James Dean wears an Elgin Pocket Watch

East of Eden is set in Salinas, California, in the fall of 1917, with America entering the war. Elia Kazan filmed the last act of Steinbeck's novel, with James Dean as Cal Trask, the son who cannot seem to win his father's approval. The pocket watch Cal carries was not a prop. Dean had bought it in New York around 1951, while scraping by as a television actor, and the purchase cost him real money; he came to treat it as his lucky watch. He insisted on carrying it in the film as the most period-correct piece of his costume. Kazan objected at first, then relented. And the gold chain hanging from Cal's belt loop was a gift from Dean's own estranged father.

The watch itself is small and plain: a gold filled case signed Standard USA, 37 millimeters across, made around 1889, with an Elgin five jewel movement inside, a white enamel dial with a sunken seconds register under blued steel hands, and a front cover engraved with a JD cartouche. In the film he wore it with a second cover fitted to keep the monogram hidden.

Dean gave the watch away himself, to Tillie Starriet, a Warner Brothers employee he bonded with on the lot and called Mom; her letter still travels with it. He died in September 1955, at twenty-four, with three films finished. When the Elgin sold at auction in Hong Kong in 2013, it brought eight times its estimate. It no longer runs, and its hands have been set, in his memory, to his recorded time of death: 5:43.