Go Like Hell

by A. J. Baime

  Soon Henry II was seeing his Italian “Bambina” frequently—one night in Paris, another in Geneva. He set up an apartment for her at 530 Park Avenue on the southwest corner of 61st Street in Manhattan, across from his suite at the Regency Hotel, on the northwest corner. They sailed the Mediterranean on his new yacht, christened Santa Maria. (One person who saw Cristina said that she “looked better in a bikini than anyone I’ve ever seen.”)

  The more time Henry II spent with her, the more he feared the consequences: his marriage of twenty-one years and three children, and his reputation. Not only was he having an affair, she was a foreigner. There were rules of society. In many regards, the year 1963 was still a part of the 1950s. You might’ve slept with another man’s wife, but you didn’t tell anybody. You didn’t mingle in the wrong circles and you didn’t wear a tie that was more than two inches wide. Divorce was against the rules, and breaking the rules was risky for a man who ran the world’s second-largest company.

  Henry II began to explore the line that separated himself from his public life. In Dearborn he was Mr. Ford. In Europe he could be Henry. For the first time since he had taken over Ford Motor Company in 1945, the interests of these two men were not the same.

  “I’ve got the company,” he said one night while discussing marriage with his mistress. “There’s you and Anne, but I’m really married to the company. That’s the one relationship in my life that will always be there.”

  During the summer of 1963, Mr. Ford’s employees stepped carefully around him. He seemed increasingly erratic. Bottles of scotch emptied quickly in his presence. One day during a meeting in Dearborn, Henry II sat listening to Iacocca pitch the idea of a new sporty model in front of the executive committee. This was Iacocca’s baby, the Mustang project.

  “Don’t give me this shit, Lee,” Henry II said. “Just don’t talk to me about it.” He paused. Then he said, “I’m leaving.” He stood up, walked out, and headed to the hospital. Doctors claimed he was ill with mononucleosis, but a rumor spread that Mr. Ford was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  For Henry II, success in Europe was critical. Therein lay the legacy that he would leave behind. Meanwhile, blind items had begun to appear in the gossip columns about a married American industrialist and his secret lover. Business and personal life, Europe and America—it became apparent to Henry II that his two worlds were going to collide.

  “He was like a time bomb,” one Ford executive later recalled. “You could almost hear the ticking.”

  4

  Ferrari, Dino, and Phil Hill: 1957–1961

  I was just a young man caught in a dangerous occupation and needing to go on. Should you want confirmation of what it’s like, ask a combat veteran from Vietnam or another conflict how they managed to go on in the face of death. And if you think there’s a great difference between them and an impassioned race driver because the latter has the ability to quit at any time, you don’t fully understand the pull of being impassioned.

  —PHIL HILL, 2004

  FOLLOWING DINO’S DEATH in June 1956, a string of tragedies began to plague Enzo Ferrari’s factory in Maranello. Some called it “a jinx.” Others were less kind in their assessment of the facts.

  The troubles began on May 12, 1957, at the Mille Miglia, a race on 1,000 miles of public roads in Italy, with Brescia at the top (the start and finish) and Rome at the bottom. Some ten million spectators lined the course, forming a barrier on each side of the pavement. Before the 1957 Mille Miglia, Ferrari summed up his favorite event to a reporter: “It is the race of the people. One may say that the whole of Italy leans forward with her eyes on the tarred strip of road somewhere along the course on Mille Miglia day. It is a day when I feel my life is useful.”

  Before dawn, under klieg lights in Brescia, thousands turned up to watch sports cars launch from a starting ramp. A Ferrari won the race as usual, but the victory was eclipsed by news of a tragedy, news that quickly spread from Tokyo to New York. Racing driver Alfonso de Portago, Marquis of Spain, was moving at near top speed in a Ferrari 335 through the rural village of Guidizzolo, when he blew a tire. The Ferrari guillotined a telephone pole, swerved headlong into a crowd, and came to rest in a drainage ditch.

