Pictured above is the last major scene James Dean ever filmed. Portraying the oil millionaire, Jett Rink, at a banquet in his honor attended by the elite of Texas, he gets drunk and hostile, embarassing himself, and emptying the room.
He finally collapses onto the banquet’s head table, an inglorious end to Jett Rink and perhaps, symbolically, to James Dean, too.
Epilogue
DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON
During the last months of the life of James Dean, and in spite of a budding career about to explode into bloom, friends of the actor reported that he had a death wish. “He was obsessed with death,” claimed Maila Nurmi (TV’s Vampira). “He once told me he wanted to die because that was the only way he’d ever know any peace.”
“All the signs were there,” reported William Bast. “Even the noose he always kept hanging in any bedroom he occupied.”
His favorite literary passage was from Ernest Hemingway’s saga about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon: “The only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over—was in the bullring.”
Composer Leonard Rosenman said, “Jimmy saw death as a challenge.”
Elizabeth Taylor revealed that Jimmy had told her “I will never live to reach thirty.”
Nearly every friend who rode in a car with him reported that even for casual errands, he drove at frenetic, death-defying speeds.
Repeatedly warned about the dangers of this, he responded, “What better way to die than in a car crash? It’s fast and it’s clean, and you go out in a blaze of glory.”
***
On September 19, 1955, Jimmy was walking along Hollywood Boulevard, when he ran into Rolf Wütherich, a 28-year-old German mechanic whom he’d met at the Bakersfield Races on May 1, a month after Rolf had arrived in the United States.
Rolf Wütherrich in 1954 at the Le Mans races (top photo) and (lower photo) in 1966, “more or less” recovered from his injuries more than a decade before
This former glider pilot and paratrooper for the Luftwaffe was one of the world’s leading experts on racecars, especially if it were a Porsche.
In 1949, emerging from the ruins of a country devastated by World War II, he’d joined the Porsche factory in Germany as part of their racing department. He was eventually transferred to California as a field engineer for Johnny von Neumann’s Competition Motors racecar distributorship in Hollywood.
In early September, the outlet had received five new “state-of-the-art” Porsche 550 Spyders, with the understanding that these high-maintenance, limited edition vehicles were to be offered for sale only to “privateer racers.”
The two racing aficionados talked cars over cups of coffee at a café on Hollywood Boulevard. Before they parted, Rolf had convinced Jimmy to trade in his old Porsche for one of the new Spyders, “which can go a hell of a lot faster than the Model T you’re driving, perhaps reaching 140mph.”
Two days later, on September 21, the Spyder was Jimmy’s, but only after Van Neumann had gotten him to agree to let Rolf accompany him to any race as his mechanic. Jimmy accepted the deal and Rolf agreed to go with him to the Salinas Road Races scheduled for October 1-2.
On Friday morning, September 30, his last day on earth, Jimmy arrived at Competition Motors, where Rolf convinced him that both of them should—personally and together—drive the Porsche to Salinas, a 300-mile journey, for “break-in miles” before the races. Originally, Jimmy’s plan involved towing it on a trailer hitched to a 1955 Ford Country Squire station wagon, into which he’d invited several of his friends, all of whom turned him down.
“You need ‘seat time,’ behind the wheel to get the feel of this baby,” Rolf told him.
That day, before leaving Hollywood for the last time, Jimmy and Rolf had coffee and donuts at the Hollywood Ranch Market on Vine Street, across from Competition Motors.
It was 1:15PM PST when the two men departed, Rolf later claiming that “Jimmy’s nerves were frayed.”
By 2PM, Jimmy was photographed at a Mobil station at the corner of Ventura and Beverly Glen Boulevards in Sherman Oaks. He left there at 2:15PM, heading north along CA Rt. 99 and then over “The Grapevine” Highway in the direction of Bakersfield.
As later reported by Rolf, these two racing enthusiasts discussed their upcoming dream competing at racing events in Europe, particularly at venues in the South of France.
Following them in the station wagon, with the trailer, were Bill Hickman a movie stunt man, and Sanford Roth, Jimmy’s close friend, a professional photographer who planned a photo shoot of him at the race for Colliers magazine.
Years later, Rolf recalled that fateful afternoon: “Jimmy was brimming over with happiness. We had such great plans. He was so affectionate with me, I got the feeling that the might be falling in love with me. Far more than being an actor, he wanted to be the world’s championship car racer. Somehow, I became a part of his fantasy, a part of his dreams.”
“Alas, the Devil must have been listening to our plans and wanted to destroy our future happiness,” Rolf claimed.
