Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (35 page)

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 remaining 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.