MY WEEKEND IN FAIRMOUNT, INDIANA —
THE HOMETOWN OF JAMES DEAN
By ERIC LANGBERG
Few people knew who James Dean was when he died in a car crash at the age of 24, on September 30th, 1955 — exactly sixty years ago today. He’d only starred in one movie earlier that year, Elia Kazan’s East of Eden, and he had filmed two more that were yet to be released, but aside from a few television appearances, that was about it. While fan magazines had been playing him up as the next big star, no one could have anticipated the way his death would launch him to superstardom. But because his flame was extinguished too early, the 24-year-old actor went from an almost complete nobody in early 1955, to one of the most famous actors in American history less than ten months later.
And make no mistake, James Dean is a quintessential figure of American history. Jimmy grew up on a rural Indiana farm dreaming of making it big in Hollywood, and within a handful of years after graduating high school, he’d done just that; in other words, he came from nothing, and thanks to his breathtakingly raw talent and his tireless dedication to endlessly refining his craft, he became everything. His role as Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause, released a mere four weeks after his death, defined an entire generation of restless postwar teenagers struggling to find their place in the world. His life is the epitome of the American dream, and he has come to symbolize so many things to so many people, even sixty years later, that the mind staggers trying to grasp all of the ways that people have tried and still try to understand James Dean. Is he a misunderstood, closeted gay man? Is he a straight man who used his sex appeal to get ahead? Is he kind of a jerk, or did he just have a wicked sense of humor? Is he the best, most original acting talent of all time, or is he an emperor with no clothes, who just seems good because he only had three major roles? Maybe he’s none of these things, or all of them at once.
At the end of his biography Boulevard of Broken Dreams: The Life, Times, and Legend of James Dean, author Paul Alexander recounts his trip to Fairmount, Indiana for their annual James Dean Festival. He describes the memorial procession from Back Creek Friends Church to Park Cemetery and Jimmy’s grave, and he marvels at the fact that nearly forty years after Dean’s death, people still cared enough to come to Fairmount from all over the world to pay tribute to a young man who was only ever the star of three movies.
This past weekend, twenty years after Alexander’s trip to Fairmount, sixty years after James Dean’s low-slung Porsche Spyder collided with Donald Turnupseed’s Ford Tudor, snapping the actor’s neck and crushing his skull, the town once more held James Dean Days, their annual festival in remembrance of their hometown boy. This year, I took a trip out to Fairmount to pay my own respects to an actor I love, and to see if I could find an answer to the question of why people still care. I don’t necessarily know why I care. I think there’s something fascinating about his enduring transformation from man to symbol, from rural farmboy to international icon. And, not just that — a symbol with so many meanings, so many infinitely complex ways of being understood. So, last Friday, I headed to Fairmount, hoping to find out — what does James Dean represent, and to whom, in the year 2015?
“Out of Nothing…”
Friday afternoon, September 25. My roommate James Weaver has graciously agreed to drive me out to Fairmount, which will take us close to six hours from Pittsburgh. He’s also brought along his camera and has volunteered to be my photographer for the weekend. Except where noted, photos in this article are his.
Around 3:30pm, just outside Muncie, I.N., we start hearing commercials on the radio for the Fairmount Indiana James Dean Days Festival, broadcast on Star 106.9 from Playacres Park — where hundreds of classic cars from around the country have come to participate in the annual James Dean Run, a car show that happens concurrently with Museum Days. (For the record, this isn’t me being imprecise with my language — we saw official signage and souvenirs calling the event all manner of things, from the James Dean Festival to James Dean Days to Museum Days to the Fairmount Museum Festival. Like Jimmy/Jimmie/James/Jamie himself, the festival has many names.)
As I realize how close we’re getting, I take this opportunity to pull out my copy of James Dean: The Mutant King, David Dalton’s excellent biography of the star, to reread his opening section on Fairmount, Indiana.
“Out of Nothing, Nothing can be created. This gloomy axiom had vexed the Western world until well into the eighteenth century when a leatherneck named Martin Boots first set foot in Indiana, a land so uncannily level, it was as if a Divine Hand had prepared it… Night, the sea, deserts and plains are screens for the projection of latent images, and on this land — formless, malleable, and virgin as it was — they could create whatever they wished… Indiana was to be a blank page on whose surface anything could be written. Fairmount, Indiana… is the fount of some archetypal images without which the very idea of America might dissolve — the birthplace of the hamburger, the car, the airplane and the ice-cream cone.”
Dalton goes on to describe the origin myths of these images as claimed by the inhabitants of Fairmount, and he concludes with: “Then there is James Dean, archetypal American boy, the Adolescent Incarnate whose invention was himself — typical and ideal — an image as American as Adam and as common as a Coke.”
