Paul Waters Interviews Val Holley |
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Interview:
PW: When did you first discover James Dean, and what was your initial impression of him as an actor?
VH: I was fifteen when my high school English class was shown the movie, "East of Eden." Why, I'm not sure, but maybe we were studying American fiction. Dean's performance as Cal was memorable for the sense of danger and sexual tension he conveyed. I didn't get his name but I clearly remember wondering why I didn't know who he was -- I thought the leading actor in such a film ought to be a household name. Well, I guess he was, but it had somehow escaped me. Not until nine years later, when I was browsing Patricia Bosworth's biography of Monty Clift, did I stumble across Dean's name again; this time I was provoked enough to check out Venable Herndon's "A Short Life." Finally, the mystery was solved. I remember thinking, "Oh, THAT'S who that was in 'East of Eden.'"
PW: You were a close friend of Adeline Nall. Tell about the original idea of a sort of collaborative Dean bio with her, which evolved into your first Dean effort, "Tribute To a Rebel", in 1991.
VH: Being associated with Adeline Nall was one of the great privileges of my life. The woman oozed humanity. During Fairmount Museum Days of 1986, I spoke with her after her annual tour of Fairmount High, and found she was coming to Washington, D.C., where I live, for a convention of the Colonial Dames (which is a sort of alter ego to the D.A.R.). I insisted she call me so I could take her to dinner. By 1986 I already had a vague notion that I wanted to write a Dean biography, and my idea was simply to get to know her and interview her. But for a long time she had wanted to write her own book about Dean and had made some unrealized attempts with collaborators who hadn't worked out. I must not have been in a particular hurry to write my own biography, because I began to think I ought to be Adeline's collaborator. After another visit from Adeline in the spring of 1987, she somehow felt comfortable enough with me not only to start this joint venture but to invite me to stay at her home when I was in Indiana. My first trip to Indiana in this venture was August 1987. I made 10 trips in 1988 alone -- and how cool it was always to have a place to stay during times when thousands of fans were going begging because Grant County has such paltry accommodations. By late 1989 or 1990 I had finished a 12-chapter manuscript. But despite contacting many literary agents, or writing to small publishers directly, I could never sell it. And in retrospect, it's not surprising; there was too much Adeline and not enough Dean in the manuscript, and no sex, either, or whatever titillation it takes to sell a manuscript in our modern marketplace. We sometimes had conflicts about that; I tried to put more Dean into it and she always felt there wasn't enough of her. The only portion of the manuscript to see the light of day was published in the Fall 1989 issue of Traces. I think we were lucky even to get that! Traces paid me $200 which we split 50/50. (Eventually I donated the entire manuscript to the James Dean Gallery.)
The coffee table book by me and David Loehr, the "Tribute to a Rebel," was an entirely different project. A Dean fan from L.A., Diane Hanville, called me in the fall of 1990 to let me know that a publisher in a Chicago suburb wanted to hire someone to write the text of a Dean coffee table book they planned to do. I was eager to do it both for the fee and for the credit. I contacted them and convinced them I could do it -- thank goodness I had the Traces article as a credit. The "Tribute" book was fun to do and was completed after forty days of hard work, but all along I was quite firm that it was not "my own" Dean book that I wanted to write eventually. Nor did "Tribute" grow out of the Adeline project, although Adeline thought it did. This caused friction between us and we were on the outs for a few years. Fortunately, we had a reconciliation a year or two before she died. We had many, many good times from 1987 to 1990 -- we drove all over Indiana meeting people who were associated with Dean: Isabel Draesemer in Coxville; Bette McPherson in North Webster; Don Martin in Indianapolis; and others. Once I even got into a Fairmount Class of 1949 reunion because I was Adeline's guest -- quite a thing, because the same group was notorious for barring reporters who wanted information on Dean. Over the course of our visits I ended up learning much about Grant County and how Dean and his ancestors fit into the county's broader genealogy. One of the funnest things was when she found a suitcase full of the letters she'd written her mother during her two years in New York -- she was there from 1955 to 1957, hoping to work as an actress on the strength of having taught James Dean. He was killed only 7 weeks after she arrived there. Her letters turned out to have a lot of valuable information, including confirmation of the rumors that went around Grant County after Dean told the local draft board he was homosexual. In New York, Adeline became a cult figure with hard-core Dean fans who lived there and tracked her down; they were always taking her to the theater, the Copacabana, etc. Photocopies of all those letters were given to the James Dean Gallery. In the end, I'm afraid I concluded that Adeline had much less influence on Dean than she thought she had. But it wasn't wasted time because she herself was so interesting and fun to visit. She had a straight-laced reputation but I heard her say every four-letter word there is, and she confided intimate things about herself -- premarital sex, and letters (which she showed me) from male high school students begging her for sexual initiation (which she sensibly wasn't interested in granting).
