whokilledjamesdean
wbeath
Ghost of the Spyder
Death Car Myth and Mystique
By Warren Beath
Ghosts and cursed cars have been a wonderful by-product of the James Dean Legend. Mikita Brottman in her introduction to the collection of articles called "Car Crash Culture" calls Dean's death "The Mother of all celebrity car crashes" and asks "Is it posible that the highly charged panic and emotion of a violent death can stay with the parts of a wrecked car? Can accident sites somehow retain the ghosts, the memories, the smells of an accident? This common superstition is the basis of 'The Death Car', on many urban legends involving automobiles.....(Brottman p.xix).
The car in which Dean died has aquired its own mystique and largely on the strength of that aura has been replicated by manufacturers for hobbyists who are often entrenched Dean fans and take the cars on pilgrimages retracing the death drive. Only 90 550 Spyders were produced but it dominated its class at Lemans for two years after its introduction at the Paris Motor Show in October 1953. A lightweight at 1,213 pounds it has become a cultural heavyweight freighted with legend and popculture aura.
In Boston a WMBR Radio show calls itself the James Dean Death Car experience. The car has been the subject of a novel--"The Silver Ghost"-- and its destruction has been re-enacted in a slew of movies and documentaries. Jimmy's highway death looms large in J.G. Ballard's "Crash" Author Greg Kihn's novel "Big Rock Beat" has the ressurection of Jimmy's death car as a central plot point.
The year of the fiftieth anniversary of Jimmy's death at Cholame, a Hollywood production assistant and Dean fan named Micheal Derman outfitted a Best Buy support van for a Porsche 550 Spyder tour featuring a replica of the racer for a hegira from Dean's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to Marion, Indiana, and the James Dean Fest commemorating the actor's death. The tour reportedly was being filmed for a proposed documentary. At the heart of the mystique is a mystery. What happened to the car? Just as Dean's legend was born upon his death, central to the romantic cachet of the death car is its purported disappearance off a freight car in 1960, never to be seen again.
Julian Darius wrote in his influential essay "Car Crash Crucifixion Culture" (Car Cra Culture p. 310) "As celebrities are godlike, so their crucifixion via car crash completes the ascent."
Witness James Dean, whose death by car crash created his cult. Such accidents often involve a trade in relics associated with the death, the death often granted supernatural powers, resembling the medieval relic cults. Parts of Dean's death car (a sleek and sexy Porsche) were sold, purchased for reuse in other vehicles.
After a series of coincidental, often improbable accidents plagued the part's buyers, magical powers were ascribed to the car. In the end, like Christ's true cross, Dean's true car is lost to history, probably stolen by a crazed fan obsessed with celebrity relics.
In 2005 its last owner George Barris (who actualy was in possession of only the motorless body shell; the essential components are in the possession of Tyler Eschrich, son of William Eschrich who aquired the car from insurance salvage) claimed for the first time to have restored the passenger-side door from the car among the other artifacts of the fatal crash. In 2005 the Volo Auto Museum in Volo, Illinois offered $1million for the missing car--although George Barris would have to authenticate the wreck. Their money was safe, though because the death car will never re-surface, and the answer to the mystery most likely was reduced to a cube of mangled aluminum by a salvage yard crusher.
Some stories have the Porsche Spyders created from the cursed crushed metal of the Dusenberg in which Archduke and Duchess Franz Ferdinand was killed in Sarajevo. Some Dean friends claim to have predicted Dean's death to the actor himself when Dean was showing off the car in the parking lot of the Villa Capri restaurant shortly after he bought it.
Dean's acquaintance with spooky horror movie hostess Maila Nurmi of Vampira fame and a low budget Ed Wood production, Plan 9 From Outer Space recognition ended before his death but the relationship was rekindled when she was refashioned as Dean's Black Madonna in tabloid articles published posthumously. Pictured in front of an open grave at Santa Monica's Woodlawn Cemetery, she reportedly had sent the image to Jimmy as a joke with the invitation to "Come Join Me." The spin was that she had been spurned and had placed a curse on Jimmy (several people who had annoyed her reportedly died unnatural or premature deaths--Tomata du Plenty for one).
Dean's own unverified interest in the occult, and his definite morbid bent--underlining passages of death and degradation in his copy of Hemingway's Death In The Afternoon--attached his memory to the bizarre and the macabre in the wake of his death. But the marriage of the beautiful and meteoric young actor with his automotive anima--the sleek and curvaceous Porsche 550 Spyder--was a match made in tabloid heaven. "His Love Destroyed him", wrote author William F. Nolan in an article chronicling Dean's love affair with speed.
Wrote the notorious Kenneth Anger in an essay "Kar Krash Karma" in Brottman's Car Crash Culture, "Votive lights glowed in front of my very best James Dean photo, autographed--eat your heart out Marlon-- to me, and I carried my car-death compulsion to the point of aquiring for three-hundred-bucks--a twisted shard of Jimmy's beloved Porsche. It is safe to say he never loved a dude or a chick as much as he was totally taken with the romance of that new Porsche. At twenty-four, Jimmy went out with a CRRUUNNCH-BBAANNGG!!! And died doing what he loved doing sliding directly into legend.
