James Dean: 50 years after his death

Dean undoubtedly would have shared these sentiments. Though Brando based his autobiographical insights upon the wisdom of a then-stormy 70 years of life, Dean already was leaning in this direction at age 24. In pianist/composer/actor Oscar Levant's comic 1968 memoir, The Unimportance of Being Oscar, this Hollywood wit described a gracious Dean coming for a visit, largely because one of Levant's daughters was an ardent fan. He was completely charmed by the young actor, and they talked until dawn. However, "a strange thing ... [upon seeing] my daughter's room filled with dozens of pictures of him in various poses, did not seem to please Dean. On the contrary, it depressed him. He said he felt crashed under the weight of such adulation."

Paradoxically for Brando, though he predated Dean, the younger actor's death pushed him to the front of the iconic rebel line. Brando's innocent desertion was not just about surviving, or even getting old and tat, it also involved moving on to merely traditional parts. One passionate pop culture student of the 1950s, Derek Marlowe, later wrote, "At first the [rebel] hero could have been Brando, until he put on a suit and sang songs just like Dad [in the 1955 hit "Guys and Dolls"]. That was a betrayal. It had to be someone else, someone who would remain permanently young, permanently rebellious... James Dean."

A seventh possible enduring fame factor for Dean was Warner Bros.' sale of "Eden" and "Rebel" to television in 1960. The thinking here is that, just as repeated small screen appearances of "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) and "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) turned those movies into cherished classics (almost rite of passage pictures), the sudden easy availability of Dean's two most antiheroic films (at the beginning of the anti-establishment 1960s) help solidify his status as the patron saint of the misfit and the misunderstood. A 1971 Chicago Sun-Times article went so far as to suggest that "without these two movies on television, the Dean legend might have dimmed and finally died." An overstatement or not, the real irony here was that Warner Bros. had made the sale because the studio felt the obsession with Dean finally was fading!

An eighth element feeding the phenomenon of James Dean is youth culture itself. This goes beyond a simplistic recycling of Rod Stewart's recording of "Forever Young." Yes, Dean's death will keep him forever young, but the reference here is to the nostalgia most people have for that early time in their lives when they are burning with curiosity about everything. Thus, besides being moved by Dean's attempts to reconnect with his screen fathers, audiences might equally be drawn to the boy/man fascinated by the young plants in "Eden," or the nurturing friend to Plato (Sal Mineo) in "Rebel." I am reminded of a passage from S.E. Hinton's coming-of-age novel "The Outsider" (1967), a 1950s tale saturated with the spirit of Dean. The dying Johnny has written a letter to his friend, Ponyboy. He describes, in part, what he thinks a poem noted earlier in the text, Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay," means: "I've been thinking about.., that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you're gold when you're a kid.... When you're a kid everything's new, dawn. It's just when you get used to everything that it's day." Though Frost's title warns, "Nothing Gold Can Stay," to me the image of Dean represents a capsulization of Johnny's implied advice to Ponyboy, which was to stay golden-young at heart.