I walked into the Formosa Café on Santa Monica Boulevard on a mission to find James Dean. I needed to commune with him and visiting his grave in Indiana wasn’t an option. Like many restaurants in Hollywood, the Formosa Café boasts on its website that “stars like Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, and Elvis Presley” used to go there “regularly for dining and drinks.” I didn’t expect James Dean to materialize in a plate of orange chicken—I only wanted to feel close to him while I thought about his legacy. Plus, a girl’s gotta eat.
A host who looked about 12 led me past the deep red booths and textured wallpaper and seated me at a table inside an old-fashioned trolley car, which, insists the website, is “the oldest surviving red train car in existence.” I ordered cold peanut noodles and a Diet Pepsi and studied the black and white headshots that bordered the ceiling. The Grateful Dead’s “Box of Rain” played in the background followed by David Bowie’s “Suffragette City,” over which I heard a middle-aged gentleman at the next table redundantly inform two women across from him, “This is very Hollywood heyday.”
Later, I paid my bill and took my Chinese takeout box of leftovers to a seat at the bar, still on the lookout for James Dean. As two young bartenders ignored me, I wondered if anyone who worked at the Formosa Café recognized any of the actors’ headshots. Had the twerp who seated me ever seen Rebel Without a Cause?
Finally, one young bartender asked me if I wanted a drink.
“Yeah, I do,” I blurted, allowing each word to thud with the same dry disdain as if I had said, “Yeah, you idiot.”
I ordered a glass of sparkling rosé and finally spotted James Dean’s framed face above the bar. He hardly looked happy to be there.
“Would you have been nicer to the bartender?” I wondered.
I sipped my rosé—which I wish more people called “pink champagne” because “pink champagne” sounds more fun— and sent an important text to my septuagenarian neighbor.
“What do you think of when you hear the name James Dean?” I wrote.
“I think of the bracelet I wore in grammar school with his picture on it when everyone else was wearing Elvis bracelets. Sorry.”
I’ll never get away from Elvis. I love him, but I’ll never get away from him. When I’m not thinking about him, people who know me will prompt me to think about him in various creative ways: by putting on the movie ELVIS while I sit and sip my coffee; by sending me YouTube videos of his Las Vegas performances; by presenting me with thoughtful Elvis gifts for no reason besides “Stephanie needs this.” Months ago, a wonderful friend I haven’t seen in years sent me photos from an antique market in North Carolina that featured a designated Elvis section. (Hand to God, as I typed that last sentence, a different friend sent me the trailer for Sophia Coppola’s upcoming Priscilla movie.) Even when I’m by myself with no one to tempt me to think about The King, he appears to me of his own spooky volition. Once, while browsing through a shop near my apartment, I flipped to a random page in a cocktail book and found a recipe for an Elvis Presley, a drink I’ve never heard of and would likely confuse the average bartender. Another time, his face on a pillow lured me into an antique store, where I found a vintage fur coat I fell in love with and charged to my credit card without a second thought.
The simple explanation for these events is that Elvis was one of the most famous people who ever lived and whose image blew up even more after he died. Despite knowing this, when I spot Elvis out in the wild, I power up my imagination and tell myself he’s spotting me. In my world, Elvis is just saying “hello”—or that he wants me to have a vintage fur coat. I’ll never get away from Elvis. I love him, but I’ll never get away from him.
But this isn’t about Elvis. This is about James Dean.
“The girls loved Elvis,” continued my neighbor in another text. “I don’t remember any boy trying to emulate Elvis. I actually don’t remember a big public outpouring when James Dean died like there was when Elvis died. For a while after James Dean died every actor was touted as THE NEXT JAMES DEAN. He obviously made quite an impact on the movie industry. That’s all I remember except wearing a bracelet with his picture on it and thinking I was cool. I probably wanted to be James Dean too.”
