A new biography claims that actor James Dean was forced to pay off a former male lover to conceal their affair weeks before East of Eden hit theaters in 1955.
According to The Daily Mail, author Jason Colavito details the transaction and the circumstances that led to it – including court documents – in his just-released book Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean.
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“This story has never been told before, and all parties involved worked hard to make sure no one ever found out,” Colavito told the outlet. “And for seventy years, no one did. The only reason we know about it today is that Dean’s agent secretly kept copies of his papers hidden away for decades.”
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Per The Daily Mail, Dean met Rogers Brackett while working as a parking valet next door to CBS Studios in Santa Monica, California. Then a radio director for an advertising agency, Bracket was apparently taken with the struggling young actor, helping him get radio roles and even inviting Dean to move in with him.
The precise nature of Dean’s sexuality has long been a matter of debate, with many of his contemporaries providing conflicting perspectives on whether he was gay, bisexual, or merely an opportunistic Hollywood hustler. In his 2006 memoir, Surviving James Dean, screenwriter and author William Bast, who also claimed to have had a sexual relationship with Dean, described the actor as Brackett’s “kept boy.” In his 1996 biography, The James Dean Story: A Myth-Shattering Biography of a Hollywood Legend, Ronald Martinetti quoted Brackett as saying, “I loved him, and Jimmy loved me. If it was a father-son relationship, it was also somewhat incestuous.”
Regardless, according to Colavito, Brackett continued to support Dean even after the actor moved to New York in 1951, paying $450 for Dean’s hotel bills and giving him more than $700 in gifts and loans.
The two drifted apart in the years that followed as Dean’s star began to rise. But, Colavito says, in the weeks leading up to the premiere of East of Eden, Brackett, then short on cash, asked Dean to repay the money he’d spent on the actor when he’d moved to New York. According to Colavito, Dean had come to view his relationship with Brackett as exploitative, and told the older man “I didn’t know it was the w***e who paid — I thought it was the other way around.”
Brackett eventually sent a formal legal demand for Dean to repay him $1,200, which he characterized as a “loan.”
“Implicit in the correspondence and conversations between Brackett’s team and Dean’s is the threat that the suit might become public, which both Brackett and Dean knew would destroy Dean’s career,” Colavito told The Daily Mail.
With Brackett threatening to file suit, Dean agreed to pay back $800 in weekly installments and even got Warner Bros. to pay Brackett a “finder’s fee” to ensure his silence about their relationship.
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