Is That Really Le Point You Want to Make?

A French newsmagazine offers thoughtful coverage of "Jimmy," with one odd claim.

This weekend, Le Point, one of France’s most important newsmagazines, published a lengthy feature about my book, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean. Overall, it was a thoughtful overview of my book and James Dean’s life and legacy. The piece begins, in English translation, this way:

The actor, who died in 1955 at the age of 24, has survived the decades, even more than Marlon Brando, because he was able to offer on screen an incredible alchemy of everything that forged the classic adolescent imagery: the desire to be saved and the rebellion against parental conformism, idealism and rage, pure narcissism and doubts, sexual hesitations. He develops nothing masculine. In his three films, Dean is stuck in love triangles, first between Richard Davalos and Juliette Harris in East of Eden, then between Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause, and finally between Liz Taylor and Rock Hudson in Giant.

While mostly the piece is a fair assessment of my work (though the quotes attributed to me follow the French style of being more approximate than literal), I do want to take a moment to discuss the comments from the piece’s author, Aurélie Raya, and journalist Olivier Rajchman near the end of the article. Raya begins the penultimate paragraph by asserting that my book labels James Dean as gay:

This publication placed James Dean in the gay camp, but nothing is so clear-cut: “Factions clash and try to appropriate one actor or another. No one supports bisexuality. What is true for Dean is true for Cary Grant, who died in 1986. Several women were his companions and testify strongly to his vigor. Sophia Loren rejected him, and he had a secret affair with a Yugoslav sportswoman during the filming of North by Northwest. Grant was homosexual in Edwardian England, and he was then bisexual before becoming heterosexual in the second half of his life. The writer John Gilmore, a friend of Dean, assures us that the latter took what he needed from his partners of both sexes and was quick to abandon them before they abandoned him,” insists Olivier Rajchman.

The end of the article makes it sound as though I were unfair to Dean and that I had overlooked important facts. However, Rajchman must know that the sources he is using are themselves heavily biased and not entirely reliable.

James Dean in “Rebel without a Cause”

First, I open my book by very directly laying out that we cannot assign a label to James Dean: “Dean had sexual relationships with both women and men, but his family, friends, and colleagues all came to different conclusions about what, if anything, these relationships meant to him. […] There is no way for us to peer inside a dead man’s heart, and debat­ing whether he would today have labeled himself gay, bisexual, heteroflex­ible, homoflexible, demisexual, queer, or something else is both irrelevant and ahistorical.”

Rajchman quote begins with a line about sexual factions claiming actors that comes directly from Scott Eyman’s recent biography of Cary Grant. I won’t belabor the point, but I quoted the line in my own piece about Cary Grant, and Rajchman goes on to level the same criticism that I made in my own post about Eyman failing to recognize bisexuality, a criticism that is unique to me. The claim about Cary Grant transitioning from gay to bi to straight is not an incontrovertible fact; Rajchman is instead quoting a line that Grant’s pool boy, Bill Royce, told Eyman—a line I highlighted in the same blog post in the next paragraph. Far from being a criticism of my omissions, this is in fact my own work in someone else’s mouth. How much credence you give Royce—who claimed to have had an “involuntary pelvic response” in Grant’s presence, leading Grant to confess his sexual journey to him—depends on how much you value a story told forty years after the fact.

The line from Gilmore is indeed something Gilmore wrote, but as I point out in my book, Gilmore is a highly problematic source. Much of what he wrote is unsupported by evidence. Even though I used him sparingly in my book for incidents that seem most likely to have been true, it was evident to me, as I duly noted, that he seems to have made a lot of stuff up.

It’s rather odd that Rajchman echoes me almost word for word since he seems to imply that he imagines Dean “evolving” into a heterosexual: “There are truths in an ocean of fantasies. […] In the United States, you can write anything, but not in France. That said, the only one about whom I have never read an insinuation of this kind is Kirk Douglas. Dean died at 24, when he was going out with Ursula Andress. He could have evolved.”

I think I was rather clear in my Cary Grant blog post that this idea of “evolution” is merely modern projection from people afraid of queer sexuality:

It simply is not possible to inhabit another person’s heart and to know what they felt and how they processed those feelings internally. It’s doubly difficult to translate what we do know about people from the middle twentieth century into a twenty-first century idiom. Cary Grant, for example, might well have performed “homosexual acts” without thinking of himself as “a homosexual” because he was also attracted to women. The compartmentalized minds of previous generations, which too often could not conceive of same-sex romance or of bisexuality, often divorced physical acts and emotions, or even, as was typical among British men according to extant literature, made a distinction that only anal-receptive “passive” sex was truly a homosexual act. In other words, it’s a lot more complicated that simply assigning a historical personage to one of the dozens of contemporary LGBTQ+ sexualities.