I share this information with my roommate/driver/photographer, who asks me how much of it I think is true. Can one tiny town really be responsible for so many quintessential elements of American iconography? I’m not sure how much of it is true, I tell him. But I don’t necessarily care, either. It makes for a good story, doesn’t it? And really, what else matters?
“A Warner Brothers set, a back lot Anytown…”
A little after 4:ooPM, the cornfields end suddenly and we find ourselves in Fairmount. As the GPS guides us down picturesque tree-lined streets, past little signs decorated with cartoon Jim Starks pointing the way to the Fairmount Historical Museum, I realize I’m nervous. I’ve read about the town and the festival extensively online, but what if this turns out to be a disaster? It’s common knowledge at this point that Jimmy’s face has been infinitely replicated and commercialized, blatantly exploited to sell everything from blue jeans, to soap, to home security alarm systems. What if this festival is a cynical exercise in wringing as much money out of tourists as possible?
But then, I see the James Dean Gallery, and all at once, I think that my fears may be unfounded. Aside from the giant statue of James Dean in the lawn, the banners bearing his face hanging from the porch, and the massive American flag, the James Dean Gallery is an otherwise unassuming structure, surrounded on all sides by residential housing. Walking up to it, one gets the sense that one is headed into the house of a superfan, someone who really loves and cares for James Dean, rather than a business designed to make money.
As we are standing on the lawn taking pictures of the gallery, a man in the iconic red jacket and jeans from Rebel gets out of his car and walks over to the statue. We will run into this man several times throughout the weekend; when he enters the lookalike contest on Saturday night, we will find out that he’s come up to Fairmount from Florida to enter.
“Want a picture?” he says, and immediately falls into an all-too-familiar pose.
We head down Main Street, because I can make out a familiar-looking spire that I’ve seen in photographs over the tops of the trees, and within a block we come upon a charming street fair that looks so much like the carnival in East of Eden that I wonder for a moment if it’s been intentionally set up the same. But then, I suppose, that’s exactly the appeal of Fairmount — it really could be Anytown, USA, as Dalton wrote in The Mutant King. This street carnival, this midway on Main Street, with its rows of flashing pastel lights, roaming squads of squealing children, and the scent of funnel cake and buttery popcorn, is precisely how Hollywood would envision a small-town street fair.
Then Main Street opens up in front of us, and I can’t help but laugh to my roommate: “It does look like a movie set.”
Dalton writes, “Fairmount is the quintessence of the small town, as it was and as America will always dream of it… On a misty morning it could well be the streets of Monterey, where Jimmy prowled in the opening scenes of East of Eden. It has the perfect economy of a Warner Brothers’ set — a backlot Anytown sandwiched squarely between Westerntown and Anytime, New York. It’s so still it almost seems to be holding its breath, and so succulent in its plainness.” Staring down Main Street, I have to agree with every word.
Standing at one end of street, the buildings stretch for three or four blocks in front of you, none of them higher than three or four stories, and then, that’s it. From one end, I can see a row of trees blocking off the other side of town so close that I almost feel like I could toss a paper airplane and lose it among the branches. There are tents lining the sidewalks, but through the gaps I can see that the buildings have generic names like “Bank” and “Hardware” and “Fairmount Ice Cream,” which only heighten the “succulent” Anytown feel.
Once we reach the Bank, I stop and stare up at it. One of my favorite photographs of Jimmy was taken in front of this bank, by LIFE Magazine photographer Dennis Stock, for the biography-in-photos he crafted for the magazine to promote East of Eden. Up until this point, we’ve seen a lot of images of Jimmy around town — on almost everyone’s shirts, on the sides of buildings, on street signs — but here, in front of this bank, I see the first concrete evidence that I am currently in the town where James Dean grew up. I pull up the photo on my phone, look around, and get my angles right, until I’m positive I’m standing right where the photo was taken. It doesn’t look like the town has changed much at all since February of 1955 when Jimmy and Dennis came to town, save maybe a redirected powerline here, an added awning or a faded paintjob there. I find this strangely comforting.
We will come back to this spot several times over the next two days, to watch the Grand Parade and, later, to attempt to recreate the photo. That’s my attempt on the left; Jimmy is obviously effortlessly cooler than I could ever dream of being, but I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. At first I thought I looked like a giant, but then some quick Googling revealed that James Dean, that larger-than-life, idealized Man, was only 5'8". I’m a full six inches taller than he would have been, I realized. Yet, somehow, next to him like this, I still feel small.
