No, James Dean Was Not Marlon Brando's Sex Slave

There is no reason for the media to keep repeating Darwin Porter's and Danforth Prince's wild--and untrue--claims.

Marlon Brando (second from left) and James Dean (center)

I recently came across yet another article asking if James Dean had been Marlon Brando’s “sex slave.” This particular piece appeared in a French publication, but its origin was the same as every other, the fabricated 2016 biography James Dean: Tomorrow Never Comes by serial fabulists Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince. The massive tome—it stretches over 700 pages—is chock-a-block with unprovable claims dubiously sourced to unrecorded secret interviews with the dead. Indeed, the book opens with a note stating that the authors followed Truman Capote’s example in making up dialogue, citing the New York Times for proof that using “conversational storytelling” for “engaging reading” is “an acceptable literary device.” (That’s a lie, too: The story Prince quotes from doesn’t claim to justify unacknowledged fabrication.) Nevertheless, since this particular claim refuses to die, it’s probably worth explaining exactly how the two authors fabricated the claim from unrelated elements of the historical records.

Note the line about “honoring” James Dean’s “violent” death.

The account Porter and Prince provide is a mess, frankly, a hodgepodge of jumbled thoughts and ahistorical fantasies barely strung together with a narrative. Much of it is made up of irrelevancies seemingly designed just to take up space and repeats material verbatim from the pair’s unreliable 2006 biography Brando Unzipped. The allegations proper start on page 314, in which the authors falsely claim (in material lifted from Unzipped) that Marlon Brando made an appearance at the Actors Studio while James Dean was studying there. They then quote a lengthy conversation the pair had in which Brando allegedly flirts with and seduces Dean with a kiss. The source they give is Robert Lewis, a television director who died in 1997, nine years before the pair reported what the octogenarian supposedly confessed to them in astonishingly specific detail. On page 316, Prince and Porter claim that Brando lied about when he met Dean. They cite otherwise nonexistent testimonials from Alec Wilder, Stanley Haggart, Tennessee Williams, and Frank Merlo—all dead.

This claim rests on a response to East of Eden that Brando gave to Modern Screen in their October 1955 issue: “Jim and I worked together at the Actors’ Studio in New York and I have great respect for his talent. However, in that film, Mr. Dean appears to be wearing my last year’s wardrobe and using my last year’s talent.” Despite the cover date, the issue was actually sold in late August or early September 1955, with articles written sometime in the early summer of 1955, while Dean was still alive. Here, Brando was telling a bit of a white lie in order to hew to the Warner Bros. studio line that Dean was a distinguished student of the Actors Studio. For example, in the New York Times on March 13, 1955, Howard Thompson wrote that “For what he learned at the Actors Studio […] Dean pointedly credits director Lee Strasberg. ‘an incredible man.’” In reality, Dean had attended only a couple of classes before Strasberg so offended him that he left and did not return. Brando was fudging the fact that while both he and Dean worked at the Actors Studio, they were not there at the same time. Later, in his autobiography Brando stated what Dean himself had said, that they met at Elia Kazan’s instigation on the set of East of Eden in 1954. Our authors claim this is a lie, but they offer no verifiable facts, only otherwise unrecorded testimony from long-dead people, allegedly told to them anywhere from thirty to fifty years prior.

Porter and Prince also claim that Dean’s former lover, Rogers Brackett, told them in detail about Dean’s affair with Brando, after Dean gave him a full account of Brando’s aggressively dominant style of what the authors refer to as sodomy. This includes Brackett claiming to have seen cigarette burns on Dean’s chest: “Jimmy told me that they were from cigarette burns by Brando. I was practically ready to call the police on this brutal son-of-a-bitch until Jimmy told me that he’d asked Brando to do that to him.” They also quote composer Alec Wilder as saying Dean confessed to him his love for Brando. “I really believe that Jimmy fell in love with Brando that year. As for Brando, I don’t think he ever loved Jimmy. […] In my opinion, Jimmy was in love with Brando.”

According to the authors, this took place in 1952-1953, but this is a difficult allegation to sustain. Dean had separated from Brackett in early 1952, though the break was not complete. Nevertheless, his activities in these months left little time to be in an S&M relationship with Brando, since he was then living with Elizabeth “Dizzy” Sheridan, who definitely noticed the nights he slipped out to meet with Rogers Brackett but somehow missed the daily S&M sessions with Brando. Brackett gave only one known interview about Dean before his death, to Ronald Martinetti back in the 1970s, and there is no record of him speaking to our authors, nor have they provided confirming evidence, such as the photographs Martinetti took with Brackett to document his own interview with the reclusive former advertising executive. Alec Wilder’s apocryphal quotation closely echoes wording Martinetti uses in his 1975 Dean biography in quoting Brackett on his and Dean’s relationship, though in that case Brackett was the besotted and Dean the more ambiguous party.

The cigarette allegation comes from Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon II (1984), expanding on a claim first made in his Hollywood Babylone (1959):

Dean had taken to hanging out at the Club, an East Hollywood leather bar. The predatory night prowler, who dug anonymous sex, had recently discovered the magic world of S and M. He had gotten into beating, boots, belts, and bondage scenes. Regulars at the Club tagged him with a singular moniker: the Human Ashtray. When stoned, he would bare his chest and beg for his masters to stub out their butts on it. After his fatal car crash, the coroner made note of the "constellation of keratoid scars'' on Jimmy's torso.

Anger’s claims are false, but analyzing them would take a whole article of their own. The important thing to note is that Anger definitively places this alleged event in 1955 and states that it was a “recent” development. Therefore, Anger does not support Porter and Prince’s claim that Dean and Brando engaged in cigarette burning pain play in 1952.

