Rebel's Ride
REBEL'S RIDE
James Dean’s Triumph finally goes home
Nina Padgett
HE WAS A SHOOTING STAR, an incandescent flash across the sky of the public's consciousness. He sprang to the very top of Hollywood’s pinnacle, a slight figure with a
torrid screen presence and a smile that seemed to signal understanding of a joke that nobody else had heard.
He was James Dean. And if he loved the craft of acting, he also loved speed on wheels. He sought it any way he could-with sports cars and behind the handlebars of a succession of motorcycles. It was his undoing.
In an odd and macabre counterpoint, Dean’s death at the wheel of his Porsche in September, 1955, played against his seemingly unlimited artistic future to instantly confirm the status of legend upon him. And now,
Dean’s 500cc Triumph Trophy, purchased nine months before his death and thus a legitimate element of the mosaic that forms the actor’s legend, has completed the circle of James Dean’s pilgrimage. It sits, restored to the condition it was in when he last rode it, in the Fairmount Historical Museum, in Fairmount, Indiana, not far from Dean’s birthplace.
Fame and museums must have been the farthest things from Dean’s mind when he rolled out of the family farm
on his way to Los Angeles and the pantheon of Hollywood immortals.
But his interest in motorcycles, and the great pleasure to be derived from their use, was almost inborn. It began during his late childhood while he was being reared by his aunt and uncle, Marcus and Ortense Winslow, on their farm following the death of his mother. Just down the road from the farm was Marvin Cater’s Cycle Shop, a favorite local gathering spot. Dean went there to buy his first bike, a 1.5-horsepower CZ.
But as interested as he was in motorcycles,
Dean also was hearing the calls of other sirens. He answered those calls by acting in high school drama productions. After graduation, he chased his dreams to California, where he enrolled at a Los Angeles-area junior college, and within a year, transferred to UCLA’s Theater Arts program.
By 1951, Dean was in New York, where the following year he made his first television appearance and acted in his first Broadway play. In 1954, he was contacted by director Elia Kazan, who wanted Dean to audition for his film, East of Eden. The pair departed for Hollywood and filming began shortly thereafter.
Production of Dean’s next film, Rebel Without a Cause, began the following spring, and it was during this time that he began looking for a new motorcycle. He cruised the Los Angeles-area dealerships, and finally settled on a 500cc Triumph Trophy, purchased from Ted Evans Motorcycles in Culver City, not far from the massive studios of MGM.
Dean greatly admired Marlon Brando, whose seminal role in The Wild One so influenced public perceptions of motorcycles and motorcycle riders. He set the bike up Wild One style, replacing the stock seat with an aftermarket item, flipping the buddy seat on the rear fender around backwards, and substituting a Flanders handlebar for the original. He rode his Triumph with verve. His friend, photographer Dennis Stock, who rode as a passenger with Dean, remembers, “He was an intense driver. He did everything with a lot of energy.”
Dean rode the Triumph to work on the set of Rebel, and posed on the bike for a publicity shot with co-star Jim Backus, a photograph that would-almost 40 years later-play a part in the bike’s restoration.
Rebel Without A Cause was perhaps Dean’s most significant role. The film, which co-starred Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood, focused on the problems of teenage gangs and alienation. Dean played Jim Stark, the new kid in town who must prove himself among his new peers. His garments in the movie, a red jacket, T-shirt and blue jeans, have become his unofficial signature, and so has the car he drove, a 1949 Mercury.
Production of Rebel was scarcely complete when production of Dean’s next, and final, motion picture commenced. This was Giant, the Texas oil-industry epic co-starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and Dennis Hopper. Filming ran until September.
His contract with Warner Brothers forbade Dean from pursuing auto racing during filming. But there was a roadrace scheduled at Paso Robles, California, the weekend after filming ended. Dean entered himself and his Porsche 550 Spyder—one of those golden-age classics that could be driven on the street as well as on the racetrack.
Dean didn’t make it to the starting grid. While on the way to Paso Robles, at the intersection of Routes 46 and 41 near Chalóme, California, the little aluminum-bodied Porsche collided with another car. Dean was killed. He was 24.
In the aftermath, his Triumph was returned to the dealership from which it came, and in 1956 was sold, as a demo model, to a local desert racer. Following its desert career, the bike was raced at Ascot, and finally ignominiously retired. When it was found six years ago by Marcus Winslow, Dean’s cousin, who manages the James Dean Foundation in Fairmount, it was about 75 percent complete.
Michigan restoration experts Bill and Charles Breidenfield used photos of Dean aboard the bike to guide them as they rebuilt the bike, and when the job was done, complete with fresh paint by Coy Winslow, Dean’s second cousin, the well-traveled Triumph was placed on permanent display at the Fairmount Historical Museum.
“It was in pretty rough shape,” said Charles Breidenfield, “with a lot of odds and ends missing. The project took quite a bit of time, but it was worth it. James Dean is an icon. A lot of people still identify with him.”
If indeed life sometimes imitates art, the words of Johnny, the leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club in The Wild One, ring as a demonstration of Dean’s attitude to life aboard a motorcycle. Marlon Brando, playing Johnny, said of biking, “You don’t gotta go any place special.
Just get out there and have a ball.”
James Dean did just that in every adventure that his motorcycles, cars or acting took him on.
He never looked back. He seems never to have felt the need to.
Nina Padgett is a freelance photographer and writer based in Illinois.
