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

by Brock Yates

  But the debate over how fast Dean had been traveling at the last moment of his life started during an interview with Wutherich at the Paso Robles Hospital. Recorded by a group of law enforcement officers, Wutherich spoke with difficulty, constrained by his broken jaw and missing teeth. He told the officials that Dean was traveling "sixty to sixty-five"-numbers that implied a modest speed. But further analysis by Porsche expert Lee Raskin, who spent years studying the crash, indicated that Wutherich was speaking about engine rpms, not the car's speed. The 550 Spyder had a large tachometer centered on the driver's instrument panel. A smaller speedometer was mounted to the left. Raskin and others believe that Wutherich, seated to the right of Dean, would have had difficulty seeing the speedometer, and would have been watching the tachometer. The plan on the trip had been to "run in" the fresh engine at high rpms to ready it for the race. In an interview given in 1960, after he'd returned to Germany, Wutherich reconfirmed this contention. If this "sixty to sixty-five" statement meant 6,000-6,500 rpm, as opposed to "sixty to sixty-five" mph, the Porsche running in fifth gear would have been approaching Turnipseed at between ninety and ninety-eight mph.

  Wutherich could not remember if Dean had downshifted into a lower gear seconds before the crash; and eyewitness John White maintained that he and his wife saw no brake lights from the Porsche prior to impact.

  How fast was James Dean going? The EDSMAC computer simulation had the Porsche ground-looping on the pavement rather than pinwheeling through the air before stopping. This radically altered the accident dynamics and speed calculations. At the end, based on the eyewitness reports of the Whites and Clifford Hord, and on Wutherich's testimony, it is believed that Dean came off Polonio Pass at somewhere near ninety miles per hour. Perhaps at the last minute he slowed somewhat as Turnipseed appeared. If the impact speed was in the seventy to eighty miles per hour range, the midair tumbling would explain why the car stopped so close to the impact location.

  No matter, James Dean was dead. The coroner reported the cause as a broken neck, coupled with multiple fractures of the jaw and both arms, plus major lacerations. He somehow clung to life for a time and probably expired in the ambulance. The bleeding was so extensive that blood-alcohol tests were not possible, although there was no reason to believe that Dean had been drinking at any time since the Malibu party the night before.

  Two weeks following the James Dean accident, automobile racing made anther oblique entry onto the front pages. On the sunny Monday morning of October 17, an outrageous playboy named Joel Wolfe Thorne took off his new Beechcaft Bonanza from the Burbank airport. Thorne had raced four times in the Indianapolis 500 in the 1930s and, thanks to a fortune stemming from New York's Manufacturer's Hanover Bank, had funded a series of ultra-fast Thorne Engineering Specials at the Speedway. Veteran George Robson had driven one of them to victory in the race's postwar revival in 1946. The survivor of multiple marriages, endless nightclub punch-ups and other social-page peccadilloes, Thorne somehow lost control of his plane moments after becoming airborne and nosedived into a North Hollywood apartment building. Thorne and three residents were killed in the crash, and several others were critically injured. While the accident had occurred far from any racetrack, Thorne's death reinforced the public perception that the sport was infested with lunatic risk-takers.

  But it was James Dean's death that stunned the nation. Major coverage by periodicals like Life and endless stories in the Sunday supplements elevated young females of the population into a state of mass hysteria. Popular movie magazines like Photoplay and Silver Screen unleashed a barrage of stories on the late actor that would continue for years to come. His fan mail deluged Warner Brothers in volumes that remained at record levels long after his three movies had ceased distribution.

  As expected, Dean's funeral, in his hometown of Fairmount, Indiana, became a spectacle. His body was flown to Indianapolis on the Tuesday following his death and placed in the hands of Wilbur Hunt, the owner of Fairmount's only funeral home. The service was set for the next Saturday afternoon at the Friends Church, with pastor Ken Harvey and Cincinnati television evangelist Dr. James A. DeWeerd presiding. With only six hundred seats available in the Church, loudspeakers were installed to permit the overflow crowd outside to hear the service. Funeral director Hunt summarily denied requests from various Hollywood celebrities for reserved seats, claiming that Dean's local friends deserved the same consideration and that his first-come-first-served policy would remain in effect. Burial would be in the Fairmount Cemetery.

