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A couple years back, a salacious book about about the short, beautiful life of James Dean caused quite a stir when it alleged the Rebel Without A Cause heartthrob had a very kinky affair with Marlon Brando. Apparently, the On The Waterfront actor liked to dom his younger colleague, and force him to watch as he hooked up with strangers!

But here’s the thing: You’ve got to take it all with a giant chunk of salt. That exposé’s authors—Danforth Prince and Darwin Porter—are notorious for crafting elaborate Old Hollywood sexual fantasies wholesale, and their claims have been frequently refuted.

So, who can you trust? How about somebody who was actually there!

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Legendary casting director Joel Thurm—who worked on classics such as Grease and The Rocky Horror Picture Show—was such a person, and his new memoir Sex, Drugs, & Pilot Season: Confessions Of A Casting Director is as juicy as you might hope.

While there are some reports that Thurm’s book does, indeed, confirm Dean and Brando’s affair, it’s well worth a read beyond that, especially as he paints a picture of a sexually liberated Hollywood scene, where even closeted A-List stars could indulge in gay hook-ups behind closed doors.

The casting director specifically recalls an industry party in the ’70s where “most of” the attendees were gay. Apparently, everyone was gathered together to screen a gay adult film calls Boys In The Sand, which was one of the first of its kind.

While at the party, Thurm caught the eye of iconic film and television actor Rock Hudson, who, years later, would become one of the first Hollywood stars to come out as he publicly fought his battle with AIDS.

Thurm, now in his 80s, admits the Giant actor was one of his childhood crushes, and therefore couldn’t resist when Hudson beckoned him into a private bedroom. The only trouble was, the casting director was so starstruck that he “couldn’t get it up”—so he tells Page Six.

“I was embarrassed and mortified… getting it up was a specialty of mine,” Thurm reveals with a laugh. “I couldn’t do it because he was Rock Hudson! It so intimidated me. Someone said, ‘Well, why didn’t you just bl*w him?’ I said, ‘Because I was too…’ I couldn’t do anything.”

Happens to the best of us, Thurm! And, apparently, it’s happened to Hudson quite often. The Hollywood insider shares his screen idol was “unperturbed” by the moment, and that he’d seen it happen a number of times.

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Elsewhere in the memoir, Thurm details another dalliance that went a little more successfully. He was on the set of the 1976 TV movie The Boy In The Bubble, for which he had cast a John Travolta in one of his earliest leading roles. Among the co-stars was established actor Robert Reed—well known as The Brady Bunch‘s patriarch—who took issue with “playing second fiddle” to the young hot shot.

Thurm recalls visiting Reed’s dressing room in an effort to assuage any frustrations: “It was known [that he was gay,]” he tells Page Six. “But I didn’t go in there with the intention of that. I went in there with the intention of just, ‘Hey, thank you for putting up with what we have to do. And then, I don’t know, I just started rubbing his back. I thought, ‘Well that’s what you do in a situation like that.’ I had no intention of anything more than that. But he seemed to respond.”

And respond he did! Although Thurm notes Reed continued to be a diva on set after the fact.: “[He] went back to being the same pr*ck he was before.” Oh well, you tried, Joel!

All of these stories and more are covered in Joel Thurm’s eye-popping memoir Sex, Drugs, & Pilot Season: Confessions Of A Casting Director, which is on shelves now.

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