Wheels of Change: From Zero to 600 m.p.h., The Amazing Story of California and the Automobile

From Chapter 28: The Last Days of James Dean

It was a cool thing to be young and alive in 1955, and it was an even cooler thing to be young and alive and James Dean. He was in his early twenties, single, so good looking people couldn't take their eyes off him, a magnet for beautiful women. He had begun filming "Rebel Without A Cause," his second film, in April, only a month after his first, "East of Eden," had turned him into a major star. Actually this transformation had begun a few months earlier when the Los Angeles Times sent a photographer over to the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank for a feature the paper was running on the final days of shooting "East of Eden," the picture based on the Steinbeck novel of the same name.

The young Julie Harris, Jo Ann Fleet and Raymond Massey were also appearing in the movie, though they held the photographer's interest only in a limited way. The person who fascinated him, the reason he was there, the point of the assignment in the first place--that was James Dean. And there certainly was no disputing one thing: The camera loved him. There he was, in a heated exchange with Massey, who plays his father. Click! With Jo Ann Fleet, his movie mother, and other cast members in a dramatic confrontation. Click, click! The film critic for the Times, Phillip K. Scheuer, who was writing the feature, could not turn his eyes away from Dean either. "At once a roughneck and an introvert, the unloved one, he is inevitably being compared with Marlon Brando, another Kazan favorite," he wrote.

Kazan was Elia Kazan, the director of "East of Eden" who had previously directed Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront" and "A Streetcar Named Desire." He had also directed Montgomery Clift, another beautiful, brooding actor who had become a giant Hollywood star seemingly in the blink of an eye. But neither Clift nor Brando had generated the kind of buzz Dean had even before his first movie had come out.

A few weeks after the Times' photo spread appeared, Hedda Hopper called Dean "the most exciting young actor to hit the screen in years." That Dean had yet to actually hit the screen mattered not a whit to Hooper, whose excitement only increased after the movie reached theaters in March. "I can't remember when any screen newcomer generated as much excitement in Hollywood," she wrote in a follow-up piece after "East of Eden's" release. Hopper, who was approaching 70 but who retained the same youthful enthusiasm for movies and celebrities she had always had, didn't like Dean at first. "I'd seen Dean only once," she confessed. "Slumped, surly looking and carelessly dressed, in the studio commissary. He was not impressive." Then she saw him in "East of Eden"--saw that scene when he hops off a moving train with effortless grace--saw his torment when he shoved those blocks of ice down the barn chute to get his father's attention--and her eyes opened to everything he was bringing, and could potentially bring, to movies. You couldn't not watch him when he was on screen. Yet his performance wasn't showy or actor-ly but real and raw and straight to the heart.

On the day Hopper's article came out in the Times, Dean might have been excused if he had decided to grab the paper and have breakfast with some of his actor-friends at his favorite coffee shop, Googie's, on Sunset and Crescent Heights. But he didn't go to Googie's that morning; instead he was in Palm Springs, getting a charge out of life in one of the best ways he knew how: racing automobiles.

The eighth annual Palm Springs Road Races, held at the airport on a 2.3-mile track, attracted 20,000 fans and hundreds of sports cars, including Dean's white Porsche 356. Like Dean in Hollywood, the Porsche 356 had gained a rapid and enthusiastic following after its introduction to this country the year before. This was his first race in it, his first sports car race in California--a one-hour, 27-lap feature event for stock and modified cars with engine sizes under 1500 cc. His competitors included the British-born driving ace Ken Miles, a newcomer on the American sports car scene who was beating the stuffing out of just about everyone he faced in his MG Special. Miles won this race with ease too, followed by a driver from Los Angeles. But Dean came in third, serving notice that he was not just some Hollywood pretty boy but a driver with talent. "James Dean, Hollywood actor, drove his Porsche Speedster with veteran aplomb for third," said one reporter. Dean collected two trophies for his showing at Palm Springs, and a photograph of him holding these awards reveals none of the on-screen torment and conflict for which he was known as an actor. In a jacket and white tee shirt, with that great puffed-up dirty blond hair of his, he's smiling and happy.

"Rebel Without A Cause" finished shooting in early June, and Dean immediately began work on another film, "Giant," costarring Elizabeth Taylor. Warner Brothers was so worried about Dean's racing that its contract with him stipulated that he could not race during the making of the film. But after "Giant" wrapped, he was a free man again. "Motor racing," said a biographer, "had become for him as much of a passion as acting." Equally to the point, Dean now had plenty of freshly-minted movie cash to pursue that passion. A friend had tipped him off about the new Porsches on display at Competition Motors in Hollywood, and Dean went over to take a look. He was not a tough sell. On September 21 he traded in his old Porsche, covered the rest of the ticket with $3,000, and drove away in a new, silver 1955 Porsche Spyder--"a tiny vehicle with a topless aluminum body as fragile as an eggshell," as one writer described it.

The Spyder, though street legal, was intended for racing, and in order to enter it in a competition it needed a number. Dean brought it over to Dean Jeffries, a much in-demand Hollywood car customizer who painted 130 in stylized black script on the doors and hood. He also painted the words "Little Bastard"--Dean's name for the car, a private joke with a friend--above the rear license plate.

When he was on location for "East of Eden" Dean had gotten to know Salinas, which was holding a sports car race the first weekend of October. So it seemed a natural place to give Little Bastard its first competitive test. Originally Dean, a member of the California Sports Car Club, planned to tow the Porsche on a trailer behind his Ford Country Squire station wagon, but changed his mind--"at the last minute," says one account--and decided to drive it instead. A photographer, Sanford Roth, who was shooting a magazine photo essay on Dean, and another man took the Ford, while Dean and his mechanic Rolf Weutherich went ahead of them in the Spyder. Blasting out of Los Angeles late Friday morning Dean reached the Bakersfield area at 3:30 p.m. The time is known precisely because that was when California Highway Patrolman Oscar Hunter pulled him over on the highway for a speeding ticket--65 in a 55 mph zone. Dean signed the citation and after pledging to appear in municipal court in two weeks he drove off, stopping for gas at a filling station a little while later.

By this time Roth in the station wagon had caught up with his subject. He brought out his camera and snapped a picture of Dean--the last photo of him alive--in the gas station. Behind Dean in the photograph are the station wagon and the empty trailer that originally was supposed to carry the Little Bastard to the race. The shiny, silver sports car with the black 130 on the front was already gassed up. Dean is standing next to it by the driver's door. He's got a cigarette in his mouth, sunglasses, white V-neck tee shirt, light blue casual pants. He's pulling a racing glove onto his right hand. He's ready to rock…