  Back in Paso Robles, Rolf Wutherich slowly recovered after surgeons decided that his shattered leg did not require amputation. His final few months of rehabilitation took place in Los Angeles after Johnny Von Neumann arranged for his return. But the emotional damage was more severe than anyone had suspected. Wutherich became moody and unruly. The Porsche management returned him to Germany to work in the race car testing department at Zuffenhausen. Journalists and other visitors to the facility were forewarned not to discuss the Dean accident with him, lest they receive a violent reaction. On July 28, 1981, while driving at a high speed near the village of Kupferzell, Wutherich lost control of his Porsche and was killed.

  As the years passed, the rumors about James Dean intensified, including the inevitable contention that he, like-Elvis, had actually survived, and was living as a disfigured recluse in a mental ward. Some claimed that his ghostly Porsche could still be spotted dashing down darkened roads near Paso Robles. Sal Mineo added to the lunacy when he told the tabloids that he was carrying on a conversation with Dean from the great beyond. "Knowing Dean changed my life completely," he claimed. "At moments of doubt or insecurity he's a source of tremendous strength to me. After he died I became obsessed with him, trying to make contact with him, because he called me `Plato,' the same name in the film." Sadly, Mineo met his own violent death in 1976, when he was fatally stabbed outside his Hollywood apartment.

  Several tabloids maintained that Dean was alive, and offered a $50,000 reward for his location. This ploy produced grabber headlines for the editors-with an absolute guarantee that the money would never have to be paid.

  Even the big weekly magazines continued to troll for readers. A year after his death, the October 16, 1956 cover of Look magazine featured his sulky face in a portrait for posed while shooting Giant. The blurb beside it proclaimed: "James Dean: the strangest legend since Valentino."

  In the parking lot of Aggie's restaurant in tiny Cholame, a Tokyo businessman named Seita Ohnishi, who dealt in Dean souvenirs, erected a stainless steel monument twenty-two years following the accident. It carries a simple engraving: "James Dean 1931 Feb 8 1955 Sep 30 PM 5:59." Surrounding the monument on a low stone wall are various quotations favored by Dean, including one from The Little Prince: "What is essential is invisible to the eye." Another is attributed to Dean himself and embodies the mystique that locks him in the public imagination: "Death is the one inevitable, undeniable truth. In it lies the only ultimate nobility for man. Beyond it, through immortality, the only hope."

  As James Dean soared into the pantheon of endlessly fascinating, mystery-shrouded superstars, soon to joined by John E Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Princess Diana, the car that cost him his life became a part of the lore surrounding his death. After being briefly stored in the repair garage at Cholame, it was sold to a Beverly Hills surgeon after the Dean family had collected the insurance, and amateur sports car driver Dr. Troy McHenry, who also owned a Porsche 550 Spyder. After removing the engine and transaxle, McHenry later sold some suspension and steering bits to a friend, Dr. William Estrich of Burbank, who installed them on a special sports racing car. Estrich was later killed at Pomona, California, when he hit the only tree standing anywhere near the track. It was believed that a Pitman arm in the steering routinely failed, giving rise to the ludicrous rumor that the Dean car was "jinxed."

  One legitimate mystery did arise from the tragedy. George Barris bought the engineless hulk and, after failing to
repair it, turned it over to the Greater Los Angeles Safety Council for use as a display device to scare young drivers. The "James Dean Death Car" embarked on a nationwide tour, where it meandered from city to city for four yearsa source of ghoulish curiosity but of doubtful value in the cause of teenage driving safety. In 1960, the car was loaded into a box car (or a truck-the story varies) in Florida to be returned to Los Angeles. It never arrived. The car was stolen in a Midwestern freight yard and disappeared. Forever. Some believe it was chopped into bits to be sold as souvenirs-which never reached the market. Others think it remains in the hands of a private collector. Historian Lee Raskin, who has delved deeply into the mystery, speculates that either the Dean family, tiring of the gruesome notoriety, retrieved the relic and had it destroyed, or more seriously that Barris, still active in Southern California's custom-car circles, collected the insurance and had it crushed. Barris refuses to comment. Whatever the case, the where- about's of the world's most famous and notorious Porsche remains the single unsolved link in one of the most famous automobile crashes in history. Dean's first Porsche Speedster is also missing, although historian Raskin knows its serial number and remains on a trail that became blurred after Lew Bracker sold the car in the early 1960s.

