“It would not have helped either of us”

Exploring the origins of the claim James Dean was sexually abused by a minister.

I think I solved a puzzle. The recent publication of Kate Anderson Brower’s new biography of Elizabeth Taylor prompted me to revisit Taylor’s long-secret description of what James Dean confessed to her privately while shooting Giant in 1955. Brower’s book offered nothing new—just previously published quotes, presented uncritically—but in thinking about it, I may have untangled a confusing thread.

Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean on the set of Giant

The difficulty stems from a passage in New York Herald Tribune Hollywood correspondent Joe Hyams’s 1992 biography James Dean: Little Boy Lost. In it, Hyams, who described himself as Dean’s close friend (though really more of a useful acquaintance), claimed that Dean had been sexually abused by a much older friend, the Rev. James DeWeerd, a somewhat prissy future religious TV show host who was well-known for enjoying the (apparently platonic) company of teenaged boys, often shirtless. Anyway, here is what Hyams wrote; I will add numbers to the paragraphs to make discussing it easier:

[1] A year after Jimmy’s death, Dr. DeWeerd told me how he and Jimmy often went for long rides in the country in his convertible. During one of those drives, DeWeerd turned off the main road and parked under a tree. He had rarely talked with Jimmy about his wartime adventures, but on this day he told Jimmy how he had gotten the gaping wound in his stomach. He then asked Jimmy if he would like to put his hand inside the wound, which was almost deep enough for the boy’s entire fist. The intimacy frightened and excited Jimmy.

[2] To DeWeerd, Jimmy poured out his belief that he must be evil, or his mother would not have died and his father would not have sent him away. Jimmy confided that he was afraid that people would suspect how evil he was and not love him. DeWeerd confirmed Jimmy’s beliefs. “I taught Jim that he was depraved and vile, that he had to seek salvation,” DeWeerd said. And who better to offer salvation than the pastor himself?

[3] On other drives there were more personal intimacies, and soon they had a secret bond that Jimmy was warned he must never reveal. It was the beginning of a homosexual relationship that would endure over many years, during which time DeWeerd came to consider Jimmy his protege. “Jimmy never mentioned our relationship nor did I,” the pastor told me. “It would not have helped either of us.”

[4] Forty-five years ago it would have been essentially impossible for a male in this country to grow up without feeling that any kind of homosexual contact was sinful or sick, in addition to being illegal. I can only imagine the mixed message Jimmy must have received when he was seduced by a religious person, a man above moral reproach. Some youngsters would have been so terrified of homosexual contact that they would have hit or run away from the pastor. There are others who would not have been overawed by their mentor, and would have said they didn’t want anything to do with him. But Jimmy did neither of these things, presumably because he didn’t have that strong an inhibition against male-male contact based on his acceptance of the pastor’s philosophy that new experiences contribute to mental growth. And, of course, DeWeerd was only confirming what Jimmy had suspected about himself all along—that he was basically evil, for otherwise his mother would never have left him.

Most later writers assert that Hyams claimed DeWeerd had confessed to sexually abusing Dean, a claim subsequent biographers rejected until 2011, and they accused Hyams of fabricating the interview. But I have always had a problem with that because Hyams doesn’t exactly say that. We can dismiss paragraph 4 immediately because it is merely Hyams’s opinion and analysis. Paragraph 2 is indisputably true, having been previously published in Hyams’s 1956 Redbook feature on Dean and including claims DeWeerd repeated many times. Paragraph 1 strikes me as likely something DeWeerd actually said, but it is mixed with Hyams’s conclusions about sexual abuse that probably colored his description, especially in that last sentence.

That leaves the third paragraph, which most later writers assume is entirely a paraphrase of Hyams’s 1956 interview with DeWeerd. But I think Hyams pulled a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand. He was a newspaper reporter and war correspondent, trained in hard news, and it’s hard to imagine him fabricating quotations—but it is easy to imagine him conflating context because he did it a lot. To that end, it is entirely likely DeWeerd said the bit about a relationship but didn’t mean it sexually. Other testimony, too lengthy to get into here, demonstrates that DeWeerd did indeed believe it impolitic to publicize knowing Dean while he was alive, since a friendship between a bad-boy actor and a national religious broadcaster was bad PR for both. DeWeerd did not speak about Dean until Dean died and was sanctified.