I closed my text messages and looked up the Formosa Café’s Instagram. On January 12, they shared a picture of Austin Butler, the star of the ELVIS movie, standing near the entrance of the old-fashioned trolley with the departed Lisa Marie Presley. On instinct I turned toward the wall behind me and saw a red booth with a glass case mounted above it. From inside the glass case, at least eight Elvis figurines stared back at me. Somehow, about 45 minutes earlier, when the 12-year-old took me to my table while “Box of Rain” piped through the speakers, I managed to miss something as ostentatious as a glass case full of Elvises. A quick internet search brought me to an article from the Los Angeles Times: “The [Formosa Café] also attracts the starry-eyed--and regular folk are just as welcome to sit at the Formosa’s primo booth: Marilyn’s, of course. Above the booth is a glass case of Elvis Presley porcelain figurines given to [Formosa Café owner Lem] Quon by Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s manager.” I looked back at the booth, then at the approximate spot where Lisa Marie stood months earlier. James Dean’s headshot hardly glistened behind its plexiglass frame.
I finished my pink champagne and walked to the restroom. Taped to the door was a poster advertising the following week’s rooftop movie screening: the 1964 Elvis vehicle Viva Las Vegas. Starry-eyed, I stared at the poster, imagining Elvis’ ghost pulling out all the sparkly stops to win back my attention from an aloof James Dean.
I was 18 years old when I first saw Rebel Without a Cause from start to finish. I watched it in my 12th grade film class, and aside from registering James Dean as a bona fide human fireball, I don’t remember the movie making much of an impression. My now-forgotten thoughts were probably recorded in an essay I wrote for homework, but since the instructor was also my journalism teacher, and since I was co-editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, she never made a fuss if I didn’t turn in an assignment. The point is, if I wrote about the movie, I don’t remember what I wrote.
I have a much clearer memory of watching the end of Rebel Without a Cause with my dad one slow Saturday four years earlier, when I was in 8th grade. My English teacher required us to read a million words per semester, an assignment I felt undaunted by as a newly minted fan of John Steinbeck. I still read some young adult novels and was excited for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but most of the time I was glued to stories of California migrant workers, or the respectable women of Cannery Row who just happened to work in brothels. Steinbeck isn’t as hip as Jack Kerouac, but Travels with Charley: in Search of America is the book that opened my mind to the idea of driving across the country; that, and the roadies my family took every summer up the coast.
On a break from reading The Grapes of Wrath, I wandered downstairs and joined my dad on the couch. He said he was watching a famous movie about a teenager who doesn’t get along with his parents.
“That’s Natalie Wood,” he said, pointing to the brunette wrapped up in James Dean’s arms. “She drowned in real life.”
Even at 14 I noticed James Dean was a bona fide human fireball, but I didn’t notice that he was young. He looked mature for his age in a way other 20-somethings didn’t, with deep lines in his forehead and bags below his eyes.
“He reminds me of Brad Pitt here,” said my mom when she joined us on the couch. She and dad got excited when young Dennis Hopper appeared, but I didn’t know who Dennis Hopper was. I stayed quiet and focused on the movie; James Dean’s most famous movie about a teenager who doesn’t get along with his parents.
About 22 years after that slow Saturday—or 18 years after I may or may not have done my film homework—I saw Rebel Without a Cause was available on a popular streaming service—the one that underwent an unnecessary rebrand. I remembered snapping pictures of the Observatory on the long, meandering hikes I took in Griffith Park the previous year, back when I was jobless and happier than ever. Nothing beat the feeling of getting to the trails at 10am and wandering until 2 or 3:00 in the afternoon before limping back to my car with pain shooting from my toes to my ass. Sometimes I hiked to the back of the Hollywood sign which, because I’ll never get away from Elvis, always made me think the scene in the movie where Austin Butler takes a business meeting while sitting on one of the Os in “HOLLYWOOD.”
“Right over there, the Observatory, that’s where they shot Rebel Without a Cause,” he says, before waxing nostalgic to Steve Binder and Bones Howe about his former dream of being “a great actor like Jimmy Dean.” Alas, this chat atop the Hollywood sign technically never happened. The acting dream, however, was real.