[After their crash later that day, Rolf would spend a month at a Los Angeles hospital recovering from a double fractured jaw and major femur and hip injuries. For the next six months, he endured separate surgeries at three-week intervals, and became emotionally scarred in ways that became increasingly obvious throughout the rest of his life.
For their “date with destiny,” Rolf Wütherrich and James Dean set out in newly purchased Porsche Spyder. Their lives would be changed forever. Jimmy’s would be ended, and Rolf would be physically and emotionally scarred for the years that remained for him before his own tragic and violent death.
Later, in Europe, despite his physical pain and violent outbursts, he became a navigator for the Porsche factories at the Monte Carlo Rallye. For eighteen years after that, he worked for Porsche in Germany, drifting into alcoholism and sometimes threatening suicide. He ended up in a psychiatric ward.
In July of 1981, he was intoxicated and driving through Kupferzell, in what was then known as the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (i.e., West Germany). There, perhaps in a suicide attempt, he lost control of his vehicle and crashed into a wall, dying instantly.
Like Jimmy, more than a quarter-century before, he had to be extricated from the wreckage. He was fifty-three years old.]
***
Once upon the open road to Salinas, and with no cars around them, Jimmy began to speed, referring to his new Porsche as “a torpedo on wheels.” He was wearing sunglasses and had tossed his Rebel Without a Cause red jacket into the back. Rolf later reported that he actually said, “It’s a wonderful world after all. I’m doing what I always wanted to do.”
Suddenly, he heard the sounds of a police siren. At 3:30PM O.V. Hunter, a California Highway Patrolman, pulled Jimmy over at Mettler Station on Wheeler Ridge, just south of Bakersfield. He issued a ticket, asserting that Jimmy was doing 65mph in a 55mph zone.
Soon, amid a landscape of arid, scrub-covered desert, Jimmy and Rolf were on what was known as “The Racer’s Road” to Salinas. As they neared Blackwell’s Corner, Jimmy slowed down when he spotted the gray Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Coupe belonging to Lance Reventlow, son of the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton.
The two men had agreed to stay together that night at a private home Lance had arranged for them in Salinas. Lance was accompanied at the time with a fellow racecar driver, Bruce Kessler.
Over sandwiches and coffee, Lance and Jimmy discussed their upcoming plans to escape to his private lodge in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Kessler had wandered off with Rolf to inspect their respective cars.
Jimmy estimated how long it would take to reach Paso Robles, where they were to have dinner together in a steak restaurant before retiring for the night.
At 5:12PM, Jimmy and Lance were seen locked in a tight embrace before climbing into their cars. At 5:15PM, Jimmy drove with Rolf out of Blackwell’s Corner, heading west on CA Route 45. Paso Robles lay sixty mile
s in the distance.
Rolf reported that Jimmy drove recklessly, accelerating his Porsche and dangerously passing other cars as he made his way to the Polonio Pass and the “Antelope Grade,” heading for the Y-shaped intersection of Routes 41 and 46. Its location was a mile east of the small town of Cholame.
[In 1955, what is now identified as Route 46 was known as Route 466. At the time, Route 41 and 466 were two-lane roads (i.e., with traffic moving on single lanes in each direction) with narrow shoulders.]
Before taking off, Rolf had warned Jimmy that the low-slung, aluminumskinned, pale gray Porsche might be hard to see in certain lights. At 5:43 PM, the sun was setting, but Jimmy hadn’t yet turned on his lights.
Anxious to get to Paso Robles and his rendezvous with Lance, Jimmy stepped on the gas, testing his Porsche to see if it indeed could reach a maximum speed of 140mph. The speedometer registered 85mph. At a junction coming up, he slowed down to 65mph.
Also heading for the “Y” intersection was Donald Turnupseed, a twenty-three year old Cal Poly (California Polytechnic State University) student who had never heard of James Dean. He was driving to the little town of Tulare to spend the weekend with his parents, and was motoring recklessly as if he were late for some rendezvous.
Only two minutes before their gut-wrenching crash, he was heading east, blowing his horn as he passed two other cars. They included a 1948 Mercury Sedan driven by Earle Requa, and a 1952 Dodge pickup with Tom Frederick behind the wheel.
Also speeding toward the junction were Jimmy and Rolf. Jimmy zoomed west, passing a car driven by John R. White of Los Angeles, who was traveling with his wife and son. “Look at the god damn maniac go,” White said.
On route 46, at the “Y” junction, Turnupseed slowed down to make a left turn onto Route 41 and then moved suddenly into the intersection. His car’s radio, at high volume, was blasting out Doris Day’s rendition of “Sentimental Journey.”
