part one  |  part two |  part three |

  
  Jimmy said that Strasberg was a "very ugly man" who kept no mirrors in his house for fear of chancing unexpectedly upon his own reflection. Neither Montgomery Clift nor Brando was affiliated with the Studio, and Jimmy felt that it was unnecessary for a talent such as his own to be criticized by the "ugly man" who had a "personal vindictiveness" toward Jimmy while favoring others who kowtowed to Strasberg's opinions or who fucked or sucked the members of the board. Jimmy said that Strasberg's ideas were "nothing more than personal opinions," and paraphrasing Nietzsche, Jimmy said, "It wasn't that they were true, only that they were held as being true." The instructor's opinions were, Jimmy said, "mostly hot air and hog shit." He mimicked Strasberg's self-importance; even the roundness of the man's bald head seemed to glint from Jimmy's impersonations. The voice was Strasberg's, mouthing silly, nonsensical statements or stodgy platitudes. "He sits there in this posture, this ugly man who is married to an ugly woman," Jimmy said, "and farts out these opinions while half of the people in the place run around goosing each other."

Jimmy delighted in the few times I became sarcastic and blasphemous, and he'd encourage me to get drunk and shoot my mouth off about people. James Sheldon said, "Dean aligns himself with the castigated. Point someone out as a mainstream reject or someone so wounded in some way they have a terrible negative attitude -a creep- and Jimmy goes out of his way to get close to that person. In that way you'll be caught off-balance."

Jimmy worked the angle of shock. He'd stir up ridiculous situations to upset people. Once he suggested I dress up as a girl before we went to visit some people. "The flake and the chick'll be there," he said, and he'd introduce me as a girl he'd met, and tell them we were "getting serious-going together." At the party he'd find out I was a guy. He'd be very upset and we'd fake a heated argument, but then we'd kiss and make up. The making up, he said, would "get them to the quick."

He asked me, "You ever had something to do with a guy, or just fooling around?" All I'd told him at the time was that when I was fifteen I'd gone to a Hollywood party at the Garden of Allah, and Tyrone Power, who was drunk, had squeezed my hand, patted me on the head, kissed me and said I was the most beautiful boy he had seen in a long time. Since then I'd gotten regular propositions, but I'd never had an affair with a guy. I'd just been experimenting and trying to get around.

Jimmy said the idea of us going to the party - me as a girl - was a "great idea." We talked a little about people being bisexual, and he said he didn't think there was any such thing. If someone really needed emotional support from a male, he would probably be homosexual, but if he needed the support from a woman, then he'd be "more heterosexual."

That season in New York, Jimmy began to deliberately shift his relationships. He was finding new supporters while breaking away from people who were no longer tolerant of his "bad boy" pranks. James Sheldon liked Jimmy, worked with him and helped him, but even Sheldon was taking a dim view of Jimmy's behavior. "He's changing for the worse," Sheldon told me, "and he can't even see it."

Meanwhile, John Hodiak was on Broadway in The Caine Mutiny, and I managed to join him in a restaurant one night after the performance. We'd talked briefly on the phone, and his voice had sounded far away. He was excellent on stage, but he had changed. He didn't look quite like he had in Hollywood.

With him was an attractive actress, Joan Loring, who teased me for eating the bread and part of the salad John hadn't finished, even though he'd invited me to take it. "The kid doesn't have any money," he told Loring, and then asked how one could expect an actor to have any self-determining abilities? I reminded him of what he'd told me about the power of positive thinking. He said success was an illusory state of mind, "a figment of the imagination . . . Success is simply one dog eating at the other dog until one is dead and the other one full." Then he said, "You go out and look for another dog," and they began to laugh. There were hard lines around his mouth, and he was losing his hair.

A few days later, Jimmy came to my apartment wanting me to teach him how to fence in an hour or two. I said it couldn't be done, but tried to show him how to hold a foil, as one would hold a bird, firmly but carefully. But he clutched at it, his moves sudden and jerky, and he couldn't bend one of his fingers. He was still in Eartha's body-movement class, and though she'd said the fencing was a good idea, Jimmy quickly lost interest in it. I didn't know why he'd wanted to learn.

