Jason finds a rare photograph.
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 (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.
| | |
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