Donald Turnupseed’s Ford, from which, amazingly, he emerged unscathed—at least physically.
In the distance, Jimmy spotted a two-toned black-and-white 1950 Ford Sedan. Neither vehicles slowed down. Jimmy’s last words to Rolf were, “He’s gotta see us. He’s gotta stop!”
Without signaling, Turnupseed turned into Jimmy’s right-of-way. Jimmy’s position was just thirty yards away from the intersection.
Behind Turnupseed, also approaching the “Y”, was the Hord family, with father, wife, and son sitting in the front seat, three abreast. Ken Hord, the son, called out, “Jesus Christ, Dad, look at that son of a bitch coming our way!” Later, in an analysis of the events, he said, “To avoid a crash, my father just yanked our car to the right and went off the road into a barbed wire fence.”
Panicking, with seconds before the inevitable, Jimmy slammed on his brakes as Rolf screamed, “We’re going to die!”
Then, Jimmy made a desperate, split-second decision to “power steer” his Porsche into a side-stepping racecar maneuver that drivers use on the track during attempts to steer around another car. Unfortunately, the clock had run out. It was too late, and the maneuver failed.
Tom Frederick, a twenty-eight-year-old beekeeper, said, “In my pickup, I was right on Turnupseed’s tail.
I was next to him, passing him on the right, when the Porsche hit the Ford with a sound that could probably be heard a mile or two away. It was like a bomb. A part of the Porsche went sailing over my pickup.”
Earle Requa’s Mercury was also headed toward the intersection. His wife, Edith, screamed “Look out!” as a car flew through the air. Requa brought his car to an abrupt stop near Turnupseed’s bashed-in Ford. Its driver was sitting behind the wheel, bloodied and dazed, but still alive. The driver’s-side door had been flung open.
The lightweight and aerodynamic Porsche had been hurled more than fifty feet through the air, hitting the earth but “leaping up” again three times before ramming into a telephone pole.
Rolf was thrown fifteen yards from the scene of the accident, landing with a sickening thud on the tarmac of the highway.
When an ambulance arrived, two attendants found Jimmy’s mangled body within the wreckage, trapped behind the splintered steering column. His remains were pulled from the metal that entrapped it. Limp and covered with blood, he had fractured bones and a broken neck. His forehead was caved in, as was his chest.
He had died upon impact.
Weeks later, in a hospital, Rolf gradually emerged from his leaden haze. He remembered not only Jimmy’s last words, but his last sounds as well.
“I heard a soft cry that came from deep within his throat. It was the cry of a little boy wanting his mother…or a man facing his God.”
***
The local radio station, KPRL, was the first to broadcast the news. Within thirty minutes, the events surrounding Jimmy’s death were flashed around the world, radio and television stations interrupting their broadcasts with bulletins. Newspapers going to bed remade their frontpages.
James Dean, aged twenty-four years, seven months, and twenty-two days, passed into history.
A legend was born.
Acknowledgments
The data in this biography of James Dean was compiled over a period of half a century. Sometimes, years would pass with nothing added to the dossier. In other cases, bountiful harvests of information would appear, suddenly and unexpectedly.
In particular, seven sources were so enormously helpful that they were singled out on this book’s dedication page. They included Stanley Haggart, Rogers Brackett, Alec Wilder, Nicholas Ray, William Bast, Eartha Kitt, and Geraldine Page.
And in addition to those seven, there were hundreds of others.
***
Over the years, virtually anyone who ever knew or worked with James Dean had an opinion about him, and usually didn’t mind sharing it. Understandably, some of them didn’t want to be named.
Our task, as developers of this project, involved tracking down all these comments, including those gathered from secondary sources. All of these are acknowledged as they were cited.
Much of the insider information about Dean’s days in television came from Stanley Haggart, who was a TV producer and art director in the 1950s. He knew many of the producers, directors, and actors who worked with Dean, and many of them had tales to tell. Before his death in 1980, Haggart, in collaboration with Darwin Porter, recorded most of the fruits of his labors into a manuscript tentatively entitled James Dean: What Becomes a Legend the Most? Although it was never completed, many of the revelations appearing in this book about Dean’s convoluted life during his TV years derived from that original source.
Whereas some of the sources cited within these acknowledgments are well-known personalities (Rock Hudson, for example), others with memories and opinions about him flickered for a moment in the public eye and then faded from the scene. Those sources, of course, were the hardest to track down.
But regardless of their “celebrity quotient,” everyone whose memories were included in this book articulated some distinctly personal reactions to James Dean: good, horrible, or indifferent. Some sources delivered only a paragraph; others could talk about him for hours. Some of them waited until the beginning of the 21st Century, when they had little to lose, before relaying what really happened.