In 1956, before filming Love Me Tender, 21-year-old Elvis told a journalist, “I’ve made a study of poor Jimmy Dean. I’ve made a study of myself, and I know why girls, at least the young ‘uns, go for us.” (Feel free to shake off the ick of the “young ‘uns” comment before continuing.) “We’re sullen,” he said, “we’re broodin’, we’re something of a menace. I don’t understand it exactly, but that’s what the girls like in men. I don’t know anything about Hollywood, but I know you can’t be sexy if you smile. You can’t be a rebel if you grin.”
As I looked at the thumbnail of James Dean’s face taunting me from the popular streaming service, I struggled to come up with why he’s even remembered as such a rebel. Not a rebel, but the rebel; the goddamn patron saint of sullen, broodin’ rebels. He wasn’t the only man in the 1950s who smoked cigarettes and rode motorcycles—what made his white t-shirt more important than anybody else’s?
I went ahead and hit “play,” not knowing what to expect—certainly not that I’d love the movie and that poor Jimmy Dean would break my heart.
James Dean plays Jim Stark, a lonely new kid in town who’s harassed by the leather-clad tough guys. The only student who wants to be Jim’s friend is Plato, a queer-coded reject with a picture of Alan Ladd in his locker. Befriending Plato would be a social disaster for a new kid, but Jim is nice to him anyway. After a field trip to the Griffith Observatory, Buzz, the leader of the tough guys, uses his tough guy knife to deflate a tire on Jim’s car. Buzz then pressures Jim into a knife fight, but when no victor is declared, Buzz suggests they meet that night for a game of chicken.
The rules of chicken are simple: two people (usually men, I assume) drive their cars at full speed straight towards the edge of a cliff. Whoever jumps out of his car first is a “chicken.” If someone jumps too late—or is so manly he never jumps—he’ll zoom off the cliff and plummet to his death, but at least he won’t die a chicken.
Moments before the game starts, Buzz and Jim stand next to each other and look out over the edge of the cliff. Buzz grabs a lit cigarette from between Jim’s lips, turns to him and says, “Ya know something? I like you.” Buzz then looks away, embarrassed. After a second, Jim asks him, “Why do we do this?” Buzz shrugs. “Well, you gotta do something now, dontcha?” I won’t explicitly spoil what happens in the movie from 1955. I’ll only say the game of chicken leads Jim to an epiphany: toxic masculinity is going to get us killed for nothing.
Later that night, Jim tells his parents what happened. He wants to call the police, but Mom and Dad want him to stay out of it. Temperatures run high, and Jim can’t say more than a few words without his parents interrupting. Most frustrating of all is that Dad won’t stop agreeing with him, even though he isn’t listening.
“I think that you can’t just go around proving things and pretending like you’re tough!” says Jim.
“Yeah, that’s right,” answers Dad, somewhat robotically.
“And you can’t, you know, you gotta—”
“That’s right.”
“You gotta look a certain way, you can’t--”
“That’s right. You’re absolutely right.”
Jim can’t handle any more superficial validation from Dad. He’s onto something big-- something inescapable and systemic that needs to end forever.
“You’re not listening to me!” he yells. “You’re involved in this just like I am!”
As James Dean delivered this last line, I sat up straight on the couch. My cheeks burned red as I watched a young actor in 1955 scream to his dad about the oppressive performance of being a man. “You can’t just go around proving things and pretending like you’re tough. “You’re not listening to me. You’re involved in this just like I am.” James Dean does a hell of a lot more in this movie than smoke cigarettes and look cool—he dares to tell an older generation of men that their rules are getting us nowhere.
In a quieter moment, Natalie Wood’s Judy curls up next to Jim and asks, “What kind of a person do you think a girl wants?”
“A man,” he says.
“Yes, but a man who can be gentle and sweet. Like you are. And someone who doesn’t run away when you want them. Like being Plato’s friend when nobody else liked him. That’s being strong.”
