Death Car 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 possible 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 of the many urban legends involving automobiles….” (Brottman p. xix)

The car in which Dean died has acquired its own mystique and largely on the strength of that aura has been replicated by manufacturers for hobbyists who often are 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 Le Mans for two years after its introduction at the Paris Motor Show in October of 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. Dean’s highway death looms large in J.G. Ballard’s Crash. Author Greg Kihn’s novel “Big Rock Beat” has the resurrection of James Dean’s death car as a central plot point.     

    
The year of the fifty-year anniversary of Dean’s death at Cholame,  a Hollywood production assistant and Dean fan named Micheal Dermen 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 a destination of 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 Crash Culture p. 310) “As celebrities are godlike, so their crucifixion via car crash completes this ascent. Witness James Dean, whose death by car crash created his cult. Such accidents often involve a trade in relics associated with the death, often granted supernatural powers, resembling the medieval relic cults. Parts of Dean’s ‘death car’ (a cleek and sexy Porsche) were sold, purchased for reuse in other vehicles. After a series of coincidental, often improbably accidents plagued the parts’ 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 actually was in possession of only the motorless shell; the essential components are in the possession of Tyler Eschrich, son of William Eschrich who acquired the car from insurance salvage) claimed for the first time to have the restored passenger-side door from the car among other artifacts of the fatal crash. In 2005 the Volo Auto Museum in Volo, Illinois offered $1 million dollars for the missing car--  though George Barris would have to authenticate the wreck.

Their money was safe, though, because the death car will never resurface, 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 the Archduke and Duchess Franz Ferdinand was killed at Sarajevo. Some Dean friends claimed to have had a bad vibe from the car, and Alec Guinness claimed to have predicted Dean’s death to the actor himself when Dean was showing the car off 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 Plan 9 From Outer Space fame ended before his death but the relationship was rekindled when she was refashioned as Jimmy 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 Dean as a joke with the invitation “Come Join Me.” The spin was that she had been spurned and had placed a curse on Jimmy Dean (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 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 Spyder 550—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 actually acquiring—for three hundred bucks—a twisted shard of Jimmy’s beloved Porsche. It is safe to say that Jimmy never loved a dude or chick as much as he was totally taken with the romance of that new Porsche. At twenty-four, Jimmy went out with a CRRUUNCH-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’s endearments (“My baby”) cast her in the popular unconscious as the missing element—a fatal lady love who seduces him to doom—and make 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 Andress!) 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 Roth 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 under the windscreen lighting and passing cigarettes to Jimmy as if he was Paul Henried to Dean’s Betty Davis.
Howard Lake wrote in the context of car crash songs but that could equally be applied to car and driver in this case, “Like James Dean, these lovers punctuate memory with their youthful beauty, suspended forever in a coital imminence, dead long before the consummation of their relationships.” (Howard Lake, Violence and Vinyl, reprinted in Car Crash Culture, Brottman ed., PALGRAVE 2001).

            In December, 1957 Whisper magazine printed a story "Ghost Driver of Polonio 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 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 Fairgounds. He was fifteen minutes into an hour-long race for modifieds under 1,500cc 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 acquired some suspension and steering parts from his friend and fellow surgeon William Eschrich that had come from the components of Eschrich had purchased from insurance salvage. Eschrich was also involved in a minor accident, and quoted him as saying he was not superstitious.

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 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 Barris claims it did not disappear into the following year. Previous 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 myths 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 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 motor.

*Dr. William Eschrich's car rolls over in the same race. The 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 Highway Patrol garage fire story was recounted.

*A month later the car falls off steel display mountings and breaks the hip of a  teenager.

*A few weeks later the car is on a truck carrying to to Salinas when it falls off the truck and crushes the driver who had been thrown from the truck-- don't ask me how.

*The car breaks mysteriously into two pieces 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 11 pieces while resting on stationary supports.

*The car disappears off a freight truck.