Another time he asked if I had any marijuana. He wanted to get high and was sorry Curry wasn't around because he always had grass. I had cheese and soda crackers and a quart of beer, and Jimmy drank that quickly. He was restless and edgy, and seemed trapped in the space of the apartment. I'd been fooling around with a painting, a view from my window of the corner drugstore and the firehouse across the street. "There's no people in the picture," Jimmy said. I said I hadn't painted any into it yet. He said if it was his painting he'd leave it empty.

I put on Alex North's music from A Streetcar Named Desire, but it only made him jumpy. He couldn't sit still, bracing and tensing his shoulders and squinting through his glasses at everything. At one point, staring at me, he said, "If you put on a wig and dress you could play a chick." He made several phone calls, drank the beer and made faces because he didn't like the taste of it. Did I have anything else to eat, he wanted to know, something like cake or cookies? I said I didn't, but suggested going out somewhere.

"Like where?" he asked. He said he was starving. His belt was full of holes, he said. He was lying. James Dean never went without a meal in New York.

There was a pretty good French cafe on Ninth Avenue, but Jimmy said he didn't know much about French food, and he was broke to boot. He then said James Sheldon knew "all the French stuff," and had suggested dinner a couple of times. "Sheldon's got money," Jimmy said, and he could pay for the dinners.

He phoned Sheldon, who knew the restaurant and would be waiting in front for us. Spirits lifted, Jimmy bounced down the stairs. But by the time we walked over there, his mood had changed again. He sat hunched and guarded at the table, suspicious of what Sheldon had ordered. Once he tasted it, though, he dug in, wolfing the food down. He soaked the crepe with a sweet syrup before eating it, almost floating it, as Sheldon stared at him and said, "You're going to eat that?"

Jimmy picked up the crepe in his hand and squeezed it until the filling oozed out. He thought that was very funny, and at one point Sheldon said, "You're a knucklehead!" and rubbed Jimmy's head-one of those Dutch-uncle rubs, and said again, "This guy's a knucklehead!"

Sheldon ordered another bottle of wine, though he drank little of it. Embarrassed by our behavior, he paid the check and left early. Jimmy wouldn't leave until he had eaten all the crepes and bread, and finished the second bottle. As we walked back toward 8th Avenue, he told me he'd been in a show with actress Irene Vernon. They had been eating somewhere when she complained about the greasy potatoes; they were "swimming in grease," she'd said. Jimmy thought that was funny, but Irene was upset that the grease was spreading to the other food. He removed the potatoes from her plate, he said, and put them into a water glass where they could "swim properly," then used a napkin to wipe up the grease from her dish. She could spread the other parts of her meal, he told her, onto the place where the potatoes had been.

Heading north again, we stopped at Jerry's Tavern, drank beers and were smashed by the time we got to my place. And because the conversation got around to sex with guys as well as girls, I told him about the time an actor friend, Bill Smith, had driven up to a dude ranch where I worked, and how we'd stayed overnight at a country club. It had surprised me, I told Jimmy, when the actor showed me his cock in the room, how big he could get it.

I said I wasn't sure what I thought about seeing him like that. Jimmy wanted to know if I'd been in the sack with the producers I'd met, and I said no - except for a couple of them, but I hadn't liked it. It was something like the experience of a young relative of mine going down on me, having failed to persuade me to have sex with him from behind. "Butt-fucking him," Jimmy said. I said yes, and Jimmy asked me in a serious voice, almost like he was a doctor, if I'd wanted to suck the actor's cock. He went on to inquire whether I'd experienced any sort of pain. "Be honest with me," he said, "be as honest as all the days." What did I feel about the guy's cock, "because it seems to stand out in my mind." He laughed at the unintended pun, and asked me how come I hadn't done it?

I said the guy had surprised me and I had been scared. I said I couldn't say more about it than I already had.

Jimmy said it was probably possible for him to have a relationship with a guy, too - to have a physical exchange without it being labeled "homosexual," because he felt that something like that, like what the actor and I had come close to, was simply an extension of the friendship. "Just going to the edge of the friendship or sort of beyond it," Jimmy said. He didn't think any kind of sexual experience would push him or anyone else in one direction or the other.

He wanted to know if I had sucked my relative's cock, and I said I'd done that once or twice. That was what he'd done to me, had me shoot in his mouth, and fuck him in the ass. Jimmy asked me about another producer and how it had felt to have him kissing me. I said I hadn't liked it.

