The "Inevitable Showdown" That Wasn't

A popular website claims John Derek played a role in James Dean's death following a "showdown" over Ursula Andress. It's not clear that it ever happened.

This week, Factinate put out a YouTube video about John Derek, a mostly forgotten Hollywood heartthrob of the 1950s. For our purposes, the only important information about him is that Ursula Andress broke up with James Dean in early September 1955, began dating Derek in late September, and married him the next year. The video, however, goes rather far in suggesting that Dean stalked Derek and tried to intimidate him into dropping Andress, which is a fairly dramatic story that doesn’t appear in any of the standard Dean biographies.

The video led me back to Factinate’s 2021 article on Derek, which gives a longer account:

When Derek and Andress started their affair, Dean was not happy; he even went so far as to stalk the two in his car while Derek and Andress were driving down Sunset Boulevard. Derek continued to date Andress, however, and things continued to escalate between Derek and Dean.

It soon led to an inevitable showdown between the two men.

The alleged showdown began after Derek dropped Andress off at her home one day. As soon as Derek stopped in front of Andress’s home, Dean walked out the door and offered to drive Derek around in his brand-new Porsche. Derek’s friends tried to stop him from getting into the car; they had no doubt that Dean’s intentions were far from good. Derek, however, wasn’t going to back down. He hopped into Dean’s car, which quickly roared to life.

With Derek in the passenger seat, Dean careened down the streets of Hollywood, driving over curbs, going up and down sidewalks, and screeching up Laurel Canyon. Dean wanted to give John Derek a good scare, but was infuriated when Derek kept as cool as a cucumber. Frustrated at Derek’s lack of reaction, Dean drove back to Andress’s home in a fury.

The incident of stalking is derived, in a somewhat confused way, from a brief paragraph in an article titled “His Searching Heart” from the May 1956 issue of Movie Stars Parade:

Jimmy needed advice and the 19-year-old starlet from Germany tried desperately to help him. Though they fought like cats and dogs, Jimmy admitted it was fun making up. […] Ursula tried, but when she felt it wasn’t working out, she switched her affections to John Derek. Moody and sullen, Jimmy dogged her footsteps for weeks afterwards, peering in car windows at her and John, confronting them at restaurants, calling her at odd hours. But he was left out in the cold.

The bit about cats and dogs is a close paraphrase of a quote Dean gave to a gossip column shortly before his death. The remainder can’t be literally true as Ursula left him only a couple of weeks before he died, and he was in various places doing things, such as auto racing, often documented in photographs, and probably didn’t have the time for stalking. A 1989 book, James Dean: Shooting Star, attributes the story to a recollection from Maila Nurmi, but as she was not in contact with Dean at the time and hadn’t been for months (she didn’t even know where he was living, sending a postcard to his favorite restaurant for him right before his death) and gives the account nearly verbatim, she must have been remembering the Movie Stars Parade story as her own memory.

The Movie Stars Parade article is a mixture of fact and rumor that is not particularly reliable. The only Dean biographer to credit the story was Venable Herndon, who repeated it almost verbatim, without acknowledgement of the source, in James Dean: A Short Life.

John Derek (1926-1998) as a young man.

Even Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, who accept any and every story as true in their 2016 Dean pseudo-biography, and made up many more to boot, don’t include this one. Instead, they claim that when Dean offered Derek a ride in his Porsche, Derek and Dean went off together and Dean performed oral sex on him as his “sex slave,” making Derek Dean’s last lover. This very much did not happen.

Dennis Hopper probably gets runner-up for the least believable story. In 1990, writing angrily about his outrage that “two biographies” of Dean had called Dean “gay,” Hopper instead claimed that Andress had asked Dean to marry her while he was filming Giant and that he had refused until his career took off, so she brought Derek to the set and paraded him around, cuckolding the lovestruck and very heterosexual Dean. This never happened.

The story of Dean’s crazed driving, though, appears in a 2020 biography of John Derek, but without any of the suggestion of jealous intimidation. This version has Dean visiting Andress to show off his new Porsche—a fact reported in the media in late 1955. When she refused his invitation to ride in it, Derek accepted instead. However, in this account, Dean was proudly showing off the car’s capabilities when Derek tried to anger his romantic rival by mocking the car, causing Dean to become angry. However, the book does not cite sources and the bibliography credits only Porter and Prince—sigh.

Try as I might to find the source for the current version of the anecdote given by Factinate, I am at a loss. It seems to have emerged sometime in the past decade and is most frequently seen on social media. I wasn’t able to find it in print.

James Dean with Ursula Andress at the Thalian Ball, August 29, 1955.

The most reliable account, contemporary with events but directly contradicting many key details from the Factinate version, tells us that Dean and Andress were still casually seeing each other as friends as late as September 28, 1955, when they went to see I Am a Camera together, a far cry from the depiction of crazed stalking. On September 29, the night before his death, he visited Andress and asked if she wanted to accompany him to his race in Salinas, which she declined. Some versions of the story say she informed him that day she had started dating Derek. According to gossip columnist Joe Hyams, Derek met with Andress that day for the first time in months, sparking their romance. Either way, Derek arrived as Dean was inviting Andress, and she rejected Dean in favor of Derek. She told the Hollywood Reporter shortly after that she blamed herself for Dean’s death, alleging that he “would not have committed suicide” in that car that day had she not ended their relationship. According to Andress, she and Derek only became seriously involved after Dean’s death.

Ironically enough, John Derek uttered the line “live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse” in 1949’s Knock on Any Door, a line that Dean appropriated, and which is now inseparable from him.