Forever 24.

It has now been 71 years since James Dean’s fatal car crash, which took him from us at just 24 years old. Today is the anniversary of that tragic accident.

I wasn’t alive during Dean’s lifetime, but growing up, his mythology was impossible to escape. There was the rebel, the movie star, the beautiful young man who seemed destined to remain young forever. And then there was the sheer sexuality he brought to the screen. The charged moments between Dean and Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause left me breathless. And although Dean and Paul Newman never actually appeared together in a film, the clip of them doing a screen test together is beyond intoxicating.

Today, we remember the man who became an unintentional sex symbol, frozen forever at 24.

There’s also a wonderful stage play, later made into a film, called Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. It follows a group of James Dean devotees who reunite at a small-town Texas five-and-dime on the anniversary of his death, twenty years after Giant was filmed nearby. It’s less a story about Dean himself than about memory, longing, identity, and what happens when the mythology of our youth collides with who we eventually become.

I haven’t been able to find the complete film available in one piece, but it can be watched in roughly 10-minute segments on YouTube. Starring Cher, Karen Black, Kathy Bates. The Disciples of James Dean meet up on the anniversary of his death and mull over their lives in the present and in flashback, revealing the truth behind their complicated lives.

https://youtu.be/wpd5rov_i2c?si=dBu-Qwm_t0C-eN6E

So today, come back to the five-and-dime with me and raise a glass to Jimmy Dean: gone at 24, still smoldering 71 years later.