The Boy

by Richard Williams

  CHAPTER 42 MELBOURNE

  The crowd gathers around the helicopter, at a safe and respectful distance. Men and women, boys and girls, they are packed a dozen deep in a wide circle to watch the slight figure as he climbs aboard, still wearing his racing overalls, turning to give them a final smile and wave of his hand. The door closes, the rotor blades spin faster, and they applaud as the machine lifts off, carrying away the hero who has spent a magical day among them. Faces raised to the sky, they watch the helicopter hover briefly above the parkland, over the circuit where he has given them a glimpse of the deeds for which he has become famous, before he starts the journey back to his own world, many thousands of miles away.

  This has been a typical day in the life of Stirling Moss, racing driver. It began, to the delight of the press photographers and newsreel cameramen assembled on the starting grid of the Melbourne Grand Prix, with a kiss from a film star – the English actress Sabrina (born Norma Sykes), noted for her hourglass figure and recently featured in Blue Murder at St Trinian’s, in a role that required her only to sit in bed wearing a nightdress, reading a book. It has ended, like so many others before it, with a laurel wreath around his neck.

  The date is 11 November 1958, and this victory marks the end of a season in which he has raced forty times, starting on 19 January in Buenos Aires and finishing here in Melbourne. He has raced in Argentina, Cuba, the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Monaco, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Morocco and Australia. He has avoided a kidnap attempt by Latin American revolutionaries and survived a terrifying accident at 165mph. Of those forty races, in eight makes of car, he has won twenty. He has missed being crowned champion of the world by a single point, the result of a gesture that will become almost as celebrated as any of his victories.

  The helicopter is taking him to the airport, from where he will fly to the Bahamas. The next few weeks will be spent in Nassau, supervising the construction of a waterfront house of his own design. He and his wife will stay there until New Year’s Day, when the papers report the news that he has been awarded an OBE. That day they take a flight to Los Angeles, where they attend a Hollywood party whose guests also include Tony Curtis, Gary Cooper, Joan Collins and Steve McQueen. From there they fly across the Pacific and back to the Antipodes, where a new season will begin with a win in the New Zealand Grand Prix.

  The victory in Melbourne is the 143rd of his career. There will be sixty-nine more to come in the four years before the injuries from an unexplained and near-fatal crash force him to quit, still without the title that many believed to be his by right. ‘If Stirling Moss had let his head rule his heart,’ Enzo Ferrari will write many years later, ‘he would have won the world title he so richly deserved.’ But today he is twenty-nine years old, close to the height of his powers and the apex of his fame.

  CHAPTER 43 THIS IS YOUR LIFE

  It’s an evening in April 1959 and Eamonn Andrews, one of Britain’s most prominent television personalities, is addressing the audience in the BBC Television Theatre. He’s teasing them with clues about the identity of the subject of this week’s edition of This Is Your Life – always a closely guarded secret until the moment Andrews, clutching the large red-covered book containing the biography in question, confronts the unsuspecting celebrity, who has been brought to the location of the live telecast under false pretences.

  ‘He’s a tricky character, this one – difficult to manoeuvre where we want him, when we want him – which is now,’ Andrews says, addressing the audience sitting at home in front of their screens. ‘So will you please come out into the street outside our theatre to see if we have manoeuvred him.’ He is followed by a camera as he makes his way out of the theatre’s main entrance and onto the pavement.

  ‘We haven’t got him here yet but there’s a lot of traffic, a lot of people gathering in Shepherd’s Bush Green… and let’s hope that our man arrives… You do see the crowd gathering outside, even though we’ve hidden the name of the show tonight…’

  A saloon car draws up, ordered into the kerb by a policeman on a motorcycle. ‘Ah, this looks like trouble! Well, now, let’s see – a speed cop, eh? Well, let me tell you, he’s not a policeman at all – he’s an actor. The people in the car don’t know that, but we do.’ As he speaks, a slightly built, balding man in a suit gets out of the front seat of the saloon.

  ‘I’ve got a different sort of a summons,’ Andrews tells him. ‘Stirling Moss – there are the cameras – This Is Your Life.’

