"He Had Revealed so Much of Himself"

A trove of "lost" tapes provides the oldest known version of Elizabeth Taylor's oft-repeated story about James Dean's secret confession.

This weekend, HBO and Max debuted a new documentary, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, culled from forty hours of interview recordings that Elizabeth Taylor recorded with Life magazine journalist Richard Meryman in 1964. Much of the material in the recordings had previously been transcribed into Taylor’s book, Elizabeth Taylor: An Intimate Memoir, a few months after the recordings were made. However, the printed version had been cleaned up significantly and a great deal of material, under the agreement Taylor had with Meryman, had been redacted. One of the segments Taylor required to be omitted was a discussion of James Dean.

Meryman died in 2015, with tapes allegedly having sat in his attic since he finished ghostwriting Taylor’s memoir. Meryman’s widow found the tapes and donated them to the Taylor estate, which cooperated with filmmakers in producing the documentary.

Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean during the filming of “Giant.”

Part of Taylor’s comments about James Dean, specifically about his death, appeared nearly verbatim in Intimate Memoir. The part that she did not want included revolved around late-night conversation she had with Dean during the filming of Giant in the summer of 1955:

Sometimes Jimmy and I would stay up until like three o’clock in the morning talking. He would tell me about some of the grief and unhappiness in his life and some of his loves and tragedies. And the next day on the set, I’d say, “Hi, Jimmy,” and it was almost as if he didn’t want to sort of recognize that he had revealed so much of himself the night before, and it would just be a cursory nod of the head, and it would take maybe a day or two for him to become my friend again.

This is not a new revelation, but it nevertheless came as a surprise to me because almost these exact words appear in gossip columnist Joe Hyams’s 1992 James Dean biography, James Dean: Little Boy Lost, presumably from an interview Taylor gave to Hyams sometime after Dean’s death. Indeed, Taylor’s words are so similar in the Meryman and Hyams versions that when I first heard the recording, I thought they were one and the same:

He would tell me about his past life, some of the grief and unhappiness he had experienced, and some of his loves and tragedies. Then, the next day on the set, I would say, “Hi, Jimmy,” and he would give me a cursory nod of his head. It was almost as if he didn’t want to recognize me, as if he was ashamed of having revealed so much of himself the night before. It would take maybe a day or two for him to become my friend again.

Taylor also told the story a third way in an undated interview that was reprinted without citation in Randall Riese’s Unabridged James Dean.

We had an extraordinary friendship. We would sometimes sit up until three in the morning, and he would tell me about his past, his mother, minister, his loves, and the next day he would just look straight through me as if he’d given away or revealed too much of himself. It would take, after one of these sessions, maybe a couple of days before we’d be back on friendship terms. He was very afraid to give of himself.

And here she is again, quoted by Donald Spoto in his 1995 Taylor biography. Although no source is given, it’s from the 1985 documentary George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey, as Spoto later acknowledged when reusing the lines in his 1996 Dean biography:

Sometimes Jimmy and I would sit up until three in the morning talking, and he would tell me about his past life, his conflicts and some of his loves and tragedies. And the next day it was almost as if he didn’t want to recognize me, or to remember that he had revealed so much of himself the night before. And so he would pass me and ignore me, or just give me a cursory nod of the head. And then it took him a day or two to become my friend again. I found all that hard to understand.

The consistency of the story from one interview to the next over many decades is remarkable. Clearly, she had memorized a polished chestnut to give reporters, but I don’t think I could use nearly the same words three or four decades apart. The most interesting elements are the differences, especially when Taylor ties Dean’s minister, the Rev. James DeWeerd, to the revelations Dean offered, a weird (if you will forgive the pun) detail that only really makes sense in light of Hyams’s report that DeWeerd had molested Dean as a child. Otherwise, what “grief” or “tragedy” would this represent?

Even as late as 1997, when journalist Kevin Sessums interviewed Taylor and asked about Dean, you can see that she started to launch into this very well-practiced anecdote before stopping herself and going in a different direction, clearly dividing her on-the-record version from the secret, off-the-record one: “We used to sit up and . . . [pause] Off the record? He was eleven when his mother died. He was molested by his minister.” When read together, the slight differences in the various versions suggest more about what Dean confessed than we could otherwise glean from any one account.

All-in-all, the Meryman tapes offer nothing I didn’t already know about Elizabeth Taylor’s relationship with James Dean, but they do offer the oldest firmly dated version of Taylor’s oft-repeated story and testify to the astonishing consistency with which she told it over a lifetime.