Jimmy
Dean, Jimmy Dean…. Man,
am I imagining it or have you mellowed out
a bit in the last 28 years? The reason I
ask is that last weekend I went back to your
hometown of Fairmount, Indiana, and I sensed
a Jimmy more at peace with himself, less
angry and eruptible. Would it be fair to
say you’ve settled down
a bit, demons are falling away a bit? You’re
spending more time in coffee shops with Elvis,
I bet, chewing the fat over your days in
the Hollywood gulag. But hey, Jimmy? Stay
away from those strawberry crullers, dude.
When
I first set out to write your biography in
1973, you were a little bit more, uh, guarded.
You were still mad probably, and I don’t blame
you. Wondering whether it was auspicious to
write a book about you, I ingested some peyote
and waited for the spirits to talk to me. An
image arose of a vast, impregnable walled citadel.
A sort of neo-medieval cyber city, like the
one in Hendrix’s version of "All
Along the Watchtower." At the center of
this fortress was your tomb, a magic object
made of translucent jade that pulsed with an
eerie light. Guarded it was by the Custodians,
an alien paramilitary, parapsychology clan
who kept all seekers outside the gates. Like
poor Bob in Dylan’s dream of St. Augustine,
I put my head against the glass and cried.
The walls, did I mention, were of solid crystal—hey,
this was Señor Peyote talking, where
everything is symbolic and yet somehow solid
at the same time.
Not
exactly encouraging as "should-I-embark-on-this-quest?" visions
go. It occurred to me that where I lived at
the time might have something to do with the
ominous cast of my apparition. I lived in a
rickety building at the entrance to the Holland
Tunnel in New York City, the very entrance
to Hell itself, and opposite the sinister windowless
phone company skyscraper—a Bulgarian apparatchik’s
baked-brick version of Kafka’s castle.
Or
it may have all been in my troubled mind—where
else? Still, I was undeterred. I was out to
breach the fortified city of the Sacred Dean.
I wanted to talk to the boy inside. And, really,
as it turned out, the quest wasn’t that
sinister in the end. Okay, there was the time
you tried to electrocute me in the bath while
I was staying in your room at the Iroquois
Hotel. And how about the time my girlfriend
totaled my car in an exact duplication
of your crash at Cholane? But there I think
you were just trying to tell me that she wasn’t
the girl for me—and, boy, were you right
about that. Let’s face it, neither of
us was ever that crazy about patchouli.
Anyway,
Jimmy, you wouldn’t believe Fairmount—not
that it’s changed that much. Payne’s
grocery store is still there, it’s a pizza
parlor, though. They’ve fixed up the old
Citizen’s Exchange Bank, painted the cupola
with new gold paint. Even the Fairmount State
Bank with that fifties gold grille on the front
(locally known as "the cheese-grater")
looks kinda retro and cool. They’ve retro-fitted
the old hardware store, too. It probably looks
more authentic now than it did in your day.
The whole of Main Street has gone retro, just
about. You can buy fifties records and poodle
skirts and classic guitars.
And,
man, as you swing off the thruway or Route
9, they’ve
got huge billboards saying, "FAIRMOUNT,
HOME OF JAMES DEAN." Forget about Charlton
Heston and James Whitcomb Riley and her other
native sons, Indiana’s gone Dean—big
time.
I
get the feeling your ghost is somewhat at rest,
you’ve achieved what you set out to do.
You said—in so many words—"I
need creatures who resemble me!" And you
found them, millions of them. You did what
even the most ruthless dictator could never
achieve—you remade the world in your image.
And
about this mellowing-out business? Maybe it’s
just us, the fans, who have mellowed out over
the years? I went to Fairmount to speak at
the Fans’ Weekend, organized by David
Loehr, the Dean of Deanabilia—and a very
good-natured occasion it was, too. Very sweet,
like you could be, Jimmy, very simple and warm.
Down-home folks from Texas and Arkansas and
Chicago and San Diego, as well as a couple
of infamous celebrities—but we’ll
get to them in a minute.
Friday
night there was a dinner for the fans and a
cool rockabilly set by Paul Watson in the basement
of the Lion’s Club. At noon the next day
we played James Dean Jeopardy. Sample
questions: For $300: In Rebel, Natalie
leaves what behind at the police station? For
$600: What Hoosier starred in The Blob in
1958? Top prize, $50, went to Mark Kinnamen
for the second year in a row. Saturday night
there was a banquet and I gave a speech about
you, Jimmy. Rufus Wainwright and his cohorts
(opening for Roxy Music) blew in and added
a touch of rock ’n’ roll insanity
to the evening.
Pam
Crawford from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, told me
that when Jimmy died, she and her sister—she was
about eight at the time—took turns sitting
out on Highway 65 ("You know how you think
your highway is the highway to the whole world?")
a-waitin’ for Jimmy to pass by in his
white convertible. They didn’t believe
this baloney about him being dead. They figured
he’d just gotten fed up with all that
nonsense in Hollywood and decided he’d
go hide out among the razorbacks in the Arkansas
hills—who’d ever look for him there?
They sat and sat on that road for days until
finally their momma came out and said, "Come
on in you girls, it ain’t gonna happen."
Pamela
Des Barres was there with her friend Kip Brown
who’s been working on his book, James
Dean: Day by Day for some twelve years
now. He’s recently uncovered a recording
of Dean singing Eddie Arnold’s "Cattle
Call." Not quite the rockabilly Dean we’d
like—but still…. Miss Pamela, as
I’m sure you all know, is the author of
the great groupie memoir, I’m With
the Band. Her seventh visit to Fairmount,
Jimmy!
She
told me a childhood conversion story herself: "I’d
just turned nine and I was trying to fall asleep
on my mother’s lap in our ’49 Ford
when news came on the radio that James Dean
had died. I asked my mother who that was. It
was just so sad and mysterious that from that
day on I became obsessed with him. For a long
time I carried around a picture of his tombstone
in my wallet. I bought Bill Bast’s book
about him and took it to high school with me
every day where all the boys compared pretty
unfavorably with Jimmy. That’s how I got
into rock stars, and most of them didn’t
match up too well either, I can tell you."
Miss
Pamela recently wrote a screenplay about the
one-legged jazz singer Toni Lee Scott who was
a friend of Jimmy’s. In the process of writing
the screenplay, Pamela had Toni hypnotized
and asked her to go back in time and tell her
what Jimmy smelt like. "She said he smelled
like a baby—mixed with motor oil."
I met
Kurt Hemmer, an English professor at Harper
College who teaches a course on James Dean
in his cultural studies program and uses my
book, The Mutant King, as a textbook
in his class. Well, like I always said, you
is cultural history, kid.
My
friend Paul Mones, the writer/director and
lunch-counter hipster, said to me the other
day: "If
it hadn’t been for Marlon Brando and Bob
Dylan, there’d be a lot more people in
mental institutions." And if it hadn’t
been for you, Jimmy, there’d be a lot
more people in suits.
If
you’re looking for the Dean conversion
experience, you’ll get another chance
this year to walk in the footsteps of the mutant.
From September 28-30, 3,000 enthused Dean fans
and hot-rodders will descend on Fairmount for
the annual Remembering James Dean Weekend.
Check it out at www.JamesDeanGallery.com where
you’ll also find the text of my speech, "Hail,
Fellow Mutants!"
