Just days before James Dean’s first movie premiered, the actor reportedly paid off a disgruntled male lover who threatened to expose their relationship.
The agreement, which remained a secret for seven decades, is unveiled in a new book, “Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean.” The star died in a car accident at age 24 in 1955.
“James Dean had been blackmailed by a former lover,” author Jason Colavito claimed to Fox News Digital about the “Rebel Without a Cause” icon.
“He had met a man named Rogers Brackett who was an advertising executive and radio show producer way back when he was just starting his career,” Colavito explained.
“The two of them had a relationship, according to Rogers Brackett. It was a loving relationship, and they were partners. They lived together. He provided Dean with a great amount of help and assistance in getting his career started. [But] their relationship fell apart.”
According to Colavito, the two men met in 1951. At the time, Dean, an Indiana native, was working as a parking valet. Colavito claimed that Brackett introduced Dean to several prominent people in the film industry, kicking off his Hollywood career.
Dean, struggling financially, reportedly took a smitten Brackett’s offer to move in with him. The relationship became tumultuous with Brackett saying of Dean years later that he was “like a child” who “behaved badly just to get attention.” Meanwhile, Dean saw Brackett as “increasingly desperate” and “manipulative,” Colavito wrote.
The relationship, which was on and off, lasted until about 1953, Colavito claimed.
“There were many reasons that the relationship between James Dean and Rogers Brackett soured,” said Colavito. “One of the reasons was that James Dean simply wasn’t comfortable being in a relationship with a man.
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“This was the first time that he had been in such a relationship, and it moved very fast. They went from meeting each other to living together in a matter of weeks. And according to the stories that Dean’s friends later told, James Dean felt overwhelmed by it.”
“It was simply too much,” Colavito continued. “He felt like Rogers Brackett was trying to control him, that he was acting more like a father to him than an equal.” As for Dean, he felt “used,” said the author.
WATCH: ‘REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE’ STAR JAMES DEAN WAS BLACKMAILED BY LOVER: BOOK
After the couple parted ways, Brackett seemingly disappeared from Dean’s life – at least until Dean was about to make his screen debut in 1955’s “East of Eden.”
“Rogers returned, and he started sending letters and making telephone calls to James Dean’s agent demanding money,” Colavito claimed. “He wanted James Dean to repay him all the money that he had spent on him during their relationship, supporting him. Things like paying for his rent, paying for his clothes, for meals, for travel. He wanted reimbursement for all of that.”
Colavito claimed that at the time, Brackett had lost his job and was looking to finance an opera he wanted to produce.
“He was trying to hit up Dean for that money,” said Colavito. “He knew that James Dean was about to become a huge movie star in ‘East of Eden.’ So, he timed this strategically. There are letters between James Dean’s agent, his attorney and Rogers’ attorney that show the development of this incident. It eventually rose to the level that Rogers said that he was going to sue Dean.”
At the time, a homosexual relationship would have destroyed Dean’s career before it even started – and he knew it.
Dean, feeling sexually exploited, but wanting to avoid a public scandal, reluctantly agreed to pay Brackett $800, which, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, is about $10,000 today, to “make him go away.” The average salary for men at the time was about $3,400, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
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Colavito claimed that Warner Bros. Studio also paid Brackett a “finder’s fee.”
“It was saying, ‘OK, we’ll give you credit for finding Dean and delivering his career to us if you won’t talk about him anymore,’” said Colavito. “We find that while James Dean was… filming ‘Rebel Without a Cause,’ there were a couple of days when he’s absent from the set… without explanation.
“No one really knew what happened… That is the exact period when James Dean signs the settlement agreement and provides payment to Rogers Brackett to buy his silence.”
Colavito said he made the discovery last year. At the time, the family of Jane Deacy, Dean’s New York agent with whom he shared a close bond, had sold off her archives at auction. Deacy died in 2008.
“These papers had been hidden for seven decades,” said Colavito. “No one had seen them before. And they contained a huge number of revelations of things that had only been hinted at or rumored about in the past… when these papers were put up for auction… I went through all the more than 400 pages of documents.”
“I was the first scholar who was able to use these materials to fully develop James Deans’s story,” Colavito shared. “I purchased that settlement agreement so that it wouldn’t disappear into the ether, and it would be available for inspection and for the historical record.”
For decades, Dean’s sexuality had been debated, with some claiming he was bisexual. In 2006, William Bast wrote a memoir, “Surviving James Dean,” in which he claimed they had a secret relationship while Dean dated women in Hollywood. Bast died in 2015 at age 84.
According to Colavito, Brackett was dying of cancer when Ronald Martinetti interviewed him in 1974 for his book, “The James Dean Story.” The stipulation was that the interview could not be published before Brackett’s death. The first edition of Martinetti’s biography was published in 1975, followed by his updated version in 1995.
Following the near-scandal, Dean moved on.
According to reports, Dean met Italian starlet Pier Angeli on the Warner Bros. lot in 1954. Colavito said that the relationship was “complicated.”
“It looked like the kind of ideal young love that would be celebrated in every magazine and newspaper in America, and it was celebrated… but behind the scenes, the relationship was rather fraught,” Colavito claimed.
“Pier said that at the time, she didn’t know whether she was really in love with Dean and certainly wasn’t ready to get married to anyone… We know that, at least, the first part of that was true, because she ran off with [singer] Vic Damone a few months into their relationship. They got married.
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“Being ready for marriage was probably something she was ready for, but not with Dean,” Colavito added.
Colavito claimed that Dean “felt strongly” about the possibility of marrying Angeli before she said “I do” to Damone. Still, those who knew Dean claimed that his feelings for Angeli weren’t “romantic or sexual love.” It was said to be more of an “emotional connection” and “a deep friendship.”
One pal even claimed that they never had “a physical relationship” and instead, the pair were often heard “arguing with one another very loudly.”
Six months into their courtship, Dean asked Angeli to marry him in 1954, Vogue reported. She said yes. But two days later she turned him down after her mother reportedly forbade the union. Damone was Italian American and a Catholic.
Dean was “devastated,” according to the outlet.
Angeli and Damone parted ways in 1958. She remarried to orchestra conductor Armando Trovajoli in 1962. That marriage ended in 1969.
Angeli died in 1971 from an accidental barbiturate overdose. She was 39. According to the outlet, Angeli wrote to a friend two months before her death, “I don’t think any man can save me now. I think it may be too late. I think I was meant to live and die alone. Love is far away, somewhere deep inside of me. My love died at the wheel of a Porsche.”
Colavito said it’s “very difficult” to say for certain what Dean and Angeli’s relationship was really like.
“Stories change wildly over time,” he pointed out. “Pier herself would eventually [say] that she felt that James Dean was her true love and that there had never been a more perfect union than the two of them.
“Now, she didn’t say anything like that at the time. There’s no evidence from anyone who spoke with them that there was anything like that going on during the few months that they were together.”
“But over time… memories fade and people become more and more romantic about their pasts,” he shared. “And because of the hardships that she had experienced in life, she came to idealize that time as her perfect lost love.”
