A ’50s RETROSPECTIVE

James Dean — You Broke My Mama’s Heart

And the whole world was watching you do it

I want to tell you about the fifties. I want to tell you about James Dean. And while I’m at it, I’ll want you to see how James Dean — who’d never even met my Mom, who didn’t know her sweet soul from Adam, still broke her heart.

If James Dean were alive today, he’d be ninety-two years-old. Mom would be a hundred and nine. But what are these but numbers when compared to the ageless fragility of the human heart?

James Byron Dean was born in 1931 in Marion, Indiana, just a side-shuffle and a back-step down the U.S. map from Liberal Kansas, where you’ll remember Dorothy and Toto were scooped up by a tornado and deposited in the Land of Oz.

This story doesn’t have anything directly to do with Dorothy, Toto, Oz, or tornadoes, nor in any specific way does it represent a biography of James Dean. In spirit, James Dean and Dorothy play major roles in the biography of the times — the times meaning the fifties. As soon as we get to the end of this story, you might even conclude it was the fifties that really broke my Mama’s heart. But make no doubt about it: James Dean was right in the middle of it — was, ultimately, the cause of it.

I was a child of the fifties, a Baby Boomer: back when the word “shit” that we fling around in today’s print and on the screen was still referred to publicly — and accompanied by a blush — as poo-poo or ca-ca. The age of an odd kind of innocence that blithely danced on the backs of social injustices.

I was a white boy in a white world where our stay-at-home white mamas in their immaculate kitchens fried their Aunt Jemima™ flap-jacks on glistening new stoves — nearly all of it depending on our daddies’ paychecks. In the late ‘40s’ and early ‘50s’, a lot of folks lived barely above the poverty level. Many male breadwinners took a hit to their egos, by “allowing” their wives to work. My mom worked in the vegetable sheds to help our ends meet.

But the daddies were soon to have help. Smack-dab at the beginning of the fifties — in February of 1950, to be exact, the Diners Club Card™ was introduced¹ to an upward-mobility-starved nation, tired of the lingering effects of wartime rationing and deprivation. It was joined by other cards … and the freeing up of credit restrictions.

That war — the war to end all wars — was behind us, and laid out neatly patterned before us were the plans for a new world, a different world. Finally, Johnny came marching home again (Hurrah, hurrah)² and he was randy as all hell, which gave our generation the name “Baby Boomers.” Between 1946 and 1965, seventy-six million babies were born in the United States alone!³

And we needed our love and attention.

I know things happen variously by causes and effects, reapings and sowings, spontaneous emissions, synchronicity, and the old toss of the dice, but now that we can look back at it from a distance, there was that ghost of an architect there all along, laying his plans out on the table, nodding and smiling down on our immediate future.

An innocent and carefree ‘50s is what I think that ghost saw.

Oh, sure, there was the shadow of shame over the Japanese internment camps set up in February, 1942.⁴

“But what was Roosevelt to do? We were at war with Japan.” “Besides, it only lasted two years, right?” “And in the end, each one was given a ticket to go anywhere he/she wanted to go … along with twenty-five bucks. That was fair, wasn’t it?”

For the rest of us, though, even those shadows have a way of passing. Especially in the bright sunlight of prosperity.

And the dance went on and on.

Television, which had its infancy in the early 40s, became a gawky teenager in the ‘50s with the introduction of color broadcasting.

America was waiting in line for theirs, credit card in hand.

The Squires family loved our new toy. Dad was always tinkering with the rabbit-eared antenna. And with his newly purchased color degaussing ring, he was able for a few precious moments, to bring the greens, reds, yellows, and blues, always bickering and bleeding into each other, to their correct alignment.

On Saturday evening, November 3, 1956 Mom and Dad sat on the sofa, my sister, Donna, and I on the floor in front of them, and we all stared at our TV with wide-eyed wonder (as did fully one-half of American households that night).⁵ Burt Lahr and Liza Minelli — Judy Garland’s daughter — hosted the first ever full-length movie on TV, “The Wizard of Oz.” We collectively gasped when the movie went from black-and-white to color!

The Wizard of Oz movie became a family tradition on CBS, airing annually between Thanksgiving and Christmas, marking a season of cohesiveness, of warmth and giving. And the Squires family — especially Mom and Dad — was right there waiting for it every year.

Along about that time, James Dean entered our small part of the world, a part steeped in fantasy and tradition largely created by the Baby Boomer generation. I don’t want to make him more than he was. He came at the right time and the right place to help nudge our generation onto a slightly different trajectory. The Baby Boomers were ready for him. Their parents were not.

Our generation was not unique. Children have always rebelled against the yoke of their parents’ tyranny. But seldom had such rebellion been delivered with more dramatic angst than in James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause.⁶

James Dean was not a genius. He wasn’t even particularly bright. He was just a damned good actor, an exceptional emoter of the words the scriptwriter gave him. It was the writers who understood the dynamics underlying this generation’s division between parent and child. Still, James Dean became its voice.