At the end of Rebel Without a Cause, the clear winners are heterosexuality and the white nuclear family. Still, I can’t help thinking that Jim Stark’s rebellion, like too many things, is doomed to be misremembered, misappropriated, and immortalized as a symbol for some silly thing it wasn’t.
The image of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause signifies the culture-defining rebellion of post-WWII teenagers; in other words, he was cool. Unfortunately, 20th century coolness is explicitly for men. Masculine men. Sexy, broodin’, masculine men who would sooner drive off a cliff than apologize for being jerks. “I saw you dancin’ with my girl” they say, chomping their gum so aggressively it’s amazing their jaws don’t come unhinged. What about refusing to carry knives? Or being nice to the queer kids? Or telling Dad you’re finished with pretending like you’re tough? Jim may not be a perfect progressive poster child, but it’s incorrect that his coolness boils down to rocking a red jacket.
Decades later, cool guys still pose and sneer among us, making uncomfortable spectacles of how much they don’t care. I think of my middle school and high school teachers who the students considered “cool”: average-looking men in their 20s and 30s who used bad words and quoted The Waterboy. They got noticeable kicks out of making the female students laugh and gave them their email addresses to “keep in touch” during summer vacation. I also think of a manager at a former workplace of mine who walked around with a cigarette tucked behind his ear. Everyone in the office knew he smoked, but he advertised it anyway. “I’m goin’ out for a smoke,” he’d announce, with one cig behind his ear and the pack rolled up in his stupid sleeve. He was just so cool: so cool, he kept a guitar in his office that he tuned with the door propped open; so cool, he once demanded an assistant in a Led Zeppelin t-shirt to “name three Led Zeppelin albums”; so cool, he lost his temper on women who assertively did their jobs.
In Rebel Without a Cause, Jim doesn’t carry a knife because he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He coaxes someone to hand over a gun by using patience and kindness instead of intimidation and force. He wants to give Judy a ride to school. He wants to give Plato his red jacket. Yes, he’s a 20th century man who blames his dad’s weakness on his nagging mother, but he’s also a gentle and sweet teenager who “doesn’t run away” from anything. If we’ve forgotten who James Dean really was, is it too late to remember Jim’s cause?
A friend and I had a conversation about James Dean about a week before I watched the movie that left me broken-hearted. We ate dinner in Little Osaka at a restaurant we hadn’t been to in years. While we waited for our food, we had one of those upsetting conversations that leave me wondering if my friends and I are just getting older of if the pandemic altered time forever.
“Was it 2017 when we were last here?”
“Did we not come in 2019?”
“No way.”
“Hm.”
“When did we see that documentary around the corner? 2017?”
“Maybe. Unless...”
“Unless it was 2016?”
“...It might have been 2016.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
After dinner we walked down Sawtelle Boulevard and tried to spot what had changed in the intervening years. We recognized the karaoke bar and the nursery, but neither of us remembered the crowded café that appeared to only serve crepes. A noisy line of 20-somethings wrapped around the front of the building and my friend made a comment about “young people” with a tone of pure disgust. It cracked me up to think he and I were no longer “young people,” and we howled on the sidewalk for a good 20 seconds.
Suddenly, and for no discernible reason, a cool guy in a car zoomed by at a noticeably dangerous speed, the engine so noisy I could feel it in my chest. Once my ears recovered, I remembered a James Dean anecdote I read in a book I bought in Seattle. The book, titled Hound Dog, tells the story of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the legendary songwriting team. I had never heard of the book before, but when it fell off a shelf in front of me and I saw Elvis’ face on the cover, I figured someone wanted me to read it right away.
I told my friend Leiber’s story of running into James Dean at Villa Capri in Hollywood:
“I’d seen him in Elia Kazan’s film of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. He played against Julie Harris and he was sensational [...]. Now I suddenly felt like I was in a James Dean movie, especially when he asked me, ‘Wanna see what your Jag will do against my Porsche?’”
