Product Description

Explores the personal struggles of the powerful actor and explains how Dean's sexual ambivalence and hidden homosexuality affected his life and made him such a believable on-film rebel. Reprint."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #409628 in Books
• Published on: 1997-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This is a juicy biography that looks at the events that shaped Dean's (1931-1955) homosexuality. The death of his mother left Dean to be raised by relatives in Indiana, where he enjoyed an adolescence filled with basketball, 4-H Clubs and fast motorcycles. During this idyllic time he lost his virginity--to the local minister. After graduation from high school, Dean moved to L.A. to attend acting classes at UCLA. Unable to find film work, he slept with men (including, purportedly, Clifton Webb) who could help him to get acting jobs. Moving to Manhattan, he joined the Actors Studio to study under Lee Strasberg. After appearing on TV and Broadway, Dean returned to Hollywood to make East of Eden . Rebel Without a Cause and Giant followed, but Dean died in a car accident before their premieres. No movie critic, Alexander ( Rough Magic ) instead has written a graphic sexual biography that's likely to shock Dean fans. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The interesting thing about James Dean is the fact that, almost 40 years after his death, he remains an icon of American pop culture. In the last chapter of this tell-all biography, Alexander takes a stab at accounting for Dean's continuing popularity, but his real interest throughout the book is in the actor's sex life. Although he devotes some attention to Dean's work as an actor and to his heterosexual liaisons, Alexander's contribution to the Dean legend is to label him as homosexual. The early death of Dean's mother; abandonment by his father; a close teenage "friendship" with an older, more worldly man; trips to the Hollywood casting couch (male version); testimony from numerous of Dean's self-proclaimed male lovers (one of whom provides a diary, complete with pillow talk)--these are only a few of the brush strokes that make up Alexander's portrait of Dean as a gay man. Contradictory evidence,like Dean's romance with actress Pier Angelli--considered by many to be the love his life--gets perfunctory treatment: ". . . the affair developed so quickly it would be hard to imagine that the love was lasting or substantial." That clears the way neatly for Alexander's conclusion: "James Dean used this sense of angst, caused by his inability to live the life he wanted to lead, to spur him on as he relentlessly pushed the boundaries of his art." Well, maybe, but by Alexander's reckoning, Dean didn't suffer from all that much repression, despite living in a 1950s closet. The point about revealing the secret sexual histories of dead celebrities, after all, isn't to prove the case as much as to raise a ruckus. Alexander ought to do just fine. Ilene Cooper

From Kirkus Reviews
Alexander, whose last book was a biography of Sylvia Plath (Rough Magic, 1991), takes on another promising but doomed artist- icon. Dean, Alexander claims in the first of many debatable assertions, ``brought something new to sex--an ambiguity, an openness, an androgyny that had not been there with other Hollywood stars.'' In no small part, he argues, that quality grew out of Dean's own conflicted feelings about his sexuality, which Alexander says was predominantly that of a homosexual. He recounts the by-now familiar story of Dean's brief life: his out-of-wedlock conception leading to his parents' marriage six months before his birth; his mother's death when he was nine; his father's handing him over to cousins who raised him as a son; his attraction to acting; his difficult relationship with his father; his struggles in Hollywood and New York; and his gradual rise to stardom, cut short by his death at 24 in an auto accident, leaving a legacy of three starring roles and a veritable cult of worshiping fans. What Alexander adds to this story is some potted and misleading social history, explicit tales of sexual encounters, and a great deal of unsubstantiated and highly speculative psychobiography recounted in tedious, overheated prose. The book is riddled with errors, calling Robert Lindner's Rebel Without a Cause a novel (it was a nonfiction book about psychopathic murderers), misidentifying Gary Cooper as the star of Shane, and calling Dos Passos's USA an ``epic poem.'' Alexander is unenlightening about Dean's acting style, his films, or his enduring appeal. The book has nothing new to say, and says it badly. (65 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Judge for yourself and don't neccessarily believe all the negative reviews
It's quite frustrating to read all the negative reviews here. Paul Alexander has written other critically acclaimed biographies and from this background there is no reason to believe he was just some lousy reporter interested in writing a badly researched, scandalous tabloid biography, although this is just what some reviewers here wrongly claim.

