Lost in the Shadow of His Slouch

The slouch is back. The sensitive, soulful, pleading eyes. The mumble. Everywhere I turn--billboards, buses, magazines, bookstore windows, TV--there he is, beckoning. Come back to the jive and crime, come back to Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

For more than 30 years I allowed his destructive power over me. Now I am a father of two, married, an executive who willingly labors in the world of responsibility. An adult at last.

I assumed I would never descend back into that obsession with prolonged adolescence. It’s been called the Peter Pan Syndrome. Jung called it the puer eternis --eternal child. I prefer to identify it by its most current pop manifestation: the James Dean Syndrome.

This month, TNT tempts me to slip back. A few minutes watching Turner’s “James Dean,” and there I would be, transported back to 1955, to the Cine Theater in Linton, Ind., reliving the moment when Dean’s character Jim Stark cried out to me in “Rebel Without a Cause”: “You’re tearing me apart!”

We were both Hoosiers. Maybe that was the start of my addiction. I remember asking my mother about the actor I’d just seen for the first time and learning he’d died in a car wreck. The guy who had survived the movie’s “chickie run” had perished on a real highway in a real California. That Indiana night felt haunted by Dean’s ghost.

When we moved from Indiana to Southern California in 1960, driving along Route 66 through Texas, I stared out the window and remembered “Giant” and how misunderstood Dean’s Jett Rink had been. My rite of passage from Hoosier hick to California delinquent followed another of his scripts. I enrolled in a Compton junior high school with a student population of 3,000--almost the size of our Indiana town--and had to fight gang kids for acceptance, just as Dean did in “Rebel.”

By the 1980s, I was wearing cowboy boots and well on my way to being one of those balding guys with a graying ponytail. Fortunately, I hit bottom in a most unexpected way: I went home again.

I was suffering a post-divorce identity crisis and was considering a return to the state of my birth for a fresh start. I had read an item about Fairmount, a town just north of Indianapolis, where Dean grew up. Each year, Fairmount honored its most famous son with a festival, on the anniversary of his Sept. 30, 1955, death.

Fairmount was an archetypal one-stoplight town. Most of the locations from Dennis Stock’s famous Life magazine studies of Dean were preserved: the quaint Midwestern Main Street, the idyllic farm where he grew up, even the brick high school.

But on the weekend of my visit, 30,000 Dean fans had descended on the town. They came from Europe and South America, New York and Alaska. They came for the parade, the Dean museums, the vintage car show, the 1950s rock dance, and they came to hear his high school drama teacher speak at memorial services in the Back Creek Friends Church near his grave. Not a room in any motel was available; everything had been booked for a year.

I heard about a room for rent in one of the town’s homes.

The place resembled the house of seven gables. I entered a front parlor and encountered a bearded, elderly gentleman seated in a huge armchair. Crutches and a cane leaned against the chair. On a white grand piano, incongruous within the maze of decrepit furniture, were gilt-framed photographs of Dean dressed for his high school prom. The photos surrounded a bouquet of carnations and roses. A crude Oscar statuette made of foil and spray-painted gold tilted from the middle of the bouquet.

The old man, Alfred Jackson Roth, had been the florist for Dean’s Fairmount funeral. The Oscar floral bouquet was a replica of the original that had lain on Dean’s casket. He asked if I had come to hear “the stories.” I said I’d prefer to get back to the Main Street festivities, and he seemed grateful. The room, he said, would cost $20 for the night. “In advance.”

Wandering the crowds and examining the memorabilia in the booths, I began asking Deanaholics why they were so obsessed with a dead movie star who appeared in only three films. I hoped they’d tell me why I’d become captivated. But each peered at me as if I were a Martian asking about oxygen. If I didn’t know, they couldn’t help me.

At the cemetery, Dean’s gravestone, twice stolen in the last few years, glistened in the sunlight, its marble surface smeared with lipstick kisses. Love letters and cigarette packs lay among the floral wreaths and flowers. A poem was held to the ground by a switchblade plunged through its heart.

That night at the James Dean Lookalike Contest on Main Street, a local country and western deejay introduced the finalists. Each mounted the stage with a Dean slouch. Each lit a cigarette in the Dean manner. All but one chose the Jim Stark persona from “Rebel Without a Cause.”

“Here’s a first,” announced the deejay. “What if Dean hadn’t died in a car crash? What would he look like today?”

A paunchy, graying, 60-ish lookalike labored his way to the stage. He paused to squint at the crowd, then laboriously put on a pair of spectacles. The Deanaholics stared in contempt while the locals hooted.

I returned to Roth’s haunted house to find the parlor packed with Dean fans. They sat in reverent silence while Roth rested his hands on a crutch and described how Dean stopped by this house on his way home after school. Roth always gave him a glass of milk, and yes, the high school student would sometimes press his forehead against the cold milk bottle, just as he’d done so effectively in “Rebel Without a Cause.” As one group left, another arrived, like trick-or-treaters in Dean costumes.

Again and again, Roth described the Dean funeral, let them gaze at the photographs and touch the wreath, and gave them signed photographs of the original wreath.

I went up to my room and collapsed into sleep, fully clothed, only to waken in the dark to whispers. I stared at the high ceiling and listened to the seance on the other side of the wall.

Two North Carolina women rented the next bedroom every Festival and always held their private seance to talk to “the spirit of whoever was James Dean in his last life.” Crouched over a Ouija board, in the light of burning candles, the two housewives who saw one another only once a year talked to the darkness.

Through paper-thin walls, I heard: “Jimmy Dean, why won’t you come talk to us? Jimmy Dean, you’re not answering.”

At 4 a.m., unable to endure more, I slipped out into the hall. The candle glow flickered under their door. I tiptoed downstairs and discovered Roth nodding in his chair. He awakened with a start, dropping a cane, and squinted. “You here for the stories?” he asked. Then he recognized me and nodded. “The girls keepin’ you up? I gotta keep my front door unlocked ‘cause of my guests. But these Dean people, they’ll steal everything Dean might have touched. So I sit here and keep an eye on ‘em. Wanna sit?”

I took a seat. “These Dean people,” he mumbled, “they’re not right in the head,” nodding back to sleep.

I had to agree. I listened to the whispers through the ceiling from the interminable seance. By dawn, I had hit bottom. I was no longer interested in living like a 24-year-old. I’d had enough adolescence for a lifetime. Acting the angry young man or the rebel at my age simply felt stupid.

In each of his films, Dean still reaches out for a paternal embrace, just as I had done for decades, blaming my parents for most of my disappointments. Now in my 50s, I’ve become the father he hates. I no longer identify with James Dean. Now, I am fascinated by his fathers--Raymond Massey, who played the unforgiving patriarch of “East of Eden,” and Jim Backus, who, in “Rebel Without a Cause,” looked so cool cleaning the floor in that flowered apron.

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Richard Stayton is the editor of Written By, the magazine of the Writers Guild of America West.