Assessing Media Coverage of "Jimmy"

Six weeks after release, some shocking patterns have emerged in media coverage.

In my book Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean, I outlined some of the reactions that the media had to books and articles which reporting that James Dean had had sexual relationships with men as well as women. In 1957, Rave magazine condemned such claims as “slimy insinuations.” In 1964, Screen Facts angrily denounced the “street-corner clan of homosexual would-be actors” who had seduced Dean and “damned [him] to the slavery of their half-world hell.” Thirty years later, after a 1994 book called Dean gay, the feminist writer Molly Haskell wrote in the New York Times that any discussion of Dean’s homosexual relationships should “remain hidden,” complaining that any effort to treat the subject seriously was “arrant nonsense.” The producer of a 1995 Disney Channel documentary about Dean told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that Disney had ordered references to Dean’s same-sex relationships removed from the broadcast, and the man behind Warner Bros.’ failed 1995 Dean biopic, Marvin Worth, was quoted as saying he wanted to make a “good” movie, not one with gay stuff in it.

James Dean reading a magazine while Elizabeth Taylor naps.

This, of course, is merely a sampling of hundreds of negative media reactions from the twentieth century, a period that ended twenty-five years ago. This doesn’t even begin to cover the movies, books, and TV shows that simply refused to acknowledge it at all and instead depicted Dean as a robustly heterosexual figure. Today, though, we are supposedly in a freer, more open era where someone’s romantic or sexual pairings are no longer so shocking. That’s why I was so deeply surprised and shocked when the same reflexive media disapproval fell on my book. I didn’t think it would happen to me, not in this day and age. Dean has been dead for seventy years; what possible reason is there to be upset now?

Jimmy was published on November 19 and garnered headlines across the country and around the world because of its revelation of the legal claims Rogers Brackett made against James Dean after the end of their relationship. However, most of that news coverage came from right-wing media outlets, including Fox News, The New York Post, and The Daily Mail. As of this writing, not a single publication in the so-called “respectable” mainstream press has reviewed Jimmy or even mentioned it. (However, many gay-themed websites published brief notices of the Daily Mail article.) This is especially surprising because those publications published extensive coverage and reviews of my publisher’s other, smaller November books, including a biography of Shemp Howard (the fourth Stooge) and a discussion of the movie On the Waterfront, not to mention another publisher’s book by Julie Gilbert about forgotten author Edna Ferber’s involvement with the making of the James Dean movie Giant—a book that falsely claimed Dean had sex with the septuagenarian Feber, based on Gilbert’s fantasies. (Reviewers also cleaned up Gilbert’s book, strategically omitting from reviews the sex claim and other demonstrably false material.)

Now, obviously, no one is entitled to a book review, but this is an almost unprecedented situation for me. Even my minor books published by micro-publishers received timely reviews and notices. What are the chances that thirty or forty major publications would request review copies before publication and not one would consider it worthy of notice, especially when the book has newsworthy claims that received international media coverage in newspapers, magazines, websites, and television? Not even Publisher’s Weekly, which reviews almost everything, including my publisher’s other fall releases, deigned to review Jimmy. Two magazines that had planned coverage abruptly pulled out after receiving the book, and I doubt I am that bad a writer that editors would run in terror from my prose. My publisher and publicist can’t recall another book that made global headlines and received zero acknowledgement from the literary world, not even to condemn it.

The coverage I did receive offers some depressing clues. Closer magazine did a feature on Jimmy, and the celebrity-themed magazine went to great lengths to edit my interview with them and bowdlerize my book to remove most references to homosexuality. The story they published became a tale of James Dean’s love affair with Pier Angeli, while his much longer relationship with boyfriend Rogers Brackett had any romantic or sexual element removed, turning Brackett into Dean’s “roommate,” like it was still 1955. Worse, an Italian tabloid wrote a rather bitter piece about how homosexuality allegedly ruined James Dean after queers turned him gay. Just this week, the Romanian edition of OK!, the celebrity magazine, published a lengthy story evincing horror that Dean might not have been straight under a headline that claimed his status as a “sex symbol” had been destroyed by the revelation he had slept with men.

I suppose I should have expected this when global editions of Vogue published a piece a year ago decrying the “poisoned rumors” that Dean had slept with men and including several homophobic comments. I tried to insulate my book from those attitudes by rooting it in fact rather than rumor (guess I should have gone with septuagenarian orgies) and collecting contemporary documents to support every claim (again, I guess I should have just imagined some crazy fantasies).

A couple of years ago, a news anchor from one of the major broadcast networks told me that I would be better off writing a completely different book and sneaking my research into that one because, in the anchor’s opinion, no one in the media would ever touch that subject matter. I didn’t believe that was true, or, rather, I stupidly hoped that it wasn’t true and that we lived in a better world than that.

I remain heartened by the many lovely emails I’ve received from people across the country and around the world who have read the book, were moved by James Dean’s story, and wanted to let me know. Even the people who took issue with my conclusion and wrote letters of complaint conceded that I told a compelling story beautifully. And, ultimately, seeing my words help readers feel a connection to the past is worth more than any book review.