“The allure of lovingly-polished chrome…”
After a dinner at Grains and Grill, one of only a handful of restaurants in Fairmount, we head toward Playacres Park to check out the car show. On the walk there, I think about the circumstances of James Dean’s death and decide that it’s pretty morbid, really, to have a gigantic car show every year in memory of a man who was killed while driving. But then I remember racecar driver Lew Bracker’s touching memoir Jimmy and Me, about his best-friendship with the actor, and in particular his long passages about how passionate Jimmy was about cars, and I decide that the car show is sort of fitting, too. He died doing something he loved. How many of us will be able to say that?
On the way to Playacres Park, we run across the Fairmount Historical Museum, which is the second of two buildings in Fairmount dedicated to memorializing Jimmy. But, unlike the James Dean Gallery, which is all about James Dean’s life, legend, and legacy of advertising power, at the Historical Museum Jimmy shares the museum space with Fairmount’s other famous hometown son: Garfield the Cat.
Well, technically, cartoonist Jim Davis is the other famous resident, but Fairmount claims Garfield almost as strongly as it claims Jimmy Dean. Garfield lends his name to a race around town that takes place on Saturday morning during the festival every year, for example, and he shares real estate on Fairmount’s water tower with a profile of Jimmy.
Fairmount is responsible for the hamburger, the airplane, the car, the ice cream cone, James Dean, and a certain lasagna-loving, Monday-hating feline… does it get more American than that?
The cars are really impressive. I’m not particularly a car person, but it’s hard to resist the allure of lovingly polished chrome, bright, glistening, glittering paint jobs, and sleek, aerodynamic design. I know enough, at least, to recognize the significance of an entire row comprised entirely of Mercurys… Jim Stark, after all, famously drove a Mercury ’49 in Rebel.
While we’re at the car show, I stop by the merch table to check out what keepsakes are being sold, steeling myself for the worst, most crassly commercial trinkets I can imagine. (But, I remind myself, crassly commercial trinkets would certainly fit the popular conception of Jimmy’s dead image being used to sell anything and everything, in order to milk his popularity for all it was worth. Depending on who you read, some biographers claim that there was a secret meeting of Warner Brothers executives within days of Jimmy’s death to decide how they could profit off the publicity. I’d believe it.)
Instead, the souvenir tent is surprisingly charming, and even more surprisingly, it’s all inexpensive. T-shirts that I’ve seen on Amazon for $25+ are here being sold for $12. Buttons, keychains, framed photos of Jimmy, all under $6. My eye catches a box full of rolled-up posters; I just moved to a new house, and the walls of my bedroom are still mostly bare.
“How much are the posters?” I ask the woman behind the table, who is wearing an Official James Dean Run / Museum Days t-shirt commemorating this year’s festivities. I see hundreds of similar shirts all weekend long, from this year and years past. It seems that many of the festival attendees, Fairmount natives and otherwise, have been here before.
“The bundle is 5 posters — theater-sized versions of each of his three movie posters, and two others, $5 each,” she says happily.
“Oh,” I say, considering. “So, $25 total then?”
She looks confused, then laughs. “No! Of course not. Each bundle of five posters costs you a total of $5! One dollar per poster.”
I stare at her. “Seriously? …I will definitely be back.” I start to walk away, then wonder what I’m even bothering to think about, turn around, and buy myself a bundle of the cheapest — and best-quality — posters I’ve ever purchased. I carry them proudly, feeling like a comic book collector at Comic Con who’s just made off with the best swag he could have hoped for.
“You could still see his writing…”
On the way back to our car, we come across Ginny’s Junkyard, an outdoor rummage sale of sorts presided over by Ginny and her dog, Mavis the Chiweenie. While I play with Mavis, Ginny tells me about growing up in Fairmount. She’s surprised that we’ve come all the way from Pittsburgh just for this event, but then she laughs and says that she’s used to people caring way more about James Dean than she expects them to. “Growing up here, I’m so desensitized to it all,” she says. Once, while she was on a school trip in Paris, she sat by chance next to a woman in a cafe who had just returned from a vacation to Fairmount, Indiana. “She came to the U.S. just for James Dean Days!” Ginny marvels, still.
She asks if I have any questions about the town. I think for a minute, consult my map, the time, and my roommate, and ask her how to get to the cemetery. She gives me directions — referring to what I’ll soon realize is the Marathon gas station just outside town as “the Village Pantry,” the name of the convenience store attached to it — and then tells me that if I keep going up the road from the cemetery, I’ll find the Winslow Farm, which is where Jimmy grew up. “It’s still a private residence,” she says, giving me a pointed look. I tell her that we’ll be sure to be respectful, but that I’d still like to drive past. She understands.
We thank her, say goodbye to Mavis, and head up the block — where I realize I can see a familiar-looking building just ahead. “I think that’s the old Fairmount High School,” I tell my roommate.
