James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  Jimmy’s death mask at Princeton University has been placed beside those of Beethoven, Thackeray, and Keats; and Marilyn’s image during the second decade of the 21st Century is bigger now than it was when she died.

  Social historian, celebrity novelist, and trenchant wit, Gore Vidal

  ***

  During one of the last conversations Stanley Haggart had with Gore Vidal, the subject of Jimmy and Marilyn came up.

  During their talk, Vidal said, “You know I’ve had reservations about both Monroe and Dean, as well as Mr. Elvis Presley, each doomed to die before their time. However, I must say that if a record shop, a clothing store, a diner, or a bar, wants to cloak itself in the glamor of 1950s Hollywood, a picture of one of these creatures on the wall will add to the establishment’s youthful allure. Dean, of course, will be in that damn red jacket. That jacket will be manufactured for tomorrow’s youth at least until 2080 when the world will no longer care about that unholy trio of mixed-up psychos.”

  French advertising poster for Levi's jeans (“An American Masterpiece”), linking them to James Dean and Marilyn Monroe.

  “I don’t think so,” Haggart responded. “Elvis, Marilyn, and Jimmy will survive until the next Ice Age.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  TALES FROM THE F.B.I.

  J. EDGAR HOOVER

  & HIS LOVER, CLYDE TOLSON

  Hot on Jimmy Dean’s “Tail”

  JIMMY GETS CAUGHT SHOPLIFTING AND “RED-HANDED,” YET MANAGES TO AVOID BLACKLISTING AND THE RED CHANNELS LIST

  Unless He Submits to Their Closeted Desires “Clyde & Eddie” Threaten to Ruin His Career

  Until James Dean became involved with Marlon Brando and director Elia Kazan in the 1950s, the name of J. Edgar Hoover was of no special interest to the young boy growing up in Indiana. He knew that Hoover was the director of the F.B.I., and he’d seen some movies about that agency, but that was about it. Unlike many young boys of his era, he never had any fantasies of becoming a G-man.

  But once he started discussing Hoover with Brando and Kazan, he discovered each of them had personal reasons for loathing “the ugly little toad,” as Brando referred to him.

  Brando warned him that Hoover could destroy an actor’s career and he cited John Garfield as a case in point. Garfield was one of the few screen actors that Jimmy had admired in the 1940s, especially after he’d seen him opposite Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

  Jimmy also admired Garfield’s reputation off screen, and he’d heard many tales of the women he’d seduced, including Joan Crawford, Hedy Lamarr, and Shelley Winters. Jimmy bragged to Brando and Kazan, “Garfield had nothing on me. I’ve bedded them, too.”

  “What about Ida Lupino and Ann Sheridan?” Kazan asked.

  “You got me there.”

  “Garfield has also been known to seduce a man on occasion, if he’s drunk enough,” Kazan said. “Take Truman Capote, for example, back when he was much younger and a bit pretty.”

  “Been there, done that, too.” Jimmy admitted.

  The gossip columnist, Sheilah Graham, had summed up Garfield’s love-making technique. “He was a demon lover. He died young and in bed with a woman. How fitting. He made love like a sexy puppy, huffing and puffing in quick gasps. Before intercourse, he preferred women to go on an around-the-world trip of his body.”

  “I can go along with Garfield on that around-the-world thing,” Jimmy said. “But not the sexy puppy image. But women I seduce compare me to another animal: El Toro.”

  “In their own estimation, all men are bulls,” Kazan said. “Women usually tell a different story.”

  According to Kazan, Garfield’s wife, Roberta Seidman, whom he’d married in 1935, had been a communist, but Garfield never was. Nonetheless, he was ordered to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Red Scare of the 1950s. During his time being grilled, the actor voiced his support for the First Amendment, which opposed government investigations of people’s political beliefs.

  Blackballed as a communist sympathizer, he remained a subject of invasive scrutiny even after the conclusion of his testimonies. His services as an actor were no longer in demand.

