James Dean ....
This is an amazing site.... James Dean in Death. If you are into celebrity death curiousities, this is the spot for you. It has a little bit of everything:
- A Blog .... P.S. Did you know that he has been dead almost 51 years??????
- News stories
- Pictures
- and, so much more!
This site also offers a book on James Dean, his life, his death and the aftermath....
Interviews... like the following (found at this link)
The Death of James Dean: The Interviewwith Warren Beath...When did you write The Death of James Dean?
- I started working on it in the early eighties but I had already been corresponding with accident investigators for ten years, and collecting things related to the accident. Were you just curious, or do you think the death of James Dean really was an important event?think it was an important event, occurring when it did right in the middle of the Twentieth Century. Dean was a unique sort of hero, and it took his death to authenticate him. A dramatic death is the validation of the existential hero and the savior of any religion. He has an incredible iconic importance to the culture. The image of Dean in his sports car has inspired all sorts of artists, and it continues to fascinate people.What are the facts of the accident?James Dean has a Porsche Spyder racer barely two weeks old and with between 600 and 800 miles on the odometer. He had entered an airport race in Salinas and it must have made him nervous, the idea of competing in that kind of car with no more seat time than he had in it. Because it was difficult to handle and that was a dangerous situation. I think that was another reason Rolf Weutherich, the German expert mechanic, was accompanying him to the race. To try and fill James Dean in on the handling of the car.That’s why they decided to drive the car rather than tow it?Yes. They left Los Angeles and James Dean was ticketed by officer O.V. Hunter at around three o’clock. Hunter told me that he believed Dean was going ninety miles an hour when he saw him, but slowed when he realized he was being pursued. Why didn’t he try to outrun the patrol car?(Laughing) He had apparently done that earlier in the week, pursued in the fog around Santa Barbara when he was practicing. But in this case Hunter would have radioed for help and more officers would have been waiting for Dean in Bakersfield, if he went through Bakersfield. For more, click here
