What Happened to James Dean's Porsche?

New documents show car customizer George Barris wasn't always honest about the car's disappearance.

After James Dean died, the remains of his Porsche 550 Spyder took on a life of their own. Dr. William Eschrich acquired the wreck from a scrap yard, used the engine for his own car, and sold off other still-functional bits of the car and the metal from the body panels to men who would install them in their own cars, and sometimes crash them. Car customizer George Barris acquired what was left, and he banged the crumpled chassis back into a semblance of its original shape, put atop it a sheet metal facsimile of the wrecked body, and loaned to the Greater Los Angeles Safety Council, which sent it on tour, ostensibly as a warning against the dangers of driving at excessive speed. (In the 1950s, police concluded that Dean was traveling at 100 mph, causing the crash, but modern analysis determined Dean was not speeding.) In reality, the attraction was to gawk at the car that carried a beloved idol to his death. The council charged a small fee to let visitors, mostly teenagers, sit behind the wheel and commune with the dead Dean.

The wreckage of James Dean’s Porsche on the night of the crash.

George Barris’s reconstructed version of James Dean’s Porsche.

The initial tour around southern California was so successful that Barris soon began fielding requests to send the car on a cross-country tour. The chassis and recreated body visited several states before the car’s last known showing, in Florida. What happened next became the subject of mystery and legend.

Everyone agrees that the car never made it to its next destination.

According to the story Barris told in Jack Scagnetti’s 1974 Barris biography, Cars of the Stars, the Porsche was supposed to leave Florida on board a train. It had been loaded onto the train car, which set off for Los Angeles, but somewhere enroute, the chassis vanished from the sealed train car. “There was never any clue to its disappearance,” Barris said in the book. But Barris was, let’s say, a wild prevaricator who happily embellished facts to make for better stories, and his story changed frequently. A second version he told alleged that the car was supposed to travel from Florida to Arizona by truck. When it did not arrive, Barris said he hired private investigator J. J. Arams to find it, and Arams concluded it had never made it onto the truck and had been stolen in Florida. Some blamed Florida auto show promoter Leroy Gonzalez for taking the car rather than loading it onto the truck. In 2011, Barris changed his mind again and insisted the car had been stolen in New York City. By the end of his life, he was claiming—falsely—to have been intimately involved with the car from the first moments, alleging that Dean had sought him out to customize the car and that during painting, it induced supernatural suffering. (In reality, Barris did not see the car before Dean’s death.)

Now, a man claims to have uncovered the original documentation of the Porsche’s final journey. A poster in the Jalopy Journal forum identifying himself as Jackson Louis and posting under the screenname “Germ,” said that he has spent years tracing people who appeared in photographs of the (rebuilt) crashed Spyder on its tour of the United States in order to learn what happened to it.

According to the posting in the forum, Barris had given Germ access to boxes of old records for a project on Barris’s custom car business, and as part of the research Germ was able to find documents related to the mocked-up Spyder. In early 1960, Leroy Gonzalez of the Fabulous International Autorama in Miami requested the car for an auto show in Tampa, Florida and sent a check to cover the rental and shipping fees. The check bounced. In a letter dated February 22, 1960, Gonzalez guaranteed that the Dean car would be returned to Barris by April 1, 1960, implying that they had worked out the financial issues. The letter included an account number for the Bank of South Miami. (It is unclear, however, why the car was shipped out of Florida on March 30 but Gonzalez’s check was dated May 9; it is possible Barris began claiming the car was missing in order to build up a bigger claim against Gonzalez’s bounced check.)

Bill of Lading recording the shipping of the wrecked Porsche.

The most important document Germ uncovered is a Bill of Lading from Central Truck Lines, Inc. dated March 30, 1960. This form confirms that Fabulous International Autorama consigned a “wrecked auto” weighing 515 pounds to the truck line, which loaded it at 510 Jackson Street in Tampa and shipped it to the “Pima County Fairgrounds Exhibit Building” in Tucson, Arizona. The form states that it was shipped in care of George Barris, who seems to have been the person to have met the truck and taken delivery in Tucson. However, in July 1960, Barris wrote a letter to Gonzalez attempting to charge him $250 per week for each week the car had been missing, so the facts are not completely clear.

Consequently, if the car vanished after leaving Tampa, and the truck line’s paperwork shows that they shipped it to George Barris at the fairgrounds in Tucson, and the car never went on display in Tucson, the only logical conclusion is that Barris himself was responsible for its disappearance and his letter demanding more money is untrue. At the very least, it shows his claims about the Porsche vanishing from a moving train in Cars of the Stars are as fake as the supposed “curse” he also invented for it.