Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years

by Brock Yates

  Meanwhile, Bill France's NASCAR circuit was becoming a major battleground for the Detroit manufacturers. Pontiac joined the wars with factory-sponsored teams competing against similar operations from Ford, Chrysler, Oldsmobile, and Buick. The slogan "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday" was becoming gospel in the sales offices of the car companies. Hudson, which had dominated NASCAR in the first years of the decade, was now aligned with Nash and headed for bankruptcy in 1957. Its demise fortified the contention that racing victories in fact could not substitute for saleable vehicles. No matter. Enthusiasm for high-performance cars of all sizes, shapes, and prices was the basic sales philosophy in the middle 1950's despite the endless news of catastrophic racing crashes here and abroad.

  Diana Logan and the world of automobile racing drifted out of my consciousness until late September, when she returned from New York and we met for dinner and drinks at the Coach & Horses. She reported that Warner Brothers was preparing a James Dean promotional tour for the opening of Rebel without a Cause in October and that shooting of Giant had wrapped in Texas. Because her parents were now back home, a repeat of the beautiful night following the Rebel preview was not possible, although we agreed to meet the following morning at Von Neumann's Competition Motors. Dean and Rolf Wutherich would be preparing the Porsche 550 Spyder that "Jimmy," as she called him, planned to enter at the Cal Club races scheduled for the Salinas road course on the last weekend of the month.

  We arrived late in the morning. Because of the buzz surrounding both Dean and his new car, a security guard kept the small crowd of enthusiasts at the curb. Thanks to Diana's friendship with Dean, we were admitted into the shadowy confines of the race shop, where the sharp odors of lubricants, solvents, and high-octane fuel permeated the stark space. In the middle of the room sat a stubby silver two-seat roadster bereft of top, windshield-wipers, roll-up windows, bumpers, or other normal automotive amenities.

  The Porsche Spyder serial number 550-0055 was one of a limited run of sports racing cars that had been introduced by the Zuffenhausen, Germany-based company at the Paris Automobile Show in 1953. Now 550s dominated small-displacement class competition at the international level, and had gained mystique among sports car lovers after Max Hoffman, the American distributor for Porsche cars, dubbed the little machines "Spyders." Weighing only 1,500 pounds thanks to their feathery aluminum bodywork and carrying a highly sophisticated rear-mounted, double-overhead-camshaft, aircooled, 1.5-liter four-cylinder engine, the Spyders were reliable as anvils in long-distance endurance races and capable of dazzling top speeds over 140 mph.

  Jimmy was already there when we arrived, wearing his hornrimmed glasses and puffing on an unfiltered cigarette. The wellknown Los Angeles custom-car builder and painter George Barris had already painted large "130s" on both doors and inscribed "Little Bastard" on its stubby tail-a trenchant reference to Dean's own selfimage as a scrawny outsider.

  Wutherich had pounded out a small dent in the right front fender, the result of a minor collision with a woman driver on nearby Sunset Boulevard during an initial test drive. While theoretically a pure racing car, the Spyder carried California license plate 2Z77767, which, coupled with its rudimentary driving lights, permitted it to be driven on the public highways long before rigid safety and emissions laws limited such use.

  The car was ready for its first outing at Salinas, although Dean had not formally entered the race and some doubted that he would be allowed to compete, based on his limited experience. Cal Club rules stated that three novice races had to be completed before a driver was allowed to race a car as potent as the 550 Spyder. Because Dean had failed to finish his third race at Santa Barbara, some among his retinue warned him that the trip to Salinas might be futile. Others, including Von Neumann, felt otherwise, considering Dean's excellent performances and his obvious skill behind the wheel. That, coupled with his newfound celebrity, would surely allow him entry into the starting field.

  Diana was awestruck at the sight of the Spyder. Its shiny, unpainted body was accented only by a pair of red stripes running across the rear fenders. Wutherich started the engine, which awoke with a guttural rumble. He watched the oil pressure gauge as he blipped the throttle, the powerful little engine responding with ominous growls. Satisfied that the power plant was perfectly tuned, he switched it off as a small cheer arose from the crowd at the curb. To them, the thumping exhaust note, coupled with the screech and whine of gears, pistons, valve springs and bearings, all singing a chorus of mad cacophony, was a mechanical symphony.

