Spooky James Dean

catseye said:
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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Also, Dean (and Brando) came before, or were the start of, the 'teenager' as we know it today.
Up until then ,things had been pretty staid really.
 
Floyd said:
Also, Dean (and Brando) came before, or were the start of, the 'teenager' as we know it today.
Up until then ,things had been pretty staid really.
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Reminds me of what my older sister says about the Beatles; they were so fascinating because at the time there was nothing like them.
 
Fred Otash again.

The Fix Is In​

A credulous new biography of private eye Fred Otash makes some dubious claims about the detective's likely fictitious run-in with James Dean.​


by JASON COLAVITO

Now that The Fixer, Josh Young and Manfred Westphal’s biography of L.A. private eye and fabulist Fred Otash, is out, and its claims about James Dean the subject of a People magazine feature, I can add a new detail to the analysis I provided back in January of the many reasons Otash’s story about catching Dean shoplifting caviar at the Hollywood Ranch Market is a likely fake. Be sure to click the link and read through for the details. The short version is that Otash’s published claim is chronologically confused and reflects incorrect information about Dean that was popularly believed in the 1970s but not before or after.

Cover of The Fixer

My initial analysis was based on Otash’s 1976 book Investigation Hollywood!, which was ghostwritten for him, allegedly from his interviews and notes. Young and Westphal have collated the text with what they claim were transcripts of Otash’s field notes used in production of the book. But, in the case of Dean, this only made things worse. In his 1976 book, Otash seemingly placed the events in 1954 or 1955, a time when he knew and recognized Dean as a celebrity. We know this because Otash states that he knew Dean was “some kind of idol” and asserts that he was unwilling to charge Dean with shoplifting because “I don’t want to be the guy that killed Santa Claus,” meaning the person who tarnished Dean’s celebrity image. Dean wasn’t a well-known celebrity until the summer of 1954, when he was 23.

However, when collating Otash’s book with his working notes, Young and Westphal produced a different account. According to them, Otash began moonlighting at the Hollywood Ranch Market grocery store in 1950, during a 60-day suspension from the LAPD for gambling. They claim, somewhat incredulously, that within days he had revolutionized store security by installing five two-way mirrors to catch shoplifters, of which there many, and immediately caught James Dean: ...

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/the-fix-is-in
 
Jason finds a rare photograph.

A Surprising Photo Find​

A rare photo of Rogers Brackett, James Dean's onetime lover, resurfaces after nearly 80 years.​


The last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on gathering the photos and other images for Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean. I had just finished collecting what I was able to find and license when I lamented that as important a role as advertising executive and radio producer Rogers Brackett played in James Dean’s life, there were no photos of him as a young man. To the best of my knowledge, the only photograph of him I had ever seen was the one Ronald Martinetti published in his James Dean biography, showing a terminally ill Brackett nearly twenty-five years after he met Dean.
Rogers Brackett Ve James Dean​
Rogers Brackett (left) with portrait of himself and author Ronald Martinetti
I had scoured archives to see if I could find one that showed him in the prime of his life, but the closest I could come was a 1940s-era newspaper article that ran his photo alongside a piece about his radio and theater work. Unfortunately, that small local newspaper was committed to microfilm half a century ago, and all that survives is a black blob where the dark half-tone image photographed poorly.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when right before my deadline, CBS uncovered a picture of Brackett as he appeared a couple of years before Dean met him. He was the director of and occasional on-air personality on a CBS radio show called Vox Pop and the network commissioned a headshot in connection with that, according to the caption affixed to the picture. CBS digitized the image for the CBS Photo Archive a couple of weeks ago. (As best my research could determine, the copyright was never renewed, as required under the 1976 copyright act, which would make the picture public domain.) As far as I can tell, no other book has published this photo, and mine will therefore be the first.
Image​
Rogers Brackett as he appeared in 1946

I found the headshot fascinating because it is so much at odds with how Dean’s other lovers remembered their rival.

