Reincarnating James Dean

(Watch "Icon Redux: James Dean @ Hotel Gansevoort" to get the frontstory for this backstory.)

“He doesn’t really look like James Dean,” says the woman at the cowboy hat store. We’re standing watching Yann Bean make James Dean faces into the store mirror a few yards away, tipping the hat down over his face, furrowing his brows. Tomorrow he’ll try to fill the shoes of one of the most iconic actors in history. Today he’s trying to fill his hat.

“That’s not really the point,” I answer back.

“Oh,” says the woman. She puzzles over it a few seconds longer, then gives up considering what the point could be, giving herself over instead to thinly-veiled admiration.

“Well,” she concludes, “he’s definitely got something anyway.”

And there it is. That’s the point.

There will never be another James Dean. There will never be another Audrey Hepburn or Marlon Brando or Marilyn Monroe or Charlie Chaplin. These guys were monoliths when alive, and when they went, they left gaping holes in the fabric of pop culture that the rest of us have been trying to fill with every Jack, Betty, or reality series Mo ever since.

Two problems with this: 1) There is no replacing the old guys, and 2) when you try to fill a number 16 socket with a number 6 screw, the whole thing just ends up collapsing on your head.

The answers to the problems above: 1) Don’t replace—find exciting and new; and 2) for god’s sake, fill the holes using only number 16 screws! New and exciting number 16 screws!!!

Enter Yann Bean. Young kid. Gook-looking. Ridiculously talented. Don’t bother looking to see what he’s done—his best-known performance to date might still be a high school play in the northeast of France (long story—you’ll get the details when he’s famous). Is he James Dean? No. Can he patch the hole James Dean left in the fabric of pop culture? Maybe, if he were interested in doing so. Will he make his own number 16 screw-sized hole? We’re betting yes.

I offer this up as evidence: It’s shoot day. Yann Bean and I are standing with our equipment piled on a luggage cart manned by a Hugo Boss-clad bellman in New York’s Hotel Gansevoort lobby, a lobby literally built for giants—20-foot-high eel-skinned columns, suspended lampshades each easily 10 feet across, a mirror bigger than the biggest wall in my first New York City apartment (and sadly, not too much smaller than the walls of the one I’m in now). In the four years since it opened, this lobby has seen more than its fair share of celebrities whose iconic statuses are either cemented (Angelina Jolie) or up for debate (Justin Timberlake). And as we pass through it on our way to the duplex penthouse where Marilyn Monroe in all her Warhol-esque glory will watch this unknown kid transform himself into one of the best-known actors of all time, Yann Bean begins expanding before my eyes, expanding to fill this gargantuan space, this unfillable role, this title of BlackBook’s first ever icon of the future.

Expanding to the size of a number 16 screw.