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JAMES DEAN

IS FOREWARNED BY

ALEC GUINNESS

The Villa Capri, Hollywood

September 23rd 1955

A week before he is due to die, James Dean is sitting at a table in his favourite little restaurant in Hollywood, the Villa Capri. He is very chummy with Nikkos, its maître d’, from whom he has started renting a log house in Sherman Oaks.

Looking towards the entrance, he spots a familiar figure attempting to get a table, then being turned away. He recognises him as the English actor Alec Guinness, the star of so many of his favourite Ealing comedies, like Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Guinness has always been more than a touch superstitious, and in a few minutes he will be applying his sixth sense to James Dean. He regularly visits fortune tellers, and has even indulged in a little table-turning. At one time in his life he became obsessed with tarot cards, until all of a sudden one evening, ‘I got the horrors about them and impetuously threw cards and books on a blazing log fire.’

Guinness delights in recounting his psychic powers. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, 1943, he had been resting in the cabin of the naval ship of which he was a lieutenant, when he had apparently heard a sinister voice saying, ‘Tomorrow.’ He was convinced that this was a premonition of death.

That night, sailing from Sicily to the Yugoslav island of Vis, his ship hit a hurricane. An electrical discharge caused ribbons of blue fluorescent light, ‘until the whole ship was lit up like some dizzying fairground sideshow’. Convinced that he was going to die, Guinness found the spectacle ‘beautiful and strangely comforting’.

The ship was dashed against the rocks as it entered the small Italian port of Termoli, and he gave the order to abandon ship. He had, it seems, outwitted the sinister voice – or had it been delivering less of a judgement than a warning?

In March this year, he and his wife were on holiday in the Trossachs in Scotland when their car had a bad puncture. ‘Couldn’t get the wheel off,’ he recalls in his diary. ‘After nearly an hour’s effort said a little prayer to St Anthony and the nuts came loose the very next time I tried – and with only a small effort.’

Six months later he arrives in Hollywood, exhausted after a sixteen-hour flight from Copenhagen, in order to begin filming The Swan with Grace Kelly and Louis Jourdan.

The screenwriter of Father Brown, Thelma Moss, has invited him out to dinner, but they are having difficulty finding a table because Thelma is wearing slacks. They finally settle for a small Italian restaurant, the Villa Capri, which has a more casual dress-code, but when they get there they are told by the genial maître d’ that it is full, and so they begin to walk away.

‘I don’t care where we eat or what. Just something, somewhere,’ grumbles Guinness irritably, adding, ‘I don’t mind just a hamburger.’

At that moment, he becomes aware of the sound of feet running down the street behind him. He turns to see a young man in sneakers, a sweatshirt and blue jeans. ‘You want a table?’ he asks. ‘Join me. My name’s James Dean.’

‘Yes, very kind of you,’ replies Guinness with relief, and eagerly follows him back to the Villa Capri.

Before they go into the restaurant, James Dean says, ‘I’d like to show you something,’ and takes them into the courtyard of the restaurant. There, he proudly shows them his new racing car, one of only ninety Porsche 550 Spyders ever produced. He has had it customised: it now has tartan seating and two red stripes at the rear of its wheelwell, all designed by George Barris, the man who will go on to design the Batmobile. ‘It’s just been delivered,’ Dean says, proudly. On the lower rear of the engine cover are the words ‘Little Bastard’. The car is so brand new that it is still wrapped in cellophane, with a bunch of roses tied to its bonnet.

Alec Guinness is seized by one of his premonitions.

‘How fast can you go in that?’

‘I can do 150 in it.’

‘Have you driven it?’

‘I’ve never been in it at all.’

And then – ‘exhausted, hungry, feeling a little ill-tempered in spite of Dean’s kindness’ – Guinness hears himself saying, in a voice he can hardly recognise as his own, ‘Look, I won’t join your table unless you want me to, but I must say something. Please do not get into that car.’ He looks at his watch. ‘I said, “It’s now 10 o’clock, Friday the 23rd of September 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week.”’

Despite this grim prognosis, Dean laughs. ‘Oh, shucks!’ he says. ‘Don’t be so mean!’

Guinness apologises, blaming his outburst on a lack of sleep and food. The three of them then have dinner together – ‘a charming dinner’ – before going their separate ways. Guinness makes no further reference to the car, ‘but in my heart I was uneasy’.

Though Dean himself has an interest in morbid premonitions – passages about death and degradation are heavily underlined in his copy of Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon – he ignores Guinness’s warning. A week later, on September 30th, he is driving his new Spyder across the junction of Route 46 and Route 41 near Cholame, California, when he collides head-on with a Ford Custom Tudor coupé driven by a student with the inappropriately comical name of Donald Turnupseed.

James Dean is taken by ambulance to Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital, where he is pronounced dead on arrival at 5.59 p.m. His last words, uttered just before impact, are, ‘The guy’s gotta stop … he’ll see us.’

Fifty years after his death, this section of the road is renamed the James Dean Memorial Junction.

‘It was a very odd, spooky experience,’ recalls Alec Guinness of their strange meeting. ‘I liked him very much. I would have liked to have known him more.’