At sunset on Friday, September 30, 1955, 24-year-old James Dean was killed in automobile accident while heading to Salinas, California, for, ironically, a weekend of racing. He was getting 'wheel-time" in his recently purchased, 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder on highway 46 in Cholame, California roughly four-hours northeast of Los Angeles, when Donald Turnupseed, a 23-year old Cal-Poly student, driving a 1950 Ford Tudor, made a left turn at the intersection of highways 41 and 466 directly into Dean's path. Witness' claim Dean maneuvered right in an attempt to drive around Turnupseed, but collided all but head on into his substantially larger and heavier Ford. Dean was crushed by the impact, he suffered massive internal injuries, and his neck was broken. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital, nearly thirty miles away.
Turnupseed, a Navy veteran, said the setting sun at the time lent a "mirror effect" to the road and the color of Dean's car made seeing him harder still. There was no stop sign at the intersection. He was not charged in any wrongdoing and kept a low profile afterwards making a living as an electrical contractor. He died of lung cancer at the age of 63 in 1995.
Dean's fatal car crash occurred just under a month before the theatrical release of, arguably, the most famous of his three films, "Rebel Without a Cause". Seeing how large his legend became, it's hard to fathom he only made three movies; seems there were many more.
Reviews of "Rebel" were mixed, however, and it has not aged well. Dean's performance, without question remarkable and the best thing in it, was more like that of a marked-down Marlon Brando than the birth of an important talent. Watch the film today and you can't help but notice James Dean's "Jim Stark" seems out of place in it, not unlike seeing a Porsche 550 Spyder driven on an ordinary two-lane road. Despite the critics, the film was enormously influential; a milestone in the creation of new ideas towards young people. Brando is given much credit for initially blazing that path, Dean further stoking those flames Elvis Presly took to incendiary heights.
Much like James Dean, his Porsche 550 Spyder was more than handsome and photogenic, it was supremely capable.
Racing was the impetus for Porsche's creation of their lightweight, 110-horsepower, 550 Spyder. To be sanctioned by the 1.1- and 1.5-liter roadster class governing body, they mandated that Porsche have a "factory car" they could sell to the public. To qualify, they modified their 356 model removing its roof amongst a number of mechanical upgrades. They dubbed the roadster, "550 Spyder".
As it pertains to automobiles, the term "spyder" purportedly stems from open, horse drawn carriages and their large, wooden wheels that resembled long legged spiders. There's considerable conjecture as to why the "i" in spider was replaced with a "y".
Dean's car was one of only 90 550 Spyders made and one of only 43 "customer" cars, it was rarer still. Customer cars were cars Porsche sold to the public that were "street legal". With its "mid-ship" (mounted in front of the rear axle), air-cooled, 1.5-liter flat-four, dual overhead cam engine, locking differential, hand-built, tube-frame chassis under a wafer-thin aluminum skin, the Porsche 550 Spyder was the stuff of exotic car dreams. To some degree it still is.
550 Spyders went on to 95 victories and 75 class wins over a total of 370 races helping to establish Porsche's legacy of producing high-performance automobiles; it won the first race it was ever driven in. Having a movie star die in one in an accident that was not only not his fault, forensic reconstruction of the accident concluded Dean was not speeding at the time of the crash, but also had nothing to do, per se, with the car itself, was, no doubt, a marketing coup for Porsche. Albeit a tragic if not maudlin one.
Fanning the furor after Dean died, his friend, photographer Sanford Roth, was doing a photo expose for Collier's Magazine on his racing exploits at the time of the crash. This photograph, supposedly taken just moments before the crash, was shot by Roth as he was riding in the passenger seat of the Ford Country Squire Dean purchased as a towing vehicle when he bought the 550. Bill Collins, Dean's dialogue coach from the film "Giant", that Dean had just completed and was released in 1956, was driving. Dean's passenger in the above photograph is Rolf Wuthereich, a Porsche mechanic whom he befriend, who assisted Porsche customers interested in racing their cars.
Miraculously, Wuthereich, although seriously injured when ejected from the car after impact with Turnupseed's Ford, survived. He had few if any recollections of the crash.
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Dean had traded in his Porsche 356 "Super Speedster" on his 550 taking delivery of it just 10-days before the accident that killed him. He had "Little Bastard" painted in washable paint on the the 550's hood (bonnet) to poke fun at Warner Brothers studio executive Jack Warner who referred to Dean as, "that little bastard" when he refused to vacate his temporary trailer after filming for "East of Eden" wrapped. Racers would have their race-registration numbers painted in washable paint since their numbers usually changed race-to-race.
James Dean, while a gifted actor and an intelligent, albeit by many accounts a damaged, tortured soul, had premonitions of his early death. He told a pastor in his hometown of Fairmount, Indiana that, "the only success, the only greatness is immortality".
When Alec Guinness first saw his friend James Dean's brand new Porsche 550 Spyder, he said, "if you get in that car they will find your body in it in a week". Dean laughed and said, "Oh shucks. Don't be so mean!" Of his premonition of Dean's death in the Porsche, Guinness said afterward it was one of the oddest and spookiest experiences of his life.
Shortly before the crash and while he was filming his last film, 'Giant", Dean shot a public service announcement about safe driving.
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