PW: At the time you were putting together 'Tribute", were you already envisioning a full length, in-depth bio of Jimmy?
VH: I wanted "Tribute to a Rebel" to be something I was proud of, but I never thought of it as my own Dean biography. First of all, the publisher specified it could only be 40,000 words, which is far short of a decent biography; second, they were pretty much a G-rated outfit and actually deleted items such as the Rev. DeWeerd's nude swims at the Anderson YMCA with Fairmount boys, where he would invite them to touch his war wounds.
PW: What was the most difficult aspect of your '95 Dean book?
VH: The most difficult aspect was finding a way to position and sell a biography about someone who's been "done to death." In a way it was harder to write a sufficiently persuasive proposal than to write the book itself, because so many agents and publishers couldn't see bringing out "yet another Dean book." In such a situation you're forced to spend your own money on travel and research until you can show enough new stuff to justify another book. And even then it was almost not enough; there were still many rejections. I just got lucky when, at long last, the proposal landed on the desk of an administrative assistant who was already a fan and needed no convincing; she passed it along to her editor who (so I later heard; amazingly he never told me) was a major fan.
PW: What was your central thesis and ultimate goal with The Biography?
VH: My central thesis, specifically, was that Rogers Brackett was not just a passing fancy in Dean's life but the key to his entire career. Brackett facilitated every major break in the early years of Dean's career, and even after Brackett was forced out of Dean's life, Dean was still devoting much time and energy to expunging Brackett's ghost, which led to some of the notorious antisocial behavior and increasingly macho tests of will and nerve. But, generally, Brackett was only a microcosm for the much larger issue, which was, "Can we please stop dancing around the obvious homosexual aspects of Dean's rise to mega-fame and look them in the eye?"
PW: Please comment on your interview experiences with David Diamond. He seemed to have the most impossibly vivid memory, but I found his stories compelling and fresh.
VH: I learned of David Diamond through Desmond Stone, who was writing a biography of Alec Wilder at the same time I was working on Dean. Dean's name had come up in some of Stone's conversations with Diamond. I began writing to Diamond early in 1988, I think, and in October '88 I flew to Rochester to interview him. "Impossibly vivid" may not be far off the mark for some of Diamond's stories -- not only those in my book but many others. Long before my Dean book was finished, I began noticing that Diamond had seemingly been everywhere, like Zelig; in the late 1990's it was hard to open a new biography in which Diamond was NOT a source. Besides Alec Wilder, he held himself out as an intimate of Leonard Bernstein, Garbo, Louise Brooks, and others whom I've forgotten. The abundance and occasionally fantastic nature of Diamond's recollections can trigger a biographer's skepticism. But in the few instances I challenged him, he could actually back himself up. I don't think he was dishonest. More than likely, he remembered so many people in his past that he mixed up who did what, when, and where. The thing that Diamond had going for him was his diary. In his letters he would type out for me diary excerpts relating to Dean. When I was at his home, he had the diary in his lap, and although I wasn't invited to look over his shoulder, he did read aloud from it while I sat right across from him, taking notes. I interviewed Diamond again in 1991 at his hotel in D.C., when he was here to preside at a Kennedy Center concert featuring his own chamber music. At the conclusion of the interview, he said, "Well, it's good finally to meet you" -- so our previous 1988 meeting had slipped his mind. After the concert there was a soiree in Diamond's honor at the home of a grande dame in Georgetown. The biographer Barry Paris ("Garbo") was there, and he and Diamond were shouting at each other in Russian across the room. There are many respectable biographers who have trusted him. Now that he's dead, I should go to the Library of Congress, which has all his papers, and see if there were diary entries he didn't see fit to share.