"Have you tasted jizz?" Jimmy asked. Did I know what it tasted like? "Sure, I know what it tastes like, I said, and told him I'd said - having tasted my own on my finger. Jimmy said, "You're like a little girl who puts her finger in her pussy and then licks it off." He said, well, did I like the taste?

I laughed and he laughed, too. I answered no, I'd had to spit it out. He said, "Is that why you were scared of that guy's dick, because you didn't want to have that stuff in your mouth?" That was the question he'd been driving at. That's what he wanted to know. It made me feel nervous, and I said, "I don't know . . . What about you?"

He didn't answer, but began to giggle. He said, "I'm not active. I'm passive. You are passive too, from what you have said to me . . ." But active and passive were terms that depended on what a person happens to be doing, he said. With my relative I was being passive, but by fucking him I could be said to be active, but only if it was what I wanted to do. He said it all depended on how it happened, and on what the person wanted. It was all about circumstances-the nature of the "interpersonal relationship," he said.

He was lying on my bed with his head hanging over the edge, and I was sitting in the wicker chair. At one point I tried to get up, but I was too drunk and ended up on the floor near Jimmy. I reached up and touched his head, then pulled on his hair. He said, "Man, you know more than just being kissed by Tyrone Power. You know things like I do, because you've been through the same shit . . ."

After talking for a few minutes more, there was a strange sort of vibration in the air, a kind of intimacy that was electric and exciting. He put his finger on my lower lip and started to giggle. Then he turned his head around and was sitting facing me, and he put his hand behind my neck and pulled my face toward his, putting his lips on mine. It was the first time I had ever really been kissed by another guy. He said, "Come up on the bed before I break my neck." I moved up on the bed and lay alongside of him and he kissed me again. Our teeth touched, stuck together in a strange way. I remember closing my upper row of teeth down onto his lower row, so that I could almost bite his bottom teeth by closing my mouth. I felt his tongue against the edge of my upper teeth, and then I opened my mouth and he put his tongue in my mouth, pushing it against my tongue. I put my hands up at the sides of my face and we stayed like that for a few seconds until we backed up onto the bed. He kissed me on the neck and bit-though not really hard-into the skin between my neck and collarbone, and then he was laying on top of me.

He said, "Can you be fucked?"

"Jesus!" I said. "I don't think so."

He said, "I want to try to fuck you. We can try it if you want to." He wanted me to put my arms around him-which I felt funny doing-and to hold him. He wanted me to kiss him while he moved his lower body against me, and to keep kissing him. He wanted to suck my nipples and leaned his face over and kissed me on the side. Again he bit me, and this time it felt sharp. He was holding himself and he said, "Am I going to fuck you?"

I said, "I guess we can try to. I don't how know successful it will be." At that I replaced his hand with my hand. We tried to fuck but it wasn't going to work. I tried to go down on him, but his cock was big and made me gag and choke. I didn't know what we could do. It wasn't going to work. Whatever the hell it was that had sparked such a situation between us was just going to be all bound up by the impossibility of getting it across.

This part of the friendship stayed in the background over the next few weeks, as if it had occurred in another dimension and required no actual attention from us. For me, the physical thing was awkward. Though I doubted that either of us got much satisfaction out of it, the memory of it somehow held a wonder or excitement-and yet it still scared me. For Jimmy, the idea of doing it seemed more intriguing than whatever we actually did.

Caught up in our own ambitions, what we shared wasn't an affair by far, and what has been written about our friendship in books and magazines over the years is mostly mistaken. One book describes the relationship as "salacious" and "lustful," but it wasn't. It was a period of exploration. It wasn't so much a physical thing. I'd run into Jimmy and there would be an energy between us, even in the company of others, like a dark-haired girl he was seeing named Barbara Glenn, a young actress who cared sincerely for him, and whom he really liked.

Like one night in Jerry's, Jimmy was across from me in the booth, and we were joking around and drinking, and for a second our eyes met and that look was there, but just for a second. It was like something had run or flown across a screen-the bursting noise of a bunch of birds taking wing, so fast that unless you knew what it was, you wouldn't have seen it. But the feeling was there, and if either one of us had been a girl, we'd have gotten into a love affair, though it wouldn't have lasted.

