In New York he attended the famous church of Method acting, the Actors Studio, from which his idols Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift had graduated. He learned to play bongos with Cyril Jackson, took dancing lessons with Eartha Kitt, and soaked up the early Beat vibes of bohemian New York.

His style of acting was far more emotional and precarious than the Method encouraged. He wanted to feel what it would be like to be carried away on the riptide of illusion. The knife-edge balance between acting and life that Dean perfected gave to his impersonation of psychotic janitors and schizophrenic teenagers an edge of menace and alarming realism.

There would be ample opportunity for Dean to parade his new Frankenstein. Between his arrival in New York in 1951 and his departure for Hollywood two years later he appeared in some twenty TV shows, putting his own peculiar spin on a newly minted type, the existential crazy-mixed-up kid. Typical of these charismatic punk roles on TV is his portrayal of a hep cat killer who disturbs the sleep of a country doctor (played by Ronald Reagan) in The Dark, Dark Hours—a tense, schizzy misfit bursting into a placid, bourgeois living room.

Young, disaffected TV writers like Rod Serling, Gore Vidal and Paddy Chayevsky provided the vehicle for Dean's beautiful monster by putting a new twist on the stock juvenile delinquent character in cop shows and melodramas. They made him into a casualty of society, of bad parents. The juvenile delinquent was seen not as a violent malcontent but as a victim. By rotating this idea another 90 degrees teenage trouble makers became paragons of a true morality raging against a corrupt and hypocritical society.

The director Elia Kazan spotted Dean playing an Arab boy who seduces Louis Jourdan in a Broadway adaption of Andre Gide's The Immoralist. Dean went to Hollywood with his belongings in a paper bag, and went on to make the three classic movies for which he is famous: East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant.

In his first major role—as Cal Trask in East of Eden—Jimmy played a young boy searching for a mother whom he has been told is dead. Even critics dubious of the unmediated angst and violence in his performance in East of Eden couldn't help appreciating it.

"Maybe his father doesn't love him but the camera does," wrote one reviewer. "Look at all that beautiful desperation!"

Rebel Without a Cause is a movie about teenagers, by teenagers, and for teenagers. Made in the most adenoidal manner possible, it is full of adolescent angst, Freudian cliches, teen tableaux, True Romance courtship and rites of passage. The director Nick Ray, a case of retarded development himself, virtually handed over the film to its star and teenage cast. Emotionally overblown, sentimental, violent, often incoherent, it is the classic teen testament. Its outrageous claim that parents should learn about life from their children was to see its ultimate flowering in the sixties.

In Hollywood Dean began to unravel while pouring his emotional turmoil into his parts. He had turbulent love affairs with Ursula Andress and Pier Angeli. He turned quite morbid and began hanging out with a local witch who called herself Vampira. He also took up sports car racing with a vengeance. Dean's recklessness, his need to take things to the limit, was already legendary. Forbidden to drive while making Giant, he looked forward to taking part in a race meet in Salinas, California after he'd finished filming.

It was on the set of Giant, a week before his death that Dean made a commercial for the National Highway Committee that now seems prophetic. "People say racing is dangerous," he told the host, Gig Young, "but I'd rather take my chances on the track any day than on the highway.... Well, Gig, I'd better take off. Remember... drive carefully because the life you might save might be... mine."

The role of Jett Rink in Giant was one Dean had fought for. The director George Stevens was one of his idols, but Stevens was a director of the old school and the two soon clashed. For days Dean waited in the blistering Texas sun, seething with pent-up fury and still Stevens didn't use him. He began not showing up on the set, rewriting his lines, inventing scenes that weren't in the script and a major feud developed.

"It was depressing to see the suffering that boy was going through," said Nick Ray. "Giant was draining him and I hated to watch that happen.

Dean's identity confounded, he was caught in a trap not too different from Jett's. His close friend, Eartha Kitt, described his dilemma.

By the time the unit returned to Hollywood in July to shoot interior sequences on the Warner Brothers lot, Dean had become a shadow of himself. During these last weeks of filming, Eartha Kitt greeted him at a friend's house and sensed with a shudder the eeriness of his disembodiment.

On September 22nd, 1955 Dean finished the "last supper" scene in Giant. The following day he attended a cast party for the movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. Friends noticed a marked change in his behavior. He said formal goodbyes to his friends. On September 29th, the day before the race, he gave away his cat—a gift from Elizabeth Taylor. At 8:00 a.m. on the morning of September 30th, Dean—along with his mechanic, Rolf Wutherich—arrived at Competition Motors to check out the Porsche Spyder he had christened "Little Bastard." At 1:30 p.m., Dean and Wutherich departed for Salinas. At 3:30 p.m. outside Bakersfield, Dean received a ticket for speeding. At 5:45 p.m., at the intersection of routes 466 and 41, a Ford sedan driven by a local farmer with the bizarre name of Donald Turnupseed, pulled in front of the Porsche. Wutherich was thrown clear. The eggshell thin body of the Porsche crumpled on impact pinning Dean to the steering wheel. He was dead at age twenty-four.

Dean like to quote a line from the movie Knock on any Door which went: "Live fast, die young, have a beautiful corpse." Oddly enough he died looking like a little old man. His hair had been shaved back and dyed grey for his part as the aging Jett Rink in Giant. In a grey car on a grey road at twilight, James Dean was invisible.

