James Dean too was molested by his Quaker minister, says Liz Taylor interview
Allwyn Fernandes
http://popwatch.ew.com/2011/03/25/elizabeth-taylor-james-dean-molested/
Elizabeth Taylor may have unfortunately passed on to the hot tin roof in the sky, but she’s still passing on gossip-y secrets from beyond the grave. Over at the Daily Beast, writer Kevin Sessums just released a delicious array of previously off-the-record statements from Taylor, dating from a 1997 interview that focused on the star’s AIDS activism.
Taylor offers a bombshell about her fellow Hollywood legend James Dean, her co-star on Giant: “I loved Jimmy. I’m going to tell you something, but it’s off the record until I die. OK? When Jimmy was 11 and his mother passed away from cancer, he began to be molested by his minister. I think that haunted him the rest of his life. In fact, I know it did.”
Biographer Joe Hyman had written about that event in his 1992 book, James Dean: Little Boy Lost, but Taylor’s revelation reinforces a tragic subtext to the already-tragic Dean legend, to say nothing of offering an intriguing peak at the legendary megastars’ friendship. (“We talked about it a lot,” says Taylor. “During Giant we’d stay up nights and talk and talk, and that was one of the things he confessed to me.”)
Unable to care for his son after the mother died, his father Winton Dean sent James to live with his sister Ortense and her husband Marcus Winslow on a farm in Fairmount, Indiana, where he was raised in a Quaker background. Dean sought the counsel and friendship of Methodist pastor Rev. James DeWeerd. DeWeerd seemed to have had a formative influence upon Dean, especially upon his future interests in bullfighting, car racing, and the theater. According to Billy J. Harbin, "Dean had an intimate relationship with his pastor... which began in his senior year of high school and endured for many years."
James Dean is best embodied by the title of his most celebrated film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), in which he starred as a troubled Los Angeles teenager, Jim Stark. The other two roles that defined his stardom were as loner Cal Trask in East of Eden (1955), and as the surly farmer, Jett Rink, in Giant (1956). Dean's enduring fame and popularity rests on performances in only these three films, all leading roles. His premature death in a car crash cemented his legendary status.###