When Was James Dean Drafted?
A review of James Dean's Selective Service records clears up decades of contradictions and confusion about his draft status.
When I wrote last week about James Dean’s alleged therapist (who probably wasn’t), I mentioned the issue of Dean’s draft summons and the conflicting views on when that occurred. When I was researching my book, I found an impossible array of opinions, including (a) it never happened, (b) he was drafted in spring 1951, (c) he was drafted in fall 1951, (d) he was drafted in fall 1952, (e) he was drafted in spring 1955, (f) or he was drafted twice, with various combinations of the previous dates. Similarly, various authorities have differing opinions on whether Dean claimed homosexuality to avoid the draft, ranging from rumors that he asserted it in his 1949 draft registration to claims he declared his sexuality in 1951 or 1952, or that he had to appeal to the Defense Department when his local draft board rejected the claim, to assertions that none of this ever happened because he never claimed to be gay.
During the writing process, the National Archives was closed due to the pandemic and had months-long queues after they reopened, so I did not have access to Dean’s files, and eventually I pushed to the backburner the need to go back and get them while I was busy trying to get a publisher. But last week’s post prompted me to get the official documents.
I received Dean’s Selective Service records this week, and it seems that no other researcher has reviewed them since biographer Val Holley obtained a copy for his 1995 study James Dean: The Biography. Subsequent writers have relied on Holley as the authority. Holley had claimed that Dean received a draft eligibility questionnaire in April 1950 and was called for induction in April 1951. Following a medical exam, Holley said, Dean appealed to the national board and was called back for an unprecedented second exam in October 1951, at which point he must have presented evidence of homosexuality. He was then granted 4-F status in November 1951.
Holley was a bit cagey about how much of his analysis was inference, and later writers assumed that he had accurately transcribed Fairmount’s Selective Service ledger. It bothered me, though, that he didn’t provide a photocopy of the ledger to support his analysis. If you have read any of my work over the years, you already know what happened next. I got the documents, and Val Holley read them wrong.
The key problem surrounds this block, which lists the dates of Dean’s medical examinations. As you can see, the number very clearly read 4-28-54 and 10-9-51. Holley read the first as “51,” apparently taking the deformed crossbar on the 4 for an error. But he did not examine the whole ledger to get a sense of the handwriting or pattern and practice. Two different hands wrote the Fairmount ledger, the neater one presumably being Nelle Hines, the local clerk. I do not know the identity of the other, sloppier hand which wrote Dean’s entry. That hand wrote more than one malformed “4.” More important is the pattern: When multiple entries occur in the same block throughout the ledger, they are always presented in reverse chronological order, with the oldest flush with the block’s bottom line. Holley read the entries backward.
The actual sequence of events is fairly clear once the correct dates are evident, and the various contradictions resolve themselves.
On April 7, 1950, the Fairmount draft board sent out a draft eligibility questionnaire to Dean while at college, part of an April batch of questionnaires sent out to all the twenty-year-old young men of Fairmount that spring. (Age 20 was the earliest age someone enrolled in school could be drafted.) According to a somewhat garbled account reported secondhand by the state director of Selective Service Robert Custer, which Holley makes less clear through imprecise prose, Dean attempted to receive a deferment by claiming to be a conscientious objector and sending a letter from a local minister attesting to the fact.
The draft board rejected the claim, and by September, Dean was notified that he had been called for an induction medical exam. At this point, Dean panicked. He sought help from his best friend, Bill Bast, and his boyfriend, Rogers Brackett. Independently of each other, they both counseled the same path: to claim homosexuality. Brackett correctly remembers this occurring in October 1951, while Bast conflated events and wrongly places it in October 1952 (weirdly, Liz Sheridan also conflated fall 1951 and fall 1952, for different reasons, in her memoir). Bast helped Dean write a letter asserting his homosexuality, while Rogers Brackett paid for a local psychoanalyst to see Dean and declare him gay. At his October exam, Dean appealed above the local draft board’s head to L.A.’s national-level office. Brackett recalled that he used his influence and informed the board that Dean was cohabitating with him, a known homosexual, and that apparently did the trick.
The Fairmount draft board entered 4-F status for Dean on November 14, 1951, presumably after receiving direction from the Los Angeles board.
However, that was not the end of it.
Someone was keeping track of Dean’s activities, and in April 1954, the Fairmount draft board issued a second induction summons to Dean. I can only guess why, but the contents of a letter Dean’s agent, Jane Deacy, sent him later that summer in response to an urgent question Dean had for her suggest a fairly obvious answer: Someone had kept tabs on the news stories coming out of New York and then Hollywood about Dean’s many alleged romances with various starlets. If he were dating women, he couldn’t claim homosexuality. On April 28, 1954, Dean reported for a second induction and quite obviously once again reiterated his continued homosexuality. He later told gossip columnist Joe Hyams that he had informed the draft board about his flat feet, nearsightedness, and “butt-fucking.”
However, the draft board wasn’t convinced. In July 1954, Dean wrote to Deacy asking whether he would be forced to disclose his plans to marry Pier Angeli to the draft board and what that would mean for his draft status. The urgency of his concern prompted Deacy to make inquiries with various officials and to report back that, yes, he would be forced to report the marriage to the Fairmount draft board and, no, she couldn’t tell him what the consequences would be. The only way a marriage would impact draft status under the Selective Service Act of 1948, as amended, at that time was if the inductee had claimed homosexuality for deferment. Dean called off his plans to marry Angeli and later told a reporter that he would not marry anyone until thirty—in other words, after he was no longer of draft age.
Unfortunately, we will likely never know the exact details of what happened next. According to the Selective Service records, the government burned Dean’s correspondence with the draft board on June 7, 1968, in keeping with policy about document destruction. We know that Dean expressed concern repeatedly in 1954 and early 1955 about his letter to the draft board leaking. Multiple witnesses reported this. Friends later assumed he was referring to his 1951 letter, but more likely he was referring to his recent 1954 correspondence. The case lingered on without resolution until late May or early June 1955. At that point, Dean proudly showed Joe Hyams a letter from a draft board (likely in Los Angeles) declaring him “unfit” for service. I could only speculate how much Warner Bros. helped with securing that, but it was around this time that their head of P.R., Walter Ross, became aware that of Dean’s sexuality and disapproved of it, even as he helped to craft ways to hide it for WB.
With the case resolved and a 4-F in hand, Warner Bros. then informed the movie press that Dean had been called for an induction exam and later put out that he had been rejected for “nearsightedness” (which was not actually a disqualifying condition under the law); however, they let Daily Variety and Modern Screen falsely believe that the induction exam had occurred recently, not a year prior: “Only a few weeks ago,” Modern Screen wrote in August 1955, “he was called down to the Los Angeles induction station for his Army physical.” The magazine added that Dean—who, in reality, already knew he was again 4-F—was ready to serve: “If the Army wants me, I’m ready.” Joe Hyams, who knew the truth, reported the lies anyway and was later rewarded with a job as a Warner PR executive.
The Los Angeles 4-F designation did not get reported back to Fairmount quickly enough to enter into his Selective Service ledger line. The declaration came in June 1955, but Fairmount had not updated its ledger with summer classifications before Dean died on September 30. The spot where the rejection should have been listed is blank. Instead, the ledger scrawls in crude hand “DEC.” for deceased, and a red dot was added in place of the rejection to mark the permanent end of Dean’s record.