The ghost of James Dean still haunts Cholame.
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All around this small San Luis Obispo County town, the dry brush that populates the low, sloping foothills waves softly in the stiff breeze. Summer’s about over, so it’s warm but not unbearably so. The sun lingers in the western sky most afternoons, hanging around like Dean’s shiftless ranch hand on the porch of the Texas mansion in “Giant.”
Next to the Jack Ranch Cafe, a memorial to Dean erected in 1977 by a Japanese hotel owner has fallen into disrepair. Faint smudges spell the outline of the actor’s name on a shiny metal plate. The actual letters appear to have been pried off by vandals.
Large metal coins with Dean’s likeness, embedded in logs, either have been stolen or the resin protecting them has been scratched, splintered or otherwise destroyed. In a romantic pique, someone has scrawled “Izan & Katie” in black marker over one. An empty beer bottle sits on the small rocks at the foot of the memorial.
On Sept. 30, it was 50 years since Dean met his untimely end in a car crash about a half-mile away, near the intersection of Highways 41 and 46. Though the actor starred in but three movies, he remains one of America’s most enduring icons.
To celebrate (T-shirts in the cafe proclaim, “50th anniversary — where it all began”), a restaurant employee says, the memorial was to be spruced up with new lettering. A classic car show was planned.
Across the nation, the gears of commerce are whirring for James Dean. A festival was planned in his hometown of Fairmount, Ind. Photographer Dennis Stock, who shot Dean for Life magazine, has a new book. Warner Home Video has two new biographical DVDs that follow by only a few months “The Complete James Dean Collection.” An Atlanta gallery is showing photos of and by Dean.
Why all the fuss?
Ask Shelby Legnon, 35, a Santa Cruz rockabilly guitarist who has trekked to the Cholame memorial a half-dozen times.
Though he’s far too young to remember Dean’s first rise to prominence, Legnon says it’s easy to understand why the star’s legacy remains potent 50 years later.
“He represents eternal youth,” Legnon says, leaning on the memorial. “If James Dean had lived, he wouldn’t be the icon he is. He’d just be an old guy, like [Marlon] Brando or Montgomery Clift or any of the actors that Dean came of age with.”
`Live fast, die young’
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During the early 1950s, Dean split time between Hollywood and New York, acting in commercials, plays and television shows. His rise was mercurial: Playing the evil twin in the 1955 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” Dean earned an Oscar nomination.
On Sept. 30 of that year, speeding along in a Porsche Spyder he’d nicknamed the Little Bastard, the actor collided with a Ford Sedan driven by a Tulare college student named Donald Turnupseed. Dean was killed almost instantly.
Four days later, “Rebel Without a Cause” was released. Playing Jim Stark, a confused teenager with doting but ineffectual parents, Dean came to epitomize brooding adolescent behavior.
Legnon — sporting colorful tattoos along both arms, a blue Surly Wench Pub shirt, black denim jeans, belt, shoes and long sideburns — looks as if he could’ve stepped out of some “Rebel Without a Cause” catalog.
He says the film is his favorite of Dean’s.
“What he was wearing then typifies the look,” Legnon says. “There was a coolness factor, more than his acting. When I watch his movies now, it seems like he’s overacting.”
Epitome of cool
Not that it matters much. Richard Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University in New York, says a young appearance dilutes with age for most actors. Not Dean.
“There is no evidence of James Dean’s looking anything but like the cool, aloof rebel without a cause,” he says.
Bruce Austin, 53, of Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, where he heads the university’s department of communications, says the movie made perfect sense to a generation coming of age under the most prosperous of circumstances, a situation Hollywood was quick to exploit (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
“The craziness that’s there is the craziness you live as a teenager,” he says. “When we see a movie with that title, that’s going to say something to us.”
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Dean had completed one other film before his death, 1956’s “Giant,” which starred Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor. Third-billed, Dean practically stole the movie by playing a character who over the course of 40 years goes from cowboy to oil tycoon.
It hinted at a range the 24-year-old actor hadn’t yet had the opportunity to fully explore.
Except that it cut short a promising career, Dean’s death probably didn’t affect the course of American cinema — or even youth culture.
Brando, for one, showed a similar rebellious streak on the big screen.
“Dean was a remarkably good-looking actor who was a good actor,” Austin says.
“If he’d never existed, someone else would’ve filled his place. Hollywood has never run short of good-looking men and women to use in their pictures.”
Still, Legnon says, Dean added a unique twist to American pop culture that is emulated to this day.
“When you think about it,” he says, “Elvis was trying to be James Dean.”