You could almost hear the electricity crackling in the Fox Theater on the night my friend Jimmy and I first watched Rebel Without a Cause. It was the fall or winter of 1955. We were high school sophomores. Santa Maria was always late in getting the big movies. They premiered first in L.A. or San Francisco. That’s why his reputation got to Santa Maria before the movie did. But now it was here, and you couldn’t not hear the kids yammering about it before class or at lunchtime.

“Have you seen it, yet?” “Jesus, you gotta see it!” “What’s his name — James Dean? — damn!”

In the darkness of the theater that night, I caught a glimpse of Jimmy out of the corner of my eye starting to lean toward the screen during the scene in the police department. Jim Stark (James Dean’s character) was covering his ears against his parents’ bickering over whose fault it was that he was arrested for being drunk at a party, when came the moment in the midst of their railing that Jim threw up his hands and cried, “You’re tearing me apart!”

Those words became the rallying cry for a generation against their parents — and en macro against all authority. On a broader scale, this generational divide was being fomented by the Beat Movement,⁷ rooted in San Francisco but whose effect was being felt world-wide in its anti-establishment outrage.

But James Dean’s words, “You’re tearing me apart!” burrowed deep in my psyche, not as specific words, mind you, but in the undefined angst that enveloped them. And I wasn’t alone. I could see it in the often-comically-dramatized attitude of my peers. James Dean-style red (not green, blue, or white) windbreakers, unzipped, with the collar carelessly upturned became, almost overnight, the uniform of the day for teen boys.

The irony of it was that I was not even being torn apart. Secretly, I think that bothered me. Hell, I know it bothered me! All my friends were being torn apart by authority. Why shouldn’t I? When I was among them, however, I played my role well. In reality, authority made me a little uncomfortable — but not torn apart. The fact was I had made the actor James Dean a part of my persona but I didn’t occupy it outright. That created an odd disparity between what I felt and what I projected.

There was one day in particular, about a week after Jimmy and I had watched that movie. I recall it was one of those windy Saturday afternoons. And when it’s windy in Santa Maria, it makes for a blustery yellowish-gray day owing to the dust that swirls up from the broccoli fields. Not a day to be outside.

While Donna listened to music in her room and scrawled in her diary, I sprawled on the couch, trying to work up a proper fury at nature for demolishing my weekend.

I was well-aware that Mom had me on her radar as I thickly stewed in my dramatic juices. She would be choosing a bad time for an intervention, though I welcomed one. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as she stole down the hallway, and passing the entrance-way to the living room, glanced at me then quickly looked straight ahead and proceeded to the kitchen. She made this pass going in both directions.

Finally, she crept in and stood silently beside me at the edge of the couch, and after a moment, put her hand on my shoulder. I jerked away.

“Are you — ?”

“I’m fine!”

God, I wanted to say those rehearsed words, but the time wasn’t right! I watched her thin, sloped back enter the kitchen and listened keenly as she poured coffee into her cup. I hurt her. I really did hurt her.

Closing my eyes to tight slits, I shook my head and got to my feet, feeling my windbreaker collar brushing the back of my neck. With my hands stuffed in my jacket pockets, I pulled both sides across the front of my T-shirt and lumbered into the kitchen. I felt a catch in my throat.

She spoke before I could say anything. “Jay … I’m worried about you.”

I let out a huff of air. “Why? Why are you worried about me?”

“Well … I’ve noticed for days that you’re so — so sulky. What’s wrong, Jay? Is it school? You haven’t gotten into any — trouble, have you?”

“Awww, Damn it, Mom!”

My swearing surprised her as much as it did me, and I was very conscious of slamming my eyes shut and rocking my shoulders from side to side and kind of moaning. When I opened my eyes it was to see her own eyes stretched open and brimming — and I knew I had to say it now or never say it, and so, just then, through my own tears I bellowed, “You’re. Tearing. Me. Apart!”

And as I watched my words suck the oxygen right out of her, I realized my folly — my stupidity. I wanted to recant. I wanted to reach out and pull her tiny frame into my arms. But something kept me from it. Her jaw trembled as she turned, stumbled through the laundry room and out the door into the back yard.

I need to follow after her. I need to call her back. I need to tell her what a fool — what an idiot I was!

Instead, I watched through the kitchen window, I pulled back the curtains and looked out at her cowering at the far end of the yard, all but her head and shoulders hidden behind the sheets that were draped over the clothesline and whipping in the wind.

Thank you for reading my story.

REFERENCES: ¹https://www.dinersclub.com/about-us/history/ ²https://www.lyricsondemand.com/miscellaneouslyrics/patrioticsongslyrics/whenjohnnycomesmarchinghomeagainlyrics.html ³https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/baby_boomer.asp#citation-2 ⁴https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans ⁵https://gobacktothepast.com/wizard-of-oz-american-holiday-tradition ⁶https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Without_a_Cause ⁷https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_Generation