James Dean: Little Boy Lost

He made only three movies - East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant - and became an international icon after his tragic death at the age of twenty-four. He was James Dean, and no one has told the real story of the man, the actor, the myth, as fully, as powerfully, and as intimately as the authors of James Dean: Little Boy Lost. This is the book drawn from extensive interviews with Dean's friends and colleagues, many of whom are speaking out for the first time...the book written by one of Dean's confidants...the book that Joe Hyams, noted celebrity biographer, has held back from writing - until now.
Who was James Byron Dean? After nearly four decades, many of the people who knew him best finally break their silence. To his friends - fellow actors like Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, Dennis Hopper, and Julie Harris - he was both generous and mean-spirited, solitary and social, macho and feminine, wise for his years and incorrigibly adolescent. To directors like Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, and George Stevens, he could be guilelessly open to suggestion one moment, yet arrogant and impossible the next. Most of all, the compelling enigma known as James Dean lived life joyously, painfully, and without restraint, embodying like no one else the conflicts and passions that are part of young people everywhere.
This book follows its fascinating subject from the Indiana farm where he spent an active but troubled boyhood, to the crucial, early training ground of the New York theater world, to his meteoric rise to international stardom in the movies. It shows how post-war Hollywood was still a charmed, leisurely community, yet one ripe for the explosive ascension of a dynamic new presence like James Dean. It reveals details never disclosed before of the making of his three landmark films. It candidly explores Dean's many love affairs and discusses with great insight the surprising truth about Dean's much-talked-about bisexuality. It exposes, as only an insider's book can, the true story of Dean and actress Pier Angeli - his one real love - and the shocking outcome of their liaison.
With sixteen pages of photographs, many never before published, James Dean: Little Boy Lost is the definitive story of a stunning young talent who lived too fast, died far too soon, but whose memory will live on as long as the youth of the world dare to hope, love, and dream.