Sure enough, as the sun sets and a quiet dusk falls on Fairmount, we find ourselves standing in front of the building where Jimmy went to school until he graduated in 1949. A small crowd has gathered on the sidewalk to stare up at the building, speaking to each other in hushed, pained voices… because the building has fallen into complete and utter disrepair.
Fairmount High School appears to be a full, complete building when you’re looking at it from the front, but the second you see it from an angle, you realize that the entire back half of the building has collapsed in on itself; the front is just a facade, concealing a shockingly large pile of brick and rubble behind. There are chalkboards and desks sticking haphazardly out of the debris, giving the impression that school was in session the day the building came down. At first, I think that this must have happened recently, within the past week at the most. My mind is racing, imagining emergency town council meetings rushing to figure out how to clear away the wreckage before the tourists arrive, but then a woman in the crowd taps away at her phone and tells the assembled onlookers that, apparently, the building has been this way for several years. This isn’t mid-demolition. This is how it looks, all the time.
One side of the building looks like it’s been ripped away by a giant claw, the result of an attack by one of those gigantic, atomic Universal monsters David Dalton imagines rampaging through the streets of Fairmount. It’s a window back in time, a cutaway diorama, giving us a look into what the classrooms were like before the building was abandoned. There’s still writing on the chalkboard; with the help of my roommate’s camera lens, we can see that it reads, “YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN.” I feel a chill.
“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” says the man next to me. He tells me that he lives in nearby Marion, and that he can’t believe the town didn’t preserve the school because of its historical significance. “He went to school here!” he says incredulously, “and now look at it!” He doesn’t define which “he” he’s talking about; of course I already know. Listening to the reverent way he talks, I imagine his uses of He and His are capitalized.
“Y’know, He was born in Marion. And they knocked down the building. It’s a parking lot!” he laughs incredulously. “And over at the Winslow Farm — I’ve been there, and you can see in one of the barns a spot where He wrote His name, just before He died!” Wow, I say. That’s pretty special. “And, I’ve heard… I never went inside the school myself, but I heard if you went in there, there were places you could still see His writing on the chalk boards. And now look at it.” He wanders away, shaking his head sadly.
I don’t tell him that I think this is a tad unlikely, as James Dean graduated in 1949 and the school was still open for business until 1986. Sometimes, I think as I stare up into the ruins, up into the past, it’s better to believe the legend.
“Top of the Hill”
By the time we reach Park Cemetery, I already feel numb. I had been so comforted, so amused, by the way Fairmount had seemingly frozen itself in time as a way to preserve Jimmy’s memory, that seeing the high school in that state was somehow viscerally shocking. The school was the setting for so many of the happy stories I’d read about Jimmy’s youth: discovering his love of acting in the classroom of Adeline Nall; performing on stage for the first few times; and formulating his plan to move to Hollywood after graduation to “contribute something to the world.” And now…
At this point, it’s dark, and the moon is rising over Fairmount. We pull into Park Cemetery, following the handwritten signs that direct us to “James Dean, Top of the Hill,” and I try to recall what I’ve read about the gravesite — stories of people coming from around the world to kiss the headstone, or even stranger, to fool around on top of the grave, only to be caught by the groundskeeper. There are two people at the top of the hill now, but as our headlights sweep across them, they get back in their car and pull away, leaving us alone with Jimmy.
Seeing James Dean’s grave does not, to put it lightly, help my emotional state. I am happy to see that he’s buried next to Ortense and Marcus Winslow, the aunt and uncle who raised him as their own after his mother died and his father put him on a train back to Indiana with her body. I’m not as happy to see that his father is on the other side. Jimmy and his father Winton did not, by any account, have a good relationship. He was like his movie characters in that way; Cal and Jim derive most of their existential angst from conflicts with their fathers, making Jimmy the perfect actor for the roles.
As I sit in front of the headstone, staring at the fresh lipstick prints above his name, taking in the cigarettes, Miller Lite, and hubcap that have been left as offerings from fans, a half-remembered eulogy about making the most of your dash comes to my mind. The dash, that is, on your gravestone, between the year of your birth and the year of your death. James Dean certainly made the most of his dash, even if it only represents 24 short years. Sitting by the grave, I realize that I’m now actually in the same spot Jimmy is — and not in the way I was while walking in his footsteps by the bank on Main Street. There, I was walking with a memory, a ghost. That was where Jimmy was. But here, now, he — what is left of him — is right here, six feet below me. A man who was for me in essence an abstract idea has become corporeal… reversing the arc undertaken by his memory’s meteoric rise to myth in the popular imaginary.
My roommate points out how well-kept the cemetery is. Nearly every single grave has flowers on it. Many of them are illuminated by what appear to be solar-powered LEDs, and in the admittedly dim light, I don’t see a single headstone that looks worn or weathered. Aside from a few extra flowers, Jimmy’s grave is no more elaborate than anyone else’s. The legend of James Dean may have taken on a life of its own after that fateful day sixty years ago, but now, in death, Jimmie from Fairmount is just like anyone else in the area: a hometown boy, come home to rest.
