by Tom Rubython
The two men laid siege to Marbella’s night spots and became the talk of the town. Hailwood’s occasional presence helped Hunt to settle after Suzy Miller’s departure. And as Hunt’s Formula One career developed, Marbella proved the perfect haven for a few years. But most of all, it enabled him to keep the millions of dollars he was earning away from the clutches of the British tax man.
CHAPTER 18
Marriage to Suzy and Richard Burton to the rescue
James gets out of a hole
A few weeks after arriving in Marbella, James Hunt began rethinking his life. He was only 25 and, for some reason, he suddenly decided he should be married. No one knew what was going through his head but, whatever it was, it was not the soundest thought he had ever had.
Hunt had already given many people his views on marriage and expounded his belief that conventional thinking on the subject was wrong, especially with regard to racing drivers. He thought it was a “stupid myth” that drivers had to have a stable home life in order to cope with the stresses and strains of racing.
But his move to Spain seems to have changed his mind. Initially, he was lonely, and, within a week of arriving, he appears to have bought into the “stupid myth” and gone actively looking for a wife. Maybe his change of mind was caused by his sudden loss of form on the tracks. He told his biographer Gerald Donaldson that he wanted a woman to “help my career and ease my life in exile.”
In fact, the last thing Hunt needed was a wife. His lifestyle meant he met a lot of women, and it wasn’t unusual for him to have sex with more than two of them in a day – often complete strangers. His sexual appetite was voracious and, until he met his second wife, Sarah Lomax, years later, he never found a woman who could keep up with him.
His search for a permanent partner was short. Hunt began playing tennis at the Lew Hoad club in Fuengirola, where, at the bar one day, he set his eyes on Suzy Miller. Like him, Miller had just moved to Spain for a lifestyle change and was without friends. She had been modeling non-stop in London for two years and had made some money. She had also attracted the attention of some unsuitable boyfriends and had moved to Marbella for a change of pace.
Miller was a striking woman who always made a brilliant first impression, especially on men who appreciated willowy, small-breasted blondes. The two fell into easy conversation and, a few extraordinary months later, she was Mrs James Hunt.
Miller was not classically beautiful but had the effervescent appeal of an English country girl. Her looks, presence and effect on people were very much the same as the late Princess Diana’s. Princess Diana, also never classically beautiful, managed to captivate everyone she met – and Miller had exactly the same effect.
Barely 24, a year younger than Hunt, she had spent much of her childhood in Southern Rhodesia with her expatriate parents as well as her twin sister, Vivienne, and a brother called John. As a child, she took piano lessons and became a concert standard pianist. She also was an excellent cook.
Her father, Frederick Miller, had been a high-ranking officer in the British army and then a lawyer and barrister employed in the British colonies. Her childhood had been spent in a number of different countries. But it was under the African sun, with her father working as a judge in Kenya, that Suzy developed into a truly attractive young woman; a real ‘head turner’ as Hunt would later describe her to his friends back in London.
By the time the family returned to England, she was a young woman. Frederick Miller bought a farmhouse in Basingstoke, Hampshire, but Suzy, Vivienne and John all moved to London. Without any obvious career prospects, Suzy soon signed up for some modelling work and found she was constantly in demand. As well as being good looking, she had an easy personality and was at home in any social circle. She had an instinctive warmth and gentility, although she was not an intellectual of any sort.
In Marbella, James and Suzy began seeing a lot of each other. Hunt was still living out of a suitcase in a hotel, and she had an apartment on the coast overlooking the sea. Their mutual isolation was what initially drew them together.
Miller was very different from Hunt’s previous girlfriends. Undemanding, she was quiet and had a thoughtful manner. At first, Hunt attempted to treat her like all his previous flings – in a casual manner – but she bridled against it. And the more she bridled, the more Hunt wanted her. She was not prepared to be his casual girlfriend.
Like many women approaching their mid-twenties, Suzy wanted a husband. The fact that Hunt was a famous racing driver held no appeal at all, but she saw him as perfect husband material.
Miller had no affinity for motor racing whatsoever. She had left modelling because she had recognised how shallow a world it was and, from what she could observe, racing wasn’t that dissimilar. She was desperately keen to have children, and all she really wanted was a serious relationship with a suitable man. Content to devote her life to one man, Miller imagined a partner who would provide her with security and whom, in return, she could look after.
Hunt, however, just didn’t get it. And Miller quickly threw him out. Back at his hotel, James suffered a serious shock to his system. For the first time, he found himself feeling hurt and lovesick. Realising that he actually might be in love with her, he said: “I talked myself back into her affections.”
But Hunt had learned little and soon ended up back at the hotel once again. The relationship continued with its ups and downs, and the more she rejected him, the more he desired her. It was an old trap, and Hunt fell right into it.
After a three-week separation, which included the weekend of the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, he found himself intensely missing her. All he could think about that weekend was being naked in bed with her – and this time, his thoughts were not of lust but of love. Over the three days, he became more and more obsessive in his thoughts.
