Few towns go as all-out for their most famous son as Fairmount, Indiana.

For nearly 50 years, James Dean fans have flocked about an hour north of Indianapolis every September for an annual festival celebrating the late hometown hero and Hollywood heartthrob.

The sexy, mysterious star is best known for three films he made — “East of Eden” and “Rebel Without a Cause,” both made in 1955, and 1956’s “Giant” — before he died at age 24 in a horrific crash of his Porsche Spyder sports car in Cholame, California, on Sept. 30, 1955. 14

Yet his legend lives on, for fans both old and young: rebels seeking applause, or maybe just a giant adventure east of Eden — or at least east of the Mississippi.

“I suspect he always thought that he’d be famous someday,” Dean’s cousin Marcus Winslow, 81, to

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