“Mini Size Bar Soap”
Saturday afternoon, September 26. The next day, we head to Fairmount once more, this time from a different direction because we’ve spent the morning in my old hometown of Cicero, Indiana. This time, I’ve given my roommate/driver/photographer James directions such that our approach will take us into town past the Winslow Farm, where Jimmy spent ages 9 through 18.
Sure enough, as we head into town, there it is — the barn where Jimmy carved his name into the cement during his last trip to Fairmount, and where he posed with a humongous pig for one of my favorite photos taken that trip; the pond that doubled as a swimming hole where Jimmy spent many a lazy summer afternoon; the mailbox where he stood with his dog for another of my favorite Dennis Stock photos.
I’m surprised by how close the farm is to the road. The photographs and Robert Altman’s documentary The James Dean Story make it look like it’s set off from society a bit, but it’s literally right up against the major road that leads into to town. I’ve read stories of fans coming to the farm from around the world, knocking on the door, and asking Marcus and Ortense to show them where Jimmy’s bedroom was. By all accounts, they were happy to oblige — the Fairmount Historical Society has letters on display that fans wrote to Ortense, asking for her to send them things of Jimmy’s, alongside her gracious and gorgeously-handwritten replies gently turning them down. The Winslows were happy to indulge, that is, until fans started to take advantage of their hospitality; apparently, one fan stole an album full of photos of young Jimmie that still hasn’t been recovered.
A bit farther down the road to Fairmount, we once more pass Park Cemetery, this time lit up in the daytime. As we drive, I seek out the hill where I now know Jimmy is buried, and to my shock, I see a figure in a red jacket and bright blue jeans staring down at his grave. For a moment, I’m convinced I’ve seen a ghost, but almost at once I remember the James Dean Lookalike Contest taking place tonight, and rational thought resumes. And then the cemetery is gone, and moments later we’re in Fairmount again.
We arrived in Fairmount too late yesterday to visit either museum, so that’s first on the docket today. We park once more near the James Dean Gallery, marveling that we haven’t had to pay for parking yet this weekend; even if we’d been forced to park on someone’s lawn, most residents were only charging $3 for visitors to park for the entire day. An attempt to squeeze every penny out of the tourists, this weekend most certainly was not.
The James Dean Gallery is free. Walking into the house, there’s a roped-off stairway up to the right, and the gift shop is on the left; it’s the only way into the museum. Enter through the gift shop, I guess. I take a quick look around and numerous things catch my eye — a rack of beautifully-printed 89c postcards, a wall of those $12 t-shirts, a bookshelf full of biographies I haven’t read — but have read about — which are hard to get online, and a $2.99 souvenir newspaper reprint of the Fairmount Times’ special edition from the week Jimmy died. $2.99. I think I bought a replica Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia for $15, back in the 90s. This place could charge almost literally any price they want for their souvenirs, as many of them are completely unique to this one small town… But I get the sense that they feel price-gouging would be an insult to Jimmy’s memory, even sixty years later. The prices haven’t even kept up with inflation.
“We’ll have to come back later so I can buy out the gift shop,” I tell my roommate as we step through into the museum. We will return later, and I will buy one of the shirts, a book, a newspaper, and a number of postcards, and to my delight, the clerk throws in a free bookmark. All of those keepsakes come to $33. I would have happily paid $30 for entrance to the museums.
Because — the Gallery is as cool as I could have hoped for, and then some. The first display case in the first room contains the home visit bag used by the doctor who delivered James Dean on February 8th, 1931. I’m amazed that the Gallery could have gotten ahold of such a thing. The cases are full of photos of a young Jimmy that I’ve never seen before, hanging around the farm, posing with his classmates, and performing onstage at Fairmount High School. The case even contains a piece of the curtain from the high school stage. I stand staring for a long time, remembering my own high school acting days, wondering what it would be like to have one of my former drama club members be as famous as Jimmy Dean. Would anyone think to track down the curtain that we used when we performed?
I spot a handwritten journal kept by the Reverend Jim DeWeerd, who preached at Back Creek Friends Church and who had come to be quite a controversial figure in the Dean mythos thanks to his role as Jimmy’s mentor. Again, depending on who you read, many people believe that the reverend abused Jimmy; reportedly, Jimmy told Elizabeth Taylor as much, which she then confided in a reporter with the caveat that he not publish the article until after her death, as she’d promised to take his secret to the grave. Other people, like Paul Alexander, believe that the relationship was consensual, even if Jimmy was a teenager; he cites Jimmy’s lifelong interest in bullfighting, which he picked up from watching a film DeWeerd had made of a bullfight he’d seen in Mexico. It’s true that Jimmy continued to write the Reverend letters throughout his life — I know because I read one at the Museum — and it’s also true that DeWeerd delivered the eulogy at Jimmy’s funeral.
