With extensive research, this account of the Hollywood star and his legion of fans offers “the best narrative yet of Dean’s final ten hours” (San Francisco Examiner). Just before sunset on September 20, 1955, James Byron Dean’s Porsche 550 Spyder collided with Donald Gene Turnupseed’s Ford Tudor on California Highway 46. At age twenty-four, America’s newest screen idol was dead. But what really happened? Drawing on original documents, including the coroner’s inquest and other previously unpublished material, author Warren Newton Beath provides a painstakingly accurate reconstruction of Dean’s final hours and tragic death. In addition, Beath explores Dean’s life and his enduring status as a cultural icon, including Elvis Presley’s worship of him; Hitchcock’s use of Highway 46 in the famous crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest; death threats against Giant director George Stevens if he dared excise a single frame of Deans’ final performance; and many more fascinating facts about the enigmatic screen legend. Beath’s definitive account concludes with a memorable portrait of the James Dean cult, a strangely moving record of his posthumous life in the hearts of his adoring fans.

James Dean's short life and three-film career inspired countless actors and rebellious teenagers, but his untimely death in a 1955 car crash has been an inspiration of a different kind. The ensuing decades have seen a continuing fascination with Dean's life, and have also fostered legions of devotees fascinated by his death. With the expected (death site pilgrims, alternative theorists, reports of Dean's ghost hitchhiking along that fated highway), there are the odd, the unbelievable and the downright wacky: lingering love affairs with Dean's ghost, visions of his disembodied head, and, of course, reports that he's alive and well, raising chickens and drinking rum with buddies in South America. The ongoing, growing fascination, folklore and legend surrounding the life and death of James Dean is testament that the cult of celebrity death is alive and well. This encyclopedia of James Dean-related subjects includes entries on such topics as associates, locales, books, and ephemera associated with his life. It focuses intensely on the events and people linked to his fatal crash, and on the body of myth, mystery and folklore surrounding Dean's tragic death.

In the decades following his death, many of those who knew James Dean best––actors, directors, friends, lovers (both men and women), photographers, and Hollywood columnists––shared stories of their first-person experiences with him in interviews and in the articles and autobiographies they wrote. Their recollections of Dean became lost in fragile back issues of movie magazines and newspapers and in out-of-print books that are extremely hard to find. Until now. The Real James Dean is the first book of its kind: a rich collection spanning six decades of writing in which many of the people whose lives were touched by Dean recall their indelible experiences with him in their own words. Here are the memorable personal accounts of Dean from his high school and college drama teachers; the girl he almost married; costars like Rock Hudson, Natalie Wood, Jim Backus, and Raymond Massey; directors Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, and George Stevens; entertainer Eartha Kitt; gossip queen Hedda Hopper; the passenger who accompanied Dean on his final, fatal road trip; and a host of his other friends and colleagues.

A beautifully written memoir, candid and definitive, that tells the story of Bast's five year relationship with the charismatic actor and American legend--James Dean.

James DeanJames Dean is known as the first rebel. He was a '50s-styled, leather-clad biker rebuking authority. With his black turtleneck and a penchant for bongo drums and poetry, he could also easily be a kind of forerunner to the beatniks. And with his unkempt, wild hair and far-reaching philosophies, he is often cited as a kind of early hippie as well. But whatever category you put him in, James Dean was the embodiment of cool. He had a cool look, cool clothes, cool attitude, and a cool backstory that most know nothing about. James Dean began life in Indiana as the descendant of a long line of farmers. After the tragic passing of his mother at a young age and the virtual abandonment of his father, he was left to be raised by his sister and her husband on a farm in Fairmount, Indiana. Inside you will read about...- Losing His Family - A Troubled Childhood - Dean's First Big Breaks - Friends and Lovers - Dean's Acting and Car Racing Career - The Final Ride And much more! So just how did this Indiana farm boy become a Hollywood legend and kickstart a counterculture rebellion that would last throughout the '50s, '60s, and beyond? Who was James Dean? Come along as we find out more about the man, the legend, and the eternal rebel without a cause: James Dean.

"What's important about Jimmy is that in spite of his short life, he had really lived-and with his beauty, he acted in ways that other actors only dream about." - Terese Hayden, producer, Camino Real Killed in a car crash at only 24, James Dean has become a tragic legend. Compared to a Marlon Brando, Dean rose to fame in the film East of Eden, based on the novel by John Steinbeck. American teenagers particularly related to Dean through his role in Rebel Without a Cause, where he portrayed an emotionally confused teen. This is the most comprehensive biography of James Dean ever written, based upon over one hundred interviews with people who have never before spoken on record. Val Holley delves into Dean's early life and training on stage and in television using research that is astounding in its detail and frequently lets his sources speak in their own voices. Praise for James Dean: The Biography: "Val Holley allows James Dean to be as wily, controlling, beautiful, seductive, sexually ambivalent, and actory as he apparently was. It's like suddenly having the gift of a fourth, posthumous movie to slip on the shelf." - Brad Gooch, author of City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara "I was drawn in by its legwork and detail, surprising interviews, sweet reasoning, and vivid characterization. This immortal of the screen stacks up as an American enigma." - Patrick McGilligan, author of George Cukor: A Double Life, "Val Holley's James Dean is obviously a labor of love, and very thorough." - Washington Post Book World "The most definitive biography yet written ... quite interesting without being sensational." - Booklist "Holley has produced a meticulously documented work that dissects Dean's personality as never before." - Publishers Weekly "Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, this is a worthy addition to the growing body of literature surrounding an actor whose life achieved mythic proportions as a result of his untimely death." - Library Journal "The freshest, most revealing, and probably the most truthful account of [Dean] I have ever read." - Alexander Walker, author of Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh Val Holley has written numerous articles on James Dean and H. L. Mencken. He lives in Washington, D.C. James Dean was his first full biography.

Published on the 50th anniversary of his death, this is the definitive photographic portrait of James Dean in both his professional and his private worlds, the real man behind the lingering legend.

All eyes are upon Rikio. And he likes it, mostly. His fans cheer from a roped-off section, screaming and yelling to attract his attention—they would kill for a moment alone with him. Finally the director sets up the shot, the camera begins to roll, someone yells “action”; Rikio, for a moment, transforms into another being, a hardened young yakuza, but as soon as the shot is finished, he slumps back into his own anxieties and obsessions. Being a star, constantly performing, being watched and scrutinized as if under a microscope, is often a drag. But so is life. Written shortly after Yukio Mishima himself had acted in the film “Afraid to Die,” this novella is a rich and unflinching psychological portrait of a celebrity coming apart at the seams. With exquisite, vivid prose, Star begs the question: is there any escape from how we are seen by others?

This is the book that restarted the James Dean cult by celebrating him as the cool, defiant visionary of pop culture who made adolescence seem heroic instead of awkward and who defined the style of rock 'n' roll's politics of delinquency. The only book to fully show how deliberately and carefully Dean crafted his own image and performances, and the product of still unequalled research, vivid writing, intimate photographs, and profound meditation, James Dean: The Mutant King has become almost as legendary as its subject.