AT 5.45pm on September 30, 1955, 24-year-old actor James Dean was killed in Cholame, California, when the Porsche he was driving hits a Ford Tudor sedan at an intersection.
The driver of the other car, 23-year-old California Polytechnic State University student Donald Turnupseed, was dazed but mostly uninjured; Dean’s passenger, German Porsche mechanic Rolf Wütherich was badly injured but survived. Only one of Dean’s movies, ‘East of Eden’, had been released at the time of his death (‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and ‘Giant’ opened shortly afterwards), but he was already on his way to super-stardom – and the crash made him a legend.
James Dean loved racing cars and, in fact he and his brand-new Porsche Spyder convertible were on their way to a race in Salinas, 90 miles south of San Francisco. Witnesses maintained that Dean hadn’t been speeding at the time of the accident – in fact, Turnupseed had made a left turn right into the Spyder’s path – but some people point out that he must have been driving awfully fast.
He’d been giben a speeding ticket in Bakersfield, 150 miles from the crash site, at 3.30pm and then had stopped at a diner for a soft drink, which meant that he’d covered quite a distance in a relatively short period of time. Still, the gathering twilight and the glare from the setting sun would have made it impossible for Turnupseed to see the Porsche coming, no matter how fast it was going.
Rumour has it that Dean’s car, which he’d nicknamed ‘Little Bastard’, was cursed. After the accident, the car rolled off the back of a truck and crushed the legs of a mechanic standing nearby. Later, after a used-car dealer sold its parts to buyers all over the country, the strange incidents multiplied: The car’s engine, transmission and tyres were all transplanted into cars that were subsequently involved in deadly crashes and a truck carrying the Spyder’s chassis to a highway-safety exhibition skidded off the road, killing its driver. The remains of the car vanished from the scene of that accident and haven’t been seen since.
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