Aside from this journal, and the fact that the Gallery sells copies of John Gilmore’s LIVE FAST, DIE YOUNG, I find no other references to any of Jimmy’s reported male lovers. Granted, there is a TON of stuff on display, so there is a good chance I missed something. But, although both museums are laid out quasi-chronologically, telling the story of his career and romantic life through the objects he created, touched, and left behind — trinkets from Pier Angeli, letters to Barbara Glenn, and an autographed photo of Terry Moore — I find no mention of Rogers Brackett, the older male producer who paid Jimmy’s way to New York, and who made many of the connections that enabled Jimmy to be cast in his television roles. Similarly, I spy a signed cast poster from a New Jersey production of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean tucked among a wall of posters, but I don’t see anything about the movie, or its positioning of Jimmy as a queer icon.
The Gallery’s owner is David Loehr, a man who holds the title for owning the world’s largest collection of James Dean memorabilia. Aside from photos of, by, and inspired by Jimmy, the vast numbers products bearing Jimmy’s likeness are the Gallery’s main attraction. I see rows upon rows of odd items, like James Dean Mini Size Bar Soap, and The Rebel Security System, and Japanese advertisement for a CDean Player. My favorite is a gigantic ad for Levi’s jeans that’s just a close-up of Jimmy’s face. So iconic is his association with those bright blue jeans from Rebel that the ad doesn’t even need to display the product it’s selling.
After the Gallery, it’s time for the Grand Parade. We stand on the corner where Dennis Stock stood to take the photo of Jimmy by the bank and watch the procession of cars. I wonder what James Dean would think, knowing that Fairmount was still throwing parades in his honor, sixty years after his death. Like the street fair the night before, this is your quintessentially Hollywood small-town parade — fire trucks and police cars from three neighboring towns tossing candy to kids, local high school marching bands and kids’ sports teams, and classic cars from the James Dean Run. Well, I suppose most small-town parades don’t have Garfield riding on their trucks, or James Dean lookalikes walking the parade on stilts, but otherwise, this could be any hometown pride parade in any part of the country. It’s completely and utterly charming.
The Fairmount Historical Museum doesn’t provide as much insight into Jimmy’s legacy as the Gallery did, but instead focuses mostly on his life and career. Also, there’s that Garfield the Cat room; the juxtaposition is jarring, sending you from a room containing little Jimmie’s baby clothes and his first motorcycle, to a room filled with little ceramic cartoon cats and comic strips, and then back to a room that has some fence-posts from Giant and the wind-up monkey from Rebel. It makes a weird kind of sense too, I think; like Garfield, Jimmy’s image has constantly been in danger of losing all meaning because of how frequently he’s been duplicated, imitated, and manipulated, and the museum’s display attempts to tie both Jimmy and Garfield to a concrete sense of place and time — Fairmount, Indiana.
“…All good fun.”
We plan to attend the screening of Rebel Without a Cause that afternoon, but when we arrive at the Municipal Building, we realize that the town is projecting the film on a 4:3 projector screen in a small room with folding chairs. Rebel is one of my favorite films, one I can watch over and over again without getting bored; I love losing myself in the luscious CinemaScope widescreen. I’m not interested in watching a fullscreen version, so instead, we decide to head up to nearby Marion, to visit James Dean’s birth site, where a memorial has been built that will be dedicated today.
Whereas Fairmount feels frozen in time, Marion appears to have let itself go, by which I mean grow. The main road through the town — US Route 9 — is lined on both sides with strip malls filled with chain stores, chain restaurants, liquor stores and — to our amusement — video rental stores. But the birth site memorial is very classy; it’s a stone pillar set back from the parking lot, on the site of the apartment building where Mildred Dean gave birth to Jimmie early in the morning of February 8, 1931. It’s in a residential area of Marion, where it’s easier to imagine Jimmie as a toddler walking down the street holding his parents’ hand.
After a fantastic dinner at Mi Pueblo, a Mexican restaurant across the street from the birth site that claims to be the “Best Mexican Restaurant In The World” — after a few $1.99 margaritas, I tell my roommate that this really might be the mesht bexican restaurant I’ve ever been to— we head back to Fairmount, dusk falling once more.
