Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (29 page)

BY THE TIME I TUMBLED OFF AN AMERICAN AIRLINES
DC-8 at Burbank airport, my whole world had changed. Two days of
semi-sleep on a series of flights that had zigzagged from Milan to
London's Heathrow to New York's Idlewild to California had left me
semi-comotose. The incessant din of the big radial engines that powered
airlines in the pre-jet days had left me with a piercing headache, while
days would pass before my digestive track purged itself of airline food.

After a day of sleep in my apartment, I rose to face a the gray
assault of smog that blanketed the Los Angeles basin. Relief came
only after a Santa Ana wind boiled off the high desert, shoving the
acrid clouds into the Pacific and replacing them with sunny, 100degree temperatures. I tried to write, but my thoughts were too fragmented by the nightmare at Le Mans, the wacky frivolity at Modena
and, worst of all, the incredible Diana.

She had been right about James Dean. East of Eden had opened to
rave reviews for the sulky kid who played Steinbeck's Cal Trask with
an intensity that rivaled another new Method actor, Marlon
Brando-who had already attained stardom with his debut the year
before in another Kazan masterpiece, On the Waterfront. East of Eden
opened at New York's Astor Theatre in all its Cinemascope grandeur
on March 9, 1955. No less a superstar than Marilyn Monroe was stationed in the lobby to hand out programs to the black-tied VIPs who
had been invited to the premiere. The reviews were mixed, mostly
due to the complex plot, which offered Kazan little time to broaden
the characters played by veterans Raymond Massey, Burl Ives, and
Julie Harris. But Dean's performance as the wayward, outcast son
elicted raves. Said the master French director and cinema immortal
Francois Truffaut in his Cahiers du Cinema review, "James Dean has
succeeded in giving commercial viability to a film that would otherwise have scarcely qualified, in breathing life into an abstraction, in
interesting a vast audience in moral problems treated in an unusual
way ... this shortsighted star prevents him from smiling, and the
smile drawn from him by dint of patient effort constitutes a victory."

One American movie critic exclaimed that Dean radiated the
"innocent grace of a captive panther," while another labeled him the
possessor of "bastard robustness."

A local horse trainer, movie wrangler, and occasional stunt man
was amazed at Dean's performance. While shooting Eden in
Steinbeck's home town of Salinas, Monty Roberts had been employed
by Kazan to work with Dean in an effort to acquaint the small-town
Indiana kid with the ways of the West. Dean was an adept student for
the man who would rise to world fame of the creator of a revolutionary form of passive horse training called "the language of Equus"
and who would be the basis for the Robert Redford character in the
hit movie The Horse Whisperer. Dean was quick to learn complex
rope tricks like the butterfly, but to Roberts, who had worked on numerous films, including the "Red Ryder" serials and "My Friend
Flicka," Dean seemed to possess no talent as an actor. They became
good friends, but Dean was so introverted, so blank an emotional
canvas, that Roberts seriously doubted Kazan's judgment in enlisting
the young man for the starring role. During the Salinas shooting,
Dean bunked with Roberts and his new wife, Pat, in their small
spread near the local airport. A strong bond developed between the
trio, but Roberts remained skeptical about Dean's future in the movie
business. One day, he was invited to watch the daily uncut film. He
watched in stunned silence as the explosive personality of James
Dean lit up the screen.

So introverted off the stage and screen that he seemed talentless to
Roberts and others, Dean's performance in East of Eden was so vivid,
so electrifying, so overwhelmingly commercial that Jack Warner and
company immediately signed him to a long-term contract and
announced that he would star in Rebel Without a Cause, while plans
were laid to give him major roles in productions of Giant, Somebody
Up There Likes Me, and Left-Handed Gun. (The latter two films would
later be handed off to Paul Newman.)

With the Warner Brothers publicity machine in top gear, Dean was
billed not as an existential outsider but as a bobby-soxer idol in the
mold of Tab Hunter, Robert Wagner, Rock Hudson, and Paul
Newman. Dean, deeply serious about his acting, hated the vapid
typecasting and resisted Hollywood culture. He was living with his
father, Winton Dean, a widowed dental technician, at 1667 South
Bundy (a street to become infamous forty-five years later, thanks to
O. J. Simpson) and was becoming increasingly interested in sports car
racing as a way to escape the glitz. Following his mother's early death
in 1940, when he was nine years old, Dean had been moved to the
tiny Indiana town of Fairmount, where his aunt Ortense and her husband, Marcus Whitman, raised him through high school. Riding his
Whizzer motorbike and driving a friend's "souped-up" 1934 Plymouth through a series of ess-bends they dubbed "Suicide
Curve," Dean quickly displayed the balance and daring to become the
fastest driver of the lot.

This scrawny high school basketball and track star from
Fairmount, Indiana, exploded on the American scene as the newest
anti-hero, radiating repressed, volatile anger and rejecting the
increasingly plastic and vinyl "good life" permeating the national psyche. At the same time that a gaudy group of writers and poets were
gathering in Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury coffeehouses
and calling themselves Beatniks, young male actors like Brando,
Dean, Newman, and Sal Mineo brilliantly expressed the latent restlessness, alienation, and anxiety that helped trigger the angry, drugfed revolution of the hippies, which lay ahead in the next decade.

