; in a 1955 Modern Screen profile, Dean describes the albums littering the floor of his Sherman Oaks home: “I collect everything from Twelfth and Thirteenth Century music to Wanda Landowska’s harpsichord recordings of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier to the extreme moderns—you know, Schoenberg, Berg, Bartok, Stravinsky. I also like Sinatra’s Songs for Young Lovers album.” The version of the Schoenberg story known to James Dean was a secondhand, mixed-up version at the end of long game of telephone, of which he was merely the middle link in a century of copying and confusion.

The story is conventionally attributed, according to most later citations, to Umair Mirza’s An Encyclopedia of Quotations about Music in 1978, which quotes Ross as saying “Very well, I can wait.” Mirza, a past editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, gives no source and states only that the anecdote is “attributed” to Schoenberg. The explanation about six fingers appears in Mirza’s editorial note, and Mirza clearly is not personally familiar with the story or the sourcing. The exact wording used in most later sources (sans the “very well”) and given by Ross appears almost identical to that given in a piece by Anthony Burgess on the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: “when told that a soloist would need six fingers to play his concerto, [he] said: ‘I can wait.’” I am not aware of the exact date of publication, only that his collection Homage to QWERTY UIOP dates it to 1978 or later and it must postdate the publication of the 1979 third edition of the ODQ, which his piece reviewed. The Schoenberg quotation, however, does not appear in the ODQ of 1979. ...

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/james-dean-and-the-story-of-schoenbergs
 
And the saga continues.

Was James Dean "Sexually Sadistic"?​

An old 1956 newspaper story suggests that one of Dean's "friends" spread disparaging rumors about him after his death.​


JASON COLAVITO APR 03, 2024


If you have access to enough information, you can draw inferences that let you see what had long been hidden. As I make final corrections to my manuscript for Jimmy, I noticed something I had previously overlooked. In October 1956, the journalist Maurice Zolotow, then best known as a contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, published one of the most scathing indictments of James Dean ever committed to print. In a syndicated newspaper article, Zolotow claimed that he needed to save a generation of young people from the “evil” of James Dean by revealing the truth behind the myth. Zolotow described Dean as violent, selfish, cruel, arrogant, smelly, and—most bizarrely—“sexually sadistic.”

It wasn’t clear to me how Zolotow came to that conclusion, but then I noticed something. Zolotow bases his claim on what he says is “many persons who knew him both personally and professionally,” but the claims he made echo the words of one specific person.

Zolotow was no fan of James Dean. A year after seeing Dean’s dance of homosexual seduction in The Immoralist, where he played a gay houseboy who awakens an archaeologist’s same-sex desire, Zolotow made an offhand but apparently disapproving reference in Theatre Arts for November 1954 about Dean’s “interesting sexual gyrations,” which stuck in his memory.

In his 1956 piece, Zolotow tells a particular story that seems suspiciously disconnected from facts. Writing of an actress who can only be Dean’s summer 1954 girlfriend Pier Angeli, Zolotow says: “One girl, a lovely and sensitive actress now happily married, was Dean’s girl friend for a long time. He tormented and humiliated her by taunting and insulting her, abusing her, hurting her pride with rude and crude behavior.” Zolotow gives no source for this, and some of it could be gleaned from the well-documented arguments the couple had, but the claim of “abuse”—coupled with Zolotow’s claim that Dean was “brutal” and “sexually sadistic” implies a level of violence beyond mere romantic disagreement.

Two decades later, we find a surprisingly similar story. David Dalton interviewed Dean’s frenemy Leonard Rosenman, who similarly claimed Dean was violently abusive:
Jimmy would get drunk on a couple of glasses of wine, and when he got drunk he could become very nasty. His personality completely changed; he was completely uncontrollable and could get vicious. It was very Jekyll and Hyde. He also became violent, and he had a reputation for beating up his girlfriends. He did this to Pier once too often and I think she had just had enough.
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To Venable Herndon, another Dean biographer writing around the same time, Rosenman dropped the claim about Dean’s “reputation” and instead asserted that Dean had told him directly that he physically abused Pier Angeli. ...

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/was-james-dean-sexually-sadisti
 
Portholes and Poltergeists.

When James Dean rented a West 68th Street apartment in New York City, he was very excited that the fifth-floor room had round porthole windows. These reminded him of a round window he had seen in a picture of Marlon Brando that he had saved, and he took to telling people that his apartment had been Brando’s. I looked everywhere for that photo and never found it. Then, today, Pinterest sent it to me in the daily digest of photos I receive despite not having a Pinterest account that I am aware of and never using the site.



After researching the image as best I was able, the caption in one reprint says it was a 1951 colorized photo of Brando on the set of A Streetcar Named Desire that had been published in a movie magazine. As you can see from Dennis Stock’s Life magazine photo of Dean’s apartment, the window is not the same.

Living in a box : James Dean's 1950s apartment. | Retrospective modernism

Meanwhile, the man who now lives in Dean’s former apartment told the West Side Rag this week that he believes Dean’s ghost haunts the rent-controlled room and moves furniture.

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/the-porthole-windows-of-james-dean
 
I wonder why the man assumes it's James Dean and not any other previous occupant of the flat?
 
I wonder why James has this 'afterlife', as an idol? Is it mainly because of his looks (or something other than that too-obvious conclusion of mine; e.g. his early, tragic death perhaps)? I remember reading about how The Smiths formed, and, apparently, Morrissey had a life-size cardboard figure of James Dean in his (Moz's) bedroom*.


*Not to mention, of course, that Morrissey wrote a Dean biography.
 
Steven said:
I wonder why James has this 'afterlife', as an idol? Is it mainly because of his looks (or something other than that too-obvious conclusion of mine; e.g. his early, tragic death perhaps)? I remember reading about how The Smiths formed, and, apparently, Morrissey had a life-size cardboard figure of James Dean in his (Moz's) bedroom*.


*Not to mention, of course, that Morrissey wrote a Dean biography.
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I think there's something about very good looking people dying young. They remain forever fixed at the peak of their physical attractiveness, they never age or sag or reveal themselves to be utter tossers (unless they have done so before their death), so it's easier to romanticise them.
 
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