"Beatings, Boots, Belts and Bondage"
Uncovering a plausible source for Kenneth Anger's claims about James Dean's BDSM sex life.
Note: This post has been updated with material from the 1959 edition of Hollywood Babylon.
The late filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s reference in Hollywood Babylon (French ed. 1959, English trans. 1965), his scandalous (and scandalously inaccurate) collection of celebrity gossip, to James Dean’s alleged penchant for sadomasochistic sex has been extremely influential in shaping perceptions of Dean over the past six decades. However, no source for Anger’s claims has ever come to light, leading many to conclude that Anger fabricated the allegation from whole cloth. However, I think I found the most plausible point of origin for Anger’s allegations.
In the 1959 Hollywood Babylon, Anger wrote about gay men’s interest in James Dean:
The existence should also be noted of another cult of Dean, in the shadows: Jimmy was also mourned by the homosexual, who thought he recognized one of his own, and he was especially grieved by the Sadomasochistic Club, who affirmed that Jimmy obtained his enjoyment only with belts, blows of the riding crop and skillful cigarette burns: hence his nickname, the Ashtray of Flesh… (my trans.)
This was bastardized in the 1965 English edition, which spoke allusively of men who enjoyed S&M and would
“dig” sex assorted with beatings, boots, belts and bondage, like James Dean—spiced with knowing cigarette burns (which gave Jimmy his underground nickname: The Human Ashtray) . . . (ellipses in original)
From this brief allusion in the 1965 edition, Venable Hernon, a later Dean biographer, searched New York S&M clubs in the 1970s for evidence of Dean’s BDSM activities and heard from aging patrons that Dean had engaged in public fist-fucking and other extreme acts—a chronological impossibility, given that anthropologists believe fisting wasn’t invented until the 1960s and wasn’t popularized among gay men until the 1970s. Anger later drew on Herndon and other 1970s Dean biographies to expand his salacious profile of James Dean for 1984’s Hollywood Babylon II, but as that information is entirely derivative, we can ignore it.
Dean biographer David Dalton wrote that Anger, who was gay and had a crush on Dean, had “created” the story from a “rumor” and quoted Dean’s friend and onetime lover Bill Bast on what he considered the origin of the story:
“Kenneth Anger wishes that Jimmy Dean would have put out cigarettes on his body,” Bill said. “It’s not that Jimmy was above, shall we say, game-playing, but I can’t see Jimmy sitting still for something like that. It’s a little out of character. If Jimmy had idiosyncrasies, and he did, I’m afraid they were much more conventional.
“Jimmy made a drawing once of a human ashtray; I suppose that’s where the story got started. He was always making nasty drawings . . . He smoked too much and so did I, and in the morning our apartment was always like the black hole of Calcutta. We woke up to the stench of cigarettes and ashtrays. So Jimmy drew a picture of an ashtray and up out of the center is the head, arms and torso of a man. Jimmy called it the ‘Human Ashtray.’ Through the head there was a hole and the cigarette would rest in his mouth.”
It also seems possible that the cigarette burn story derives from an anecdote about Dean sitting motionless when a fireplace grate fell over on him, giving him a bad burn. He allegedly said that he had decided that physical pain would not bother him, so he had ignored it. The anecdote appeared in Royston Ellis’s 1961 Dean biography Rebel, from an earlier source.
But neither of these sources connects to BDSM. That part of the story has never been satisfactorily explained. However, I learned that Anger was friends with a gay composer named Ned Rorem, who later won the Pulitzer Prize. Rorem lived in New York in the spring of 1956 and then left for France. The two were close friends that year in Paris where they went out drinking together and dined together. James Dean was one of Anger’s objects of interest around this time, and it turns out that Rorem was part of a circle of gay men in New York who were also fascinated by James Dean.
In his diary for the spring of 1956, Rorem discusses a conversation he had with fellow gay composer William Flanagan about BDSM and James Dean, inspired by the March 1956 publication in Poetry of a rather maudlin ode to James Dean by their mutual friend, the poet Frank O’Hara, who was obsessed with Dean. Their group of friends were divided, with Rorem heading up the faction that loved the poem and also loved Dean, and the bisexual public intellectual Paul Goodman heading up the faction that found the poem and Dean unworthy of adulation.
In his diary, Rorem writes of the scene when he arrived back in New York around the time the poem was published, a time when Rorem lamented that young gay men had stopped becoming drag queens to instead imitate James Dean:
America, the new compulsion—male impersonation. In his mépris [= contempt] of women a young man refuses to caricature them; he becomes instead a male impersonator by affecting leather and dungarees (male symbols, it seems). He attends S. & M. meetings (i.e., sadomasochist or slave-master) where truly gory doings are rumored. Yet, when I question Bill Flanagan about the details, the Third Avenue bartender, overhearing, intrudes: “Don’t kid yourself—they just hit each other with a lot of wet Kleenex!” Perhaps it’s in mimicry of divine James Dean (already immortalized by our Frank O’Hara); still, it’s a cause and not an effect: James Dean would not have existed without them.
Third Avenue, you should know, was the location of a famous cluster of gay bars at the time. Known as “the Bird Circuit” after the avian names of several gay bars, it was one of the preferred cruising locations where O’Hara and his friends would pick up young men for sex. The other was Greenwich Village, where Rave magazine said in 1957 that “slimy insinuations” held that Dean visited bars for “perverted” sex. There is no doubt that Dean was familiar with gay bars; Bill Bast wrote of Dean’s knowledge of them.
Rorem’s conviction that Dean owed a debt to the cluster of young gay men who affected hyper-masculine attitudes is quite close to gossip columnist Joe Hyams’s claim in Redbook that same year that Dean “was sought by homosexuals,” who had shaped his persona and Gene Ringgold’s 1964 lament that “a street-corner clan of homosexual would-be actors” had exercised undue influence over Dean.
At any rate, Rorem’s diary entry links BDSM to Dean, and while I obviously can’t prove Rorem is Anger’s source (both men died recently), it seems plausible that Rorem and Anger discussed this and Anger garbled Rorem’s rather theoretical argument about Dean’s allegedly affected masculinity into a straight-up love of BDSM. This is probably as close as we will get to the real source of Anger’s far-too-influential offhand comment.
Afterward, when Venable Herndon tried to confirm Anger’s story, it seems plausible that genuine memories of James Dean visiting gay bars (perhaps even some with early BDSM clubs) merged over time with memories of the Dean-influenced gay BDSM scene (many gay bars of the 1960s decorated with photos of Dean, and one in San Francisco had a statue of a leather-man modeled on Dean) and became conflated into the legends Herndon encountered in the 1970s.