  Twelve were killed and many more were injured. De Portago’s fame made the story all the more shocking. He was a nobleman and an international celebrity, an Olympic bobsledder, the married lover of both actress Linda Christian and Revlon model and fashion icon Dorian Leigh. He was a character so romantic and mysterious, even Ferrari found him fascinating. (Ferrari described him as “a magnificent brute.”) At the scene of the accident, de Portago was found twice. His body had been severed in two.

  Ferrari routinely read seven or eight newspapers a day, and he recoiled from the venom in the press. “The last time.” “Abolish the Mille Miglia.” “Enough with these absurd races of suicide and massacre.” The Mille Miglia—for thirty years Italy’s most beloved sporting event—was never held again. The Magician of Maranello bore the brunt of the blame. He was served papers: “Enzo Ferrari, born in Modena on the 20th February, 1898, and resident therein, [is] charged with manslaughter and causing grievous bodily harm by negligence. . .” The charge claimed that Ferrari had used Englebert tires not equipped to handle the speed that his cars could travel. He would be found innocent, but the charges would hang over him for the next seven years.

  When hearings began, Ferrari defended himself. He was a fierce nationalist, and he had dedicated his life to winning races in honor of Italy. He felt betrayed by his country.

  “Why should I continue in an activity whose only reward is being branded a murderer?” he asked.

  He threatened to quit, but he couldn’t walk away. Before the 1958 season, he debuted a new racer—the Dino Formula One car. In its nose was the six-cylinder engine designed on Dino Ferrari’s deathbed. Like Dino himself, the car was destined for death and glory.

  July 6, 1958: Luigi Musso of Rome was killed in a Dino on the treacherous Muizon corner at Reims during the French Grand Prix. August 3: British driver Peter Collins followed, also in a Dino, at the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring. At the Grand Prix of Morocco, the final race of 1958, Ferrari contract driver Mike Hawthorn placed second, earning enough points in the Dino to secure the World Championship. It was as if Ferrari had resurrected his son and made him a champion machine. Weeks later Hawthorn’s body was found lifeless in a wrecked Jaguar beside a wet highway outside London.

  Two of the original seven Spring Team members remained.

  A debate over racing’s death toll raged in Europe among sportsmen, journalists, moralists, and politicians. One estimate put the figure at 25 percent each year; one in four Grand Prix drivers who started a season could expect to be dead before it was out. After each tragedy came the grim cleanup, and the photos in the papers of weeping mothers and beautiful widows in black dresses.

  How to regard athletes willing to give their lives in the pursuit of glory?

  The racing driver spoke of speed’s sensuality, the way a lifetime of experience can be piled into a single lap around a circuit. And the challenge to one’s psyche—to master the car was to master oneself. There was the story—most believed true—of the driver pulled from a wreck with two broken legs, ankle, nose, ribs, three vertebrae. Doctors checked him over: his pulse and blood pressure were normal. When one had gone so deep into oneself, was there a way back out? To paraphrase the writer Ken Purdy quitting was in itself a form of suicide. “Only those who do not move do not die,” the French driver Jean Behra said after de Portago’s death. “But are they not already dead?” (Behra crashed a Porsche at the Grand Prix of Berlin on August 1, 1959, and was hurled from his mount. A witness described his final moment: “For an instant he could be seen against the sky with his arms outstretched like a man trying to fly.”)

  And the cars: Was the will to achieve progress, ever-increasing speeds, undermining itself?

  Every year engineers summoned more power from engines while
lightening the cars. The results were automobiles so fast, the slightest error or unforeseen variable could be catastrophic, and the idea of safety—seat belts even—was considered unmanly.

  “The modern racing car has become like the old Miura bull,” claimed retired Ferrari driver Piero Taruffi in an article in the Saturday Evening Post entitled “Stop Us Before We Kill Again!” “It has developed into an animal that is too high powered. The racing car must be bred-down to a safer speed.” These vehicles required “almost a superhuman quality from the race car pilots,” according to the Corriere della Sera.

  Though other teams suffered casualties, none suffered such loss of life as did Enzo Ferrari’s. The Vatican publicly attacked Ferrari in its official newspaper I’Osservatore Romano, calling him “a modernized Saturn turned big industrialist [who] continues to devour his sons. As it is in myth, so too is it in reality.”

