Marking the 70th Anniversary of James Dean's Death: His Final Days

In commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of James Dean’s death, I am publishing an excerpt from my biography of James Dean, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean (Applause, 2024) on the final days of the Hollywood legend.

The last picture of James Dean, taken on the morning of his death.

Not only did Dean care little about speeding (“I’m not always in a rush!” he protested), but he also wanted a faster car so he could be a more com­petitive racer. Dean ordered a Lotus Mark IX racing car from the United Kingdom, which was to be shipped without an engine or a paint job, to be customized and finished in the United States. Dean put down a deposit, but the car took too long to ship and wasn’t scheduled to arrive until October at the earliest. Therefore, in mid-September he traded his Porsche 356 Speed­ster for the new Porsche 550 Spyder on the advice of a mechanic he had recently befriended, Rolf Wütherich, and almost immediately got it banned from the Warner Bros. lot thanks to his wild driving. The new car was small, sleek, and silver, low to the ground, and streamlined into sensual curves that gave it the Atom Age flair of a flying saucer hovering just above the asphalt. Dean had it painted with his racing number, 130, and the nickname studio chief Jack Warner had angrily bestowed on him, Little Bastard, a speeding billboard of performative offense. He lavished attention on the car, showed it off to anyone he could corral into looking at it, and referred to it only half in jest as his true love. In calling it by his nickname, he revealed too much.
​
He also resumed seeing Dr. Van der Heide, the psychoanalyst, who advised him with the blasé cruelty of a profession still mistaking Freud for fact that his real problem, the cause of all his traumas and sexual confusion, was anger at his father. According to the therapeutic notions then prevalent among high-profile therapists in the L.A. area, too many males like James Dean were emotionally immature due to flawed parenting, and in extreme cases, this could induce homosexuality. These perpetual adolescents wanted someone to care for and protect them instead of mastering their emotions to become more aggressive, dominant, and manly. Van der Heide reminded Dean of the reasons—excellent ones, Dean thought—that he had pushed his father away. Yet he told Dean he needed regular and sustained love from his father in order to heal. The thought left Dean depressed. “Jim and I—well, we’ve never had that closeness,” his father Winton said around this time. In treating the wrong problem, therapy did more harm than good.

At the end of the month, he entered a race to be held in Salinas, the town where the story of East of Eden had taken place, an hour and a half south of San Francisco. In the days before the race, he spent an hour with Marcus and Ortense Winslow and his grandfather, visiting from Indiana, and, fol­lowing his therapist’s advice, his father. He also saw that Bill Bast was broke and miserable, living with rowdy roommates in a crowded apartment, strug­gling to write. After the Confidential Tab Hunter story, Bast had feared that his increasingly public gay lifestyle could harm Dean’s career, so he stayed in the background, avoiding the galas Dean had begged him to attend with him.

But now Dean told Bast he wanted to repay him the $700 he estimated Bast had spent on him over the years and asked Bast to join him in his rented home, the one with no separate bedrooms, in which he had placed a minia­ture planetarium to fill the ceiling with stars, a reminder of the cosmic and the eternal. In the same gentle tones he had used as Jim Stark to promise love to Plato in the planetarium in Rebel without a Cause, Dean told Bast that next week, in October, Bast would move in and it would be as it was before, but more so. They would live together, and Bast would write his great screen work, a modern Jekyll and Hyde. “Make me a promise,” Dean said, both of the screenplay and the life Bast wanted for them, art and flesh swirling into one. “You know what you want,” he added, speaking as much to himself as

to Bast. “Stop putting it off. Like I told you,” he said, echoing his words from Borrego Springs, “there’s nothing to be scared of.” Bast recalled feeling as though Dean had spoken to him as big brother, best friend, and lover—the Greek ideal Dean had so long sought for himself.

Not long after, Dean received a strange phone call from a waiter at his favorite Italian restaurant, the Villa Capri, telling him that a postcard had arrived for him from Maila Nurmi showing her as Vampira sitting by an open grave with the words “wish you were here” written across it. Dean called Nurmi on September 29 to ask if she wished him dead. She had intended the photo as a rejoinder to the Life magazine picture of Dean in a coffin and had sent it to the restaurant not knowing his address. But she told him only that it was a joke, without explanation, expecting to entice him into a renewed friendship. He hung up.