  On September 17, James Dean had recorded a television commercial for the National Safety Council with fellow actor Gig Young. It was aimed at young drivers, imploring them to drive sensibly. Dean concluded the spot by advising, "And remember, drive safely because the life you save may be ... mine." A day later, he, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock Hudson finished the famous "Last Supper" scene for Giant at the studio, thereby releasing him from his non-racing contract. Firm plans were then made to make the Salinas race on the last weekend of September. Dean and Wutherich would drive the Porsche to the race, thereby breaking in the fresh engine on the way. Studio photographer Sanford Roth and Dean's friend, stuntman Bill Hickman, would follow with a white 1953 Ford station wagon and a car trailer to be used to haul the Spyder back to Los Angeles following the race.

  Roth had met Dean on the Giant set in Texas and was assigned by Collier's magazine to record the young star's weekend of racing with his new Porsche.

  I accepted Diana's offer to drive with her to Salinas, figuring that a story on Dean's debut in his new Porsche might be saleable. Based on his performances in his first three races, it was possible he might become a major star in the sport even before the year was out. There being little doubt about his passion for fast driving and his latent talent, his future as both a race driver and a superstar on the silver screen seemed assured.

  James Dean's last day began early. At eight o'clock on the morning of Friday, September 30, 1955, he was with Wutherich at Competition Motors, having driven over the mountain from his newly rented home at 14611 Sutton Drive in Sherman Oaks. He had been up late the night before attending a private party in Malibu, but, being young and fit, appeared ready for the 325-mile run north to Salinas. Before picking up the Porsche, he had stopped at the Competition Motors race shop on Ventura Boulevard, where future world champion Phil Hill was working on a Ferrari Monza he was planning to run at Salinas. Hill later recalled the brief meeting. "It was the only time I ever talked with him other than a few grunts at the racetrack. Generally he'd show up with a great retinue of hangers-on, and I had no interest in that sort of thing. I needed to be a great racing driver and that was my sole preoccupation. I'd seen dozens of these so-called godlike creatures from Hollywood, and I'd been inclined to treat him as sort of a mutation. But on that day we talked about racing without all the usual distractions."

  After meeting Wutherich later that morning, Dean had lunch at the Farmer's Market with his father, Winton, and his uncle, Charlie Nolan Dean. He talked about the day before, when he had visited his friend Jeanette Mills and presented her with his Siamese cat, Marcus, which had been given to him on the set of Giant by co-star Elizabeth Taylor. Following this leisurely interlude with his father and uncle, he returned to Competition Motors, where he met Roth, Hickman, and Wutherich. After Roth shot a photo of Dean and Wutherich in the Porsche raising their joined arms in a victory salute, the little group headed north, planning a late-day arrival before practice for the races began the following morning.

  Diana picked me up in the Ferrari Mexico early that same afternoon, hoping to miss the rush hour traffic heading out of the valley. We ran north on Sepulveda Boulevard, following the route taken earlier by Dean. Route 99 took us over the Tejon Pass and the notorious Grapevine into the broad San Joaquin Valley. From there it was west on Route 166, a two-lane toward Taft and Maricopa, then north on Highway 33 to Blackwell's Corners and a stop for a tank of Richfield high-test and a Coke.

  We got
there an hour after Dean and his retinue had left. An excited kid with a scruffy crew cut told us that Dean and two guys in a Ford wagon had met up with Lance Reventlow and fledgling movie director and racer Bruce Kessler. He reported that Dean had laughed about a speeding ticket he had received on the Grapevine from California Highway patrolman 0. T. Hunter, who had written him up for doing 65 mph in a 55 mph zone. Hunter also wrote up Hickman, who was driving the Ford wagon. Hunter registered curiosity about the tiny Porsche, but gave no indication he recognized its driver.

  After polishing off a Coke and an apple at Blackwell's Corners, Dean put on the red windbreaker he had worn in Rebel Without a Cause. It was donned simply as protection against the late-afternoon chill, but would later be ascribed to his belief that the garment brought him good luck-yet more of the lore and legend attributed to every aspect of his short, tragic life. With a quick wave to Reventlow and Kessler and a promise to meet them for dinner in Salinas, Dean skittered out of the sun-baked parking lot and accelerated onto Route 466 toward Cholame and the fateful intersection with Route 41.