  Before the committee, Garfield had claimed that he didn’t know any communists in the film industry. He later hoped to redeem himself in an article he wrote entitled “I was a Sucker for the Left Hook,” claiming he’d been duped by communist ideologies. The title of the article, of course, was a reference to movies that had cast him as a prizewinning boxer.

  In May of 1952, during the peak of the Red Scare, the rebellious young actor died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-nine.

  Jimmy didn’t want what had afflicted Garfield to happen to him. He wasn’t really afraid that it would, since he was almost completely apolitical. He hardly knew the difference between a Republican and a Democrat, much less a communist. When asked what he thought of President Eisenhower, Jimmy said, “I don’t know what he does in the White House, but as a soldier, he sure put a lot of firecrackers up the asses of those god damn Nazi shitheads.”

  At the time Jimmy was hearing these stories about Hollywood’s tormented conflicts with the FBI director, he had no idea that he would ever tangle with Hoover himself.

  When he did, his involvement would have absolutely nothing to do with politics, but with sex.

  WANTED BY THE FBI: HOOVER’S FILES ON

  Marlon Brando & James Dean

  GROW THICKER, LONGER, AND MORE INCRIMINATING

  Hoover, an avid television watcher, especially crime dramas, had begun the compilation of a file on Jimmy when he first started seeing him in teleplays. His favorite was The Dark, Dark Hour, in which Jimmy, cast as a hoodlum, breaks into the home of a doctor (played by Ronald Reagan) and threatens to assassinate him if he doesn’t remove a bullet from the body of his comrade, who had been shot during an earlier robbery.

  According to reports, Hoover was intrigued by Jimmy.

  Since 1946, based on political, not sexual reasons, he’d also amassed a growing and rather incriminating file on the communist/socialist leanings of Marlon Brando. Rumors about the Leftist sentiments of Brando had intensified when the actor had appeared on Broadway in the controversial appeal to radical Zionism written partially as propaganda by Ben Hecht, A Flag is Born.

  Everyone connected to A Flag is Born was eventually evaluated by the F.B.I. as subversive to U.S. interests, not only its star, Paul Muni, but its director, Luther Adler, too.

  Brando, self-styled as “the only goy in the cast,” continued arousing the suspicions within the F.B.I. which, as demanded by Hoover, documented his civil rights clashes as well as his bisexual escapades.

  Clyde Tolson (left) was J.Edgar’s lover and personal assistant, and was called “the Gary Cooper of the F.B.I.” Above, he is seen with Hoover, enjoying one of their favorite pastimes: Betting on the horses.

  At the close of the play, Brando traveled across the country raising money for Irgun, an anti-British group led by Menachem Begin [later, Prime Minister of Israel (1977-1983)] that advocated violence.

  “I was a hot-headed terrorist back then,” Brando said. “As I matured, I came to understand both sides, even the Arab point of view. I was a bit over the top, proclaiming in speeches that British troops blocking Jewish immigration to Palestine were committing greater atrocities than the Nazis. Blame it on my youth.”

  “I like Jews, and I fuck many of them for pleasure,” Jimmy admitted. “About all I know of Arabs is that I played a homosexual Arab boy in The Immoralist, and I was a no good, blackmailing son of a bitch.”

  Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover, Guy Hottel, and an unidentified friend.

  Even though Elia Kazan had directed Brando in his greatest hit at the time, A Streetcar Named Desire, the actor was very critical of his director.

  Like Brando, Kazan had been intensely investigated by the F.B.I. Its G-men turned up evidence that he “supported dangerous left-wing causes.” He had been called before the
House Un-American Activities Committee as a friendly witness, naming names. His collaboration and cooperation shocked Hollywood, soiled his reputation, and cost him the friendship of his liberal friends such as playwright Arthur Miller.

  Brando at first didn’t want anything more to do with Kazan after that, but the actor and the director obviously repaired their differences in time for Kazan to direct him in his Oscar-winning role in On the Waterfront.

  [The F.B.I. investigation had determined that Kazan, from 1934 to 1936, had been a member of the Communist Party in New York. But later, according to the F.B.I. dossier, he had became disillusioned with the party, and turned against communism after the Hitler-Stalin pact. Consequently, his American communist friends turned against him.

