Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (34 page)

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 number 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.

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."