  Ironically, at the very moment that James Dean's vulnerable little Porsche was being folded into a lump of bent aluminum and steel, Ford Motor Company was embarking on a daring campaign to sell automobiles through safety. This was a revolutionary concept in Detroit in 1955, since many executive's believed that reminding customers of the potential of a crash was counterproductive, and that the liberating quality of automobile travel far transcended any concerns over safety. Talk of seat belts had been rejected, based on the conventional wisdom of the day that drivers and passengers did not want to be trapped in a wreck.

  Ford and Chrysler had made feeble attempts to improve automobile safety, each donating $100,000 a year to the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, New York, where research chief Bill Milliken, himself a sports car driver, led a small team of auto-safety engineers. Sadly, the cash-strapped Milliken and his group could not make serious inroads on the issue. At one point, funds became so scarce that engineers had to drop cadaver heads down a stairwell to determine the benefits of various helmets and other head-protection devices.

  Ford's new advertising campaign, launched in September 1955 along with their lineup of 1956 models, trumpeted "Lifeguard Design." This involved such product additions as dished "Lifeguard" steering wheels, optional "Lifeguard" seat belts (available in harmonious upholstery colors), "Lifeguard" door latches that helped keep the doors closed in the event of a crash and "Lifeguard" instrument and sun visor padding. Ford had already begun employing laminated windshield glass in 1927 (a move opposed by General Motors, who feared the effect of reminding the buying public about safety.)

  As luck would have it, an indifferent public and intense pressure from crosstown rival General Motors caused the "Lifeguard Design" campaign to be quietly abandoned. In 1956, Chevrolet's new highperformance V-8 sedans swamped Ford, displacing it as the sales leader in the American market. Wags in Motor City sneered, "Ford sold safety, Chevrolet sold cars."

  Death refused to leave the headlines as 1955 drifted away. In addition to the carnage on the highways and racetracks, the ugly specters of racism and of lethal drugs were arriving on the scene. The great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker went down from an overdose of heroin. Black Americans celebrated the entry of the brilliant soprano Marian Anderson on the all-white stages of the Metropolitan Opera, and in December Alabama housewife Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the front of a Birmingham city bus. But they reeled in horror when Mississippi Klansmen lynched fourteen-year-old Emmett Till for a presumed affront to a white candy-store clerk. These incidents, good and bad, produced backpage news stories in the nation's press, but were harbingers of the epic civil rights struggles to come-as well as the nation's descent into a drug-fogged rebelliousness that would shatter tranquility during the wild and woolly sixties.

  Unnoticed outside the tight little world of Southern California sports car racing was an accident at the Sacramento State Fairgrounds one month after the Dean fatality. David E. Davis Jr., a transplanted Detroiter who had come west to race sports cars while earning a living as an hourly worker at North American Aviation in El Segundo, flipped his new MG TF 1500 and suffered horrible facial injuries. Following his eighteen-month recovery he was hired by Road & Track as the magazine's West Coast advertising manager. That was followed by a brief but successful copywriting career back in Detroit at Chevrolet's Campbell-Ewald ad agency. In 1962 he assumed the edi- tiorship of Car and Driver magazine, a struggling rival to Road & Track. Davis was a brilliant columnist and editor who elevated Car and Driver to the largest-selling automobile monthly in the world before leaving to start Automobile magazine for the Rupert Murdoch empire in 1986. Davis would be one of the few examples of serious injury on the racetrack diverting an individual from competition and into a field where he made a singular impact.

  But it was not over. The grim reaper made one more selection before the deadly year ended. The 100-mile race at Phoenix, Arizona, was on the American Automobile Association's championship schedule as its final involvement with the sport. Set for the one-mile dirt oval at the State Fairgrounds, twenty-four of the best Indianapolis drivers were entered, including defending national champion Jimmy Bryan and the new titleholder, Bob Sweikert, whose victories at Indianapolis and Syracuse, plus other high finishes, had earned him the right to carry the coveted No. 1 on his car the following season. (It would be a brief reign: the brilliant but cocky Sweikert, who often claimed that he would never live to retire, tumbled to his death in a sprint car at the Salem, Indiana, high-banked speedway on June 6, 1956.)