  As Kazan later told Miller, “I hate the communists and have for many years, and I don’t feel right about giving up my career to defend them. That’s why I’m naming names.”]

  Brando summed up Kazan’s appearance before HUAC: “Gadge squealed like a ballsy pig on castration day.”

  F.B.I. agent Guy Hotell, Hoover’s indiscreet henchman, “arranger,” and pimp.

  ***

  What little is known about Jimmy’s involvement with Hoover and his lover/assistant, Clyde Tolson, was gleaned from three sources, Guy Hotell, detective Fred Otash, and Stanley Haggart.

  An F.B.I. agent himself, Hotell, for some twenty-five years, was the second-most-important man in Hoover’s F.B.I., ranking just behind Tolson himself. A former football player at George Washington University, and known as “the stud” of the campus, Hotell often traveled with Tolson and Hoover on their many trips and vacations together, always remaining in the background.

  After a few months of working directly for “Clyde and Eddie” [his nickname for J. Edgar], Hotell realized that one of his main duties was “arranging private hookups for these two guys who lived deep in the closet.”

  Young Guy Hotell (left) with J. Edgar Hoover: “Just two guys on holiday together.”

  “‘Pimp’ is too nasty a word,” Hotell said, “but Eddie and Clyde couldn’t very well arrange sexual liaisons for themselves. They were too famous, especially Eddie. I spent a few nights with both of them when I was younger and had a full head of hair. But they later tired of me, and put me to work as an ‘arranger.’”

  They wanted me to accompany them on their vacations,” Hotell claimed. “I tagged along, but unlike Clyde and Eddie, I was a lady killer with an occasional boy thrown in. When they were seducing some young man, I was most often banging some hot gal.”

  Eventually, Hoover got rid of Hotell when he became alcoholic and made a lot of indiscreet remarks around Washington.

  Two inter-related books by James Kirkwood, only one of which (American Grotesque) was ever completed and published. Publication of the title depicted above on the right was delayed until 2012, when it reached the editors at Blood Moon Productions. After many amplifications from other sources, it emerged as the book displayed below.

  After Hotell was booted, and, much later, when Hoover was conveniently dead, Hotell decided to write a best-selling tell-all about him. Through his prospective publisher, the writer James Kirkwood, Jr., was approached to ghost write the book for him. Kirkwood later won a Pulitzer Prize for his Broadway musical, A Chorus Line.

  [A political investigation was an unusual detour for Kirkwood, who usually wrote light novels and plays, most often with a comic touch. An exception to this had been American Grotesque, an account of the Clay Shaw/Jim Garrison affair in New Orleans. Garrison had vengefully charged Shaw, a respected business leader, with conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy, charges which later mushroomed into a horror story that unfairly ruined Shaw’s life, bankrupted his businesses, and placed him at the mercy of the judicial system for decades.]

  Playwright and investigative journalist James Kirkwood, researching court records in Louisiana in the mid-60s.

  American Grotesque was first published in 1968. Hotell had read it and been impressed by how it presented its information and premises. Consequently, Hotell and Kirkwood worked together on The Gay Adventures of J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson.

  Regrettably, Kirkwood died of spinal cancer in 1989, and Hotell also died a few months later. The book was never published. However, author Darwin Porter had worked with Kirkwood, mostly on note taking and interviews, and he retained the material, which was later published by Blood Moon Productions as J. Edgar Hoover & Clyde Tolson; Investigating the Sexual Secrets of America’s Most Famous Men and Women.

  During extensive interviews, Hotell revealed that Hoover was fascinated “almost to the point of obsession” with the private lives of movie stars. Of special prominence were Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and James Dean.

  “He even had three blow-ups of Dean hanging in his bathroom,” Hotell asserted. He also told me that he had a porno clip that Dean had once made during his hungry days walking the streets of New York. I asked to see it, but he refused.”

