James Dean, Angst-Ridden Symbol of ‘50s Defiance, Makes Debut as Postal Service Star

Proving that yesterday’s iconoclast can become today’s icon, James Dean--the angst-ridden 24-year-old star of “Rebel Without a Cause”--is now featured on a U.S. postage stamp.

Friends and acquaintances eulogized Dean, who died 40 years ago in an auto accident, during a ceremony Monday to unveil the stamp at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.

Dean starred in just three films, but his early death, combined with the tormented characters he played, made him a symbol of youthful rebellion and anguish to teens and young adults in the 1950s.

To fans who remember his performances, Dean’s work highlighted destructive family relationships decades before the term “dysfunctional” became part of a cultural cliche.

But on Monday, the symbol of postwar upheaval took his place among American icons from Thomas Jefferson to Marilyn Monroe. The first-class stamp is the second in the Postal Service’s Legends of Hollywood series, which began last year with Monroe.

Dean, who lived in Sherman Oaks, was a notoriously fast driver and amateur racer. He was driving to an auto race in Salinas when he died in a crash on California 46 near Cholame in San Luis Obispo County.

He grew up in Fairmont, Ind., studied acting in New York and appeared in several plays, including the television drama “The Immoralist,” before Warner Bros. flew him to Hollywood for a screen test.

Former colleagues recalled his brief career at the ceremony Monday.

“I’ve always had a kind of double image of him,” said Lois Smith, who in the film “East Of Eden” played the barmaid who leads Dean’s character to his mother, a brothel owner. Dean struck her at once as a tender boy, Smith said, and “a guarded, taut young man with a suspicious look in his eye.”

Carrol Baker, who co-starred with Dean in the 1956 film “Giant”--his last--recalled the day the cast received the news that the actor had been killed.

Baker said she and others were in a projection room at Warner Bros. viewing scenes from the film.

Director George Stevens “stood up and all the light drained out of him,” Baker said. “Then he collected himself and said, ‘Jimmy Dean has just been killed.’ ”

The stamps go on sale in post offices nationwide today. But Monday, they were available in post offices in Burbank, at Warner Bros. Studio stores and on the film company’s Burbank lot. As a band played and postal officials ceremoniously flung a building-high tarp of a huge likeness of the stamp, hundreds of collectors, vendors and fans lined up quietly at a white tent just out of earshot. They waited patiently for a chance to buy the stamps, which are most valuable if purchased and canceled on the first day they are sold.

Heather Schutz-Girard, who normally works at the Santa Clarita post office, sat with an ink pad under the tent, administering to newly purchased stamps the coveted first-day cancellation.

By noon, she said, about 500 people had come by asking for postal cancellations on everything from envelopes to T-shirts.

“I worked the Marilyn Monroe one as well,” Schutz-Girard said.

On hand was George Barris, a car customizer and movie stunt coordinator who worked with Dean in films and helped him with the Porsche Spyder in which he was killed. Barris and his wife Shirley wore bright red jackets--of the type Dean popularized in “Rebel Without a Cause”--festooned with Dean memorabilia.

Their grandson, Jared Fathi, was barely big enough to peep over the mounted poster of Dean he carried around throughout the late morning event.

Barris, who lives in Encino, came to promote an upcoming film of Dean’s life, for which he staged the crash scenes.

Dea Serrano, 37, a Postal Service worker, turned out with other members of the American First Day Cover Society to buy the stamps.

She and her teenage children make cachets--envelopes featuring original artwork that goes with the theme of a new stamp--to be sold or traded with other collectors. The postage is affixed to the envelope and hand-canceled with the date of the stamp’s release.

Making the cachets, she said, enables her to learn about the subjects of the stamps.

“With every step,” she said, “you learn the history.”

In the case of Dean, it is a history with which no one in her family is particularly familiar.

Sixteen-year-old Naaman Abreu, her oldest child, said Dean didn’t symbolize rebellion to him at all.

His idea of a tormented soul for his generation? Dennis Rodman, the tattooed, rainbow-haired professional basketball player.