James Dean and Marcus: the Siamese kitten that received the actor's last handwritten note

The note is written in pencil, in a hand that leans slightly to the right, and it describes how to prepare formula for a kitten only a few weeks old. One tablespoon of white Karo syrup, one can of evaporated milk, distilled water boiled in the same proportion, an egg yolk, mix and cool. No cold meat, no cold bottle. One drop of vitamins a day. Signed "JD" with a small flourish. It is the last thing James Dean wrote by hand before climbing into his Porsche 550 Spyder bound for Salinas on September 30, 1955. He died that afternoon at a junction on California Route 466. He was 24. The kitten he had left a meal prepared for was named Marcus.

Who was Marcus, and where did he come from?

The Siamese arrived at the Sherman Oaks house in Los Angeles in late summer of 1955, during the final weeks of filming Giant. Elizabeth Taylor, who shared the screen with Dean on that picture, noticed that the actor spent many afternoons at the home of photographer Sanford Roth and his wife Beulah, playing with the couple's cat. She decided to give him a kitten of his own. She handed it over on the set in Marfa, Texas, and brought it to California when filming wrapped. Dean named him Marcus, after a cousin of his from Indiana.

The most famous photograph of the pair was taken by Roth himself in the small sitting room of the Sherman Oaks house: Dean in a turtleneck sweater, barefoot in an armchair, the kitten clinging to his sweater and gnawing on a button. Roth shot the scene several more times during September. The images are collected in James Dean Revisited (Viking Press, 1962), Roth's book with text and original photographs from the actor's last month.

The breed: traditional Siamese, not modern

Marcus was a classic Siamese of the 1950s, which is to say what is known today as the traditional Siamese or Thai, distinct from the modern wedge-headed, extreme-silhouette Siamese that took over the show ring from the 1970s onward. The cat in the photographs has a rounded head, a sturdy body, and the usual seal points (face, ears, legs, and tail in a dark chocolate close to black over a cream body). That morphology is what TICA recognizes today as Thai.

Siamese cats were in full vogue in Hollywood at the time. Vivien Leigh kept several, Joan Crawford did too, and they were imported with relative ease from Southern California catteries. There is no published record of Marcus's cattery, though he is usually placed among the breeders active in Los Angeles in the early fifties.

The actor's routine with the cat

From the testimony of Roth and of Jeanette Miller, a personal friend of Dean in whose house Marcus stayed the last night, a striking routine has been reconstructed for a 24-year-old bachelor in the middle of promoting Rebel Without a Cause. Dean came home at midday to feed the kitten, a habit his Warner colleagues teased him about. He prepared the formula himself. For short trips he left the animal with the Roths. For longer ones, with Miller, who lived in a house with a garden nearby.

The handwritten note with the instructions (lot 24469 at Heritage Auctions, sold in 2017 with provenance documented in the Miller archive) is a crumpled sheet of notebook paper written in a fast hand. Besides the formula recipe, it includes a final line: "Take Marcus to Dr. Cooper on Melrose for shots next week." That is, take the cat to the vet on Melrose Avenue for vaccinations the following week. By the following week, Dean was already dead.

What became of the cat after the crash

Marcus stayed with Jeanette Miller in the weeks after the accident. According to Roth's public photographic archive and later interviews with Miller, the cat was afterward taken in by the Roth family, who already kept cats at home, and lived there for several years. There is no reliable record of the exact date of his death; traditional Siamese of the period typically lived between 12 and 16 years with home care, and the press reported him dead without much coverage in the mid-1960s.

Dean's personal papers, including the Marcus note, passed to the Roths after the accident and from there, through successive donations and auctions, into private collections. The handwritten note is probably the actor's only unintentional "will": an instruction for caring for an animal he was never going to see again.

Why did Elizabeth Taylor pick a Siamese?

There are two readings. The practical one: Taylor knew from conversations with Dean that the actor enjoyed the Roths' cat, also a Siamese. The gift replicated an affection she had already observed. The cultural one: in 1950s Hollywood the Siamese functioned as feline status, a breed seen as exotic, elegant, and tied to classic cinema. Disney would popularize the image even further with Lady and the Tramp in 1955, the very same year, and its Siamese cats Si and Am. For an actress of Taylor's stature, giving a Siamese was the feline equivalent of giving a pedigreed puppy.

The cross-referenced accounts (Roth, Miller, Taylor in interviews after 1980) agree that the choice was almost automatic. Dean received the cat without surprise and accepted him as if it were exactly what he had asked for.

What the story tells us about the Siamese

The Siamese is a vocal breed, demanding of human presence, with a clear tendency to fix on one specific person in the household. The typical picture fits the brief life Marcus shared with Dean: the actor came home, the cat greeted him as its sole reference point, ate only from his hand, slept on him. Had Dean lived longer, Marcus would probably have developed the intense attachment characteristic of the breed, what some veterinarians call a one-person cat.

The breed also carries a health profile of its own. There is documented predisposition to dental disease (gingivitis and periodontal disease above the average), hepatic amyloidosis, feline asthma, and certain types of intestinal adenocarcinoma. Modern Siamese of extreme morphology add respiratory and ocular problems, including the convergent strabismus once typical and now selected against. Traditional cats like Marcus show a more balanced picture: documented longevity usually runs 12 to 15 years with standard care and can reach 20 with veterinary follow-up.

The verifiable facts, in one line each

Fact	Confirmation
Marcus's breed	Traditional Siamese (seal point)
Origin of the cat	Gift from Elizabeth Taylor during the filming of Giant, summer 1955
Surviving handwritten note	Heritage Auctions, lot 24469, sold in 2017
Last night with Dean	September 29, 1955, left at Jeanette Miller's house
Dean's death	September 30, 1955, Route 466 (Cholame, California)
Photographic record	Sanford Roth, James Dean Revisited (Viking Press, 1962)

Why the story matters

The Marcus formula is the most intimate possible version of a myth. James Dean left no will, no children, no house of his own (he rented the Sherman Oaks place). The only thing he left in writing before dying was a note so a friend would know how to feed a kitten a few months old. Anyone who has hand-raised a kitten before full weaning recognizes the recipe: evaporated milk with corn syrup and egg yolk was the standard homemade formula before the pet industry put out specialized milk replacers in the 1970s. Dean had gotten it, most likely, from his vet or from the Roths. He copied it onto a scrap of paper and left it on the counter.

That note says more about the man than any later interview. A kid of 24 with two films released and a third still to be cut, about to climb into a car he drove badly, spent the last useful quarter hour of his life writing down a cat's diet. It does not reach the myth of the doomed actor. It reaches the more human myth of the kid from Indiana who looked after a Siamese.

What the cat says about the actor

If the popular story of Dean is fast cars, a red jacket, a wounded gaze, and an early death, the story Marcus adds runs the other way. An actor with a schedule, with small responsibilities, capable of coming home every midday so that a small animal could eat. Serious biographers of the actor (David Dalton, Donald Spoto) have cited the anecdote as a counterweight. It does not undo the icon; it completes it.

If this story tempts you to adopt a traditional Siamese, two things to keep in mind. The breed needs real human presence, not just food and water left out for the weekend, and it is not a cat content to watch the world from a windowsill alone. It also needs mental exercise: play, windows with active views, another companion animal if you are going to be out for long hours. Cared for well, a Siamese will give you 15 years or more. Marcus, by contrast, had thirty days.