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/a-surprising-photo-find
 
More dodgy claims about Dean.

This week, Factinate put out a YouTube video about John Derek, a mostly forgotten Hollywood heartthrob of the 1950s.

For our purposes, the only important information about him is that Ursula Andress broke up with James Dean in early September 1955, began dating Derek in late September, and married him the next year. The video, however, goes rather far in suggesting that Dean stalked Derek and tried to intimidate him into dropping Andress, which is a fairly dramatic story that doesn’t appear in any of the standard Dean biographies.

The video led me back to Factinate’s 2021 article on Derek, which gives a longer account:

When Derek and Andress started their affair, Dean was not happy; he even went so far as to stalk the two in his car while Derek and Andress were driving down Sunset Boulevard. Derek continued to date Andress, however, and things continued to escalate between Derek and Dean.
It soon led to an inevitable showdown between the two men.
The alleged showdown began after Derek dropped Andress off at her home one day. As soon as Derek stopped in front of Andress’s home, Dean walked out the door and offered to drive Derek around in his brand-new Porsche. Derek’s friends tried to stop him from getting into the car; they had no doubt that Dean’s intentions were far from good. Derek, however, wasn’t going to back down. He hopped into Dean’s car, which quickly roared to life. ...
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https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/the-inevitable-showdown-that-wasnt
 
Coming soon.

Unveiling the Cover of "Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean"​

My new book will be published this fall.​

JASON COLAVITO JUN 26, 2024



I am proud to share the cover of my new book Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean, out this fall from Applause Books, and imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. It was a long, challenging road to develop an attractive cover that captured the feel of the book, but I think this one more than succeeded.


https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/unveiling-the-cover-of-jimmy-the
 
Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean.

"He Had Revealed so Much of Himself"​

A trove of "lost" tapes provides the oldest known version of Elizabeth Taylor's oft-repeated story about James Dean's secret confession.​


Jason Colavito Aug 04, 2024

This weekend, HBO and Max debuted a new documentary, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, culled from forty hours of interview recordings that Elizabeth Taylor recorded with Life magazine journalist Richard Meryman in 1964. Much of the material in the recordings had previously been transcribed into Taylor’s book, Elizabeth Taylor: An Intimate Memoir, a few months after the recordings were made. However, the printed version had been cleaned up significantly and a great deal of material, under the agreement Taylor had with Meryman, had been redacted. One of the segments Taylor required to be omitted was a discussion of James Dean.

Meryman died in 2015, with tapes allegedly having sat in his attic since he finished ghostwriting Tayllor’s memoir. Meryman’s widow found the tapes and donated them to the Taylor estate, which cooperated with filmmakers in producing the documentary.

James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor.

Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean during the filming of “Giant.”

Part of Taylor’s comments about James Dean, specifically about his death, appeared nearly verbatim in Intimate Memoir. The part that she did not want included revolved around late-night conversation she had with Dean during the filming of Giant in the summer of 1955:
Sometimes Jimmy and I would stay up until like three o’clock in the morning talking. He would tell me about some of the grief and unhappiness in his life and some of his loves and tragedies. And the next day on the set, I’d say, “Hi, Jimmy,” and it was almost as if he didn’t want to sort of recognize that he had revealed so much of himself the night before, and it would just be a cursory nod of the head, and it would take maybe a day or two for him to become my friend again.
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This is not a new revelation, but it nevertheless came as a surprise to me because almost these exact words appear in gossip columnist Joe Hyams’s 1992 James Dean biography, James Dean: Little Boy Lost, presumably from an interview Taylor gave to Hyams sometime after Dean’s death. Indeed, Taylor’s words are so similar in the Meryman and Hyams versions that when I first heard the recording, I thought they were one and the same: ...

