The Rebel Fans Of Actor James Dean Will Note The 40th Anniversary Of His Untimely Death

James Dean starred in only three movies, yet his sulking, badboy image was forever immortalized the day his sleek silver Porsche collided with another car at a desolate crossroads.

Dean fans stop every day in this dusty Central California hamlet, population 65, to catch a glimpse of the area where the 24-year-old actor died 40 years ago Saturday.

Some gaze at a stainless steel memorial, imagining what the crash must have been like. Others grab a bite to eat at the Jack Ranch Cafe, where you can buy James Dean T-shirts, lighters and magnets and listen to 1950s records on a jukebox.

Dean, who had bit parts in four other movies, is still idolized by a cross-section of the United States. Many who were teenagers in the 1950s fondly remember him, but he also has not been forgotten by many of today’s teens, who identify with the actor’s angst-ridden characters.

The fascination hasn’t faded, perhaps because more than any other actor, Dean symbolizes doomed stardom: Live fast, die young.

His portrayal of troubled teens in “Rebel Without a Cause” and “East of Eden” continues to affect viewers.

“I think they’re both movies that kids could relate to because they were having problems with their own parents,” said Marcus Winslow, Dean’s cousin. “He really came across on the films just like one of them. And the kids today have the same problems.”

Dean’s most enduring image is a poster of a brooding teenager wearing a white T-shirt and rolled-up jeans and holding a cigarette.

Bob Hinkle, a close friend who taught Dean rope tricks for the movie “Giant,” said Dean actually was shy, not surly. In fact, the only time he ever saw Dean get angry was shortly before his death, when he yelled at director George Stevens for making him wait hours to shoot a scene for “Giant.”

Producers ordered Dean, an avid racer, not to drive his Porsche while working on the movie. Two weeks after his final scene, he was dead.

He was on his way to a race in Salinas that early autumn day in 1955 when a sedan driven by Donald Turnupseed, a college student, turned from one rural road onto another and into the path of Dean’s Porsche Spyder. California Highway Patrol officers estimated that Dean was driving between 70 mph and 75 mph.

“He’s got to see us,” Dean said to Rolf Wuetherich, his mechanic and passenger, Hinkle said. Those were Dean’s last words.

It was 5:56 p.m. The impact of the collision crumpled the car and injured the mechanic. Dean’s neck and arms were broken and his left side was crushed.

He died in an ambulance. Turnupseed was not injured.

At the Warner Bros. studio 200 miles south in Burbank, Stevens and “Giant” co-stars Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and a young Dennis Hopper were reviewing scenes from the day before. Hinkle came in and told Stevens to turn off the projector.

“I said, ‘George, I’ve got some bad news,”’ Hinkle recalled. “‘You’d better shut her down. Jimmy Dean got killed in an accident.’

“George sat back down, and Liz started screaming and crying.”

Ironically, Dean had filmed a traffic safety film saying he felt safer on the racetrack than on the road.

“Drive carefully,” he warned. “The life you save may be mine.”

The 40th anniversary of Dean’s death is expected to attract 25,000 fans to the actor’s hometown of Fairmount, Ind., where he was buried. A park will be renamed after Dean, and a bronze bust of the actor will be unveiled.

The monument is identical to one at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, where Dean had a knife fight with gang members in “Rebel Without a Cause.”

His burial site is a mecca for would-be actors and foreign tourists enamored with Dean’s image. People chip away bits of Dean’s pink granite gravestone as a memento, women leave their lipstick imprints on the memorial, and others sprinkle the site with cigarettes, sunglasses, flowers and love notes.

In California, dozens of vintage 1950s-style cars will retrace the fatal route Dean took. Along the way, the procession will stop where Dean was ticketed for speeding south of Bakersfield and where he got out of his Porsche to look at a Mercedes at Blackwell’s Corner, about 80 miles farther north.

Their final stop will be at the memorial. Women dressed in 1950s-style poodle skirts and men wearing jeans and leather jackets will eat 55-cent hamburgers and hot dogs. A high school drama class will present excerpts from “Rebel Without a Cause.” There will be hula hoop and James Dean look-alike contests.

Dinah Hutton, who was 6 years old when Dean died, said she stops by the monument every time she drives by on state Route 46.

“Because he died young, he has been romanticized,” she said. “That’s the intrigue.”

“These kids are crazy about him now, and it’s wonderful,” said 89-year-old Adeline Nall, Dean’s high school drama teacher. “He’s gained by passing away.”

Had he lived, many people who knew Dean say he would have been an ideal director because he liked cameras and improvised on the set to compensate for forgetting his lines. Still, the thought of Dean as a senior citizen is as odd as picturing Marilyn Monroe as a grandmother.

“Jimmy will always be 24 years old,” Hinkle said. “You can’t associate him with an old person. People don’t realize that he’d be 65 next year, with a gut, balding and drawing a pension.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Dean remembrance The Disney Channel will lionize James Dean Saturday at 9 p.m. in “James Dean: A Portrait.” It will be followed by his signature film, “Rebel Without a Cause.” Narrated by Rip Torn and drawn from David Dalton’s “The Mutant King,” this is an oftoverstated but consistently affecting hour of powerful images and evocation. “In the ‘50s there were two people who transformed our culture,” Torn intones. “Elvis Presley, who changed our music, and James Dean, who changed the way we lived.” Dallas Morning News