PW: David Dalton's James Dean: The Mutant King has become enshrined and deified by Dean fans since it first appeared in 1974. In your opinion, what are the book's worst shortcomings?
VH: Dalton is an evocative writer, and I well remember how fascinating I found "The Mutant King" to be. I believe its most valuable aspect is all those Dean letters to Barbara Glenn -- that's Dean at his most candid. Dalton was lucky to be able to print them, but copyright laws were less onerous in 1974, plus there was no 500-pound James Dean Foundation in those days to watch for any unauthorized publication of Dean's words. I'm very jealous. All I could do was paraphrase the letters. I am also impressed at how well Dalton caught Adeline Nall. Her words and their rhythms, as he recounted them, were absolutely Adeline.There were loads of lapses in accuracy in "the Mutant King", although I've forgotten many. I recall Dalton reported that Dean and James Sheldon were roommates. I showed that page to Sheldon and he said "No, Jimmy never lived with me -- I was married at the time and when I was married I was a very good husband." Elsewhere Dalton had Dean writing to Barbara Glenn to describe his August 1952 yacht trip with Lem Ayers, but that would be four months before Dalton said Dean met Glenn, at the time "See the Jaguar" was opening
in December 1952.
PW: Give some examples of interviews you were never able to obtain, either because the person was deceased or they declined to participate. I recall a lengthy section in your book that lists individuals who refused to be interviewed, as well as a list of those who did take part.
VH: It's a pity Rogers Brackett was dead before I started writing. That may have been the single best interview a Dean biographer could land. But I compensated to a large degree by interviewing many of Brackett's friends who had never spoken on record before, which provided a perspective Brackett himself might not have given. Bill Bast, for better or worse, knew Dean probably as well as anyone else, but in the 1990's he wasn't giving interviews. All I got from Bast was a curt note telling me that my speculation on the address of the Santa Monica "penthouse" apartment in which he and Dean were roommates was incorrect. If Bast had been talking, would he have been honest with me? I don't know -- his 1956 Dean book was terribly disingenuous. The trouble with Bast's book is that he was writing a screenplay, not a biography -- read it carefully, and you'll see it's broken down into scenes. Here's something interesting: re-read Bast's book, and then watch his 1976 TV movie, "James Dean: Portrait of a Friend." You'll see that he has rearranged the order of the scenes as they occurred in the book, proving that correct chronology is less important to Bast than dramatic continuity. When I interviewed several UCLA drama classmates of Bast and Dean, it became clear that many events in Bast's 1956 book were entirely different from the way so many other classmates understood them. So I made a rule not to depend on Bast's version of events. In the few instances where I did, I now regret it -- for example, his implication that Dean met Beverly Wills in the spring of 1951. But if Dean and Wills met on the radio show, "Junior Miss", as Bast claimed, it would have had to be before the end of 1950, because I know now that's when "Junior Miss" went off the air, so that's a mistake in my book. That makes an enormous difference to a biographer who's trying to piece together Dean's UCLA life from fragmentary evidence. The lines Bast placed in Dean's mouth were mere fictional screen-type dialogue. For example, in the scene where Dean is about to move to New York, he's telling Bast about the referrals he's got lined up in Manhattan, including "Jim Sheldon who's a director on the Montgomery show back there". Well, this was in 1951, and Sheldon was indeed a director then, but Sheldon would not work for "Robert Montgomery Presents" until 1953. Nice try, Bill. Then there's Eartha Kitt. She sent me a handwritten letter saying she was performing at the Carlyle Hotel and to call her. So I went to New York, called her, and the operator put me right through; I was flabbergasted. In that electrifying catwoman voice, Eartha said, "You'll have to call the publicist -- it's Mrs. Shapiro ...," who of course is Eartha's daughter. You've got to wonder what the hell she intended in that note. What a waste of time. I carefully checked the stories in Eartha's autobiography against the known chronological record in contemporary newspapers, and I concluded her memory is quite faulty.