  Somewhere up ahead, a twenty-three year-old student at California Polytehnic had left the San Luis Obispo campus and pointed his two-tone black-and-white 1950 Ford Tudor coupe toward home and his pregnant wife at 1001 Academy Street in Tulare, south of Fresno. Little did young army veteran Donald Turnipseed imagine that he was headed for involvement in perhaps the most famous car crash in history.

  Dean drove the Porsche over the barren Diablo Range, where the San Andreas Fault rises out of the earth like half-buried dragon jaws, with his customary verve. He was not running flat-out, following the orders of Wutherich to break in the fresh engine at sensible speeds.

  As Dean rolled off the twisty section called Polonio Pass, Highway 466 yawned wide toward the Highway 41 intersection. On a crested hill to the west lay the tiny hamlet of Cholame, little more than a greasy lunch counter next to a hulking wooden automobile-repair garage. Dean overtook a slow-running Pontiac sedan being driven by Los Angeles CPA John Robert White. In a daring move, Dean made the pass, barely avoiding an oncoming Packard driven by Clifford Hord. White and his wife grumbled about the audacity of the red-jacketed driver behind the wheel of the strange, bullet-shaped roadster.

  Turnipseed, who never spoke publicly about the accident before his death in 1995, later confided to Monty Roberts that he had spotted the Porsche approaching on his right, but had failed to judge its speed. At first he attempted to scoot across the intersection, then slammed on the Ford's brakes. Reassessing the situation, he floored the throttle and tried to make another crossing, but panicked as the Porsche bore down on him.

  Dean, driving hard, spotted the Ford jiggering at the intersection and said his last words to Wutherich. "That guy up there has gotta see us. He's gotta stop."

  Turnipseed was stopping, his brakes locked in a skid that later measured twenty-two feet. The Ford veered right, but was still in Dean's path. Understanding that a brake lockup would spin the Porsche out of control, Dean tried to veer right around the yawing Ford, but at the last second rammed its left front fender almost broadslide. The impact sent the Porsche spiraling into the air, spilling Wutherich onto the pavement while Dean's crushed body remained on board. The rumpled machine slammed to earth near a lone telephone pole while the Ford, its left front fender shattered, pinwheeled to a stop in the middle of the intersection.

  The Whites had watched in horror as the accident unfolded. They stopped to find Turnipseed wandering aimlessly, his nose bloodied, but otherwise unhurt. Wutherich dazedly lay on his belly like a beached whale, his left leg crushed and his jaw broken. Only the shredded red jacket of James Dean was visible inside the mangled cockpit of the Porsche.

  The world's most famous car crash had occurred at 5:59 P.M. at the deserted intersection of two anonymous highways in the middle of the California high desert. Only four eyewitnesses were present- Turnipseed, Wutherich, and the Whites. They would produce contradicting stories that would help generate endless bizarre rumors about the incident.

  Our first clue came when Diana sighted the flashing lights of police cruisers and smoking red flares as she descended Polonia Pass. "There's been an accident," she said, without emotion. As she braked the Ferrari to a stop in a line of four other vehicles, including the Whites' vermilion Pontiac, the only visible indication of the crash was Turnipseed's wounded black-and-white Ford. Beyond it was parked a Cadillac ambulance, its rear door yawning open to accept a patient.

  Three men in white jackets were wheeling a gurney toward the Cadillac. A young man in a black shirt I later learned to be Turnipseed stood by, holding his nose. The form on the gurney was covered with a blanket. Then Diana spotted the wreckage of the Porsche.

  "Oh my god," she screamed. "It's Jimmy!"

  Before I could stop her, she leapt out of the Ferrari and rushed toward the ambulance. A California Highway Patrol Officer intercepted her, grabbing her arms and holding her away from the scene. He did not release her until the ambulance departed, its siren wailing as it ascended the hill toward Cholame and the thirty-three miles to the War Memorial Hospital at Paso Robles.

  Diana rushed back to the car and climbed in, her face dripping with tears. Jamming the Ferrari into gear and tearing past the barriers, she blubbered, "Jimmy's hurt. They're taking him to Paso Robles Hospital. I've got to be there!"

