BarcelonaSeventy years ago now, James Dean paid 800 dollars – the equivalent of 13,700 euros – to publicist Rogers Brackett to buy his silence about his sexual orientation. This secret of who was a young Hollywood bride has come to light after the Daily Mail advanced some of the fragments of The secret life of James Dean, the book written by Jason Colavito about the private life of the actor, who died in a car accident at the age of 24. The publication, which goes on sale this Tuesday in the United States, details the writings of Dean and Brackett, the publicist who was the actor’s partner and who later extorted the young man by threatening to make public that he was gay .
“Implicit in the correspondence between Brackett’s team and Dean’s team is the threat that the lawsuit be made public, something that both Brackett and Dean knew would destroy Dean’s career,” Colavito tells the Daily Mail. The same author has provided the newspaper with a photograph of the document, in which you can read the payments made by Dean’s team to the publicist’s legal team to prevent the sexual orientation of one of the actors from being made public most coveted in the 1950s.
The publicist who opened the doors to Hollywood
At the age of 20, Dean left the University of Santa Monica to start a new life at the University of California in Los Angeles to begin training in the world of acting. The change of university also forced him to look for a job to pay the rent for the apartment in the city of stars. Since at that time he had not yet managed to enter the world of performing arts, what would be the protagonist of Rebel sense causes he started working as a valet in a parking lot in front of the CBS studios. There he met Brackett, who then had a relevant position in the advertising agency of the evening program of the American broadcaster.
The writer claims that Brackett, fifteen years older than Dean, “fell in love” with the actor. Despite the fact that the publicist’s feelings initially “scared” the precocious actor, Dean ended up going to live in his “partner’s” flat – as the author refers to the relationship they had – because he didn’t have enough economic independence, and also accepted his first role in a production, the series Alias Jane Doe, which came to him thanks to the contacts that Brackett had in the sector. But the coexistence did not end up working. “Sometimes he acts like a child. He misbehaves just to get my attention. He was a child that I loved, sometimes as a father figure and sometimes not as a father figure,” Brackett explained in a letter.
Over time, the secretive and unequal relationship they maintained as a couple and as roommates became a dead end dependency for the young man. In 1951, Dean received a letter from the government requiring him to do military service at the base in Marion, Indiana. At the insistence of Brackett, then 35, Dean visited a psychiatrist to be diagnosed as homosexual and therefore eligible for service. This whole process “affected the self-esteem” of the 20-year-old boy who was just starting to get his first roles, in which he embodied the image of an attractive boy who seduced women.
The relationship soured and they went their separate ways. But in 1955, a few weeks before it was released East of Eden, the CBS employee filed a lawsuit in New York Municipal Court seeking $1,200 as compensation for all the expenses he had had to face to support what he considered to be “a child.” “The audacity of the request surprised him, as he thought he was at peace after enduring abusive behavior from Brackett for some time and having to to dance for his friends,” Colavito writes in the book. The actor preferred to come to an agreement with his former partner rather than confront him, fearing that he would retaliate by making his sexual orientation public and cause “a scandal public” that would have ended his professional career.
James Dean died in a car accident in September 1955, a few months after Brackett’s lawsuit. His death at the age of 24 generated a great commotion in the industry because one of the icons of mid-century cinema disappeared. Dean was the first to receive a posthumous Oscar nomination for Best Actor.
Source: www.ara.cat