Leiber thinks for a minute and comes up with an idea:
“‘I live at the top of Laurel Canyon. On the way up, there’s a street bordering the main road that’s separated by a long narrow island. The street is one way coming down [...].’
‘And I presume there’s hardly ever traffic coming down.’
‘Usually deserted,’ I assured him.
‘Usually,’ he repeated, ‘but not always.’
‘Nothing is always,’ I said.”
At this point in the story, my friend became visibly uncomfortable.
“Nothing bad happened,” I assured him.
“Okay...”
“We parked, got out, and inspected the raceway. A few seconds later, a Ford station wagon came barreling down the street.
‘Thought you said there wasn’t any traffic,’ said Dean.
‘Hardly any,’ I said.
As we stood there, though, over the next five minutes at least six cars came zooming down the street.
‘You’re crazy, Leiber. Let’s go back and drink.’
I laughed and we drove back to Villa Capri.
‘It was a setup,’ Dean said when we assumed our old positions at the bar. ‘You didn’t want to race, so you proposed an impossible course.’
‘I did want to race,’ I said, ‘It just so happened that the course was in use.’
‘Dean gave me one of his Actors Studio smiles that meant whatever you wanted it to mean. I excused myself to go to the bathroom. When I got back, Dean was gone.’”
Maybe this really happened. Maybe Leiber, co-writer of “Stand By Me,” “Love Potion #9,” and “Hound Dog” cheekily cheated death when James Dean refused to play a real life game of chicken after drinking at Villa Capri. Maybe James Dean really gave an “Actors Studio smile” before wordlessly disappearing into the night.
The thing is, it’s also possible James Dean said goodnight before he went home, and that his “Actors Studio smile” was just a person’s smile—a smile that meant amusement and not whatever someone else wanted it to mean.
The thing is, if James Dean were just a person, the story would be ruined.
Even after texting with my septuagenarian neighbor, I continued asking people the question, “What do you think of when you hear the name James Dean?” Here are their responses:
“Hot ass.”
“The giant sign at that one gas station.”
“Cool, rebel, powerful, potential, car crash, gone too soon.”
“The Goo Goo Dolls’ deep cut ‘James Dean’ from their 1989 album Jed.”
“Film class.”
“The Eagles’ Song.”
“When those weirdos fuck around his car in Crash (1996).”
“I think about how he only made three movies before he died tragically young in a car crash and how people thought he was gonna be the next Brando, but it was cut tragically short. And I think of his squinty eyes.”
“[The song by] Phil Ochs.”
“Frozen breakfast sandwiches.”
“That he died in a car accident at a young age, so it felt like an incredible loss of talent. And that he was super handsome.”
A few things stand out to me when I look at these answers. The first is an utter lack of familiarity with the real James Dean, aside from the fact that he died young in an infamous car crash. No one said, “good actor,” or merely, “actor,” but in one way or another, plenty of people said, “dead actor:” “gone too soon”; “died tragically young in a car crash”; “an incredible loss of talent.” Only two people I surveyed mentioned a James Dean movie, and they both said Rebel Without a Cause. In fact, according to this list, people hear the name “James Dean” and think mostly of references: The Eagles’ song; the Phil Ochs’ song; the obscure Goo Goo Dolls’ song; the weirdos fucking in Crash (1996). When they don’t think of death or popular culture, they think of a cool image: a bracelet to wear to school as a “fuck you” to the Elvis fans.
The evening after I compiled this list, I drove to the Griffith Observatory in a second attempt to commune with James Dean, narrowly nabbing a parking space in time to buy a ticket for the 7:45 showing of “Centered in the Universe.” Dressed in a white top and a red jacket with my blue jeans and boots, I ignored the impulse to think of Elvis when I saw the Hollywood sign across the parking lot. Once inside, I found one of the last seats available on the edge of an aisle and reclined in my chair to look up at the projected sky. A live narrator pointed out constellations as he talked about prehistoric people making sense of the world by telling stories about stars. I felt insignificant. I felt special. I felt my mind drift to the planetarium scene in Rebel Without a Cause.
