PicoBlog

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.

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.

I have sifted through virtually every source in existence, and Zolotow and Rosenman are the only two sources that imply anything like a reputation for domestic abuse. None of Dean’s girlfriends ever made such a claim. But we do know from Rosenman’s comments to Esquire magazine in December 1956 in which the former friend disparaged Dean that he was spreading rumors about Dean in the fall of 1956. I’m not sure what inspired it. Perhaps it was insecurity about owing his career composing for movies to Dean, who got him his first Hollywood jobs. Maybe it was Dean exposing Rosenman’s adultery in front of all Rosenman’s friends, which had led to a year-long falling out. Whatever the reason, it is beyond my scope.

The only question is whether Rosenman gave the story to Zolotow or added it to his storehouse of disparaging claims after reading it in Zolotow’s column. As Rosenman claimed Dean gave him the information, that suggests Rosenman is the source.

That’s where one other bit of interesting evidence comes into play. As a journalist embedded in the entertainment scene in New York, Zolotow would undoubtedly have known Walter Ross, then the executive heading New York publicity for Warner Bros. Ross hated James Dean, seemingly hated homosexuality, and, as I have previously discussed, was very likely the anonymous “movie executive” who disparaged Warner Bros. efforts to “resurrect” Dean to promote Giant in Inside Story magazine in February 1957. In 1958, Ross published The Immortal, a lightly fictionalized account of James Dean’s life in which Ross depicted his Dean stand-in protagonist exactly as Zolotow had—selfish, arrogant, evil, and sexually perverted—but the victim, rather than the perpetrator, of domestic abuse.

Ross was not shy about using any and every bit of nasty gossip he knew about James Dean, but he didn’t make him a domestic abuser. Ross was always cagey about his sources. Only very late in life did he finally concede his book was about James Dean, and the only time he ever spoke about his sources, he privately told Dean biographer Ronald Martinetti that the rumors were simply “in the air.” (We know from later accounts gathered in the 1970s and 1990s that many of the stories had circulated on Broadway from late 1953 on, so Ross may not have been entirely flippant in his response.)

In short, because the claims don’t show up in Ross’s book, it is much more likely that Rosenman is Zolotow’s source.

ncG1vNJzZmiikai8r6%2FOpZivoaSke7TBwayrmpubY7CwuY6pZrCZo2K3ornErGSdnZGjerSx166YpaSpYsCisMisq6Kb