  Ferrari publicly declared his bottomless grief for each of his drivers killed. He would remember shaking their hands for the last time. At the factory his inner circle saw him struggle to maintain composure, pulling himself together to maintain his public persona. But his critics argued otherwise. They said Ferrari controlled his drivers like marionettes, the strings being their own talent and vanity. They said he created rivalries between his men to spur them to move faster.

  “I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of those boys,” said veteran driver Harry Schell in 1959. “When you drive for Ferrari you are headed one way only: for that little box under the ground.” (Schell was killed in a Cooper at Silverstone a year after uttering these words.)

  No one could argue that Ferrari’s cars were less safe than any other. To the contrary, neither he nor his technicians ever cut corners. When asked about the root of his mania, his obsession with victory, Ferrari told one reporter in 1958, “Everything that I’ve done, probably, I did because I couldn’t do anything less . . . One day I want to build a car that’s faster than all of them, and then I want to die.”

  “It does not seem to me that I have ever committed a bad act,” he would later write in his memoirs. “Yes, I am calm, even if not serene, even terribly imperfect, as I am. I have never repented. I have regretted often, but repented never. Is this a good thing? I fear not. I feel myself to be alone after so many delirious events, and almost guilty for having survived.”

  On the eve of the 1960s, Ferrari found himself lacking talent. He had one young pilot on his team who’d been clamoring for a shot at the big time. The racer had been hanging around Modena for a couple of years, competing in smaller events and working as a test driver. He was a rare breed in this part of the world—an American. With each death, the American climbed a spot on the team. Suddenly, he found himself at the top.

  “How would you like to drive for me at Le Mans?”

  And there it was, a dream and a nightmare embodied in a sentence. Enzo Ferrari had spoken it in French. The man sitting before him—Phil Hill of Santa Monica, California—didn’t speak Italian, but he spoke French. They were sitting in Ferrari’s office at the factory on either side of an expansive desk. Hill was smaller than the old man; he stood five feet ten, his body cut wiry and strong, with short arms and heavily muscled hands and wrists. He was twenty-eight, but his short-cropped hair, smooth skin, and shy brown eyes made him look younger.

  Hill answered yes—he would like to drive for the team at Le Mans. But even then, Ferrari sensed hesitancy. The equivocation was clearly articulated.

  “What do you think of our great protagonist?” asked Ferrari. He was speaking of Umberto Maglioli, an Italian who had beaten Hill at the Mexican road race weeks earlier. Hill had come in second.

  “Oh, I think he’s just fine,” Hill said, trying to sound enthusiastic.

  “Well, I’m going to team you both in the same car at Le Mans. What do you think of that?”

  “Oh. Oh that would be great. That would be fine. I look forward to it.”

  The invitation was not just to drive at Le Mans. It was to join the team, and it had been accepted.

  “Well,” Ferrari said, “come now and let me show you the great cars you will be driving.”

  Phil Hill followed his new boss into the Ferrari racing shop. A spot on Ferrari’s team was uncharted territory for an American. Hill was the first.

  Hill was born on April 20, 1927, into a wealthy family. As a boy, growing up in Santa Monica he didn’t have a good relationship with his parents, and he was awkward socially. He was self-conscious, withdrawn, and he wasn’t good at sports. Other kids laughed at him when he tried to swing a baseball bat, and the snickering scarred him. Instead of playing with other children, Hill liked to wander alone in junkyards studying the rusted heaps. He could identify any make of car at a glance by age six.

  Hill’s aunt bought him his first car when he was twelve—an old Model T for $40—and with the help of his aunt’s butler, he overhauled the engine. He was too young to drive on public roads, but he had a friend named George Hearst, grandson of the publisher William Randolph Hearst, who had a horse track on his family estate in Santa Monica Canyon. The boys spent hours on the dirt oval, sliding into turns and speeding the straights.

