Were James Dean and Marlon Brando lovers in a “cat-and-mouse” affair?
When it comes to figures of Hollywood legend, they don’t come much bigger than James Dean and Marlon Brando. The rebel without a cause cut down in his prime, and his idol, the original Hollywood bad boy and method-acting hero.
The two men shared more than their mythical status in the film industry. They seemed inextricably linked until Dean’s tragic death in his prime. Both were students of the Actors’ Studio in New York, and both were unruly students at that time who had either been expelled or pushed out by acting teachers in their youth.
Notably, both actors were candidates for the role of Jim Stark in the film adaptation of Rebel Without a Cause. Brando did a screen test for an early version of the movie in 1947, and Dean got the part that would go on to define him seven years later, at the same age Brando had been during his screen test.
The two became friends off-screen after meeting when Brando visited the set of Dean’s first movie, East of Eden, in 1954. Director Elia Kazan brought the two together, as Dean was too shy to meet his hero. He had idolised Brando since seeing him as Stanley Kowalski in Kazan’s 1951 adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. His obsession went up a notch when Brando starred as outlaw biker Johnny Strabler in The Wild One, not long before filming for East of Eden started. This performance inspired Dean’s entire career. In fact, Kazan had even considered giving Brando the part of Cal Trask in his movie before eventually casting Dean.
Dean and Brando only knew each other for around a year, but they were often seen in the same crowds around town following their first meeting. With the same reputation for heavy partying and promiscuity.
But were the two more than just friends? After their initial meeting and Dean’s acclaimed 1954 performance as a gay character in the play The Immortalist, the Hollywood rumour mill began to churn.
“Cigarette burns by Brando”?
Two sensational biographies, one of each star, written by Danforth Prince and Darwin Porter and published in 2006 and 2016, respectively, claim that Marlon and James Dean had a sexual relationship. Brando Unzipped and James Dean: Tomorrow Never Comes even go as far as suggesting their relationship took on sadomasochistic dimensions.
The biographies quote TV producer Rogers Brackett, who hosted Dean in New York and was allegedly his lover, recounting his shock at discovering cigarette burns on Dean’s chest. “Jimmy told me that they were from cigarette burns by Brando,” Brackett recalled. “I was practically ready to call the police on this brutal son-of-a-bitch until Jimmy told me that he’d asked Brando to do that to him.”
In Prince and Porter’s 2016 biography of Dean, they also expand on claims supposedly made by the actor’s friend, writer Stanley Haggart. The book reports Haggart’s account of Brando forcing Dean to watch him have sex with other people and making him wait outside his apartment for hours.
“I got the impression that Jimmy was engaged in a cat-and-mouse affair with Brando,” Haggart said, “with Brando being the cat, of course. Brando seemed to be toying with Jimmy for his amusement.”
How factual are these accounts, though?
No other books, reports, or first-hand accounts have ever substantiated Prince and Porter’s version of events. Even the quotes they use are recounted second-hand in remarkable detail in the names of people who were dead when their books were published, so they are unable to verify what they are alleged to have said.
Brando did later admit to having sexual experiences with other men, but it’s unclear if he was referring to Dean. Meanwhile, Randall Riese’s book The Unabridged James Dean quotes the actor as having once said, “No, I am not a homosexual. But I’m also not going to go through life with one hand tied behind my back.” Plenty of other sources seem to corroborate Dean’s sexual encounters with men and possible bisexuality.
Dean certainly idolised Brando as an actor and likely as a male role model, too. There’s no question that Brando, seven years Dean’s senior, used this to his advantage in the Hollywood party scene. But it’s uncertain whether the relationship ever developed into anything sexual. The biographies that suggest it did seem to be relying heavily on a particularly imaginative form of journalism.
Brando would even refute having had any personal relationship with Dean two years after the younger star had died. “No, Dean was never a friend of mine,” he told the New Yorker in 1957. He then went on to claim that Dean had had some sort of obsession with him. “Whatever I did, he did.”
In acting terms, that’s no bad thing. Whether this fixation extended to the two men’s personal lives and to what extent, we’ll never know for sure.