On the positive side, there was the day in 1991 when, after months of trying, I finally tracked down Christine White -- in my own city, D. C.! And she agreed to talk to me. On the same day, I made contact with Larry Swindell, one of Dean's California classmates who became a respected newspaper columnist with a fantastic memory. That day was a threshold; I knew then that I would be joining the ranks of Dean biographers. Of course, Christine White is a whole other story -- you've got to make your own inferences about someone who claims publicly to speak with angels on a regular basis. You don't want to know how many hours of that kind of talk I had to sit through before we would get to the red meat.
PW: Paul Alexander's bio on Dean has become known in some circles as The Gay James Dean Book. This was exactly the stigma that Dalton feared would overtake The Mutant King if David acknowledged Dean's homosexual relationships and connections. Please comment on "Boulevard's" spuriousness, fantasy-like anecdotes, as well as Dalton's deliberate exclusion of the gay aspect of Dean's story.
VH: There are some ironies in calling Alexander's book "The Gay James Dean Book." First, I always assumed that Alexander, who is a father, is straight, so you can hardly say his book is a vehicle for the much-maligned and feared "gay agenda". Second, although his thesis statement did seem to be that James Dean was homosexual, I don't feel his book did a good job of demonstrating it. No source for this information was identified and there were no source notes – not even an index! Thus I have no way of verifying any of Alexander's allegations, and I wouldn't expect that any other reader would, either. Based on Alexander's previous track record with his Sylvia Plath biography, you'd better be cautious about believing anything he writes. I can't recall any other biography that got such uniformly bad reviews as Alexander's "Plath." The reviews I read in the Washington Post, N.Y. Times, and the New Yorker trashed it for its unsupported claims. I can't believe he dared show his face in the literary marketplace after that. And the notorious "hard-on photo" in the book is pretty feeble proof of ... well, anything. It surely doesn't look like James Dean to me and although I haven't read Donald Spoto's "Rebel" book, I understand Spoto devoted several pages of "Rebel" to debunking the notion that Alexander's hard-on boy is James Dean. But let's give Alexander the benefit of the doubt -- let's be devil's advocate and assume that photo IS James Dean. So what does the photo prove? Certainly not that the boy in it is a homosexual. Most men who were in show business or the arts in the 1950's will tell you that it was very common then to be photographed nude in the wild. I guess it was how you called attention to yourself, in the days before it was OK to be nude in a Calvin Klein ad. Didn't Dalton say in a recent interview that he was afraid that including too much gay information in "The Mutant King" would make Dalton, who is straight, the gay poster boy for gay Dean fans? It isn't surprising that a straight man would be afraid of that. But if Dalton suppressed information tending to show Dean was gay, isn't that intellectually dishonest? And if Dalton chose to ignore perfectly obvious instances where homosexuals made a big difference in Dean's rise to fame, is that admirable? Venable Herndon's "A Short Life" is far more honest, in my opinion, and Herndon was straight, too. If Herndon was told that Dean claimed to his draft board that he was homosexual, or that Dean was comfortable confessing homosexual affairs to Dizzy Sheridan, he didn't suppress it -- he revealed it. The only reason Alexander and others get away with it is that Hollywood biographies are rarely reviewed by scholars or intellectuals. You couldn't get away with being that dishonest if you wrote about a scientist or a politician or a Nobel Prize winner -- the scholars would tear you apart, as they did with Alexander's "Plath." (COPYRIGHT, 2006, PAUL WATERS)