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/he-had-revealed-so-much-of-himself
 
Interesting thread since I live about 2 hrs from his grave in Fairmount Indiana.
My friend and I like craft beer by Bad Dad Brewery which is in Fairmount and we are planning a day trip there .
If we make it this fall I'll take some pics of the grave with my cell phone...maybe a ghost will show up.
;)
 
dr wu said:
Interesting thread since I live about 2 hrs from his grave in Fairmount Indiana.
My friend and I like craft beer by Bad Dad Brewery which is in Fairmount and we are planning a day trip there .
If we make it this fall I'll take some pics of the grave with my cell phone...maybe a ghost will show up.
;)
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Post the pics here!
 
Oh what a beautiful morning!



Jason Colavito

@JasonColavito

James Dean was up for "Oklahoma!" but lost the role, both because his voice wasn't strong enough and because Zinnemann felt he lacked the “necessary romantic quality” to convincingly act like he loved a woman. "Oklahoma!" airs tonight on TCM.
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When adapting the Rodgers & Hammerstein's musical OKLAHOMA! ('55) to the screen, it was crucial for director Fred Zinnemann to cast actors whose vocal range rivaled the stage.A renowned baritone and veteran of both arts, Gordon MacRae was the perfect fit. #SummerUnderTheStars
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What happened to the Porsche?

After James Dean died, the remains of his Porsche 550 Spyder took on a life of their own.

Dr. William Eschrich acquired the wreck from a scrap yard, used the engine for his own car, and sold off other still-functional bits of the car and the metal from the body panels to men who would install them in their own cars, and sometimes crash them. Car customizer George Barris acquired what was left, and he banged the crumpled chassis back into a semblance of its original shape, put atop it a sheet metal facsimile of the wrecked body, and loaned to the Greater Los Angeles Safety Council, which sent it on tour, ostensibly as a warning against the dangers of driving at excessive speed. (In the 1950s, police concluded that Dean was traveling at 100 mph, causing the crash, but modern analysis determined Dean was not speeding.) In reality, the attraction was to gawk at the car that carried a beloved idol to his death. The council charged a small fee to let visitors, mostly teenagers, sit behind the wheel and commune with the dead Dean. ...

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-james-deans-porsche


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It was a regular sight, in books & magazines about 'the unexplained', to see articles on James's supposedly cursed car.
 
From Jason Colavito's enewsletter • Vol. 25 • Issue 19 • September 1, 2024 •

This week, the James Dean Museum in Fairmount, Indiana announced the death of Lew Bracker, Dean’s onetime friend and insurance agent, at the age of 96. Bracker was a tireless promoter of Dean’s life and legacy over the past seventy years, and he was among the last of Dean’s close friends to survive. (Girlfriend Ursula Andress still lives, as does friend Toni Lee Scott.) He was also adamant that Dean was 100% heterosexual and frequently criticized anyone who said otherwise, as late as a 2022 interview.
 
Jason Colavito writes on a new book about James Dean

I went back and forth on whether to write something about a new book about James Dean self-published through Simon & Schuster’s Archway vanity press this week.

Initially, I did not want to give more publicity to a bad book that will have limited distribution, but when I saw that it is now indexed on Google Books and turns up in searches related to Dean because of its recency, I thought it might be worth saying a few words about Derek Reeves’s The Legend of James Dean: Demonic Heroes Have Villainous Virtues. It is a book so audacious in its bizarre claims that it astonished even me.

Reeves is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School and wrote his first book about James Dean, American Rebel, in 2007, but I was unable to find any listings for the book, suggesting it, too, was self-published. Legend is a wholesale revision and rewrite of the first book, according to a lengthy digression in Reeves’s new book.

According to Reeves, he first encountered James Dean’s movies while attending the University of Rochester as an undergraduate in 1981, having previously known of Dean only through conspiracy theories his mother told him about Dean living on, disfigured and insane, in an asylum in New York City. Reeves writes about his formative experiences with James Dean stemming from lengthy debates he had with his fellow college students about Dean’s life and career, many revolving around conspiracy theories, and with a prominent racial undertone. (Reeves, according to his book, is Black.) Reeves claims that he spent countless night staying up into the wee hours arguing about details of Dean’s life with his peers.

