William Hall - James Dean

Series Editor C.S. Nicholls

Highly readable brief lives of those who have played a significant part in history, and whose contributions still influence contemporary culture.

T HE H ISTORY P RESS

First published in 1999

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL 5 2 QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved

William Hall, 1999, 2011

The right of William Hall, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7071 9

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7072 6

Original typesetting by The History Press

For my old friend Mike Maloney,
who made the memorable
pilgrimage with me to Fairmount,
Indiana, where the story of
James Dean begins and ends.

The author would like to express his gratitude to the editors, proprietors and columnists of numerous newspapers and magazines consulted, as well as to the authors of the biographies and other books of reference cited in the bibliography.

F airmount, Indiana. A light drizzle hangs in a thin veil of mist over Back Creek cemetery, a mile out of town. In the gathering dusk, a figure can be seen flitting through the graves, rucksack bouncing on its back, guilt written into every step of its flight. Inside that rucksack will be soil stolen from one particular grave, or perhaps a pebble or a blade of grass, or even a chipping of precious pink marble from the headstone. For this is where the vandals and the fans come in equal numbers not, in their eyes, to desecrate that one special grave, but to pay it their own twisted tribute by stealing a small memento almost half a century after its occupant died too young, tragically and violently.

In their homage they leave their flowers, their messages, their lipstick imprints on the headstone, and their heartfelt pleas for him to come back...

A one-line inscription reads simply: JAMES B . [for Byron] DEAN . It is the third such monument to be erected and systematically eroded ever since the death at the age of twenty-four of the charismatic young actor who became an icon for millions of teenagers and spawned a legend that exists to this day.

James Dean died at 5.45 p.m. on Friday 30 September 1955, at the intersection of Routes 466 (now 46) and 41 east of Cholame, in the County of San Luis Obispo, California. Minutes earlier, he had been driving his sports car at 130 mph.

T he sign on Highway 26 states proudly: Fairmount Home of James Dean. And indeed Fairmount, Indiana (population 3,400 and located fifty miles north of Indianapolis), was where James Byron Dean grew up and made his home after being taken there by his parents at the tender age of ten months.

The town itself, just a speck on the map of Indiana, is like many other small Midwest towns in the Bible Belt of America. Main Street boasts a hardware store, the Citizens Bank, a post office, a library and a single beer hall (closed on Sundays), while East Washington has the Fairmount Historical Museum and the surgery that once belonged to old Doc Holliday, the genial local practitioner who had no relation whatsoever to any nefarious activities that occurred elsewhere at a certain OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881.

Off Main Street you can find the offices of the weekly newspaper the Fairmount News, the town hall, the local school and fifteen churches including the Quaker meeting house where visiting ministers would exhort the locals on the evils of drinking and smoking, and tender advice on living a God-fearing existence or facing the wrath of the Almighty.

Outside Fairmount, mile upon mile of golden corn stretches away to the horizon, with grain silage towers jutting like sentinels against a landscape of scattered farm buildings and fields where pigs root in acres of muddy grass.

Jimmy, as he was called by all who knew him, had been born ten miles away in Marion, a busy metropolis with a population of fifty thousand. But when Winton and Mildred Dean took their baby son to settle in Fairmount, they were returning to the family base. Fairmount had been founded in the early nineteenth century by Joseph Winslow, one of James Deans distant ancestors, who with other hardened pioneers had journeyed West in covered wagons through the Cumberland Gap in search of a new life.

The town prospered as a farming community, growing corn and beans on the fertile flat fields, and raising pigs and cattle on the rich pastureland. Around 1900, a group of businessmen set up the Fairmount Mining Company to market natural gas, which was indigenous to the area indeed, Gas City still lies a few miles down the road today, though in Fairmount agriculture would remain the towns chief economic lifeblood.