Dean had come to Hollywood in 1954, carrying his meager
belongings in a paper bag, after starring in an adaption of Andre
Gide's The Immoralist on Broadway and making a mark in a number
of television dramas. In April he signed with Warner Brothers for the
East of Eden part, receiving an advance of $700. He used some of his
newfound wealth to purchase a used MG TD roadster and began dating Italian starlet Pier Angeli. The romance ended when the dazzling
brunette married singer Vic Damone in late November of that year.
By then, Dean had become the source of enormous buzz in the film
colony and had no trouble finding dates-including the exquisite
German actress Julie Harris, Eartha Kitt, Ursula Andress, and Liz
"Dizzy" Sheridan, who would find stardom forty years later playing
Jerry Seinfeld's mother on television.

His first motorcycle was a small single-cylinder purchased in
Indiana, but he soon traded up to a series of faster, British-built
Nortons. He then moved on to a larger English Triumph, like the one
Marlon Brando had ridden in the Stanley Kramer hit of 1954, The
Wild One. Brando's role as the outcast leader of a motorcycle gang
that terrorized a small California town (based on the actual Hollister riot of July 4, 1947) had introduced the American public to disaffected youth, and surely influenced Dean's acting style, if not his
entire public persona.

Using his Truimph motorcycle and later his MG, Dean honed his
skills on the notorious Mulholland Drive, where he vented his frustrations with the movie business and what he believed to be its crass
commercialism. In late May 1954, he wrote a girlfriend in New York
named Barbara Glenn about his new possession. "Honey!! A new
addition has been added to the Dean family. I got a red '53 MG
(milled head, etc. hot engine) My sex pours itself into fast curves,
broadslides and broodings; drags, etc. You have plenty of competition
now. My motorcycle, my MG and my girl. I have been sleeping with
my MG. We make it together. (signed) Honey."

Before East of Eden had been released, Dean began studying for the
Rebel role, and on March 1, 1955, traded the MG for a new, 1,500 cc
Porsche 356 Speedster-S roadster-a lightweight German sports car
built by the son of Volkswagen creator Ferdinand Porsche. Dean
became a fixture on Mulholland, sometimes running the nearly
forty-mile round trip on the insanely convoluted roadway as often as
twenty times a week.

One of his regular passengers was Lew Bracker, an insurance salesman who Dean had met in the Warner Brothers commissary restaurant. The same age as the young actor, Bracker was loyal and
unthreatening. His connection to the movie business came through
his cousin, Leonard Rosenman, who had composed the music for
East of Eden. Bracker, who was driving a Buick convertible when he
met Dean, was soon drawn into the world of high-speed driving and
sports cars.

Bracker accompanied his friend to Palm Springs on March 26,
where the California Sports Car Club was staging an amateur road
race on a 2.3-mile circuit laid out on the runways of the local airport.
Dean drove his new Porsche to the fashionable high-desert resort and entered a "novice" race for the first time. There being no formal training required for racing in those days, Dean simply dropped the
Porsche's convertible top, snapped a seat belt in place, donned a helmet, and went racing.

The skills he had demonstrated on Mulholland were instantly
apparent on the racetrack. Wearing glasses to correct his nearsightedness, Dean started sixth in the twenty-one car field. Before
halfway in the six-lap race, he had powered his way into a solid
lead. When the checkered flag fell, he had a full straightaway lead,
with the second-place car barely in sight.

After an evening of celebration with Bracker, starlet Lilli Kardell,
and new friend Lance Reventlow, the megarich son of Woolworth
heiress Barabra Hutton and a fledgling race driver himself, Dean
made ready for Sunday's twenty-seven lap "feature" race for sports
cars under 1,500 cc. Again Dean was in his element, running an easy
third behind a pair of lightweight MG specials driven by veterans Ken
Miles and Cy Yedor. When the race was finished, it was announced by
Cal Club officials that Englishman Miles's "Flying Shingle" machine
had violated some obscure technical rule and had been disqualified.
Dean was thus elevated to second place in the final standings. He
and his retinue returned to Los Angeles that evening with first- and
second-place trophies for his weekend's labors and a rising confidence that he had legitimate talent as a race driver.

Working closely with Bill Hickman, the expert stunt driver he had
met on the Rebel set, Dean enthusiastically reran his Mulholland
route to develop smoothness and rhythm. Two weeks later, he and
Bracker drove the Porsche to Bakersfield's Minter Field airport, a
defunct World War II B-24 bomber base. Saturday's six-lap qualifying
race was run in a pouring rain that lashed the normally arid city.
Driving with considerable alacrity on the slick pavement against
larger and more powerful cars, Dean finished third overall and won
his class for 1,500 cc sports cars. This qualified him for Sunday's main event. His chief rival in the thirty-lap was veteran Springer Jones, also
driving a Porsche Speedster. Jones's experience paid off, and he was
able to beat Dean to the finish line by half a car length.