Prince and Porter are obviously cribbing here from Venable Herndon’s 1974 Dean biography, where Herndon excerpted from the 1959 Anger book without specifying the date and then claimed that Dean engaged in extreme fisting activities as a male prostitute at a gay S&M club in the fall of 1951. Herndon’s source was “oral history at some of the leather-and-chain bars,” and even he doubted the rumors’ veracity.

As a point of fact, the first gay leather bar opened in 1958, in Chicago, and anthropologist Gayle Rubin argued that fisting was only invented in the 1960s. At any rate, it wasn’t commonly practiced by gay men until the 1970s.

The connection between this and Brando comes from a passage in Joe Hyams’s 1992 biography James Dean: Little Boy Lost in which actress Arlene Sax claimed, preposterously, that she listened in 1952 as a “male star” and “idol” of Dean’s spoke with him by phone and requested anal sex. While the conversation may well have occurred (it aligns with other testimonials about aggressive gay admirers), it was not with the implied Marlon Brando, who attested that he had never spoken to Dean by phone. (Dean’s calls to Brando all went to his answering service.) If it occurred, it was almost certainly with a member of Brackett’s circle of gay friends, which included some Broadway players, who were, by every account, gross sex pests. Sax, however, is unreliable. Her account is full of obvious fabrication (she inserts herself as the protagonist in an anecdote borrowed verbatim from a previously published book) and out-of-character detail, such as her claim Dean, who was deeply conflicted about same-sex encounters and refused to speak of them even to his closest friends, somehow discussed with her, whom he had just met, the pain he experienced after having anal sex with the supposed star.

The authors offer a lengthy page-long “quotation” from Brackett in which Brackett alleges that Dean would only return to him when Brando had gone too far, forcing Dean to watch him have sex with other people or leaving him to stand on the street in the cold while entertained paramours in his apartment. This is, of course, another claim unverifiable by evidence. It is, however, rooted in Dean’s actual habit of appearing at friends’ houses and standing or sitting silently to observe them.  

Marlon Brando and James Dean during the filming of “East of Eden.”

A great number of genuine quotations from various authors and actors comparing Dean and Brando as actors follow, interspersed with false quotations claiming Brando lied about not knowing Dean, before the authors pick up their sexual claims on page 325, briefly alleging that the two were part of a multipronged partner-swapping ring with a string of Dean’s girlfriends. This is based, in a crude way, on the established fact that many starlets were linked to one or both men in gossip columns of the era, often as part of planted publicity stories.

The chapter concludes with what the authors claim to be parts of Truman Capote’s 1957 New Yorker interview with Brando:

This glorifying of Dean is all wrong… he wasn’t a hero. He was just a little lost boy trying to find himself. If a documentary ever got made, it should teach the truth about Dean so that his fans will stop worshipping him. I would cooperate in a film that told the truth, but neither of the scripts did that. They were a fantasy version of Dean. I see clearly what was happening. A cult was forming around the faux memory of this kid. He was not some mythical hero, just another pathetic figure wandering the sewers of Hollywood. At times Dean was a madman with severe psychological problems. We should not glorify his insanity but expose it. In my view, Mr. James Dean should be placed in a back garage of long-abandoned vehicles.

However, the published account, in Capote’s “The Duke in His Domain” (New Yorker, Nov. 9, 1957), while hitting some of the same notes, is noticeably different:

“From a friend of mine. He’s making a documentary, the life of James Dean. He wants me to do the narration. I think I might. […] Maybe not, though. I get excited about something, but it never lasts more than seven minutes. Seven minutes exactly. That’s my limit. I never know why I get up in the morning. […] But I’m really considering this Dean thing. It could be important. […]

“No, Dean was never a friend of mine,” said Brando, in response to a question that he seemed surprised to have been asked. “That’s not why I may do the narration job. I hardly knew him. But he had an idée fixe about me. Whatever I did he did. He was always trying to get close to me. He used to call up.” Brando lifted an imaginary telephone, put it to his ear with a cunning, eavesdropper’s smile. “I’d listen to him talking to the answering service, asking for me, leaving messages. But I never spoke up. I never called him back. […] No, when I finally met Dean, […] it was at a party. Where he was throwing himself around, acting the madman. So I spoke to him. I took him aside and asked him didn’t he know he was sick? That he needed help?” The memory evoked an intensified version of Brando’s familiar look of enlightened compassion. “He listened to me. He knew he was sick. I gave him the name of an analyst, and he went. And at least his work improved. Toward the end, I think he was beginning to find his own way as an actor. But this glorifying of Dean is all wrong. That’s why I believe the documentary could be important. To show he wasn’t a hero; show what he really was—just a lost boy trying to find himself. That ought to be done, and I’d like to do it—maybe as a kind of expiation for some of my own sins. Like making ‘The Wild One.’”

The real New Yorker interview is less harsh. Porter and Prince have taken bits and pieces, remixing them, and translating Brando’s loose use of Freudian therapeutic language (“sick”) into a declaration not of neurosis but of insanity, and making Brando into a much more stringent critic of Dean’s fans, in keeping with the authors’ bitter dislike of their subject. But if they are willing to falsify so easily verified a text as a New Yorker article (also reprinted in a Capote essay collection), what possible credence are we to give to any of their other allegations?

In short, there is nothing of substance in the allegations found in Tomorrow Never Comes, and clearly lines of evidence for the many ways the authors constructed a false story around unrelated preexisting claims. Nevertheless, because nobody cares about facts or fact-checking, the S&M claim will nevertheless continue to be part of Hollywood folklore, or, rather, fakelore.