The car is the belle dame sans merci in the Dean saga and functions as the Lady in Red in the Dillinger saga. Her feminine lines and Dean endearments ("My Baby") cast her in the popular unconscious as the missing element--a fatal lady love who seduces him to doom--and makes his death a love affair gone bad. Had Ursula Andress rather than Rolf Wuetherich been in the seat next to Jimmy on the fatal day (unfortunate for Ursula) the romance of the last day would be much more satisfying.
The feminization of the Spyder fills a dramatic void and also reassures us against the uncomfortable homoeroticism of the death-intimacy of Dean and Rolf. Especially after the traditional scene where Jimmy gives Rolf a love plight--a ring--at the diner as they embark on the last leg of their death drive. The fan magazine reports have Rolf hunkered down under windscreen lighting and passing cigarettes to Jimmy as if he pas Paul Henried to Jimmy's Betty Davis.
Howard Lake wrote in the context of car crash songs but that could equally be applied to car and driver in the case, "Like Jamespuean, these lovers punctuate memory with their youthful beauty, suspended forever in a coital imminence, dead long before the consumation of their relationships." (Howard Lake, Violence and Vinyl, reprinted in Car Crash Culture, Brottman ed. PALGRAVE 2001).
'How do you like the Spyder now?' Sandy asked.
Dean said, "I want to keep this car for a long time--a real long time.'
At the Blackwell's Corner stop 27 miles from the 41/466 crossing in Cholame.
Warren Beath: "The Death of James Dean"
In December, 1957 Whisper magazine printed a story "Ghost Driver Of Polino Pass" by Sam Schaeffer that vividly described the phantom Porsche that appeared in the fog in the vicinity of the intersection where Dean had met his highway demise.
"This is the place--" a frightened Mexican-American man tells Schaeffer--"This is the very place where that young senor Dean was killed. It is a very bad place! It is bad, very bad! He drives that road every night between sundown and sunrise. It is as though he is looking for someone."
Strangely, the death car curse has some origin in fact. The Pomona Progress Bulletin of October 22, 1956 related the death of plastic surgeon Troy McHenry, 45, during a race at the Pomona Fairgrounds. He was fifteen minutes into an hour-long race for modifieds under 1500cc when his Porsche Spyder spun into a tree. The October 24 edition of the same paper carried a follow-up article entitled "Parts Used in Fatal Crash Here Came Off James Dean Car." Apparently McHenry had aquired the Engine from his friend and fellow surgeon William Eschrich that had come from the components of the Dean car Eschrich had purchased from insurance salvage. Eschrich was also involved in a minor accident, and he was quoted as saying he was not superstitious. He had installed the transaxel, suspension and steering parts from the Dean death car.
Eschrich is also the key to what happened to Dean's "Little Bastard." Though Eschrich has passed away, the major parts of the car are still in the family though his son Tyler declines to display them to the media. What Barris in fact owned was the engineless shell of the car--the mangled husk. And there was precious little of that left after the creased and brittle aluminum kept breaking over the years. The second "Supernatural" incident was the March 11, 1959 fire at a police garage in Fresno, California in which the Spyder's shell was being stored in anticipation of a highway safety show. The cause was unknown, and two tires and some of the death car's paint succumbed to the flames.
Though Barris later claimed to have spent various sums of money restoring the burned Spyder, this seems effectively to have been the end of the car though Barrris claims it did not disappear until the following year. Prior restorations had left it looking like a tuna can and precious little of the death car mystique clung to the grotesque piece of junk that was rented out to bowling alleys and skating rinks in the years after dean's death.
The 1974 publication of the book "Cars of the Stars" by George Barris and Jack Scagnetti was the event that set the car myhs afloat in an unsuspecting world. The chapter on the Dean car contained most of the death car stories that would become tabloid fodder in the ensuing three decades:
- A Mechanic unloading the 550 wreckage from a truck has both legs broken when the hulk falls on him.
- The engine is sold to Dr. Troy McHenry who is killed in a car powered by Dean's engine.
- Dr. William Eschrich's car rolls over in the same race. His car has Dean's drive-train.
- A sports car driver buys the Spyder's heavy-duty racing tires and both of them blow out simultaneously, almost killing him (The tires were among the few authentic artifacts of Dean's car in the welded-together mess that toured the country under Barris' banner).
- The Police garage fire story was recounted.
- A month later the car falls off of steel display mountings and breaks the hip of a teenager.
- A few weeks later the car is on a truck carrying it to Salinas when it falls off the truck and crushes the driver who had been thrown from the truck. The car breaks mysteriously in two places and causes a traffic accident.
- In Oregon, the car is on a truck when the truck's emergency brake slips and sends the truck smashing into a store.
- In New Orleans the car breaks spontaneously into eleven different pieces while resting on stationary supports.
- In 1960, the car finally disappears off a freight car.
- Rolf Wuetherich is convicted of attempting to murder his wife.
Despite the care Barris claims to have lavished on the death car, I have seen photos of it in a dirt lot and even in what appeared to be someone's backyard prior to its disapperance, which probably was into a crusher after the fire at the Highway Patrol garage in Fresno.
WB
whokilledjamesdean
wbeath
