“I’d no idea of that. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. Thanks for letting me know.”
He could do anything he set his hand to. In Texas for Giant, he had so little to occupy him that he learned to ride and rope, until he could twirl a lariat as well as Will Rogers. He had overpowering ambition. Like John Barrymore, whom he might have equaled had he lived, Jimmy never thought of consequences. There was no risk he would not take. He was too young to know restraint, and he was marked for death.
He got even with George Stevens. I watched him play the climactic banquet scene where Jett Rink, middle-aged and defeated, is left alone to get drunk at the top table. He had some marvelous lines, but he mumbled them so you couldn’t understand them. When Stevens realized what had happened, he wanted to retake the scene. Jimmy refused.
There was no time for Stevens to try again to talk him into it. On the evening of Friday, September 30, 1955, Jimmy was racing down Highway 41 in his new, 150-miles-an-hour Porsche, which he had christened “The Little Bastard.” He ran into another car, and Jimmy Dean was dead.
Liz Taylor had two more days’ work left on Giant, including a call for the next morning. She was extremely fond of Jimmy, had presented him with a Siamese cat, which he treasured. That Friday night she telephoned George Stevens: “I can’t work tomorrow. I’ve been crying for hours. You can’t photograph me.”
“What’s the matter with you?” said Stevens, who had heard the news just as she had.
“I loved that boy, don’t you understand?”
“That’s no reason. You be on that set at nine o’clock in the morning, ready to shoot.”
She was there. When she started to rehearse, she went into hysterics, and an ambulance had to carry her to the hospital. She was in the hospital five days before she could finish Giant.
The body of Jimmy Dean was claimed by his father, who rode on the same train that took the casket back for burial in Fairmount. The only man from the Giant set who went back to Indiana for the funeral was Henry Ginsberg.