  We caught up to the ambulance before it reached the city limits and followed it into the hospital parking lot. Still sobbing, Diana left the Ferrari and sprinted into the emergency room waiting area. By then others had gathered, proving yet again that bad news travels fast. A small man from the local paper with an ill-fitting sport coat and a Speed Graphic camera had already appeared.

  Diana became reclusive, sitting alone in a corner. I waited outside in the gathering darkness, smoking. An hour passed before there was a flurry of movement inside. A doctor appeared, looking frazzled. He introduced himself as Dr. Bossert, the physician on duty, and said, without apparent emotion, "We admitted a patient, Mr. James Dean of Sherman Oaks, California, following an automobile accident near Cholame. I regret to inform you that Mr. Dean was dead on arrival."

  A gasp arose from the tiny crowd. Diana screamed and rushed outside. I attempted to follow but was blocked by the mad cluster of bodies rushing toward the lone coin-operated telephone booth outside the emergency room. The first call was made by a reporter for KPRL, the local radio station, who alerted the world to the tragedy. By the time I made it into the parking lot, the Ferrari, and Diana Logan, had fled into the night.

  IT TOOK ME SEVERAL HOURS TO ACCEPT THAT DIANA was well and truly gone. She had left me stranded in Paso Robles, a tiny farming center over two hundred miles from Los Angeles. After waiting a day in a seedy tourist home, I managed to board a Greyhound bus that meandered through endless stops on busy Highway 101 before reaching the big city. Flustered and filthy, the memories of the gruesome crash scene and the hysterical Diana fried into my brain, I thought about trying to revive my flagging career. The James Dean story was out of the question now that every major media outlet in the nation was featuring spreads on his death.

  The tabloids screeched headlines about Dean's reckless driving style, his suicidal tendencies, his fascination with doom-the latter mostly based on marginal notes found in his edition of Hemingway's bull fighting epic, Death in the Afternoon. He had scribbled four words, "death, disability, disfigurement, and degradation" in colored ink, with the word "death" underlined in red in other sections of the book. This served as rich fodder for the sensationalists who maintained that Dean was fascinated with his own demise. Adding to the frenzy, old girlfriends were dredged up to affirm that he took insane risks behind the wheel, suggesting that he was seeking the ultimate crash. In the end it all descended to the level of tabloid journalism at its worst.

  Monty Roberts, who had expected to spend the weekend with Dean at the races, had received a call from the hospital reporting his death. Somehow, Roberts' address and phone n
umber had been found in Wutherich's shirt pocket, and, because his broken jaw made speech difficult, a member of the hospital staff used the slip of paper to inform the cowboy of the tragedy.

  Reports spread across the nation about how Dean had been driving over 100 miles an hour when the crash occurred. Pop psychologists insisted that the entire incident was an act of existential protest-a symbolic expression of youthful frustration and anger. Millions of schoolgirls reflexively mourned his passing, although his amazing rise to the pinnacle of popular culture would not occur until three weeks later, when Rebel without a Cause was released. James Dean had ironically created the ultimate publicity stunt by killing himself before two of his three motion pictures were released.

  Endless replays and diagnoses would be made about the incident, which was not a cosmic act of strange metaphysics, but a simple car crash that would be repeated by more mundane players thousands of times across the nation. Two drivers misjudged each other's intentions and collided. It was that simple.

  In the early 1990s the television series What Happened? attempted to analyze the exact cause of the crash. The producers retained Failure Analysis Associates of Menlo Park, California, to make detailed computer simulations of the incident using EDSMAC, an acronym for Engineering Dynamics Simulation Model for Automobile Collisions. Senior managing engineer Gary Kost and associate Erich Phillips recorded detailed measurements at the scene and made accurate calculations regarding the weight, structural integrity, impact positions, and damage of the two vehicles. An anomaly in the analysis was the fact that the Porsche had landed only fifty feet from the crash site, meaning that its speed at impact would have been only fifty-seven miles an hour, not the triple-digit velocities heretofore accepted to be the case. Had Dean been traveling at seventy-seven miles an hour at the time of contract, for example, the computer model placed the Porsche's landing a full 100 feet farther away from the scene.