*Rolf Wuetherich is convicted of murdering 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 disappearance, which probably was into a crusher shortly after the police fire.

 

 

The Little Bastard

The most famous race car that never raced.

Little Bastard's engine Specifications:

Engine: Ernst Furhmann 547

Type: Four-Overhead-Cam flat four-cylinder with

horizontally opposed pistons.

Dispacement: 1498cc 90 brake horsepower @

6200 RPMs, 125-135 peak horsepower @ 8,000 RPMs

Gearbox: 5-speed manual

Chassis: Tubular with torsion-bar suspension

Top speed: 150 miles per hour

Dean and the "Little Bastard"  at Competition Motors, ready to leave for Salinas September 30, 1955.

 

By Tim Black

On September 18, 1955, Dean bought his Porsche 550 Spyder here. Back then the building was called Competition Motors and it was owned by Johnny Von Neumann. The building was replaced by a church addition in 2005.  

He was still in production at Warners on Giant and brought the Spyder on the Warner's lot for his final "Last Supper" scene on the 24th. Legend has Jack Warner telling him not to drive it on the lot again. He personalized it with the words "Little Bastard" on the lower rear part of the engine cover. In a 1983 interview, Bill Hickman told Warren Beath this was what he called Dean, and Dean called him "Big Bastard" and that was the inspiration for Dean naming the car. There are many other versions of the story behind the name. The actual reason Jimmy named the car "Little Bastard" will remain muddled in argument and theory forever. 

Jimmy's Spyder's was built in Stuttgart in July, 1955.There were perhaps many reasons Jimmy decided to purchase the car. Some may submit that it was because he felt the need to become more competitive since he had pushed his 356 Speedster to the limit a few months earlier and blew the engine.

To understand his reason for buying it is to understand the psychology behind his life-long competitive nature, and that story is covered in Warren's "Psychological Autopsy of James Dean" article which may appear on a future page. But it is safe to say that the 550 Spyder was a vast departure from the 356 Super Speedster he drove at the Palm Springs, Bakersfield, and Santa Barbara races months earlier, before a contract with Warners kept him from racing during the filming of Giant. That contract was timed well, because his Speedster was being repaired by Johnny Von Neumann's award-winning mechanic Rolf Wuetherich, back at Competition Motors after Dean blew the engine at the May 28th Santa Barbara race. This gave Wuetherich the needed time to repair Jimmy's 356 correctly and to smooth out other damages to the car Jimmy created as a novice auto racer, hell-bent on winning, despite his limited professional racecar driving experience.

Dean soon left for Marfa, Texas, to film scenes for Giant, and his racing activities were on hold for the summer of '55.

He would have no way of knowing, as he dusted off his cowboy hat for George Stevens in a Texas exterior shot, that his "dream car" and "death car" was being created five-thousand miles away in a Stuttgart car plant.

One can wonder why Jimmy,  who was notorious for being tight about money, would spend $7,000 on the 550 Spyder. You can study his thought processes based on the Psychological Autopsy, however it also brings up the point: "Was the 550 worth the cost?"

 Porsche's First Official Race Car: The Porsche 550 Spyder Model 1500RS 

 Introduced in 1953, the sensational 550 Spyder was Porsche's first official race car and would win its class in famous Europen races including the Mille Miglia in Italy and the Lemans 24-hour race in France competing against top sports-racing cars. It also got a class win in the Carrera Panamericana race that ran the length of Mexico on appalling roads in extreme temperatures.

It was an earlier class victory in the Mille Miglia with Lurani-Berckheim, that convinced Ferry Porsche to create a racing division where he could set up more and more competitive engines and cars to win that race and many others.

