The Death of James Dean by Warren Newton Beath

Author:Warren Newton Beath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 1986-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

In 1969, Howard Hubbell Matson* was seventeen years old and a junior at Dinuba High School in central California. His father had died when he was thirteen, and his mother remarried three years later. With her son and two young daughters she had moved into a new house on two acres of farmland outside the little town of Reedley, two hundred miles north of Los Angeles off Highway 99.

Skinny and angular, with a jutting adam’s apple and horn-rimmed glasses (which he hated) on a face always shameful with at least one swollen pimple, the high school years were difficult. He couldn’t seem to get popular. The first year of his mother’s remarriage he was prey to a fear and sense of displacement he would never have admitted. Once an accelerated student, his grades slipped. He was amazed when he found a girl-friend. Sixteen-year-old Cindy Knight’s mother had been killed in a car accident on a rural road. Her father now spent most of his evenings with his new fiancée. Howard and Cindy found much sympathy in one another.

Howard’s life had always been very involved with movies. The first horror film he remembered seeing was Plan 9 from Outer Space. He had been eight years old. For years afterwards he was afraid of the dark and of the tall, skeletal woman with the cold stare and the long fingernails who had been in the picture, and who now came in through the back door of their house and up the hall to advance one step closer to his bedroom door each night before turning and mysteriously gliding back outside. At seventeen years old, he had let his hair grow and started smoking. He acted tough at school, but he often felt his eyes fill with tears when he sat in a movie theatre.

One Saturday night, Howard stayed up to watch Rebel Without a Cause on the late show. He had seen it before. He had been curious because he remembered that his father, who had been a highway patrolman, had told him he had known the officer who had given Dean a ticket on the day he had been killed. But on this night and at this time in his life, it struck him with tremendous force. The image of James Dean cut through the old movie with painful incision and radiance. Much of the appeal was narcissistic: Howard was instantly fascinated by what James Dean had known about him. Most devastating was the planetarium scene where Jim Stark moos like a cow at the display of Taurus in the laserium firmament. There was a painful silence, and then a horrible pause as he waited for the approval of the gang. Their disgust and ridicule, ‘He’s real cute’ and then the three reflexive emotions flashing across Dean’s face – hurt, resignation, and a protective hardness, communicated in a second with the eyes and the muscle of the jaw – hit Howard in the stomach like successive punches. And pervading the

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