We extend our apologies to those who were left off this list. Our gratitude remains, however, even if it’s not expressed.
WITH RESPECT AND APPRECIATION TO THE FOLLOWING SOURCES, WHETHER THEY’RE LIVING OR DEAD
Many Thanks
Nick Adams, Stella Adler, Eddie Albert, Ben Alcock, Corey Allen, Ursula Andress, Pier Angeli, Ted Avery, Lemuel Ayers, Jim Backus, Carroll Baker, Margaret Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Marshall Barer, Lynn Bari, James Barton, Kenneth Battelle, Barbara Baxley, Ed Begley, James Bellah, Lee Bergere, Richard Bishop, Humphrey Bogart, George Bradshaw, Freddie Brandell, Pat Breslin, “Mushy” Callahan, Truman Capote, John Carlyle, John Carradine, John Cohan, Bill Claxton, Dick Clayton, Monty Clift, Brooks Clift, Fr
ed Coe, Joan Collins, Mike Connolly, William Corrigan, Frank Corsaro, Cheryl Crawford, Hume Cronyn, George Cukor, Ray Curry, Paul Darlow, Sammy Davis, Jr., Vittorio De Sica, Jean Deacy, Alice Denham, John Derek, James DeWeerd, David Diamond, Marlene Dietrich, Vincent J. Donehue, Ann Doran, Kirk Douglas, Isabelle Draesmer, Mark Ducus, Dick Dunlap, Mildred Dunnock, Jerry Fairbanks, Edna Ferber, Carlo Fiore, Constance Ford, Margaret Foresman, Jack Garfein, Ben Gazzara, John Gilmore, Sam Gilmore, Dorothy Gish, Barbara Glenn, Ruth Goetz, Michael Gordon, Sheilah Graham, Lee Grant, Merv Griffin, Bill Gunn, Walter Hampden, Louis Thomas Hardin, Pat Hardy, Matt Harlib, Julie Harris, Terese Hayden, William Heller, Franklin Heller, George Roy Hill, Hedda Hopper, Dennis Hopper, William Hopper, Rock Hudson, Marsha Hunt, Barbara Hutton (her diaries), William Inge, Christopher Isherwood, Anne Jackson, Erskine Johnson, Louis Jourdan, Lilli Kardell, Kurt Kasznar, Elia Kazan, Arthur Kennedy, Dorothy Kilgallen, Archer King, Martin Kingsley, Toni Lee (aka Toni Lee Scott), Peggy Lee, Oscar Levant, Ralph Levy, Ralph Levy, Bobby Lewis, Arthur Loew, Jr., Beverly Long, Sidney Lumet, Gene Lyons, Moss Mabry, Karl Malden, Daniel Mann, E. G. Marshall, Billy Massena, Virginia Mayo, Frank Mazzola, Andrew McCullough, Clyde McCullough, Roddy McDowall, Maggie McNamara, Don Medford, Johnny Meyer, Ruda Michelle, Wilson Millar, Samuel Miller, Martin Milner, Terry Moore, Adeline Nall, Richard Nash, Patricia Neal, Lori Nelson, Ralph Nelson, John Paul Nickell, Maila Nurmi (Vampira), Barbara O’Neil, William Orr, Fred Otash, Gene Owen, Betsy Palmer, Terry Parks, Robert Pastene, Marisa Pavan, John Peyser, Arthur Pierson, Philip Pine, Donald Pressman, Nicholas Ray, William Redfield, Lance Reventlow, Kendis Rochen, Stuart Rosenberg, Leonard Rosenblum, Beulah Roth, Arlene Sachs, Howard Sackler, Ray Schatt, Jimmy Schauffer, Rod Serling, James Sheldon, Elizabeth Sheridan, Herman Shumlin, Steffi Sidney, Jack Simmons, Sidney Skolsky, Rusty Slocum, Helena Sorell, Maria St. Just, Kim Stanley, Maureen Stapleton, Teddy Stauffer, Rod Steiger, Stewart Stern, George Stevens, Robert Stevens, John Stix, Dennis Stock, Lee Strasberg, Susan Strasberg, David Swift, Jessica Tandy, Vaughn Taylor, Dean J. Taylor, Tom Tryon, Forrest Tucker, Gore Vidal, Eli Wallach, Clifton Webb, Ronnie White, Miles White, James Whitmore, Tennessee Williams, Calder Willingham, Chill Wills, Beverly Wills, John Wills, Henry Willson, Robert Wise, Jane Withers, Natalie Wood, Cal York, and Maurice Zolotow.
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