This past spring break, my parents asked me questions such as, “Where are you going?” Upon learning my answer, they asked follow-ups like, “Hm… why?” My roommate’s family (shoutout Liz) asked, “Why aren’t you going to the beach?” The answer was, of course, that because I am so normal about James Dean, my roommate and I were packing two bags into my car and driving the mere eight hours to Fairmount, Indiana, where James Dean grew up. (We stopped at Cuyahoga National Park on the way, so that my roommate could have a fun place to go, too.)
Sept. 30th, just a few days ago, marked the 70th anniversary of James Dean’s death on State Route 41 in California, on his way to a race in his brand-new Porsche 550 Spyder. He was 24 years old and had only filmed leading roles in three movies, two of which had to be released posthumously. An aside on how normal I am: I didn’t even have to look any of that up. Despite his meteoric and cut-off career—or perhaps because of it—the larger-than-life figure, idol and legacy that is James Dean has persisted uninterrupted for these seventy years.
Going to Fairmount, however, really hammered home for me just how myopic that version of James Dean is. It’s based on a real life, yes, but it’s become, well, Hollywood. James Dean, before he was a movie star, was a person, and when he died what survived of him most thoroughly was the movie star— the man, yes, but moreso the myth and the legend. The town of Fairmount, contemporarily known most for its annual James Dean Festival, has fossilized around the legacy of James Dean, with a monument at his birthplace, his image on multiple murals, and two museums dedicated to him along the stretch of main road. The first, the James Dean Gallery, is very fan-centric, reinforcing a larger-than-life commercial feeling, but the second, the James Dean Museum located in the heart of Fairmount’s little downtown, I was really moved by.
It humanized him. I had gone in (gone to Fairmount, even) with the intention of solidifying James Dean the person, but I was pleased with how the museum had handled their displays. The majority of their items—from personal things to trinkets to letters—were donated by Marcus Winslow, Jr., Dean’s still-living cousin with whom Winslow spent a lot of his early childhood, and taken from the Winslow farmhouse that Dean himself had grown up in. Another portion were from the town’s own archives and photographic records. When I was at the museum, their newest acquisition was not a shiny award or Hollywood memorabilia, but James Dean’s crib, which Winslow had just found in the attic. I did in fact tear up, normal style, at a small birth announcement that the museum had in a case alongside other childhood belongings and photographs, even high school report cards.
Between shirts from behind-the-scenes of “Rebel Without a Cause” and stills from “East of Eden,” the museum made sure to prominently place Dean’s tape recorder (accompanied by an information card explaining that he’d used it to record his grandparents’ casual chatter on his last visit home in February of 1955, right around his last birthday), and letters between Dean and his cousin, who wasn’t yet a teenager when Dean died (wherein Dean cleaned up his scrawl as best he could to offer a young Winslow advice on his burgeoning drawing hobby). In Fairmount, James Dean is a movie star, but he is also a boy, who wrote home to his family and played around with photography and is still missed, every day, by a cousin who remembers him simply as “Jimmy.”
As the 70th year since James Dean’s death comes and goes, I do of course think of his stardom, and how much of a shame it is that he never had a chance to do more. But I also think of how much of a shame it is that he never had a chance to be more— to figure himself out, to spend time with the people and places he loved, to really and truly grow into his life. I am glad for him, and for his legacy, and for the fact that he does, in a Hollywood sort of way, live on. I just hope that, as time marches on, the person that was James Dean gets to come along.
