Death By Car. Part 2
Some art lovers bemoaned the death of James Dean because they thought he was the perfect actor to portray abstract painter JACKSON POLLOCK in a movie. Pollock had achieved celebrity status for his "action painting," a process where he dripped paint onto a flat canvas to form abstract imagery. As it turns out, less than a year after Dean was killed, Pollock was killed when he crashed while driving his Cadillac between taverns near his home on Long Island, New York on August 11, 1956.
STEVE PREFONTAINE was (like Dean) 24 and at the wheel of a sports car when he died in 1975. The record-setting runner flipped his MGB in the early morning of 30 May after attending a post-race party in Eugene, Oregon. Prefontaine was alone in the car when it crashed. Although the exact cause of the crash has never been determined, postmortem tests placed Prefontaine’s blood-alcohol level at 0.16 per cent, well above Oregon’s legal limit.
Another early-morning accident killed actress JAYNE MANSFIELD. The bleached-blonde celebrity was driving from Biloxi, Mississippi to New Orleans around 2:00 am on 29 June 1967, rushing to make a talk show appearance in New Orleans the next morning. Mansfield was in the front seat with her lawyer Sam Brody and a chauffeur when their car ran into the back of a truck that was spraying for mosquitos. Mansfield, Brody and the chauffeur were killed; her three children, riding in the back seat, survived.
NANCY CRUZAN became famous only after the accident which led to her death. Her one-car crash on a Missouri road on 11 January 1983 left Cruzan face-down in a ditch and without oxygen for more than 10 minutes. Paramedics restored her breathing, but Cruzan remained in a coma-like "persistent vegetative state." Her family’s court battle to remove her feeding tube became a famous case in medical and legal ethics. The Cruzan family was successful, and Nancy Cruzan died in December of 1990.
MARY JO KOPECHNE died in an infamous late-night incident on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. Kopechne was in the passenger seat on 18 July 1969 when a car driven by Senator Edward Kennedy flipped off the Dike Bridge and into a large pond. Kopechne was trapped in the car and died at the scene. Kennedy escaped, but his failure to report the accident until the next morning led to a public scandal that scuttled his plans to run for president in 1972.