Unlike “Centered in the Universe,” which includes hopeful-ish messages about curious human beings finding ways to adapt to climate change, the show Jim Stark sees includes a graphic explanation of the end of the world.
“For many days before the end of our earth, people will look into the sky and notice a star increasingly near,” says the live narrator. “As this star approaches us...”
Jim then enters the room, interrupting the presentation. As he finds a seat, the speaker continues:
“As this star approaches us, the weather will change. The great polar fields of the north and south will rot and divide and the seas will turn warmer. The last of us search the heavens and stand amazed, for the stars will still be there, moving through their ancient rhythms.”
The Formosa Café has been redecorated; Villa Capri is an apartment building; Rebel Without a Cause is more of a catchphrase than a movie; and yet, we’ve invented our own rhythm with poor Jimmy Dean. We’ve forgotten nearly everything about him aside from his death and his potential, but that’s all we need from him to make sense of our own mortality. For a moment, he was a man. For eternity, he’s a constellation; a symbol; a shining star that grows brighter and nearer as we tell stories of his short-lived life.
One week after my first trip to the Formosa Café, when Elvis did what he could to keep my attention, I was zooming east down Route 46 to bring James Dean a piece of cake. I had spent the weekend up north in Pacific Grove celebrating a friend’s birthday, and on the way back to LA I stayed at the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo. I love the Madonna Inn because there’s nothing to do there, but the decor is so fantastic it feels like a theme park. My room had a forest green carpet and electric green doors, crystal chandeliers, black leather tufted chairs surrounding a brass coffee table, a brown leather couch with red floral cushions, a snakeskin ottoman, and a rock wall straight out of The Flintstones with a matching rock wall shower. I only spent one night, but next time I’ll spend a month.
The morning I left town, I sat at the counter of the hotel’s Copper Café and googled how far I was from Blackwell’s Corner, a gas station known to be the last place James Dean stopped before he was killed in a car accident at around 6pm on September 30, 1955. According to my navigation app, I could stop first at the official James Dean Memorial by the Jack Ranch Café in Cholame, and then go about 900 yards east to see the makeshift shrine at the crash site where his Porsche 550 Spyder landed. From there, I’d refuel at Blackwell’s Corner and take the 5 the rest of the way home. Start to finish, the drive time was about three hours; I would be back in time for the screening of Viva Las Vegas at the Formosa Café.
I paid for my breakfast, and on my way out I studied the banquet of colorful confections on display at the bakery. For as long as I’ve known about the Madonna Inn, I’ve been curious about the Pink Champagne cake: a multi-layered creation covered in pink chocolate shavings and piled high with pink curls. My stomach bulged with fried potatoes, but that didn’t mean I had to show up at James Dean’s shrine empty handed. I bought him a slice of Pink Champagne cake and hit the road.
When I saw the sign that read “James Dean Memorial Junction,” I was struck by the desolation of the surrounding landscape. There’s nothing there. Nothing. In fact, there’s enough nothing to make a person feel unwelcome. There’s nowhere to stop and pee. There’s nowhere to buy water. Clusters of trees peer down from atop flammable golden hills, wordlessly sizing you up and accusing you of not being from around here. They don’t want you to linger—they’d rather you move along.
Moving along feels essential on Route 46. There are two lanes headed east and two lanes headed west, and every driver zooming by has a somewhat heavy foot. It would be silly to blast the stereo and roll down the windows, because rolling down the windows would only remind you that you’re surrounded. “Zoom! Zoom! Zoom!” “You’re not from around here!”
When I arrived in the parking lot of the now-defunct Jack Ranch Café, I saw a man smoking a cigarette next to the James Dean Memorial sculpture. We made eye contact as I drove by—he was maybe in his early forties and not not-handsome. Tempted as I was to roll down my window and ask, “What do you think of when you hear the name James Dean?” I parked a little farther away and patiently waited for him to leave. He could have been a huge James Dean fan. He could also have been trying to look cool.