Food of the Gods
In the manner of an Egyptian saint, James Dean's death rather than his birth is celebrated annually on September 30th.

His fame and immense popularity are entirely posthumous. Before his violent death only East of Eden had been released. He was relatively unknown, therefore, when Rebel Without A Cause opened on October 26th, 1955, less than a month after his death.

In the two years following his death a fanatical cult began to develop around him, inflamed by the crass commercialization of his death. Pieces of the wrecked Porsche were sold as amulets, Miracleflesh masks and red windbreakers were hawked along with one shot magazines claiming to have been dictated by him from the beyond. One magazine offered a $100,000 reward to the person who spotted the reclusive Dean.

For two years after his death fan magazines pumped out a ghoulish stream of articles such as "Proof in His Own Handwriting, that James Dean Knew He had a Date with Death," "Jimmy Dean's Alive," "The Ghost Driver of Polonio Pass," and "James Dean's Black Madonna."

After James Dean's death a new sensibility entered the fan mag's marzipan kingdom. Like an Asiatic mystery cult, the way fans responded to Dean's tragic accident ushered in an era of freakishness, any combination of sex and death being a genetic component of the seething teenage brain. An actor dies in a car crash and suddenly... altars! Suicide pacts! Supernatural appearances! Fantastic rumors! He's not dead but badly disfigured and living in New Mexico.

Like others who died young and under mysterious circumstances, James Dean's life is read backwards. His already larger-than-life reputation among insiders precipitated into a morbid and evangelical cult when he died on the road to Salinas. Lives read through such a dark glass—Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix—lend themselves to fantastic fabrications and grotesque distortions.

Bizarre rumors surrounding his death soon appeared: Dean had committed suicide by deliberately driving his car into the path of the other car; he was not dead, but was so badly hurt, so terribly disfigured in the smashup that it was kinder to let his public believe him dead. Or: the love of Vampira had turned to hatred when Dean forsook her for Pier Angeli. She had therefore placed on Dean a voodoo curse that forced him to lose control of the car.

The Warner Bros. publicity department who engineered these hokey speculations had no idea it would go on for four years, never mind four decades. The Elvis sightings (a tabloid this week proclaims "ELVIS DEAD AT 63"), the Jim Morrison cult—it all came from James Dean. Vandals/disciples recently dug up his grave and stole his body from the Fairmount cemetery (since returned). Nothing remotely like this had occurred in pop culture before James Dean. Today the teen liebestodt motif is one of its sacraments.

Every year on the anniversary of his death thousands of fans converge on the small farming town where he was born. Fairmount is an ideal place of pilgrimage. A "bedroom town" to neighboring industrialized Muncie it is like a village under a spell, hardly changed since the fifties. Vintage cars parade down Main Street, you can buy an entire fifties prom outfit—poodle skirt, saddle shoes, Peter Pan collar—at retro stores and find Carl Perkins EPs at the hundreds of booths selling fifties memorabilia and Deanabilia.

The anthropologist James Hopgood has compared Dean to Mexican folk saints like Niño Fidencio with whom he has much in common. Devotees come to visit Fairmount, the same way Fidencio's disciples visit his hometown of Espinazo in Mexico. Dean fans tour the sacred sites (the ground he walked on, his home), put flowers on his grave, take away mementoes and read his biography as an exemplary tale. Some even ask Dean to intervene in their lives. But in late twentieth century America, instead of lighting candles, we buy t-shirts.

Dean is in a long line of Pop messiahs, cowboy angels and beautiful, possessed, seraphic martyrs of youth and art. Lives—like those of Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Robert Johnson—that had in common precocious talent, a wayward urgency and early death. In hindsight, their sudden, violent, untimely deaths seem the only possible conclusion to their possessed lives. It is the ultimate proof of their authenticity, their intensity, their reckless pursuit of sensation and their articulation of it. James Dean became the epitome of Jack Kerouac's combustible geniuses, those who "burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center-light pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'."

Tormented Titans
Into the smug, drowsy, suburban fifties came the metachildren of the new Pop culture—Brando, Dean and Marilyn—with their feral appetites, androgynous sexuality, innocence and violent fantasies. Like his idol, Marlon Brando, James Dean reversed the sexual polarity of the movies. It was Dean not Natalie Wood who was the sex symbol in Rebel Without a Cause.

Dean's shifting moods—violent, vulnerable, reckless, whimsical—reflected the changing states of adolescence. He blurred the lines utterly: child and adult, macho and sensitive, wounded and defiant, actor and character, flesh and fantasy, star and person.

A master at making the most of his own shortcomings, his nervous twitch, erotic slouch, menacing prowl and chronic headhanging became part of our social history. The very complexity of his psychological make-up creates the impression that James Dean can be a symbol for just about anything imaginable. He is a little like Jung's Theory of the Hat: a mass-produced item that becomes uniquely one's own. But this is the very essence of Pop, the sine qua non of a mass audience icon, someone who in their charismatic person can hold together the largest number of contradictions.

The very idea of Pop begins with him. Not pop culture itself, of course, but a certain take on it. With James Dean, a new Pop synthesis presented itself that would combine a number of elements: the doomed poet, the artist writing his own movie, tragic death and stardom.

And like everything great in American culture it was all in the blend.

Unlike his predecessors Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, Dean had none of their disdain for the movies as a crass medium for mass entertainment. He had somehow gotten around the supposed contradiction between art and popularity, and he'd done it while he was still young, barely out of adolescence.