  Moss looks surprised, turns as if to get back into the car, but then turns again and accepts Andrews’ greeting. Together they walk through the small crowd and into the theatre before making their way down the aisle, Moss shielding his eyes against the spotlights, until they reach the stage, where several empty chairs are arrayed around a low table on which is placed a vase of flowers, with a TV set on a stand in the background. Andrews guides him into one of the chairs while positioning himself next to the TV.

  ‘You know,’ he tells Moss, ‘we’d thought of putting a microphone in the car, but we’d heard of some of the things that you’re alleged to have said to speed cops, so we thought we’d take the microphone out.’

  ‘Just as well, actually,’ Moss replies.

  ‘Anyway, Stirling Moss, virtuoso of the steering wheel, This Is Your Life,’ Andrews says, reading his script from the red-covered book. ‘Now most of us only know you as a sort of robot in a racing car, remote and dedicated, come and gone in the wink of an eye. A young man in a hurry who knows where he’s going – and usually gets there first. But that’s today. Let’s look at yesterday, or rather twenty-five years ago.’ He turns to the TV set and the audience laugh as they’re shown a blurry home movie of a child hurtling down a lane in a pedal car. ‘Even then, a young man in a hurry,’ Andrews says.

  Two days before the programme, Moss had won the Syracuse Grand Prix. A photograph of a triumphant Moss comes up on the screen. ‘This morning’s headlines, there it was: “99 miles per hour – Stirling Moss does it again!” From boy to man, from obscurity to fame, from a bob a week pocket money to the salary of a prime minister – from start to finish, yours might be the story of one of your own racing engines: highly tuned, liable to blow up at times but the source of tremendous tireless energy.’

  And now the story begins, told – as is the programme’s tradition – by witnesses whose voices are heard before they make their way onto the stage. The first is a prep-school mistress, Peggy Shaw, who is there to tell us what a scamp he was. ‘He had more than his share of energy and I soon realised that I had to have eyes in the back of my head. I used to say, “Whatever you’re doing Moss, don’t do it!” Touchingly, she produces a present he gave her when he was aged ten: a tiny bottle of Evening in Paris perfume. ‘A fast mover, even then,’ Andrews remarks archly.

  We see film of the young Moss getting fit by hitting a punch bag before Andrews introduces the next guests. ‘You might have spent your days saying, “Open wider, please,” ’ he says, and a disembodied male voice responds: ‘And if I’d had my way, he would’ve.’ It’s Alfred Moss, who comes on stage accompanied by Stirling’s mother, Aileen: a pair of proud middle-aged parents. They talk about his early racing career: ‘He couldn’t tell his mother or I that we didn’t know what we were talking about,’ Alfred says, ‘because we did.’ Aileen adds: ‘The thing to make Stirling realise was that we did that for fun. We were amateurs. It cost us a lot of money. From a mother’s point of view, I’d much rather he were pulling out teeth – it’s much safer.’

  Andrews describes how, when Moss got his hands on a Formula 3 Cooper in 1948, his first win came in a hill climb at Stanmer Park. ‘That was the day we both got our names in the papers for the first time,’ says the next disembodied voice, which turns out to belong to Lance Macklin, a smoothie in a regimental tie who has arrived from Paris to talk about how they had chased women together during their days in the HWM team.

  Tommy Wisdom, the Da
ily Herald’s motoring correspondent, remembers the 1950 Dundrod TT, which Moss won in his XK120: ‘I must say, Stirling, I liked your nerve, asking me if you could drive my car.’ We see film of the following year’s TT and hear the Spitfire-pilot voice of the BBC’s Raymond Baxter: ‘Two minutes ahead of anyone else, the chequered flag signalled another win for Stirling Moss, his second successive triumph in this race.’ Ken Gregory, his friend and manager, comes on to speak of the disappointments of 1952 and 1953: ‘Although we did our best and tried many things, at the last minute something always went wrong.’ Gregory glances at Moss. ‘I wish he’d learn to relax a bit,’ he says. ‘This is about the first time I haven’t seen him doing anything. He’s always designing a house or a car or a boat or something.’