Some said they saw him that night in the Malibu Colony, a private, wealthy enclave, at an all-boy party of the kind where Burt Lancaster and Rock Hud­son could sometimes be found. Giant bit player Dennis Hopper implausibly said Dean had told him he had been in Malibu a few days before to commune with Trappist monks. Or maybe he had really been in Santa Monica studying Hindu beliefs about immortality and piercing the veil of reality with the fifty-one-year-old gay author Christopher Isherwood and Isherwood’s adolescent boyfriend, as Dean had told Bill Bast. One man at the party, whenever it occurred, remembered hearing shouts in the early hours. A young man Dean had been quietly seeing off and on while he was publicly dating Andress had confronted him and berated Dean for living a lie. He demanded Dean admit to being gay and stop the charade of dating women, “except for publicity purposes.”
​
The story might have been true. Probably, it was just a legend. But those who passed it around didn’t know that Dean had finally made his choice. When reporter Mike Connelly had asked him about marriage for an upcoming Modern Screen profile, he had changed his mind. He now had no intention of getting married, and he answered Connelly’s questions with a remarkably studied ambiguity. Asked when he’d wed, he replied, “When I find the right companion.” When asked if he were looking for a companion, he responded with a distraction: “Every man looks. But looking in itself is superficial. Looking can be an inward thing. It can have nothing to do with actual physical and emotional involvements. Oh sure, I’m looking.” He told Connelly, “It would be a very delicate setup—marriage I mean,” because “I fall short in the ‘human’ department. I expect too much of people.” Calling himself immature “where women are concerned,” he said he’d consider mar­riage at thirty a “good age.”

* * *

Early on September 30, Dean threw a red windbreaker over a white T-shirt— copying his own mirror, Jim Stark, as reality folded into story—and joined Rolf Wütherich, Sandy Roth, and another friend for the trip up to Salinas for the race and then on to San Francisco. Dean called Bill Bast and asked him to join them, but Bast said he needed to finish packing for the move the next day. Dean had planned to tow the Porsche with his Ford station wagon, but instead he chose to drive it with Wütherich riding shotgun and the others following in the Ford. They drove all day, beneath the endless expanse of blue sky, until the sun grew low over the rolling hills. He dreamed of racing Little Bastard, of winning his first competition, as though if he could only go fast enough, he might finally break free to that absolute reality beyond this world.

Jimmy Dean drove down California’s State Road 466, heading toward Paso Robles, basking in the final rays of the dying sun, the sky growing dim. Wütherich said he had never seen Dean happier. A few days earlier, Mark Twain’s “The Mysterious Stranger” had again been on Dean’s mind. The words had echoed in his head: “Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction!” Well, then, here, now, as Dean came to the intersection of routes 466 and 41 in Cholame, he could think only of winning his race, of the tran­scendent glory of triumph, of the great story he would make of it, the story he would tell Bill Bast back home—in their home. A college student turning his two-toned Ford sedan into the intersection didn’t see the low-slung silver Porsche. “That guy’s gotta see us—he’ll stop,” Dean shouted to Wütherich. But he didn’t.

They collided, flinging Wütherich from the car and crushing the beauti­ful, fragile Porsche and its beautiful, fragile driver. The boy who wished with all his heart for someone to share a perfect melding of mind, body, and soul found in death an ironic fulfillment of his desire for a union of heroic equals. Smashed into the metal, pinned behind the wheel, as the constellations mani­fested in the growing darkness to pay their twinkling tribute, he had become one with the car that bore his name, his last true love, himself. In the end, there could be no other equal. When help came, too late, and men cleaved Dean from the wreckage, Wütherich said he heard a final cry escape the mangled body, the sound of a soul breaking free to join the immortal stars.

James Dean, the little prince, the sweet prince, was dead, and all that remained were the stories. The rest was silence.

Excerpt from Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean © 2024 Jason Colavito. All rights reserved.