Early that fall we were goofing around at a party on 45th Street, around the corner from the Algonquin and Iroquois. Jimmy had done another show with James Sheldon, who showed up briefly at the party. He said that he and Jimmy were momentarily at odds. It had something to do with Jimmy's attitude: the more work he got, the more he seemed to antagonize those he worked with. Playwright William Inge didn't want Jimmy in a particular production, because, he said, "his moods are so unpredictable and he scares the pants right off me."

At the party, in an apartment above a manufacturing loft, Jimmy was hiding in the kitchen. We were eating crackers and potato chips and drinking soda mixed with wine. I was watching Jimmy trying to open a can of salmon with a bottle opener when a young black actor named Billy Gunn joined us, prattling on about the Actors Studio, Geraldine Page and a play adaptation of Andre Gide's novel The Immoralist. Jimmy played dumb. He'd landed a good role in the same show, but pretended to know nothing about Geraldine Page starring in the play with Louis Jordan. Jimmy's part was that of a homosexual Arab houseboy, and Billy Gunn had been signed to understudy the same character. Gunn didn't know Jimmy except to nod hello at casting calls, and Jimmy once said, "He's got some good reefers, when he's got 'em."

In the kitchen, Gunn bragged about landing the understudy, and Jimmy just said, "Oh, yeah?" and "What play's that? Who's in it?" The fact that Jimmy was signed for the role hadn't been announced, but he finally told Gunn. "They're keeping it a secret," he said, "in case they have to fire such an asshole as me before we get into rehearsals."

"That's okay with me," Gunn said. "If they do, I'll go on in your place!"

He left the kitchen, and Jimmy stared after him and said, "What a fucking jerk, man." But Gunn would become one of the few people Jimmy was friendly with that winter - part of Jimmy's "uptown" group. Jimmy was still seeing Barbara, hanging out with her sometimes, but kept us all pretty separate from one another. If two of us who knew him appeared in the same setting, he'd sort of shrink up, or start acting up, pulling some kind of stunt.

Barbara and I shared a sort of troubled distance, because she thought Jimmy was paying more attention to me than he was to her, and that he turned to me to discuss more serious ideas. Billy Gunn and I were friends, though. We'd have coffee at Cromwell's or the Museum of Modern Art. Billy talked about wanting to be a painter and a writer as well as an actor.

I felt relieved that Jimmy had signed for The Immoralist, because I was afraid to tell him about the play John Van Drutin was putting together. The playwright told my agent he saw something in me of the boy he'd written in I Remember Mama - the character Nels - whom I'd played in stock. The play was projected for the following season, and with Van Drutin's support the role was within my grasp. Yet it was a role Jimmy would have been right for if the Gide play weren't taking him out of circulation.

At another party, Jimmy introduced me to a Park Avenue art dealer named Fredrick Delius-like the composer-and we joked about him looking "remarkably life-like." Jimmy had met him at a show he'd gone to with Leonard Rosenman, a musician friend, and Delius invited us to his gallery. Apart from free snacks, Jimmy wanted to show me two works-an old Spanish painting of Saint Sebastian with all the arrows sticking in him, and a portrait of Rimbaud "in drag" by a French Symbolist painter.

From a smaller room with a table and chairs off the main gallery, you could look directly at the painting of Saint Sebastian,  almost life-size, bound to a tree, hands tied, head tilted back slightly with his eyes raised toward heaven as arrows pierced various parts of his body. Jimmy remained in a chair, smoking and staring, entranced by the painting while Delius showed me his latest acquisitions. The portrait of Rimbaud, he said, had been shipped to another gallery, but what he showed me was a peculiar work showing the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ. The baby's face looked wrinkled and strained, its teeth like an old person's. The Virgin was how I imagined an embalmed Jean Harlow might have looked. As I stared at the painting in a kind of awe, I felt Delius' hand moving across my rump, and he tried to kiss the back of my neck. He whispered something in some other language, and I moved away. He implored me to come back for dinner, and I said I'd let him know. As I walked away from him, he said weakly, "I can help you . . . I can be influential . . . You can ask Jimmy if I am not sincere."