Eventually the man left, and I walked over to the sculpture: a solid piece of steel wrapped around a Chinese Sumac, also known as a “tree of heaven.” Funded in 1977 by Japanese businessman Seita Oshnishi, the monument includes a memorial marker engraved with a tribute. One paragraph reads:
“Many are those who feel strongly that James Dean should not be forgotten. There are some things, like the hatred that accompanies war, that are best forgotten. There are others, like the nobler qualities of Man, to which this young actor directed our attention, that should be preserved for all time.”
I wasn’t around in the 1950s. Ultimately, I don’t know if James Dean regularly “directed our attention” to “the nobler qualities of man.” (Then again, with the bar set so low, perhaps it’s noble to change your mind about drag racing in Laurel Canyon.) All I know is when I watched Rebel Without a Cause, the scene with the game of chicken made me ball my hands into fists. Jim agrees to play the game even though he doesn’t understand it, convinced the whole stupid thing might have something to do with honor; it’s honorable to risk one’s life to not appear weak. Once he sees where that game leads, he has a change of heart. Perhaps it’s time America—the country that idolizes James Dean as the epitome of cool—also had a change of heart about all its bullshit hatred and war. We can forget all that; we can focus on nobler qualities; we can be friends with Plato.
“Okay James Dean,” I thought, “noble men deserve Pink Champagne cake.”
I got back in my car, zoomed onto the highway, made a U-turn, and before I knew it, I was heading west through the deadly intersection in the same direction as James Dean when he collided with another driver and crashed into a gulley. I didn’t plan for the reenactment. I’m clueless when it comes to directions and didn’t realize I’d have to drive westward to find the makeshift memorial. Despite having the right of way (and decent visibility), an uneasy feeling came over me when I drove through that weird intersection.
“What an awful way to go,” I thought. “And out here. With so much nothing.”
I parked on the unpaved shoulder of an apparent road to nowhere marked with a green sign that said PARKFIELD 15 —>. My city brain felt nervous that someone might try to steal my car, but after a quick look around it was evident there were no someones to be found. I took the cake from the front seat, threw a fork into the box, and made my way to the makeshift shrine.
Have you ever walked between a barbed wire fence and a notoriously deadly highway wearing oversized flip-flops and a cropped tank top? I don’t make a habit of it either, but it’s exactly what I did to bring James Dean some Pink Champagne cake. The drivers zooming by barely had time to see me, but I still felt awkward and embarrassed as I clomped across dead grass so dry and scratchy and springy, that I was practically walking on hay. At one point, about halfway to the shrine, my right foot slid hard to the left, sending me clumsily crumbling to the ground and landing on my right hip. The hay crunched beneath me as I held the cake above my head. I didn’t feel cool, but this wasn’t about me: this was about James Dean.
Eventually I arrived at the shrine, which was made up of several feet of barbed-wire fence covered in strange tokens. There were American flags, bandanas, baseball caps, photographs, bras, sunglasses, and a spray-painted sign stenciled with the word “REBEL.” A sword stuck out of the ground with a Christmas ornament dangling from its red handle. I struggled to imagine what the hell James Dean would want with any of it. This wasn’t a happy place. This place wanted me to move along. My throat tightened the same way it did when I came upon a room in an antique store that had a palpable “Keep Out” vibe. Still, that was a stuffy room in a stuffy building where anyone might feel claustrophobic. James Dean’s shrine was outside, and I still felt the need to escape.
I plopped the box of Pink Champagne cake on the ground next to a license plate and quickly, carefully, booked it back toward the road to nowhere.
“I love you!” I said, yelling over my shoulder so James Dean could hear me above the zooming cars. “I brought you a piece of cake! I’m so sorry people don’t remember you accurately, but they do remember you! And I’m sorry I didn’t stay long, but I’m worried about my car! I’m sure you understand! Goodbye!”