The decision to use the name "Spyder" was made at the request of Max Hoffman who was Porsche's influential U.S. importer. He knew that the name would be more marketable than a number such as "550/1500RS" the name Porsche planned to call the car. In Europe, "Spyder" was the description for a  light-weight, two-seat, competition sportscar. The 550 Spyder typically cost $6800 in U.S. dollars in 1955 when a full-dress convertible Cadillac only cost $4448.00

The 550 was powered by a four-overhead-cam flat four-cylinder with horizontally opposed pistons. It was a 1498cc engine developing 125-135 horsepower coupled to a five-speed manual gearbox. The chassis had a torsion-bar suspension and weighed 1120 lbs. It had a top speed of 150 miles an hour.

The Fuhrmann engine-transmisssion unit was designated the "547" and was known for the vertical drive of its camshafts, its dual plug ignition, roller  bearings, and double-sided cooling fan. Some insiders called it the "Schubladenmotor", or "drawer engine". The young engineer who invented it, Ernst Fuhrmann, received his doctorate with this complicated engine design. It is known for its difficulty to service by anyone but a handful of extremely well-trained German mechanics.

This is why Rolf Wuetherich, Jimmy's mechanic, was  the only person Jimmy would allow to touch the engine of his "baby". Porsche did not want to sell these cars unless they were being raced to win. This is probably the reason Rolf Wuetherich convinced a reluctant Johnny Von Neumann to sell the car to Dean, and offered to accompany Dean to every race. Rolf was an extremely well-trained Stuttgart racing mechanic and driver. The 550 was the pride of the Stuttgart Crest and tons of that pride had been absorbed into their new racer. Dean was a rising star and Hollywood was good exposure for the marketing of these cars. However Dean was a novice racer compared to the model racer Ferry Porsche had in mind when he set out to compete in the European races of the day.

In 1953, inspired by the success of the Porsche-based Glockler specials of the early Nineteen-Fifties, Porsche set out to construct the firm's first proper race car. Jimmy's first Porsche, the 356 Super Speedster, was basically a highly modified Volkswagen. It had proven only moderately successful as a racer. Dean found that out when he pushed his too hard trying to win at Santa Barbara Memorial Day weekend 1955.

If Porsche was going to compete against cars like Jaguar, Aston Martin, Bristol (forerunner of the Shelby Cobra), MG and Triumph, it was going to need a whole new car.

Despite the limited funds available to them that lean year 1953, two separate programs were initiated at the factory. Ernst Fuhrmann was in charge of designing a competition engine dubbed "project 547" and Wilhelm Hild headed the development of a new chassis called "Project 550".

There were only a few months available for Hild's team to construct the new racer for its scheduled debut at the 1953 24-hour Lemans race in France. The design was similar to the mid-engined Glockler, which was equipped with a modified 356 drivetrain reversed with the engine between the driver and the rear axle. A simple tube-ladder frame was created with six cross-members. The front and rear suspension were similar to production Porsches with only small revisions to handle the expected higher load. 

 

Glockler; a forerunner to the 550 Spyder at an early 1952 race

The brakes and wheels were borrowed from the 356 parts bins. Two chassis were constructed, but with Furhmann not yet ready with his 547 engine, a 356 1500 Super engine was fitted into the chassis for testing purposes.

Close to 100 brake horsepower could be produced by the 356 engine, running at a very high compression, when fueled by alcohol. For the 550, a compression ratio of 9.0:1 was chosen for reliability reasons, which was still enough for 78bhp.

Equipped with a roadster body, the first 550 debuted in the Effel Races at the Nurburgring.

Although troubled by bad weather and a bad carburetor, Helm Glockler drove Porsche's racing car to a debut victory, despite strong opposition from EMW and Borgward.

Porsche continued to enter two cars at Lemans. The Nurburgring winner was fitted with a coupe body that was expected to be better suited to the high speed track. The 1100cc to 1500cc class was easily beaten without really stressing the cars much and at the end, both racers had covered an identicle distance and finished 15th and 16th overall. The class victory was awarded to Richard Frankenberg and Paul Frere driving a 550-02. After the Lemans race, the cars were raced twice in German events with Hans Herrmann scoring another win in the 550-02. In the meantime, Ernst Furhmann was still hard at work.