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Dorothy Dean — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Career

After graduating, Dean worked in the slide library at Brandeis University for two years before serving as typist and editorial assistant on art historian Sydney J. Freedberg's two-volume study of Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture.

In 1963, Dean moved to New York City without any prospects. She soon entered magazine publishing, becoming the first woman employed as a fact-checker at The New Yorker. After leaving The New Yorker, Dean held editorial positions at Vogue, Huntington Hartford's short-lived magazine Show, and Essence.

Dean became a familiar figure in New York's artistic and literary circles. She began visiting Pop artist Andy Warhol's Factory, appearing in several of his experimental films including Batman Dracula (1964), Afternoon (1965), My Hustler (1965), Restaurant (1965), Chelsea Girls (1966), and Superartist (1967).

In the late 1960s, Dean began working as a bouncer at Max's Kansas City after Abigail Rosen sought a replacement for Nawana Davis. Rosen recalled, "I tell my incredibly chic gay pals Michael Maslansky and Frank Macfie that I need an assistant. They tell somebody and somebody else tells somebody else and next thing I know, Mickey is groveling at my feet thanking me for Dorothy Dean. I had never met the woman." She was known for her imposing presence at the club's back room. David Smith, who was a bartender at the nightclub, said, "I can remember romancing Jay Johnson, and Dorothy Dean coming right over to the table and screaming at me that she didn't approve of me for him." In her memoir Just Kids (2010), singer Patti Smith described Dean as "small, black and brilliant," writing that she "stood before the entrance to the back room like an Abyssinian priest guarding the Ark."

Dean appeared as "Black Barbarella" in American Cream (1971), a gay porn film directed by her friend Jean-Claude van Itallie.

During the mid-1970s she self-published All-Lavender Cinema Courier, an eight-issue newsletter devoted to film criticism. In 1979, Dean applied to Harvard Law School but moved to Boulder, Colorado, in 1980 at the suggestion of a friend. She supported herself by working in a bookstore before becoming a copy editor and proofreader for the Daily Camera, where she worked from 1981 to 1986.

Personal life

Dean was a close friend of Arthur Loeb, the son of investment banker John Loeb, a founding partner of the firm Loeb, Rhoades & Co., and Frances Lehman Loeb, a member of the Lehman banking family. Dean met Arthur while they were undergraduates at Harvard, and because he had limited use of his left arm and leg, she worked for him as a typist. The two remained close friends for many years, and although their relationship was platonic, Arthur proposed marriage to her. According to a friend of Dean's, John Loeb offered her money not to marry his son, which she refused, responding, "I won't marry Arthur because I don't want to. But I won't not marry him because you say don't marry him."

In early 1956, Dean gave birth to a son, whom she placed for adoption shortly after his birth. She did not publicly reveal the identity of the child's father, and her friend Arthur Loeb helped cover her expenses during the pregnancy.

Dean had a affair with former investment adviser Rollins Maxwell.

Friends and acquaintances recalled Dean's outspoken personality and heavy drinking. Among her nicknames were "Nurse Dean" and "The Curd of Human Kindness." Abigail Rosen, the first door person at Max's Kansas City, said despite Dean's fearsome reputation, she found her "actually warm." Rosen believed that Dean often made provocative and outrageous remarks because "she wanted to make sure that people didn't think she was ordinary. Being ordinary was the cardinal sin in those days."

Dean met poet Robert Creeley through Mickey Ruskin, the owner of Max's Kansas City. According to poet Gerard Malanga, both Dean and Creeley had been drinking when an exchange between them escalated, and Dean struck Creeley in the face. Despite the incident, Creeley later praised Dean's intelligence and the two became close friends, with Creeley writing a poem inspired by their first encounter.

Bob Russell, a bouncer at Max's Kansas City, said that Dean was infatuated with gay men, particularly a man she nicknamed the "Sugar Plum Fairy," who was referenced in musician Lou Reed's 1972 song "Walk on the Wild Side." Russell recalled that Dean was "often found in leather bars in the West Village in pursuit of the Sugar Plum Fairy. That was her love, and then Lou Reed became the focus of her life."

From 1963 to 1979, Dean lived in an apartment on Morton Street in Greenwich Village.