James Dean Book

JAMES DEAN: A RENDEZVOUS WITH IMMORTALITY reveals James Dean from the inside out by someone who knew him intimately in more ways than one. John Gilmore hung out with Dean during the early days in New York and again in Hollywood, after Dean had starred in East of Eden and was working on Rebel without a Cause. They pounded the pavement of Broadway together, raced motorcycles, and experimented with sex. We were bad boys playing bad boys while opening up the sexual sides of our separate personalities . . . . One scene between the two was played out in black leather to the music of Edith Piaf. The sex was a game, Gilmore writes. Jimmy was obsessed with riding the drunken boat in our season in hell, and for that brief time I was on board with him. Dean found in the young Gilmore a Rimbaud to his Verlaine to whom he confided his chaotic, erotic, and crazy ideas. We enjoyed poetry he d quote Alan Seeger s poem I Have a Rendezvous with Death, and we were obsessed with bullfights, bongo drums, booze, and girls. We knew the same friends and sleepless, searching nights. Dean s insights into his brilliant Broadway success and the three films that followed are revealed through Gilmore s first-hand recounting, as are Dean s hatred of his disapproving father and intimacy with his mother. Gilmore examines Dean s sexual confusion, his obsession with death, and the posthumous explosion of the legend into immortality. This revised version of Gilmore s earlier work on Dean includes additional photographs and new, revealing, in-depth interviews.Read More