In the spring of 1958, the book publisher Simon & Schuster shocked the New York–media world by erecting on Broadway between 46th and 47th Streets a 40-foot-high billboard with art by Andy Warhol to advertise a new novel. No publisher had ever promoted a work of fiction this way, and this book was doubly shocking. The Immortal, by onetime Warner Bros. publicist Walter Ross, told a familiar story of a surly young movie star whose death turned him into a star.
Book critics and gossip columnists whispered that the instant best-seller was more than fiction—that it was in fact a true account of the life of James Dean, the incandescent actor whose startling car-crash death in 1955, at the age of just 24, had transformed him into the world’s biggest movie star and an icon of teenage rebellion.
Most shocking of all, Ross wrote that the dead star had been gay.
When I began writing Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean, I knew of The Immortal only from a sidelong reference in an old biography of Dean dismissing the book as “voyeuristic.” Frankly, I didn’t think a novel would have much to say about my subject. But I quickly learned how wrong I was. Reading The Immortal opened a surprising window into how openly the “secret” of James Dean’s queerness circulated within the entertainment industry in the 1950s, and how assiduously the mainstream press covered it up in a homophobic era.
The biggest surprise came when reading Ross’s descriptions of his Dean-like character’s relationships with two older men who helped his career. Those descriptions offered an almost granularly accurate, albeit sometimes violently exaggerated, account of Dean’s involvement with advertising executive Rogers Brackett and Broadway producer Lemuel Ayers. But no one was supposed to have known those details until Brackett broke his silence in the 1970s.
How did Ross get his information?
I posed that question to Ronald Martinetti, the only journalist to have interviewed Ross about Dean. Martinetti had asked Ross that very question half a century ago, and Ross refused to answer. His only response? “It was in the air.”
Well, if it was in the air, I reasoned that others must also have breathed in those rumors. This led me on a years-long quest through ancient archives of pop-culture ephemera, the kind of material that doesn’t typically find its way into history books. In oblique references from forgotten tabloids and neglected newspaper columns, I found something remarkable.
In 1957, a scandal rag ran a story challenging the “slimy insinuations” that Dean had been a “sex pervert” who patronized Greenwich Village gay bars—proving such rumors were rife. Even when Dean was still alive, the fan magazine Screenland not only openly asserted that no woman considered Dean “romantically aggressive” but also that women had to compete with “the Theatre Arts set”—code for gay men—for his affections. European publications, unread in America, were less allusive. Articles bluntly reported that “some circles” knew Dean was secretly gay. Dean’s first French biographer, Yves Salgues, reported in 1957 that Dean had sex with men.
Such notices—few and far between—were never more than hints in the American popular press, a secret not meant for public knowledge. But they proved that the secret once existed and suggested places I should look for stronger contemporary proof. And sure enough, I began to find previously unseen evidence left out of the historical record—diaries, letters, unpublished interviews.
This research culminated in the first systematic evaluation of more than 400 pages of Dean’s long-secret correspondence and personal and business records, which had remained hidden until 2023, when they were made public ahead of their auction.
When I correlated these documents with press reports and friends’ accounts, hints and allusions in the records became all too clear. I had no doubt what “problem” Dean’s West Coast agent said could be fixed by his publicly dating women. A seemingly petty lawsuit against Dean for repayment of bills revealed itself to be a shocking blackmail attempt by an ex-boyfriend—reported in my book for the first time.
These long-neglected details allowed me to reconstruct James Dean’s personal struggles and the emotional wounds that shaped his life and his art. For me, as a gay man, it was a revelation to see perhaps the greatest cinematic icon as he really was, a queer man fighting to live authentically in an oppressive culture of conformity.
Jason Colavito is a journalist and author living in upstate New York