Even that background won’t prepare you for where Reeves takes his book. After asserting that he spent twenty-five years researching Dean (he “read several books and watched several documentaries,” he says), he launches into his own conspiracy theory. Reeves claims that James Dean was a wholesome, kind, gentle, polite, and religious young man whose “holy” connection to God sparked deep concern in the New York and Los Angeles moneyed elites (read: Jews), who conspired with the U.S. government to take him out and destroy his good name in hope of proving Christianity false and promoting a demonic agenda. According to Reeves, the wealthy movie moguls and bankers worried that Dean would inaugurate a new age of enlightenment and freedom as a holy messenger of God, so they diabolized him as a ruffian and bad boy in order to oppress teenagers and young adults and keep them from embracing the new path to God’s kingdom: ...

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/the-devil-is-in-the-details
 
ramonmercado said:
self-published through Simon & Schuster’s Archway vanity press this week.
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Well that means no reputable publisher would publish it, which is odd because you'd think they would lap it up. Which probably says a lot about the contents.
 
New film about James Dean.

Timed to the sixty-ninth anniversary of James Dean’s death on Sept. 30, writer-director Guy Guido announced that he has acquired the film rights to William Bast’s 2006 memoir Surviving James Dean and plans to make a movie depicting Bast’s relationship with Dean.

Bast’s book depicted a complex relationship between Bast, who was gay, and Dean, who kept his sexuality a secret, even from Bast. According to Bast’s memoir, the two briefly had a sexual relationship during a retreat in Borrego Springs in the spring of 1954, and in the fall of 1955 Dean had promised Bast that they would live together once he finished shooting Giant, a few days before Dean’s death.

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/new-james-dean-movie-to-explore-queer

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There seems such an urge to allocate someone a 'sexuality'. There is a middle state between 'entirely gay' and 'completely straight' and a lot of people float somewhere along that spectrum. Maybe he was bisexual occasionally?
 
Jimmy: The Secret Life of James goes on sale on November 19.

It's finally here! After four years of research, writing, revising, and editing, this week I received two boxes of Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean from my publisher. The book looks beautiful, and I am excited for all of you to be able to buy copies on November 19!

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The inspiration for the Jimmy dust jacket was an homage to, but not an exact copy of, William Bast's original 1956 James Dean biography. My first edition is a bit faded, but it was originally the same shade of red. Bast's cover showed Dean draped in shadow, mine bathed in light, symbolizing the difference between his biography, which hid the truth and mine, which exposes it.

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https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/my-author-copies-of-jimmy-arrived
 
More fantasies about Dean.

This past week saw the release of Giant Love, a book about the making the James Dean film Giant by Julie Gilbert, the great-niece of the woman who wrote the novel Giant is based on, Edna Feber.

The second book touching on James Dean to be released in a month, following my own, Gilbert and I have seen our books discussed in some of the same outlets, and we even appeared on the same podcast on two different days this week. I have largely refrained from commenting on her very lightly sourced book while promoting my own, but now that the Daily Mail seized on the book’s weirdest claim, I can’t pass over in silence her utterly absurd assertion that Dean was having sex with the septuagenarian novelist.