There are two rather detailed (homo)sexual scenes, and that's all. Of course one wonders how Alexander recreated them (he doesn't list his sources in footnotes and just mentions how he tried to recreate dialogue and scenes through in-depth interviews) but they are in no way the common theme of the book.

Alexander's prose is elegantly clear, empathic and evocative. What seems to annoy some reviewers is that he tries to bring to light elements of Dean's life biographies back then (this book was originally published in 1995) - and maybe even today - tried to avoid or probably suppress. From this point of view this is still an informed and reasonably balanced piece of work and in no way the lurid scam it is depicted to be in some reviews here. Some "fans" probably hate their romantic myths about Dean shattered or are too uncomfortable with homosexuality to see it mentioned in a James Dean biography.

What is strange, though, is the fact that the recently published book by Willam Bast, which probably deals more with Dean's (homo)sexuality than Alexander's book, doesn't get as many negative reviews as this book here. Maybe times have changed.

Anyway, I think there is no such thing as "the" James Dean biography. If you want to seriously know more about him you should read several biographies to get to know different points of view. But Paul Alexander's work should not be missed.

superb style, memorable quotes
I am surprised that no one has remarked upon this biography's excellent style. Here are a few memorable passages:

1. In Salt Lake City, [his mother's] coffin, covered with flowers, was removed from the train and placed on the station platform near Jimmy's window [he was a boy of nine] "Oh, my mother! That's my mother!" Jimmy was supposed to have said. "I'm going out there. I'm going to stand right beside her!" And with the train's nurse by his side, that's what he did, until the coffin was moved back on board.

2. For years, the people of Fairmount would gossip about what Jimmy was supposed to have said when [...] on his eighteenth birthday, he reported to the local draft board. Was there a reason why he should'nt be drafted? [...] Yes, there was. [...] "You can't draft me," he said. "I'm homosexual."

3. [Of his father's resistance to the idea of him becoming an actor] A father's pull on a son may be basic, but an art form's pull on an artist is hypnotic.

4. No true artist fits into the world in which he lives. If he did, he would cease to be the observer and become the observed.

It certainly seems plausible that much of Dean's rebellion proceeded from his homosexuality. After all, our inherited culture denies that men can ever really love each other, with the limited and highly qualified exception of father and son. In other cultures Dean would not have been such a rebel, perhaps. But Dean seems also to have had a certain heterosexual component to his nature. So he seems to have resembled pagan Greek men, bisexual, but with the emphasis on the homosexual side. This is what most of the people who knew him most intimately said about him. But he was promoted by an intensely homophobic culture as a heterosexual sex object of a somewhat new kind - rebellious, but safely hetero. Nevertheless there was just enough of the gay element lurking in the shadows (especially in Rebel Without a Cause) to add a certain wicked allurement.

All this must have made him personally very uncomfortable, to say the least. Montgomery Clift (see Leonard's bio) and Errol Flynn (see Bret's bio) were made so uncomfortable by this pretense that they indulged in very self-destructive behavior. It cannot be very rewarding to be idolized by strangers who, if they knew about one's most basic personality trait - who one falls in love with - would find one utterly hateful and contemptible. There certainly was a kind of death wish in driving a car at 100 or 120 mph on a highway.

The homophobes here seem to be most disturbed by the few sex scenes Alexander inserts. They are in fact rather prim, except for a sentence or two. But even these are more clinical than pornographic.

The famous nude photo of Dean as Greek faun is included.

Modern biographies are almost always written in a wooden, journalistic style that makes them more a duty than a pleasure to read. This bio does not entirely avoid the fault, but is nevertheless full of beautiful phrases and memorable lines. I enjoyed reading it.

WHOAAAA!!!!
I knew pratically nothing about James Dean's life besides he was hot, so this book was very insighting and throughly shocking when Alexander continously arises questions on Dean's sexuality. Some of the scenes are so descriptive that its easy to concluded that most likely the author's own amourous feelings towards Dean most likely plays a role in the writing of this book.

Oh, NAKED PIC OF JAMES DEAN IN THE BOOK!!!!!!!!! :o) FOR THAT IT GETS 5 STARS ALONE!! lol