Jimmy had dozed off, chin resting on the folds of his sweater, which was spotted with cigarette ash. His eyelids were slightly open and the whites of his eyes were visible behind his glasses. He wasn't interested in the proposal Delius had made to me. "He's an old queen," Jimmy said. "He's okay, and who gives a shit?" The man had wanted to fly him to Spain to see the bullfights, he said, then added, "Fat chance." He wanted to talk about the bulls again, the gorings and the funerals of matadors, until the dialogue settled on how long it would take Saint Sebastian to die from those arrows. One sticking in his lower abdomen must have pierced organs, Jimmy said, and he had to be bleeding inside. "That'd kill him," he said with certainty. He talked about being hanged-about suffocation-and was trying to imagine being guillotined, and whether the eyes fluttered with any last-second sight.

Jimmy's talk of death, dying and dismemberment wasn't as exciting or interesting to me as it was to him. It was never morose, though, and at times he tended to become almost ecstatic. Things became important and purposeful to him, and his whole attention seemed to focus on particular details, like the arrow in Saint Sebastian's lower abdomen. Nothing else mattered.

I stayed at the gallery a couple of times on a couch in the alcove. After dinner at an elegant Italian restaurant, we drank old vintage wine like water. We listened to Taglivini records, and Delius gave me a black-silk Chinese robe with dragons on it. He said I was like Louise Brooks-like Lulu-and he wanted to kiss my stomach and thighs. He cried until I undressed and wore the new black robe. I was very drunk and Delius wound up fucking me on the couch, under the painting of Saint Sebastian. I remember afterwards sitting on the toilet in the huge white bathroom, the black silk and dragons shining on the tile and the fluid of the man coming out of me.

The company for The Immoralist was having a terrible time with Jimmy's "uncommunicative behavior," as they put it. He'd read slowly and sullenly, and with little apparent comprehension. What no one seemed to know was that until he'd committed the script to memory, he was unable to formulate what he'd say, so he'd mutter and mumble and make up words, or simply fill in the blanks with speech that had nothing to do with the scene.

Jimmy had other people read his parts until he knew the thing by heart. He couldn't deal with a new page, and it took him ages to finish a paragraph. He preferred simple books with pictures, and poetry, and if he'd heard it enough he could repeat it like a talking bird.

Louis Jordan complained that "Dean mutters obscenities!" Even then, it was not until Jimmy experienced the language of the play in rehearsals that he could get involved, and that didn't happen until almost the opening-night performance.

Frustration ran fever pitch. Other actors found Jimmy intolerable, impossible to work with. There were serious arguments that escalated to the point of almost getting him fired. But Geraldine Page rescued him by threatening to walk out if Jimmy was dismissed. She insisted he'd be fine by opening night. The truth was that he'd confided in her and made her swear she'd not repeat what he told her. Geraldine told me a few years later, "In some peculiar way, Jimmy's difficulties in dealing with the printed page somehow bypassed some other part of him, triggering the most intense concentration of any actor I've worked with. He was like a cat that jumps a great distance without the need to know how far he has to jump."

He attended rehearsals as though a reluctant viewer rather than an actor, wandering around the stage, turning his back to others or mumbling so nobody understood. Louis Jordan said working with "this monster" was the worst experience he'd had in theater.

The play was opening in Philadelphia for the out-of-town tryout when one of Jimmy's ex-roommates told me he wanted to talk to me. He said he was very upset about the breakup of his friendship with Jimmy. I met him for coffee, but wound up drinking beer. He believed Jimmy was a very lonely individual. "I thought I was a maladjusted, miserable, lonely bastard," he said, "but Jimmy takes the cake." He pointed out that Jimmy couldn't be his friend, and he couldn't be my friend. I wasn't sure I understood what he was saying. "He goes through people as fast as he does underwear," he said, "if he even bothers to put it on half the time." He toasted Jimmy's forthcoming success in the play, saying, "He'll steal the show, you know. Don't underestimate my lost friend, James Dean."

He told me that Jimmy's mother had given him the middle name Byron after the crippled poet, Lord Byron, because she somehow "knew" that Jimmy would grow up a cripple or have a crippled soul. It was fitting, he said, since both Byron and Jimmy were cripples.

"Jimmy has said, himself, that it's best to be a cripple," the young man continued. "Has he told you about his ball-game theory?"

I said no. He summed it up, saying that when someone is hurt in the ball game, he's called to the sidelines. "From that position, one is offered a vantage point of the whole playing field that can't be appreciated when one is in the game. "The injured one on the sidelines," he said," sees more and knows more than those on the field . . ."