Look, I spent four years investigating every scrap of paper that Dean left behind and virtually everything anyone ever said about him, and I can tell you with all of the authority I can muster that Gilbert’s claims have absolutely no support in fact. And she knows this. While asserting, bizarrely, that Feber (who had no known sex life) was likely only sexually attracted to couples (!), Gilbert writes in Giant Love:

Ferber had never been average in any way but this one; she was drawn toward the Dean magnet just like everyone else. Mercedes McCambridge was similar to Ferber in outline: strong-featured, forthright, accomplished—and also a Deanite. […] When Katharine Hepburn called herself and Ferber “unicorn women,” I assumed the term meant that they were unique. It sounded original and right on target. They both had singular heads on their shoulders.
For much of my life people have been inquiring about my great aunt’s proclivities. Now, in the time of variety-pack sexuality, I am finally grasping what a “unicorn woman” is all about. It is a woman who grazes with couples. […] When I think of Hepburn’s statement now, the curtain parts on Ferber, Dean, and McCambridge in Los Angeles during those final weeks filming Giant. They spent a good deal of time together on the set and off. Ferber and Dean became close, but McCambridge was never far. Perhaps there was a liaison. McCambridge was married, but did say “I love you” in a letter to Ferber; and Dean was so young and arbitrary, it seemed he would try anything. The curtain closes. Maybe this was part of the “everything” Ferber had promised to tell my mother someday. I will never know if there was any lover for Ferber other than fame. In her words: “Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death—fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.”
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OK, so let’s take this from the top: Hepburn said that to Gilbert sometime in the early 1970s (it appears in Gilbert’s 1970s biography of Ferber), but there is no evidence that “unicorn” referred to a bisexual woman brought in for polyamorous sex at that time. While some speculate the term originated in the 1970s, it was not widely known then and not popularized until the online era, as part of “unicorn hunting,” a term for a male-female couple seeking a bisexual female third. Hepburn, who famously needed Spencer Tracy to explain to her what a homosexual was, probably wasn’t using brand-new polyamorous swinger lingo as she herself approached seventy. ...

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/no-james-dean-did-not-sleep-with
 
Yet another fantasy about Dean.

This week, Remind magazine published an excerpt from Julie Gilbert’s Giant Love, her new book on the making of the movie Giant, and it contained another dubious claim about James Dean that I should probably take a moment to refute. In the piece, and in her book, she writes about the relationship between Dean and costar Rock Hudson:

Dean altered the dynamic of the shoot as well as zeroing in on the bond between Hudson and Taylor. He refused to be the third wheel, and taking advantage of Taylor’s kindness, he began actually repositioning their chairs so that she was angled away from Hudson and toward him, where he would fret about things, gossip, and make her laugh at clownish antics. Hudson became the disgruntled odd man out, forcing him to either drop Taylor or vie for her—which he chose to do. To invoke another big Western movie, theirs was a “duel in the sun.”
Perhaps Hudson had more of an agenda or backstory with Dean than it would have seemed. Certain truths were not spoken of back in the mid-fifties. Hudson had a good deal on the back burner. He was a closeted gay man embarking on a heterosexual marriage of convenience. His stardom was hitched to a studio-planned personal life. He was to be married to a woman and entirely discreet about everything else. According to various sources, Hudson fell deeply into a platonic love with Taylor but was also attracted to Dean. In the beginning of filming in Marfa, when Hudson and Dean shared a house, Hudson purportedly enjoyed dressing in drag in the privacy of this rented home. Dean deplored this as well as the overtures that Hudson made toward him, hastily moving out and into a room at the Hotel Paisano.
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OK, so… No.

Gilbert’s “various sources” hide the tiny bit of research she did into this claim and the problems with it. I’ll deal with Rock Hudson first. Hudson was indeed a closeted gay man, but he was not yet embarking on a marriage of convenience. That only occurred after Confidential magazine got hold of evidence that Hudson was gay and threatened to publish it. Hudson’s agent, Henry Willson, traded Tab Hunter’s homosexuality and a second scandal featuring another actor for the Hudson story, convincing the magazine not to publish. This took place in the summer of 1955, with the Hunter exposé on sale in the September issue in late August. It was after that publication that Hudson faced public pressure to marry (Life magazine ran a cover story a few weeks later asking why he wasn’t married—hint, hint) and contracted a marriage agreement with Willson’s secretary. ...

https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/no-rock-hudson-didnt-hit-on-james
 
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