Myles' Deborah Kerr Diaries & Journals

 

VARIETY

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

 

Julia Roberts and Clive Owen attended the world premiere of Universal's "Duplicity" at London's Leicester Square.

 

 

YOUNG

AND RESTLESS   

 

The Spider

SEPTEMBER 30th,1955

In late September, Natalie Wood and Nick Adams traveled to New York together, to join Sal Mineo on a publicity jaunt for "Rebel."

"I had a secret fantasy: We would all be sitting together in the restaurant in New York, and he would arrive," Mineo remembered. "I'd be a little older now, and maybe we could be really groovy. I was in my city, a cild of the Bronx, and now it was my turn, you know? It was that kind of anticipation. And Natalie, too, was all jittery by this time."

 

On the evening of September 30, Wood, Nick Adams and Mineo attended a performance of Arthur Miller's new play, A View From the Bridge, Starring Dean's co-star from East of Eden Richard Davalos. After the play, they had dinner with Davalos and huis wife in Chinatown. Inevitably, the conversation turned to dean. "We talked about what a great future he had, and how in a few years he'd be the greatest thing that ever hit Hollywood," Wood later remembered. Then, she recalled, Adams blurted out: "With all Jimmy's rodeo riding and his racing, he's not going to live to see thirty."

But Wood immediately shot down this notion, assuring him, "Jimmy's going to outlive every one of us at this table."

As they talked that night, they had no idea that Dean was already dead.

 

He chain-smoked Chesterfields, which Rolf Wutherich was forced to light while hunched down out of the wind.  At 5 p.m. the team stopped at a grocery store so that Dean could call a friend he met while making East of Eden, Monty Roberts, who would later be the basis of the title character in The Horse Whisperer. Dean was planning to spend the night at his ranch.

At 5:45, at the intersection of routes 466 and 41 near Cholame, California, Donald Turnupseed, a student at California Polytechnic driving a 1950 Ford, suddenly turned left into the path of Dean's oncoming car. "That guy up there's gotta stop," Dean said. "He'll see us." But apparently, Turnupseed did not see them. Although an investigator would conclude that Dean was not speeding at the time, when he tried to swerve out of Turnupseed's way, he smashed into the Ford. Wutherich was thrown clear of the car and suffered a broken jaw and leg. Turnupseed was barely in jured. The Porsche was completely crushed.

 

From the station wagon trailing the Spyder, Hickman saw "an explosion and a great cloud of smoke and dust" up ahead. When Hickman and Roth arrived on the scene, they ran up to the Porsch and found Dean trapped behind the steering wheel. "I thought he was alive because there seemed to be air coming out of his nostrils," said Hickman. "They told me later he had died instantly. His forhead was caved in and so was his chest." Roth got his camera and began taking pictures. When Hickman saw the flashes, he screamed at Roth, "You son of a bitch! Help me, come here, help me!" But it was too late. The air Hickman saw coming out of Dean's nostrils was the last breath emptying from Dean's lungs. Hickman cradled the actor in his arms until the ambulance drivers arrived in the scene. They pried Dean's foot loose from the wreckage, lifted his lifeless body onto a gurney and covered him with a blanked. Roth snapped another picture as they put him in the ambulance. 

Suffering from a broken neck, multiple fractures of his jaw and both arms, and internal injuries, Dean was pronounced dead on arrival at Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital at 6:20 p.m.

 

  "THE BOY IS DEAD"