A Surprising Photo Find

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. William Bast, Dean’s roommate, friend, lover, and biographer, described Brackett as a “foppish,” sunburned, bitchy “queen.” He said, not wholly inaccurately, but somewhat unkindly, that his face looked like a bird’s and that his neck was too long for his body. Liz Sheridan, Dean’s onetime live-in girlfriend, described him as a woman made up to look like man and complained that his hair, clothes, and body were all artificially tinted the same shade of beige. Dean, in his less kind moods, after their breakup, depicted Brackett as a reptile in human form.

I always had a bit of trouble squaring that with Ed Sullivan’s depiction of Brackett in Modern Screen magazine in 1946, where the future variety show host called Brackett “one of the drollest and most charming characters ever turned loose in radio” with “a deceptively grave face and low-keyed voice.” Sullivan worked on Vox Pop with Brackett for two summers, and he depicted Brackett as a comedian whose charm and humor kept the entire radio show in “such hilarity” that the staff were in “high spirits” all the time. Similarly, the composer Alec Wilder, one of Brackett’s closest friends in the 1940s and 1950s, left accounts of Brackett as brilliant, witty, and the light of his life.

In no way would I claim Rogers Brackett was a good person. According to posthumous accounts, he had a penchant for what one might delicately term barely legal boys. He took a transactional view of sex. As regular readers know, he also blackmailed Dean for cash to fund a doomed opera he was producing, under the implied threat of causing a homosexual scandal only weeks before Dean’s first film, East of Eden, was to open. He accepted a payoff from Warner Bros. (in the guise of a “finder’s fee”) to go away forever. He was a bit of a kook obsessed with Fortean phenomena and the paranormal. He retired to a life as a restauranteur in Los Angeles, where he claimed the ghosts of children haunted his establishment.

But it is interesting to see the actual face of someone who elicited so many contradictory impressions.