  Andrews summons the voice of an unseen Alf Francis. ‘Hello, Stirling,’ he says. ‘I’m still catching up on the sleep I lost working for you.’ Francis enters from the wings. Did he and Moss, Andrews asks, always see eye to eye? ‘In the majority of cases, never! But then again whatever arguments we had, we just worked like two brothers. We could have been arguing but we were working to the same end.’ He concludes: ‘Since I came to work for him in 1951, I realised he was a champion. Now I think he is the greatest living.’ ‘Thank you, Alf,’ Moss murmurs.

  A piece of film from the Mercedes archive shows him with Denis Jenkinson in the 300SLR. ‘Ahead of you now are the years of fulfilment,’ Andrews says, ‘the fulfilment for you of a special dream – to be first past the chequered flag driving not in the racing red of Italy or the silver of Germany but the dark green of Britain. At last, 1956, here it was, the Vanwall Special with you…’ – the audience applauds – ‘… as everyone knows, with you at the wheel, you were as good as if not better than the best. And 1957 brings with it another kind of success – marriage. After a hard day’s driving – a wife to come home to, a chair to relax in.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Eamonn. Stirling never relaxes.’

  ‘That’s the voice,’ Andrews says, ‘of his long-suffering wife, Katie Moss!’

  And on she comes, cool and elegant, to hear Eamonn’s scripted set-up: ‘I believe that you’re one of the greatest gin-rummy experts in Europe?’

  ‘Well, Eamonn, if I’m not, then I should be. Because Stirling and I travel many thousands of miles each year in a plane and I usually like to sit and look out of the window or write letters, but he’s always saying, “Well, come on, come on, let’s play something” – gin-rummy or cribbage or something. He just never relaxes.’

  ‘With all this travelling around, you must have watched him in a good many places…’

  ‘Yes, I have, but he changes when he gets onto the track. He becomes a different sort of person. He often doesn’t recognise me. I know the times when I’ve stood in the pits and he’s looked right by me.’

  There’s a slightly forced laugh from Andrews. ‘But off the track he notices you, I bet.’

  ‘He’d better.’

  There’s a hint of a smile. Only she and Stirling know that, after a year and a half of marriage to her racing driver, she is feeling the strain.

  Then it’s on to Paul Bates, a young man who caught polio and lost the use of his legs while doing his national service in Malaya. From his wheelchair, he thanks Stirling for the help he’s given him: ‘At fourteen I’d seen your first race, in the crowd, of course, and later at Goodwood it was one of the last things I did before I went to Malaya, only to come back like this. Your generosity helped so much to turn my dreams into reality. Several times you’ve been my chauffeur – some chauffeur! Seriously, though, I know it was your wish that your generosity should remain a secret, and I hope you’ll forgive me for breaking my word.’

  Juan Manuel Fangio is seen on the monitor screen, in a message from Rome, remembering the time they spent together – ‘often as opponents, always as friends’. But Andrews has saved the biggest surprise for last.

  ‘There is just one more voice for you to hear, Stirling, and it’s a voice that you never expected to hear again. It dates back only twelve years but it’s a reminder of the long, long way that you’ve come in that short time. I want you to think of yourself back in 1947: a grimy kid with a second-hand sports car and not much else except ambition. Sharing with you those long hours in your father’s workshop, sweating to get it right, was a former German prisoner of war, a general handyman-turned-amateur mechanic. You know who it is, don’t you?’ Moss smiles and nods. ‘That’s right. We found him in Aschau, a little village in Bavaria – your first mechanic and your first fan, Don Müller.’

  Müller comes on, a shy figure. ‘I told him many times,’ he says, ‘I knew one of those days he would become one of the greatest racing drivers of the world.’

  ‘You said it first, Don,’ Andrews says, ‘but today we’re right with you. Stirling Moss OBE, This Is Your Life.’

  The audience applauds, the guests gather round the star, and as the credits roll a continuity announcer’s voice is heard: ‘Actress Barbara Mullen from Dr Finlay’s Casebook is the guest next week at the same time.’

  Exploiting his interest in design and fondness for gadgets, Moss turned a former bomb site in a Mayfair side street into the epitome of contemporary urban living, frequently featured in newspapers and glossy magazines (RIBA).