  Hill dropped out of the University of Southern California and got a job selling foreign cars at Roger Barlow’s International Motors. He began to refine his crude racing skills. He competed at Torrey Pines, Palm Springs, Santa Ana. The road races drew large crowds and drivers from as far off as Tucson and San Francisco. Far from meccas like Le Mans and Monza, a group of talented young men was creating a European-style sports car racing scene in the dusty flats of Southern California. As Carroll Shelby became the man to beat in the South and Midwest, Hill won race after race on the West Coast. He read everything he could about his heroes—the ace pilots of Europe.

  Both of Hill’s parents died in 1951, and with his inheritance in hand, he contacted Luigi Chinetti in New York, the Ferrari distributor. Chinetti offered Hill a bargain: $6,500 for a 212 Export. The used Ferrari cost three times what a new Ford would, and it had a checkered past. That spring, a driver named LaRivière had crashed into a wire fence at Le Mans and had been decapitated. The dents had been hammered out; Enzo Ferrari needed the money. And so Hill began showing up at races in his Italian roadster, the third or fourth Ferrari ever to roll onto California asphalt by his estimate.

  In two years’ time, Hill was competing in international events. Racing side by side with his idols, the Californian found that he could compete. But these races opened his eyes to a different world. At a race in Argentina he saw a driver crawl out of a wrecked Aston Martin in a ball of flames. The man burned to death right before Hill’s eyes. Hill competed at Le Mans for the first time in 1953 in an Osca. Days later, he attended the funeral of American racing driver Tom Cole.

  The racetrack was a place for ruthless men, like Alberto Ascari, who was mean to his own son so the boy wouldn’t miss his father when he died in a racing accident, which he did in a Ferrari at Monza. And the Frenchman Jean Behra, who wore a prosthetic ear due to a crash, and liked to remove it when the comic effect was opportune.

  The stress took its toll. Hill suffered anxiety attacks before races. When he smoked his last prerace cigarette, his heart would be fluttering, muscles twitching. His stomach grew so raw he was forced to eat baby food. Even when he won, he suffered fits of depression.

  What was he doing risking his life? He didn’t fit the stereotype of the wild-man American racing driver. He was from a socially prominent family. He spoke French and adored Beethoven. And yet he was compelled to compete.

  Hill had X-rays done on his stomach, and his doctor warned him about an ulcer. So he quit racing at twenty-six. Months went by. One fall day, with the 1954 Carrera Panamericana approaching—the Mexican road race—Hill received a letter from a Texas oil man named Allen Guiberson, who contracted jockeys to race his expensive mounts. Inside the envelope was a photo of a 4.5-liter Ferrari with a shark tail fin on the rear deck. Guiberson had scribbled five words:

/>   “Guaranteed not to cause ulcers.”

  The Mexican road race ran across the Pan-American Highway, from the Guatemalan border to the Rio Grande, broken up into stages. Five days, 1,908 miles. “You go as fast as you think you can,” Indy driver Chuck Stevenson said, describing the ride. “And then you go even faster.” Hill placed second in the race, which claimed seven lives. The Mexicans had a nickname for him: El Batallador. That’s when he got the call from Mr. Ferrari. Soon he was on board a swaying train headed south down the Italian Riviera, en route to Modena.

  Contract signed, Hill moved into the Hotel Reale on the Via Emilia. He began to spend hours at the Autodrome testing Ferraris, and keeping fit by riding a bike in the hills west of the factory. At night the Reale’s bar was the place to be. The saloon crowded with drivers, women, wealthy car buyers, journalists, crackpots, and hangers-on, all lured to the Italian city by the bellow of the 12-cylinder engine.

  Hill was “on the end of the bench,” in his own words, suffering an inferiority complex. The men he mingled with were teammates, but he knew they’d do what they had to do to defeat him on the track. He raced at Le Mans, the Nürburgring, Monza. He traveled with a piece of hi-fi equipment and his favorite recordings of Beethoven and Vivaldi.

  Ferrari’s engineers learned to respect the cagey American’s talent. He was a skilled technician, and he began to pick up the Italian language, which endeared him to the mechanics. He understood the limit of his car and the limit of his abilities, intimately enough to reach both while staying in control.