The James Dean story is now deeply ingrained in the annals of Hollywood legends. The Indiana boy who went to Hollywood and became a star after only three pictures. The

 rebel who lived fast and died young. We're told he was straight ... or he was gay and got out of the draft by kissing the doctor. Kenneth Anger (in one of the highly apocryphal accounts in his book "Hollywood Babylon") portrayed Dean as a very kinky masochistic young man who enjoyed having cigarettes put out on his flesh. Then Dean would die in a speeding car crash, the legend has it, at the age of 24. But reality, as is often the case, is very different from the illusion. Dean's history has been reshaped by the people who have told his story. This is intended to be a short, accurate retelling.



James Dean was in truth a quiet, bookish boy who was profoundly near-sighted. He was raised a Quaker in a little town in Indiana. His mother had died from breast cancer when he was nine. His father, due to the massive medical bills accrued through his wife's illness was forced into joining the military. He sent his son to live with his sister and her husband Marcus on their Indiana farm. Thereafter Dean led an amazingly idyllic childhood as a Future Farmer, local athlete, and featured high school theatrical performer. The only scar in this otherwise perfect portrait would change the course of his life. Although known to the people of his hometown, this fact was only revealed in 1994 in the pages of Dean friend Joe Hyams' book.



One of the figures who loomed large in Dean's life was the local youth pastor, the late Reverend James DeWeerd who was in his thirties at the time. Very much an outsider in the community, DeWeerd seemed especially partial to the company of young boys. It's a story we know too well these days but at the time appeared to the community to be an innocent preference. Dean was a textbook target for a pedophile, a sensitive and lonely young person adrift. DeWeerd gave him the attention he craved. We now know that some of that attention was sexual.