  CHAPTER 44 THE PAD

  ‘My father taught me that if there was anything I wanted in life, I had to work for it,’ Stirling Moss said. He remembered Alfred Moss reacting to being sent an early credit card by getting a pair of scissors and cutting it up. Out for a meal with a large group of friends, Stirling was likely to insist that the individual bills be apportioned according to exactly who had eaten what. His secretary, Valerie Pirie, remembered this happening with a party of twenty-eight at the Nürburgring: anyone else would have said, ‘Oh, let’s just divvy it up’, but Moss insisted on going through it, item by item, to produce twenty-eight separate bills.

  Perhaps the word was frugal. He was not ungenerous and he was not miserly. In the Luxembourg Grand Prix for 500cc cars in 1951, when he was only twenty-two, he had been so disappointed by the performance of his Kieft, which lasted a mere five slow laps, that he gave back his starting money to the organisers, less his expenses. But when his own money was at stake, he questioned the price of everything. ‘I’m just not a wasteful person,’ he said.

  On a trip to race in Marseilles in 1951, one of his earliest forays into international racing, he discovered that he had been booked into the Hotel Bristol at 1,400 old francs a night, excluding breakfast – a couple of quid in those days. He crossed the road and found a more modest establishment charging less than half that amount. On his first visit to Los Angeles, he found the Beverly Wilshire Hotel too expensive and moved elsewhere. He cared enough about these savings to record them in his diary.

  Soon he was among those high earners complaining about the level of income tax imposed by the British government. ‘In my first big year of motor racing,’ he told the London Evening News at the end of 1955, ‘I earned £12,000. After tax, all I had left was £1,400. This year, I don’t know. I don’t know, frankly, what I have earned’ – according to his manager, the Mercedes contract was for £28,000 a year – ‘but as chairman and director of Stirling Moss Ltd I draw £2,000, on which I have to pay tax.’ His best year as a driver, he would tell Doug Nye, was 1961, when he earned £32,500.

  What his father also taught him was the enduring value of bricks and mortar. He bought his first property in Shepherd Market, at 36–38 Shepherd Street, in 1954, for £12,000, and set about converting it for use as an office. In 1961 he was scouting around for a place to build a new home from scratch in the same neighbourhood. The council invited him to pay £40,000 for a disused hotel and an adjacent bomb site at the top end of Shepherd Street. He declined the offer of the old hotel but bought the derelict site at No. 44–46 for £5,000. The original houses had been among five destroyed when a high-explosive bomb fell on the street at half past one in the morning on 16 November 1
940, at the height of the London Blitz.

  A casualty during the following year’s raids was a nearby cottage, built in the early seventeenth century to house the resident herdsman who looked after the sheep brought to the ancient May Fair. The very particular history of this little bit of central London echoes through the words of the authorities who banned the annual fair in 1708, condemning ‘riotous and tumultuous assembly… in which many loose, idle and disordered persons did rendezvous, draw and allure young persons, servants and others to meet there and game and commit lewdness’. After Parliament had passed the Street Offences Act in 1959, the evidence of sexual commerce became less obvious. But the little warren of streets on the fringe of Mayfair still exuded raffishness, like an upmarket Soho.

  Over the next few years Moss spent £25,000 building a six-storey house that became known, thanks to extensive coverage in television programmes and magazine features, as the ultimate bachelor pad – even when he was married. He employed an architect to execute his ideas, all of which were aimed at packing as much as possible into a relatively confined space, using imagination and technology. The features included walk-in wardrobes with motorised shutters, a spiral staircase, a lift, metal storage racks, heated lavatory seats, remote controls for blinds and entertainment systems and garage doors and buttons that enabled him to get a bath running at a set temperature from anywhere in the house, when such things were virtually unknown.

  During his absences, the work was supervised by Val Pirie, who had barely left secretarial college and was already thinking of switching to a more interesting career on the day in 1958 when her agency sent her along to be interviewed for a job that would last eight years, establishing a friendship that continued until Moss’s death. She kept his diary, sent flowers to his girlfriends, kept a bedside vigil after the worst of his accidents and eventually became a director of his company. More than that, she learned to adapt to the demanding and often disconcerting personality of a man whose well-known parsimony disguised a much warmer nature. No man is a hero to his PA, it could be said, and Pirie – whom he called ‘Viper’ – saw him more clearly than most.