LIVE FAST - DIE YOUNG Remembering the Short Life of James Dean "James Dean told me, 'You remember the movie Bogie made - Knock on Any Door - and the line. "Live fast, die young, have a good-looking corpse"? Shit, man, I'm going to be so good-looking they're going to have to cement me in the coffin!'"

Sudden fame came early for James Dean. Confused and antagonized by the immediate celebrity that descended on him following the release of his first feature film, East of Eden, Dean chose to protect himself against Hollywood and the world by surrounding himself with a handful of "malcontent oddballs." John Gilmore was among the privileged few.

Live Fast - Die Young, the quintessential biography on Dean, recalls the author's first meeting with him in New York, their fast friendship, their riding motorcycles together, and their sexual encounters with women, men, and each other. Dean's insights into his brilliant Broadway success and the films that followed are revealed through Gilmore's story as well as Dean's feelings of hatred toward a disapproving father; his intimacy with his mother and their secret games that later led to Dean's sexual confusion in Hollywood; Dean's obsession with death; and, finally, the posthumous rise of the legend.

Through letters, diaries, tape-recorded conversations -

"We were bad boys playing bad boys, while we opened up the bisexual sides of our personalities..." One sex scene between the two was played out in black leather to the music of Edith Piaf.  "The sex was a game," Gilmore writes.  "Jimmy was obsessed with riding the black ship to hell, and for that quick time I was on board with him.  Dean found in the young Gilmore a "kind of unthreatening waste basket" into which he confided, dumping his chaotic, erotic, and crazy ideas.  "We enjoyed poetry and bullfighting, bongo drums, booze, and girls; knew the same crummy friends and sleepless, searching nights."