He then told me that Jimmy was seeking in others the mother he lost as a child. "Though to these same people," he said, "he can be harmful, if not destructive." He said that it resulted from the fact that it was impossible for anyone else to fill in for Jimmy's dead mother. "No one can," he said, "and in the role he forces upon you, you'll always fail our troubled boy."

Attempting to tell me how much he had been through with Jimmy, he said he was leaving New York in despair, having thrown up his hands. He said, "Once Jimmy has finished with a person, that person ceases to exist. Finis! Kaput!"

The real reason for our meeting came out when he asked me if Jimmy and I had been sleeping together. People were saying things. Was that the reason Jimmy was being so hurtful to his friends? "Are you lovers?" he asked, with a kind of weak smile. At that, I finished our conversation.

"You're a sad character, you know?" I said. "You'd be enough to drive anyone to the sidelines."

He raised his glass in a mock toast. "The playing field is yours," he said, "and with it all the blessings and the curses."

I didn't see Jimmy's ex-pal again in New York. The play went well in Philadelphia, then successfully opened on Broadway. When the opening- night curtain dropped at eleven o'clock, Jimmy had delivered a masterful performance-as well as his three-weeks notice. Everyone was stunned, including his most patient supporter, Geraldine. She said, "It was the most unheard-of set of circumstances I'd ever witnessed."

Jimmy told no one of his secret plans to dump the play. Not even Geraldine knew the whole truth, though she had played an unwitting part in the chain of events. A writer she knew, Paul Osborn, was doing a screen adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden for Elia Kazan and Warner Brothers. Geraldine had talked a great deal about Jimmy's antics, but stressed his peculiar intensity during rehearsals. After Osborn went to the Philadelphia tryouts, he realized Jimmy was the perfect actor for the part of the boyish troublemaker in Steinbeck's story.

Osborn told Kazan, and the director went to take a look at Jimmy. "I got to know him," Kazan said, "and he was an absolutely rotten person. Right away, he was a real cocker and an asshole. But he was the most perfect fucking actor for that part - all bound up in himself with his neurotic problems, lashing out at inappropriate moments. A sulker, an asshole, but absolutely perfect for the role. There wasn't any question in my mind that he'd bring it off-all he had to do was be himself. The problem I faced was convincing Warner Brothers that I should go with an unknown, starring him in the movie."

I hadn't seen Jimmy since he'd left for Philadelphia, but I went to the play after it opened at the Royale Theater in New York. He kept talking about plans that were in the works, and he said he couldn't tell anyone why he'd given his notice on opening night. In one scene, he did a seductive dance as the homosexual houseboy enticing Louis Jordan. Using a pair of scissors like castanets, Jimmy improvised the snipping sounds to accompany his dance. "It was the strings, man," Jimmy told me, "and Louis Jordan didn't even know what was going on." Jimmy was snipping away at the invisible strings binding Jordan's character to the safe middle-class morality he'd left abroad. In the blaze of the Middle Eastern desert, surrounded by rampant sexuality, Jordan becomes helpless, and with each coaxing step of the dance, Jimmy's snipping cut more and more at the man's hopeless respectability. The rigid European gives in, then finally commits suicide.

Jimmy told me his thoughts about the scissors when he called with a vague, muttered story about money being hidden in his apartment. He was going out of town on something important and had to alert me that he might need a favor, someone to get into his apartment and take care of a couple of things, maybe send something out of town. I later learned that he'd called Billy Gunn, and a girl named Chris White who worked at the Actors Studio, with a similar story. It was his way of saying "See you later" without giving away any secrets. Kazan had warned him not to talk to anyone about the movie until they had completed tests in New York, and until the studio had rubber-stamped the director's decision. With hardly anyone knowing it, Jimmy had fulfilled his prophesy - he had become the most important actor in town.

Though we'd get together in Hollywood, that was the last time I talked to him in New York. Soon, with most of his clothes and belongings stuffed into paper sacks, Jimmy was on a plane heading west "to shake the shit out of Hollywood . . ."

THAT WAS THE END

"I don't know what to do anymore. Except maybe die." ~ James Dean 
 as Jim Stark (Rebel Without A Cause)

  part one  |  part two |  part three| back to top

click on books for more info
John Gilmore's books are available at AMAZON and BARNES AND NOBLE