  In the Phoenix field was the steady, always competitive Jack McGrath driving Wichita, Kansas, sportsman Jack Hinkle's white No. 3 Kurtis-Kraft. Before leaving his Los Angeles shop with the car, McGrath had considered mounting a new front axle, but having received news that Hinkle was selling the machine after the Phoenix race, he decided to run one more time with the old unit in place. After qualifying third at over 100 miles an hour on the notoriously rutted and wooden-fence-lined horse track, McGrath seized the lead in the middle stages until he was passed by Jimmy Bryan and Johnny Thomson. Running a solid third on the eighty-sixth lap and only fourteen circuits prior to the finish, McGrath barreled into the third turn at the end of the backstretch, his car pitched sideways in its customary dirt-track broadslide. At that moment, the aged axle ruptured and the right wheel collapsed. The Hinkle began a series of vicious tumbles, in the process tearing loose McGrath's new jet-fighter-style crash helmet. Before emergency crews arrived at the scene, one of the most likable and respected race drivers of the era was dead.

  Finally, the madness of the 1955 motor sports season was over, but the repercussions were just beginning.

  WHO WERE THESE PEOPLE? WHAT SORT OF HOMO sapiens in civilized nations would engage in a sport that essentially guaranteed the death of half its participants-a mortality rate equaled only by Roman gladiatorial contests, dueling, and medieval jousting? A backward look of fifty years produces images of danger in a sport that would be intolerable today. The fatal crash of stock car icon Dale Earnhardt in the 2001 Daytona 500 produced angry charges that motor racing was too dangerous, despite the fact that only four drivers had been killed in major league stock car racing in almost two decades-even as speeds had increased more than 30 percent over the same span of time.

  The reduction of risk in all phases of life has altered human behavior. We live longer, healthier lives, yet are haunted by fears of the latest virus, terror attack, nuclear threat-or even the slightest jiggling of our fragile emotional compasses. Aside from the vicarious thrills transmitted courtesy of risk-takers like astronauts or so-called extreme sportsmen, life for the average American citizen has devolved to such tepid adventures as carbohydrate counting, battling computer viruses, and remai
ning within the confines of political correctness.

  Long gone are the days when audacity, physical courage, and the ability to tolerate physical pain and discomfort were components of daily life. The idea of early explorers probing into the unknown northern oceans aboard tiny sailing ships garbed in only the flimsiest of clothes and facing scurvy-inducing diets is unthinkable today to even the most adventurous sailor. The concept of a Charles Lindbergh launching his monoplane from Long Island on the first successful transatlantic flight with only a magnetic compass and pack of sandwiches borders on the insane. So too for Ernest Shackleton's escape from Antarctica aboard an eighteen-foot lifeboat, facing the wildest oceans on the planet. He and his iron-hearted crew are but one of a thousand examples of human daring and endurance that may have been erased from the psyche by the same technological advances that comfort and protect contemporary human beings.

  In 1935 Alexis Carrell, the noted French scientist and 1912 Nobel Prize winner in medicine, published his international best-seller, Man the Unknown. His philosophical speculations about the future of mankind advised an intellectual aristocracy (a kind of twentieth century update of Plato's philosopher-king, proposed in his Republic several millennia earlier) that prompted widespread controversy and, perhaps, later Nazi experiments with eugenics. But beyond such ruminations, Carrell wrote at length about the rising frailties of the human mind and body; our loss of audacity in the face of adversity; our inability to withstand pain; and our increasing susceptibility to mental tensions.

  The men who raced cars in the mid-1950s (there were no women competing at the top level of the sport at the time) rode 150-mph bucking broncos with no more protection than a rodeo rider. Dressed in street clothes and wearing leather helmets (that research in 1960s by the Snell Foundation revealed were actually more dangerous than no headwear at all), the human form was essentially naked in the face of high-speed impacts and fire. Seat belts were used by some and eschewed by others who believed that being tossed clear of a crashing automobile afforded a better chance for survival.