Heroes, Demons Revisited in Tragicomic Romp Through the ‘60s

“ ‘I’m glad Dean’s dead,’ said Steve McQueen. ‘It makes more room for me.’ . . . It was the first conversation I’d had with McQueen since the girl he’d been living with broke off with him and moved in with me.”

Imagine. Being dude enough to steal McQueen’s squeeze and outlive the guy (not to mention your best friend, James Dean) and tell the tale. That’s Jonathan Gilmore, graduate of Hollywood High, actor, director and sometime chronicler of the more gruesome B-murders of the mid-century Southwest.

Now, with his pretty-boy looks dusted by the effort of survival, Gilmore looks back to his own long, strange trip through the 1960s with “Laid Bare,” the first of a two-part “Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip.”

Haunted by Furies of his own, including a drunken mother who turns up inconveniently in one dive or another to cadge money off her son or put the make on one of his friends, McQueen turns out to be one of the more harmless demons in the Gilmore pantheon. He’s joined by a chorus of other folk heroes with feet coated with a substance more odoriferous than clay: Tony Perkins on the run from the vice squad, Lenny Bruce running out on dying pals, Janis Joplin turning tricks for dope.

The chief Dionysiac is James Dean himself. “Laid Bare” owes its most precious organs to a chance encounter in a drugstore on West 47th Street and Broadway that became the deep, mercurial friendship between Dean and Gilmore.

On one level, the book is just one more bit of gossip dolled up as memoir for our insatiable American village. Part of us is superior to this level of trash.

“Who the hell cares about the guy’s private life?” Humphrey Bogart is quoted as saying about James Dean. “At 24, what the hell kind of private life’s developed? If he wants to go around with an unzipped fly, what the hell’s the difference as long as he delivers the goods? He’s a kid. Wait’ll his pictures get as old as me, then judge what he’s done and wonder what the hell his fly had to do with it.”

But Bogart’s superiority is fairly distant from Gilmore’s real interest. Fly, even more than feet, is what “Laid Bare” is all about, from the curious Dean unzipping in Gilmore’s New York apartment, to the strung-out Janis Joplin straddling him in the back of a taxicab on Russian Hill, to the incontinent Hank Williams urinating down his own pant leg in the parking lot of the Riverside Rancho in Hollywood.

Gilmore may not have posted Wilt Chamberlain numbers, but what he lacked in quantity he made up for in celebrity: Dean, Joplin, Sal Mineo, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, Jena Seberg. In one particularly infernal scene, Gilmore even finds himself in an absinthe dive on the Left Bank of Paris, the not-so-obscure object of the desire of the self-abusing William Burroughs.

The Brownie snaps and publicity stills of Gilmore and his pals obscure the sharp focus of Gilmore’s description of a world obsessed by his beauty. It’s a beauty that can be tarnished only by the desire of others. Yet Gilmore is well aware that he owes much of his attraction to the mystery surrounding his relationship with young, pre-stardom Dean.

He is a smart writer and steps delicately around the stench of his own disappointments. It is the key to his survival. The abandon of genius, of Dean and Joplin, Jim Morrison, Hank Williams and even Dennis Hopper, his many-time roommate (whom Gilmore accuses of stealing one of his stories and turning it into the hit “Easy Rider”), is beyond him. Gilmore can only stand back and watch as his friends plunge into the ‘60s and madness.

Gilmore’s wandering, from year to year, from Broadway to Hollywood to the Beaux Arts, eventually leads to a tragic point. There’s something of the Bildungsroman to “Laid Bare,” not just for Gilmore, but for all the Rimbauds and young Werthers of the Camelot era, the pretty boys, the bisexual bikers, the surfers riding Waves and sailors, confident they would never see 30 or the century turn 70.

Gilmore’s tragedy is to never have found the one great wave that his pals rode to stardom and death.

His view from the maelstrom is the glory of his short-lived friends. It’s a view we can all admire with our own rubber-necking relativism, standing safely on the shore, all of us Peeping Tom’s at the small end of the century, covered with flies, unable to look away.