FAIRMOUNT, Ind. — A cigarette dangles from a 14-year-old’s mouth. Red jackets stretch from the car show to the James Dean Museum. Even the fiberglass statue of Garfield the Cat — another native son who, like Dean, is etched on the city’s water tower — is wearing one. (He’s a rebel with a cause: find more lasagna.)
“Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today,” Dean once famously said. He died 70 years ago. But here in Fairmount, he does live forever.
The James Dean Festival began in 1975. It’s put on by the James Dean Museum, some 80 miles northeast of Indianapolis. Now, 50 years later, it’s a full-blown, three-day affair honoring the actor with a parade, dance contest and a memorial service.
Seth Martin and Sarina Jones traveled to Indiana from Michigan to take a shot at winning the 1950s Dance Contest during the James Dean Festival in Fairmount. It’s one of the many activities honoring Dean some 70 years after his early demise. They took first prize. –
Cars were among Dean’s many passions (along with bullfighting) to the point that he raced as a hobby, so it should be no surprise that a major event at the festival is the car show. One of those vintage beauties wears a license plate honoring the actor. –
Bear a resemblance to Dean? Come on down to the always creative look-alike contest. That’s what Cash Croy did. The 14-year-old committed to the bit with the iconic red jacket and, yes, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Real or fake? Who knows, but it was enough to gain him the victory. –
The festival is always held around the anniversary of Dean’s death on Sept. 30, 1955, but, in keeping with the actor’s philosophy, it celebrates his life. That’s one reason his death site in Cholame, California, was nearly empty on a recent trip, while the streets of Fairmount were packed with fans young and old alike. Donning red jackets, of course.
Dean was only famous for about two years — or, as 26-year-old Boston-born actor Mike Gross puts it, seven haircuts — of his life. Yet he’s become a cultural icon, inspiring song lyrics and porn-star names, fashion trends and arguably rock-and-roll itself. He inspired legions of young rebels, including Gross, who grew interested in the actor, and in acting itself, after realizing as a teenager he looks strikingly similar to him.
Gross has attended the festival for the past five years, winning the look-alike contest three times. (Good money has it that he might have gone five-for-five, but the festival felt the need to vary things up a bit.)
Dean loved the theater, so it’s fitting that so much of the festival features a performance of sorts — and an audience. Here, the gathered crowd watches the dance contest, whose contestants twirl and dip mostly in 1950s-era clothing, a brief, romantic window into a past that lives on here in Fairmount. –
The festival highlights how timeless Dean’s influence has proved to be. Though he only lived for 24 years, spending just about two in the spotlight, his legend lives on throughout the generations. Here, 9-year-old Tristan Persinger wears Dean’s iconic hairstyle along with a white T-shirt and blue jeans with rolled cuffs. –
Of course you can get a pinup makeover during the festival to get your best ’50s hairdo. Here Lisa Backer and 13-year-old Evelyn Mummey get their hair done on Saturday. If anyone decides to remake “Rebel Without a Cause,” we’ve got two extras right here, ready for the camera. –
Dean only starred in three movies — “East of Eden,” “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant” — but he was an instant American idol, the picturesque example of a rebel. With a cigarette hanging from his lips and a model’s cheekbones, he wasn’t exactly dangerous, but he also wasn’t safe for 1950s America.
In some ways, Dean was symbolic of the burgeoning country’s place in the world: rough-hewn and handsome, young and hungry, pure potential. That his potential was never realized transformed him from movie star to legend.
“The story of James Dean can almost be more appealing than all of his films,” Gross says.
A quieter, more somber, scene is located some 2,200 miles west in Cholame, California, where a makeshift memorial marks the location of Dean’s fatal crash on Sept. 30, 1955. American iconography such as Coca-Cola bottles and a California license plate are scattered about, along with drawings of Dean and some empty Modelo bottles. –
That story, in brief: Dean was born in Marion, Indiana, in 1931. His family moved to California when he was 6. Three years later, his mom died of uterine cancer. His father sent him to live with his aunt and uncle in a farmhouse in Fairmount, where he lived until he graduated high school. Then, back to California, where he eventually caught the eye of Hollywood, briefly became one of its brightest stars, then died in a car crash at age 24.
That, of all those places, the site of his annual tribute is Fairmount, is instructive: Dean wasn’t Hollywood. He was America.
His cousin Marcus Winslow Jr., who refers to Dean as “Jimmy,” still lives out here, in the same farmhouse in which they grew up together.
One of the marks Dean left on the country can be found on the Winslow family farm where he was raised in Fairmount. In that age-old equation involving young children and wet cement, Dean pressed his hands into what would later become pavement, creating a monument that would live on decades after him. –
Marcus Winslow Jr. was born three years after his parents took Dean in to raise him, so the famous actor always felt to him more like an older brother. Winslow still lives on the family farm, though he considers Dean’s old room to still belong to Dean in spirit. –
An basketball hoop on which Dean would practice his shots still hangs at the Winslow family farm, where the actor was raised. Winslow keeps it, along with his bedroom and his imprinted hands, as something of a memorial to his elder cousin, whom he considered an older brother. –
Winslow’s parents took Dean in after his mother died in 1940. Winslow, born three years later, always saw Dean as an older brother.
“Mom and Dad thought of the world of him,” Winslow says. “It didn’t seem like Jimmy could do any wrong in their eyes.”
And then his older brother got cast in a movie, “East of Eden,” which struck Winslow because “it was just Jim up there. … He didn’t seem like he was acting. Just seemed like it was him.”
In the tradition of older brothers, Winslow moved into Dean’s bedroom after Dean graduated from the home. Now, he considers the room Dean’s again, and while curious visitors can’t enter, they can take photos from the outside for a glimpse into a brief stretch of his brief life.
“Now, it’s Jimmy’s room again,” Winslow says with a chuckle. “Because nobody cares about me sleeping here, but they do because Jimmy did.”
And that’s how you live forever.
Fog shrouds the grave of James Dean in Park Cemetery on Sept. 26 in Fairmount. That Dean was buried here — and that his life is celebrated here — instead of California is instructive in understanding his lasting impact on our culture. Dean was not Hollywood. Dean was America. –
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
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