The first order of business at the Main Stage is the Little Jimmy Dean Lookalike Contest. Parents from around the country have brought their young ones to Fairmount, dressed them in miniature versions of James Dean’s iconic outfits, and signed them up to compete for the title. As I watch the cute little toddlers stumble around the stage to thunderous applause from the audience, I realize that this is perhaps the purest expression I’ve seen all weekend of James Dean’s popular image completely divorced from its meaning. What does James Dean mean to these little kids? Have these ten year olds ever seen Rebel Without a Cause? What could they possibly understand of its angst-drenched dramatics? The one-and-a-half year old certainly hasn’t seen it. James Dean, for these kids, is a funny-looking jacket, or a reason to wear your hair high, and that’s about all.
And yet I can’t help but get caught up in the silly theatrics of it all. Some of the children perform James as a completely blank slate, as Eden director Elia Kazan claims he was; others stand on stage, hands shoved in their pockets, in their best approximation of a “cool guy” slouch. Others seem to have no idea they’re “performing” at all, and they leave the stage almost immediately, arms outstretched in search of their parents.
Audience applause determines the winner; the one-and-a-half year old wins, because he’s just so damn adorable as a little rebel that the audience can’t help but vote for him. As we laugh and clap for him, I think that it’s fitting that the winner is the person who undoubtedly has the least idea who James Dean is.
There’s about a half-hour break between the Little Jimmy Dean Lookalike Contest, and the actual main attraction of the evening, the James Dean Lookalike Contest, featuring people from around the world who have flown here just for this event. We happen to be standing by the registration table, so we have an up-close view of the contestants as they sign in. My roommate and I amuse ourselves picking early favorites based on who looks the best.
But then, one contestant arrives with a helper. After he signs in, she helps him get into costume — wearing my favorite James Dean outfit, the beige-on-khaki combination from East of Eden — and in the dim lighting under the tent, he’s thrown mostly into silhouette. I feel as though I’ve seen this exact scene before, in behind-the-scenes photos of James Dean getting into character. This lookalike is about the right height. He has perfected the shoulder-hunch, and his hair is perfectly, pristinely messy, and for the first time all weekend, I have a reference right in front of me, someone that makes me remember that James Dean was a physical body, someone who could touch, and be touched. I’ve seen umpteen photographic images of Jimmy, and moving images are another thing entirely, but this hazy outline in front of me now, in three-dimensional space, brings Jimmy to life in a way that this entire weekend spent walking among the streets and sidewalks of his hometown hasn’t been able to.
And then the lookalikes step onto the stage, and in the glare of the spotlight, it’s obvious that they’re not James Dean. They’re just people in costume, just like the children. These grown-ups have clearly studied James Dean’s posture and personality more than the children have, and their outfits are in many cases meticulous recreations of clothing Jimmy wore in his movies and more recognizable photographs. But they aren’t him.
Unlike the Little Jimmy Dean Lookalike Contest, however, the actual competition has a judging panel; it’s made up of two of Jimmy’s former classmates from Fairmount High, a former multi-year lookalike contest winner, a woman whose father was a pallbearer at Jimmy’s funeral, and Lew Bracker himself, Jimmy’s best friend in LA, his racing buddy whose memoir Jimmy and Me nearly brought me to tears. In addition to playing to the crowd, the Jimmys and Jameses and Jim Starks and Cal Trasks and Jett Rinks on stage have to win over the judges, and all at once the whole affair takes on a more surreal quality. For many of the guys, this involves going down the line shaking hands — personally, I can’t imagine dressing up like James Dean and shaking the hand of his best friend. It makes me consider the bizarre selfishness of this thing we call movie fandom. Hardly any of us at this festival actually knew James Dean, and yet, we presume to dress up like him, act like him, mourn his death? Why?
Many of the competitors come on stage several times, and with each elimination, some of them change costumes multiple times. One lookalike, who I’ve picked out as one of my early favorites, steps on stage wearing light blue pants, sunglasses, and a long white t-shirt, with gloves hanging out of his back pocket, and I gasp. My roommate looks at me, and I tap away at my phone and then hold up a photo.
“He’s dressed up in what James Dean wore on the day of the crash,” I say.
And he’s done a damn good job — this final death-day outfit wins him the competition.
As everyone files off-stage, I make my way over to the stairs, wait for him to sign a copy of his book, and then I shake Lew Bracker’s hand and introduce myself.
“I just wanted to thank you for coming,” I tell him lamely, as though I were some kind of welcoming committee. “Also, I wanted to thank you because I really enjoyed your book. It was very touching.”
He smiles. “You did? Thank you very much,” he says.
“Thank you,” I say again, and then I ask, “hey, uh… is judging something like this a little… I don’t know, strange for you?” What I mean is: How does it feel to shake the hand of someone who’s lovingly recreated and then dressed himself in the outfit your best friend died in?
He shakes his head, as if shaking off any bad implications of the event. “No,” he smiles, and I understand that he means he’s used to this. He’s had sixty years to get used to this. “It’s all good fun.”
