People and Events

Tournament of Roses officials made a startling discovery at a publicity session starring the grand marshal of the 1989 parade the other day.

Shirley Temple Black was posing for photographers with roses in her arms, recalled Bonnie Hann, a parade publicist, when suddenly “her voice started to go hoarse and she said, ‘You know, I can’t hold these roses anymore.’ We asked her why not and she said, ‘Because I’m allergic to them.’ ”

The photographers begged her for a few more shots, and trouper that she is, the one-time actress agreed.

But Black likely is the first grand marshal who won’t be able to stop and smell the roses at the parade.

Some students are ordered to stay after school. Dennis Rees of Van Nuys stayed (and stayed) after school on his own.

Rees, a 24-year-old Shakespearean actor studying at Carnegie Mellon University, ran out of money last year and secretly took up residence in the Pittsburgh drama school’s rehearsal room. He showered in the gym.

In the morning, “you’d come in, and there’s Dennis,” said administrative assistant Mindy Kanaskie. Such arrangements are “not really allowed, I don’t think,” she added, but no one turned in the hard-working squatter.

Rees said: “There’s the old cliche about ‘suffering for your art,’ but I wouldn’t want to do it again.”

Nor will he have to. He recently won a $5,000 scholarship and moved into an apartment.

The first member of his family to attend college, Rees said he was too proud to ask his father for money.

Besides, as a Shakespearean actor, Rees of all people knew it’s wise to neither a borrower nor a lender be.

Not far from the statues of Copernicus and Sir Isaac Newton, the Griffith Observatory on Tuesday unveiled a bronze bust of . . . James Dean.

The actor? Right--the observatory’s first cinematic star.

“A lot of people refer to the observatory as the ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ monument because a large part of it was filmed here,” explained Ken Warren, the landmark’s business manager.

In “Rebel,” Dean’s high school class takes a field trip to the observatory, where the rebellious one sees a show in the Planetarium and participates in a knife fight in the parking lot.

“This was the first movie where the observatory actually played the observatory,” Warren said. “We were in space in one movie, we’ve been the White House in ‘Wonder Woman’ and we played a Russian observatory in an old Robert Conrad series.”

The bust was donated by its creator, Kenneth Kendall, who fashioned the work 33 years ago at the request of Dean. The young actor was killed in an automobile crash at the age of 24 before it was completed, and Kendall retained the sculpture until now.

The artist said he began to eye the observatory as a fitting showplace after Mayor Tom Bradley declared Sept. 30, 1985--the 30th anniversary of the actor’s death--as James Dean Day.

“Mozart may have written his own Requiem,” Kendall said, “but James Dean ordered his own monument.”

If reporter/pilot Bob Tur and an employee of California Aviation hadn’t both confirmed the story, it might have been dismissed as political fiction:

President Reagan was en route to Santa Monica Airport to catch a helicopter the other day when Secret Service agents spotted a man with a shotgun entering the airport offices of California Aviation.

Stopped for questioning, the man explained that he was a pilot who was going hunting near Bakersfield.

After the agents had left, he told Tur: “I’m sure glad I didn’t tell them what I was going to be hunting for.”

“What’s that?” asked Tur, a KNX radio reporter.

“Quail,” the man said.

Rats can be a problem for Topanga residents. So when Joanne Cinelli went to buy trick-or-treat candies the other night, she also picked up some rat poison. “The clerk really gave me a dirty look,” Cinelli said. “And she refused to put the stuff in the same bag.”