The issue, then, is whether Hyams was uncritically transcribing a source or weaving multiple sources. To answer that reasonably, we need to evaluate not the specific claim but Hyams’s writing style. I am not aware of any author who has done so; therefore, you’ll just have to take my word for it: After pulling apart his sourcing throughout the book, it is quite obvious to me that his pattern was to gather information from various sources, develop a narrative from it, and support it with quotations from different interviews. The connecting tissue was often Hyams’s own conclusion, not any one source’s claim. As his novelistic Redbook piece made plain, he also had a penchant for imagining how James Dean felt (“A choking sensation crept into his throat. His mind hurled questions at the tombstone. Why did you die and leave me?”) and presenting that imaginary inner monologue as fact. And, most importantly, he was always cagey about sources, as was any gossip columnist, and only a careful analysis shows where he alternates between sources. This is sometimes noticeable in instances where he runs together facts only different people could know, or where the same person’s recollected dialogue shifts from sympathetic to unsympathetic as the unnamed informants silently change.

Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean on the set of Giant

Because of those practices, we can’t assume anything without direct attribution comes from a source named before or after. So, where else might Hyams have gotten the notion? I think it might have been from Elizabeth Taylor. Hyams himself hints at it, quoting a conversation he had with Taylor about the subject in which Taylor alluded to what Dean told her:

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.

Here, though, in this undated quote, probably from around 1956, Taylor is being intentionally obscure. When she spoke of it again in her 1965 autobiography, she was more explicit:

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.

The minister is obviously the Rev. DeWeerd, the only important one in his life. Taylor spoke of it one more time, in a 1997 interview withheld until her 2011 death:

I loved Jimmy. I’m going to tell you something, but it’s off the record until I die. OK? When Jimmy was 11 and his mother passed away, he began to be molested by his minister. I think that haunted him the rest of his life. In fact, I know it did. We talked about it a lot. During Giant we’d stay up nights and talk and talk, and that was one of the things he confessed to me.

At forty years’ remove, her memory of details was fading, and the chronology she offered is mixed up. Dean’s involvement with DeWeerd encompassed 1948 and a few months on either side, when he was around seventeen. But in the context of her other statements, it’s clear she’s referring in a somewhat confused way to DeWeerd and not some separate event.

For reasons that are beyond my interest and therefore my investigation, biographers and journalists have little or nothing to say about Hyams’s relationship with Taylor. Yet across the literature on Taylor, his name surfaces again and again as a gossip columnist who served as a mouthpiece for her, often to hit back at rival gossips. He was close friends with the pianist Oscar Levant, as was she, and they socialized together, sometimes with James Dean. But the most important information came to me from William Bast, James Dean’s friend and first biographer, who reported in his 2006 memoir that Taylor and Hyams had grown close in the aftermath of Dean’s death, both claiming to be his closest friend. In 1956, Hyams gave Taylor a copy of The Little Prince that Dean had inscribed, which Hyams had stolen from Dean’s apartment shortly after his death. Hyams intended it as a “gesture of kindness” in memory of their shared grief, and the context of his writings that followed implies heavily that they shared their secret gossip about Dean, with the understanding that such allegations were unprintable in 1956—and Taylor obviously did not want her name on them while she lived.

This, then, neatly solves the puzzle and explains all of the various claims without accusing anyone of lying. Hyams was, in my opinion, reporting what he learned from Taylor about the story Dean told of being molested.

Was that story true? That is unknowable. Dean lied a lot, but my feeling is that it’s true. Despite biographers’ and memoirists’ dismissive attitudes—people in those days thought abuse can’t happen to boys, who must have wanted it—they all quote Dean describing older men sexually abusing him in some form or another, and that isn’t really the kind of thing a man in 1955 proudly discussed. So, when you strip away midcentury’s grotesque sexual attitudes, what’s left seems to tell a consistent story.