"Slimy Insinuations"

Examining one of the first tabloid stories attacking the rumors James Dean was queer.

Recently, I acquired a copy of David Dalton’s 1991 anthology of tabloid stories about James Dean, James Dean Revealed!, mostly so I could read the ridiculous tabloid fodder published posthumously about Dean’s supernatural shenanigans, from ghostly appearances to posthumous sex romps to cursed objects. That was fun and mostly what I already knew from excerpts and summaries, but I discovered something in a 1957 Rave magazine article that surprised me—and at this point, I’ve seen, heard, or read just about everything.

The piece in question, “I Was a Friend of Jimmy Dean,” was a tell-all by pinup girl Lynne Carter relating what she claimed to be a two-year relationship with Dean, accompanied by ludicrous cheesecake photos of the scantily clad Carter. As for the claims Carter makes, they are impossible to evaluate. There is no independent evidence of her involvement with Dean. Some of her claims have the ring of truth, particularly when she alleged that Dean called her “infantile” and told her she needed to read more books. Some of her claims seem chronologically dicey, such as her allegation that Dean told her about his work on Giant during a visit to New York before the premiere of East of Eden. Dean wasn’t cast in Giant until March 1955 and the movie premiered on March 9 in New York City. A follow-up article, “I Learned about Love from Jimmy Dean,” made plain that Carter was familiar with William Bast’s 1956 Dean biography, and little in her first article couldn’t have been constructed from facts taken from the book and riffs on stories related in it. At the same time, it could also speak to Dean’s consistently awkward attempts at friendship and dating.

With no way to confirm Carter’s claims, it’s no wonder biographers of Dean have almost universally rejected her story, consigning it alongside the other women who suddenly sprouted relationships with Dean after he had died.

But that wasn’t the interesting part of the article. The interesting part is what Carter claimed to be responding to, namely rumors about Dean being queer:

We had much to talk about that evening. He lay on my bed and answered all my questions about Hollywood. He said he found Hollywood women “dumb” and that I was not to feel alone in warding off “makers.” It seems a noted producer was discussing a movie with Jimmy and, after attempting to fill him with liquor, made a play for him. To use Jimmy’s own words, his reply was “Man, this is where I cut out.”

As for the slimy insinuations that Jimmy himself was a sex pervert because he frequented certain Greenwich Village hangouts, I find them ridiculous and unfounded. He never felt it was right to openly judge any one person or thing. He accepted people on the basis of their character and not their color or class.

The first paragraph is entirely in keeping with stories Dean told, though they were not reported until many years later. It’s possible that it was constructed from William Bast’s expurgated passage about Dean “dancing” for producers from his biography. Half a century later, Bast offered an unexpurgated text and related a remarkably similar story about a television producer plying Dean with drinks and asking to give Dean a blow job, but in Bast’s telling, Dean felt he had to let the producer blow him. Nevertheless, several of Dean’s friends wrote in their own memoirs that he had told them edited versions of the story closer to Carter’s. Whatever the truth of Carter’s claims, she apparently was aware of actual rumors. (I almost wrote “oral accounts,” but thought better of the accidental pun.)

The second paragraph is the surprising one. Carter confirms that widespread rumors already existed in 1956 (her piece ran in Rave’s January 1957 issue, on sale in December 1956) about Dean being a “sex pervert.” In the 1950s, “sex pervert” could have a range of meanings, including pedophilia, but was generally used to refer to homosexuals. For example, the U.S. government referred to “homosexuals and other sex perverts” and used “perverts” as synecdoche for homosexuals. A hearing before the United States Congress referred to “fags, fairies, pansies, and other sex perverts.” Magazines, similarly, used “pervert,” “homosexual,” and “faggot” interchangeably.

“Exposed” magazine’s report on queers in Greenwich Village.

The reference to “certain Greenwich Village hangouts” almost certainly refers to gay bars. Greenwich Village had long been New York’s center of gay life, with a number of Mafia-protected gay bars operating in opposition to New York’s strict use of alcohol enforcement to close most gay bars. In 1956, Exposed magazine ran an exposé on Greenwich Villages gay bars, laughing at the “raucous giggles of prancing male sex-deviates,” the “female impersonators,” and all the “penniless perverts” being queer in the neighborhood. The magazine lamented how easy it was to make money there with a “dimly-lighted joint catering to homosexuals.” Three dozen bars for “the gay crowd” filled the “U.S. capital of sex deviation and perversion.”

Anyway, you get the idea. In context, Carter was quite clearly referring to rumors that Dean was queer and attempting to rebut them. This rather remarkable passage was, as best I can tell, discussed only once in the whole literature on James Dean, in Michael DeAngelis’s 2001 book Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom—a book, weirdly, about gay fans of Dean, Mel Gibson (!), and Keanu Reeves. DeAngelis correctly notes the homosexual implications but is more concerned about how gay fans used this text to construct a “heroic,” accepting James Dean to advocate for them.

On the other hand, I am much more amazed that the claim made it into print in 1956, since the standard biographical information claims that the first printed reference was Royston Ellis’s little-read 1962 British biography Rebel (calling Dean a “bisexual psychopath”) and then not again until the mid-1970s. Carter’s reference makes plain that the rumors were widespread in the year after Dean’s death, enough so that they could be referenced in a popular magazine. I wonder if these rumors, presumably passed by word-of-mouth (I’m still trying to avoid “orally”) were the impetus behind the bevy of increasingly absurd claims from women who told magazines they had been Dean’s secret—and very heterosexual—lovers. These stories read retrospectively like preemptive counterclaims to stories that never quite made it into the mainstream.