Thankfully, no one had stolen my car on the road to nowhere. When I got inside and sat down, I saw that my jeans were covered in hay. My black boots mocked me from the floor of the front seat as I detected an itch on my bare right ankle.
By the time I got to Blackwell’s Corner, I’d had enough of James Dean monuments. Still, at that point I needed gas, a bathroom, and maybe a soda to get me through the home stretch. I admired the giant James Dean cutout in the parking lot, and then I popped inside the store and followed the sign for the bathroom. I came to a hallway covered in James Dean photographs and newspaper clippings. In the center of the display was a glass case with a pair of orange driving goggles. Above the goggles hung a piece of paper that said, “James Dean goggles found after 62 years!” Apparently, the goggles were stolen from the crash site on the day of James Dean’s death but were now at home in Blackwell’s after the thief’s family member donated them. I sighed and turned the corner and came face-to-face with Elvis, happily thrusting his hips above the bright red EXIT sign.
“Don’t worry,” I thought. “I’m leaving right now.”
I took a seat at the rooftop bar of the Formosa Café an hour before the Viva Las Vegas screening. There were a few tables of people drinking and chatting, but otherwise the crowd looked thin. A bartender gave me a glass of water and asked if I wanted a cocktail.
“First, I have a question,” I said. “Where does the projection screen get set up for the movie?”
He squinted and looked around.
“I assume they’ll set it up over there?” he said, pointing to the wall behind me. “I didn’t know there was a movie tonight.”
“There is,” I said.
“Did you come here just for the movie?”
“I did.”
“That’s awesome,” he said. “No one ever comes for the movies.”
As if on cue, a waitress appeared to my left, put down her tray, and excitedly told the bartender, “No movie tonight.”
The bartender looked at me. His expression was one of amusement and pity. I put my face in my hands and audibly groaned.
“Let me get you a drink,” said the bartender. “This one’s on me.”
“That’s nice of you. Margarita. I guess.”
“That’s so weird the movie’s canceled,” he said, grabbing a bottle of tequila. “I wonder who pulled the plug.”
The answer came to me without a second’s hesitation.
“It was the ghost of James Dean,” I said.
Perhaps the ghost of James Dean was in no mood for Viva Las Vegas. Perhaps the ghost of Elvis was punishing me for spending the day with James Dean. Perhaps the screening was canceled because those kinds of things happen; there was no supernatural involvement and I have an overactive imagination.
Imagination enables us to tell stories about stars, like prehistoric people finding patterns in the sky. We’ve told so many stories about James Dean he’s less of a human than an attractive shape—a shape of a broodin’ American menace with a cigarette between his lips. He is a legend of liberation. An eternal constellation of cool. Fewer and fewer people talk about who he was as a man, but plenty of people know the highlights of his eerie, sparse myth. They say, “He was super handsome.” They say, “He died tragically young in a car crash.” They say, “Cool, rebel, powerful, potential, car crash, gone too soon.” They remember Rebel Without a Cause, but they don’t remember Jim Stark’s rebellion.
I first learned about James Dean when I was six or seven-years-old and found a Hollywood themed calendar in a kitchen drawer. A crafty middle child, I amused myself by scribbling important anniversaries from the Hollywood calendar into the real calendar my parents had taped to the cabinet. In the February 8 square, I wrote, “Happy birthday James Dean.” I didn’t know who he was—I just knew I liked his name. He sounded important, like a president.
When my mother discovered my handiwork, she erupted with laughter.
“Happy birthday James Dean?!” she howled.
I didn’t understand. My dad tried to explain mom’s reaction by telling me James Dean was a famous actor who died in a car accident when he was young. I still didn’t understand. In fact, I felt terrible for James Dean—he had the coolest name I’d ever heard. “How sad,” I thought. “How sad and important.”
It’s not fair that poor Jimmy Dean was made immortal at age 24. It’s not fair that his immortality has upstaged his humanity. Still, we assume something made him special while he was here—we just don’t know exactly what it was. We don’t know who he was. Yet, his star will always be there, moving through its ancient rhythms.