No, James Dean Was Not Marlon Brando's Sex Slave
The biggest challenge in writing my book was trying to root out all of the lies, misrepresentations, and hoaxes. I don't discredit Arlene Sax so much as believe that she mixed some true memories with stories that she took from elsewhere and may have come to believe were true. In terms of "James Dean: Little Boy Lost," I think that Joe Hyams was generally a truthful writer who did not make things up. (I thought he made up, for example, his story about Dean getting a second draft exemption in 1955, but I got out the records, found an earlier author's mistake, and discovered it was surprisingly true!) But he was indiscriminate in reporting what people told him, with little interest in whether it was true, and he had a bad habit of mixing sources together without identifying them, making it hard to evaluate some of his stories.
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