“…people say they could hear everything.”
As we’re headed back to the car, our trip to Fairmount finally drawing to a close, we come across a walking tour standing at the bust of Jimmy in the center of town. A man named Mark Kinnaman is explaining that the bust is identical to one at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, which is of course the place where two of the most iconic scenes in Rebel were filmed (the early “blade game” and the climactic shootout that results in Plato’s death).
Then, he announces that the next stop will be “the church,” and the tour starts walking. My roommate is tired, I know, but I ask if we can please follow them just one more stop. I’ve had my eye out for the church where Jimmy’s funeral was held all weekend, and I haven’t seen it yet. It’s what feels like one final piece of the puzzle, one final location where I might learn something about Jimmy’s life and his death, and about why people still care. He agrees, and we follow the tour, which is made up of a Fellini-esque cast of now-familiar people I’ve seen around Fairmount all weekend — some of the judges from the competition and some of the lookalikes, who are now half-out of costume; some of the people who were with us last night as we stared up at the ruins of Fairmount High School in shock; the woman who sold me the bundle of posters the previous afternoon. Everyone is smiling and laughing and talking to each other jovially, happy to be together, now, here, in this town where He once was.
We reach the Fairmount Friends Meeting Church, and I’m surprised and confused that the sign doesn’t read Back Creek Friends Church, which is what I’ve always read was the location of the funeral. Luckily, that’s the first thing our tour guide addresses. He tells us that, while many biographers name Back Creek as the location of the funeral, the town actually decided to hold it at Fairmount Friends instead, because Fairmount Friends is bigger, and actually in town, whereas Back Creek is a bit farther down the road. “When you see pictures of them carrying the casket down the steps,” he says, “that’s these steps right here.”
He tells us that more than 2,000 people came to Fairmount — a town which normally only has that many residents — to pay their respects to Jimmy. While Marcus Winslow let certain people into the church to make sure those who mattered got to see the ceremony, most people filled the streets around us, as far as the eye could see, to just be near the funeral. “They set up speakers outside the church,” Kinnaman says, “so that people outside could hear what was going on. I’ve had people tell me that the speakers didn’t work; I’ve had people say they could hear everything.” In other words: like so many other things about the James Dean legend, from his sexuality to his upbringing to his either revolutionary or nonexistent acting ability, depending on who you speak to, depending on who it is doing the remembering and the storytelling, the funeral took place both here and there, and to the people outside it was audible and silent, both possibilities — all possibilities — true and false, all at once, and forever more.
Soon, the walking tour moves on, but we stay behind. I stand on the steps and look up at the church, and I think I may have finally realized what it is, precisely, about the James Dean story that continues to fascinate and inspire, several generations after 9/30/1955. I think it’s because James Dean has come to represent the inevitability of death, but also, simultaneously, inextricably, he reminds us of the possibility of immortal life through memory.
Most of us will not have one museum dedicated to our lives, let alone two in the same town. Most of us probably won’t have yearly parades thrown in our honor. Our faces probably won’t be painted on the sides of water towers, and we probably won’t have people fly to our graves from around the world to kiss our headstones. But James Dean’s enduring influence reminds us of our own power to leave our marks on our own little corners of the world. Fairmount’s yearly ritualized remembrance of Jimmie Dean the hometown boy is a way of bringing him back to life, just for a while, to thank him for making them proud. Every time we remember someone, we bring them to life again, if only for a moment.
André Bazin wrote of photography’s powerful, metaphoric resonance residing in its ability to mummify the dead, to preserve a moment that can live on forever, even if its subject is gone. Yes, sixty years ago today, James Dean died a violent, horrific death at the young age of 24. But every time we look at a photograph of James Dean, that one specific moment when he was alive comes back into existence again. Every time we crack open the spine of a new biography to once more re-tell ourselves the story of his life — following him from Marion to Fairmount, to California and back to Fairmount, then back to California, New York, and finally California again — we keep him alive. Every time we press play on Rebel Without a Cause and watch him lay down in the street to care for a little toy monkey, every time we watch him strike oil in Giant or pull a gun on Ronald Reagan in The Dark, Dark Hours, for us he is both alive and dead, and he reminds us of our own mortality, and of our own possibility of transcending death by living life.
“One of these days, I might be able to contribute something to the world,” Jimmy once wrote in a letter to his aunt and uncle, excited about the prospect of embarking on a meaningful career in Hollywood.
Contribute something to the world, indeed.
Many thanks to James Weaver, my faithful chauffeur and photographer for the weekend, for putting up with my endless requests and aimless lollygagging as I tried to absorb the sights. And also, to the people of Fairmount, for keeping Jimmy alive for the rest of us. And finally, to James Dean — Jimmie — for contributing himself to the world.