  “He had seen most of Dean’s teleplays, and Dean became his favorite TV star. He told me he thought Dean was not only cute, but sexy. He’d had him investigated, learning that he’d been a hustler. He suggested that I should arrange a session with Dean during their next trip to the West Coast.”

  “I don’t want it presented that we’re blackmailing him, but he needs to know that Clyde and I have stuff on him that is so damaging, it could ruin his movie star career before it even begins.”

  ***

  Fred Otash now enters the picture. Readers of Marilyn Monroe biographies are familiar with his name. He became Hollywood’s most famous detective, especially in regards to aspects associated with her murder in the summer of 1962.

  Otash had tangled with Hoover and Tolson long before anybody had ever heard of James Dean. One day at the Santa Anita Racetrack, he was caught doping a horse and was arrested. Hoover was at the track that day and had placed high bets on the mob’s favorite horse. But the stricken horse, because of Otash’s doping, didn’t run.

  Otash was discovered and hit with a felony conviction, which was later downgraded to a misdemeanor. He was given a suspended sentence, and the affair was later expunged from his record.

  It was speculated that Otash got off lightly because he had incriminating evidence on Hoover. Lewis Rosenstiel, a multi-millionaire “philanthropist,” who had links to mob bosses, handled the racetrack bets of Hoover and Tolson.

  Susan Rosenstiel, Lew’s estranged wife, called it “a sweetheart deal. Hoover liked to gamble. My husband would call up his boys and place the bet. If Hoover won, he collected the money. If he didn’t, Lou covered his losses.”

  During the course of his friendship with Rosenstiel, Hoover discovered that he was a promiscuous homosexual who could “buy the best young men for sale” along the West Coast. He was also known for staging some of the best gay parties anywhere, flamboyant enough to rival those of Hoover’s other friend, the Woolworth heir, Jimmy Donahue, a cousin of the heiress, Barbara Hutton.

  Somewhere along the way, Otash learned of Hoover’s link to Rosenstiel and the nefarious “back street dealing” between the two co-conspirators. It was said that Otash managed to evade charges in his future, including illegal wire-tapping, based on the incriminating information he had on the F.B.I. director.

  Getting Busted: As a Shoplifter in a Food Market,

  JIMMY GETS CAUGHT

  Private detectives are supposed to keep silent about their revelations, except to their clients. But Otash often bragged of his inside knowledge.

  Whenever he met a friend, he’d often begin his conversation by saying, “Did I tell you about the time…?” Then he’d relate a shocking incident from his vast repertoire. He once told columnist James Bacon one of his scandals. Of course, the journalist couldn’t print it but privately gossiped about it.

  One incident Otash related to Bacon allegedly occurred when he was a security guard at the Hollywood Ranch Market, which was experiencing a great deal of shoplift
ing. One afternoon, he caught James Dean stealing both a ham and a tinned caviar, “the expensive stuff, although he could afford to pay. It was my job to see that he was arrested. Charges were filed against him, but I learned later from someone in the police department that the case was mysteriously dropped. Someone important had intervened.”

  “Believe it or not, four months later I caught Dean stealing another ham at the market—no caviar this time,” Otash claimed. “Instead of arresting him, I put the ham back on the rack and bought him some orange juice. I told him to cut out this shoplifting shit since he was making good money. But what I really wanted to know was who got him off on the last charge.”

  Private detective and movie fan, Fred Otash

  “He looked at me with that smirky grin he had,” Otash said. “‘It was the most powerful man in America,’” he claimed. “‘But I had to sing for my supper when I was driven in this big black limousine to La Jolla.’”

  “As a detective, it didn’t take me long to add two and two,” Otash said. “I knew that Clyde Tolson and Hoover were staying in La Jolla at that time going to the race track. Suddenly, it made sense. Hoover could get anybody off from anything in those days, and Dean was his type. I’m also certain if you looked at that infamous book of Hoover’s celebrity nudes, Dean posing with a big hard-on in that tree would be among his prized possessions. Some Dean biographers have written about the actor’s claim to have been seduced by this ‘bigwig in Washington.’ It must have been Hoover. Eisenhower is definitely not a suspect.”