The Fix Is In

A credulous new biography of private eye Fred Otash makes some dubious claims about the detective's likely fictitious run-in with James Dean.

Now that The Fixer, Josh Young and Manfred Westphal’s biography of L.A. private eye and fabulist Fred Otash, is out, and its claims about James Dean the subject of a People magazine feature, I can add a new detail to the analysis I provided back in January of the many reasons Otash’s story about catching Dean shoplifting caviar at the Hollywood Ranch Market is a likely fake. Be sure to click the link and read through for the details. The short version is that Otash’s published claim is chronologically confused and reflects incorrect information about Dean that was popularly believed in the 1970s but not before or after.

My initial analysis was based on Otash’s 1976 book Investigation Hollywood!, which was ghostwritten for him, allegedly from his interviews and notes. Young and Westphal have collated the text with what they claim were transcripts of Otash’s field notes used in production of the book. But, in the case of Dean, this only made things worse. In his 1976 book, Otash seemingly placed the events in 1954 or 1955, a time when he knew and recognized Dean as a celebrity. We know this because Otash states that he knew Dean was “some kind of idol” and asserts that he was unwilling to charge Dean with shoplifting because “I don’t want to be the guy that killed Santa Claus,” meaning the person who tarnished Dean’s celebrity image. Dean wasn’t a well-known celebrity until the summer of 1954, when he was 23.

However, when collating Otash’s book with his working notes, Young and Westphal produced a different account. According to them, Otash began moonlighting at the Hollywood Ranch Market grocery store in 1950, during a 60-day suspension from the LAPD for gambling. They claim, somewhat incredulously, that within days he had revolutionized store security by installing five two-way mirrors to catch shoplifters, of which there many, and immediately caught James Dean:

Another was an unknown nineteen-year-old regular, a struggling hopeful named James Dean who always paid for his food until the day he decided to stash three cans of expensive caviar in his tattered bomber jacket. Not wanting to create a scene, Otash waited until Dean was outside the store. He walked over to him, put his arm around his shoulders like they were pals, and escorted him back to his office. Dean’s hands were shaking when Fred offered him a smoke before leaning back in his chair to give him the standard stare-down. As he let him sweat it a beat for good measure, Otash was impressed how Dean’s piercing blue eyes stared back at him unwavering.

The scanty notes to the chapter cite Investigation Hollywood! and Otash’s transcripts. The trouble, as the ghostwriter of the 1976 book must have realized in obscuring the dates, is that James Dean couldn’t have been a regular at the Hollywood Ranch Market in 1950.

James Dean at Santa Monica Junior College in 1950, age 19.

James Dean turned 19 in February 1950. At the time, he was living with his father and stepmother in Santa Monica, where he attended junior college. They fed him. After that, he spent the summer out of state counseling at a youth camp. Upon his return in the fall, he lived in a fraternity house near the UCLA campus for a semester, where he took meals with the brothers, before moving to an apartment, again in Santa Monica. There, he famously avoided buying groceries to save money and lived off cheap foodstuffs, such as a bizarre combination of oatmeal, jam, and mayonnaise. The idea that he would travel regularly to Hollywood to shop for food is ridiculous. (He did make occasional trips there by bus to look for work in 1950 and lived in the area from June to October 1951, when his boyfriend, Rogers Brackett, kept him fed at the best French restaurants.)

For what it’s worth, Dean never owned a “tattered bomber jacket.” He had a well-worn blue cloth coat in 1950, and he acquired a leather motorcycle jacket years later, which remained in good shape. And of course, Dean wasn’t yet a struggling actor during his college years.

James Dean with leather motorcycle jacket.

At any rate, Young and Westphal must recognize that Otash’s story isn’t literally true since they silently omit Otash’s 1976 claim to have recognized Dean as a celebrity and to have avoided charging him with shoplifting to protect his reputation. I presume that they are the ones who introduced the idea that Dea was nineteen in order to harmonize Otash’s original account, clearly occurring during Dean’s last L.A. residency and the period of his celebrity, with Otash’s work records, which they claim (they don’t share the proof) show him working at the market in 1950.

Young and Westphal, in The Fixer, offer no critical analysis of Otash’s files and no clear description of them. They make no attempt to separate fact from fiction. Instead, they have taken all the papers—which include genuine contemporary reports and much later drafts of memoirs, books, articles, and other attempts at breaking into the media—at face value. According to the notes, the Dean material in the files comes from an autobiographical transcript of an oral interview called “New in Hollywood.” In other words, it’s a story he told long after the fact—and probably made up.

The fact that Young and Westphal—the latter of whom describes the many ways he tried to monetize Otash’s files for TV or movies before settling on this book—did no fact-checking of Otash’s claims is telling. That Grand Central Publishing let them get away with it is disturbing.