On the evening of Sunday 20th July 1974, he arrived back in Marbella. He had flown in from London after retiring halfway through the race. He drove straight from the airport to her apartment and proposed marriage. As he remembered: “Knowing that the prospect of marriage would swing Suzy around, I went back to her and proposed.” It was a desperate measure and reflected the extent of his infatuation. He had truly lost his senses. Suzy accepted without hesitation and immediately telephoned her parents and sister with the news. She watched as a sheepish Hunt also telephoned his astonished parents. The engagement was properly announced a week later and a wedding date set for the end of the Formula One season, in October. The roller coaster had started, and there would be no getting off.
Suzy wanted to get married right away, but that was impractical, and Hunt wanted to catch his breath and put some time between the engagement and the wedding day.
Immediately after the proposal, he expressed some regret to his friends, saying he was not quite sure what he was doing. Although he wanted Miller to be his girlfriend, he found he was still sexually attracted to other women. Miller, however, was perfect at family occasions and for parading as his partner. She added a great deal of value to him, and he knew it. So he resolved to try his best to reform himself in order to make the relationship work.
But there were inherent problems. He loved having sex with her, but found that it was over quickly. Hunt was a sex addict before the term came into common usage, and he was unfaithful to her almost from the start.
But Hunt found that, once he had proposed, there was no escaping “Miss Miller’s clutches”, as he put it. And at that time, he did not even particularly want to escape. He enjoyed home life with her very much. He was in love with her, or so he thought, and was undeniably proud of having landed her.
Friends at the time conceded that Hunt was unsure of himself where women were concerned, and his interest in them typically extended no further than the bedroom. He had a giant appetite for sex and looked to feed wherever he could. On a physical level, he was unequalled. Emotionally, however, he was an amateur. According to his biographer and friends, he would often suggest in conversation t
hat he was not sure what love was. Later in his life, he denied ever having been in love with Suzy or, indeed, even with his second wife. The only woman he ever professed to have loved was Helen Dyson, his girlfriend at the time of his death. But no one truthfully knows if that would have lasted, despite all Hunt’s protestations to the contrary. It seems he just wasn’t that sort of man. As biographer Donaldson astutely observed: “The emotional component of a relationship for James was still virgin territory.”
The engagement party was held at his brother Peter’s apartment in London. It was attended by the two families and most of the Hesketh team. Many of the invitees were very surprised. Hunt’s former girlfriend Taormina Rieck had married in the intervening years and was also there. He was still close to Rieck and had attended her wedding the year before. Now, Hunt stood before her confessing that he didn’t know what he was doing and that he didn’t want to marry Suzy. He said to Rieck: “I don’t know why I’m doing this.” To which she retorted: “Well, why the hell are you, you silly clot?” He allegedly told her that, as he looked around at the happy family scene, he realised that it had gone too far and he couldn’t get out of it. She remembers him appearing very weak and confused. It was at odds with the confident Hunt whom everyone knew. As Rieck now puts it: “I could see he was very confused.”
The situation was not helped by the attitude of Lord Hesketh, which some say bordered on the irresponsible. Hesketh encouraged the union and even offered to pay for the wedding, which he duly did. He then appointed himself to organise the event, and transformed the wedding into one big party for himself and his friends. Although Hunt had known Hesketh for only a little over 18 months, he was named best man.
Suzy was Catholic, which dictated a Catholic church, and Hunt converted to Catholicism for the ceremony. The wedding was held at the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, better known as the Brompton Oratory, in Kensington. The grand setting was entirely appropriate for the society wedding of the year.
Hesketh arranged a full orchestra to play the music, and the invitations stressed that nothing short of full morning suits were required. More or less every racing driver of distinction was invited, including Graham Hill, Stirling Moss, Jackie Stewart, John Watson and Ronnie Peterson.
The prospect of a wedding had been haunting Hunt since the engagement party. It had also been dominating his thoughts during the closing races of the 1974 season. Realising that the prospect of a permanent partner had not improved his performance in the cockpit, Hunt was well into having second and third thoughts about the marriage by the time the season ended. According to Donaldson, he wanted desperately to cut and run and get out of the whole dreadful situation, but was too chicken to do it. Seeing no way out, Hunt turned to drinking.
For the full four days leading up to the wedding, he was never once sober. The night before the ceremony he had hardly any sleep, as he stayed up most of the night drinking himself silly in preparation for the big event. And, on the day of the wedding itself, the situation was an utter farce. At 6 o’clock that morning, Hunt woke up and poured himself the first of many beers. Before leaving to go to the church, he knocked back a couple of bloody marys in quick succession in order to keep him going until lunch. By the time he walked up the altar, he was hopelessly intoxicated. Some say he had done it deliberately because he would otherwise not have been able to go through with the ceremony. As Hunt himself would later say: “I just couldn’t handle the whole scene, so I went out and got blind, roaring drunk. For four days, I went on the most stupendous bender of my life.”
At a time when what was really required was some clear thinking and decisive action, Hesketh and Bubbles Horsley indulged Hunt through it all. Horsley reassured him that every prospective groom was nervous before getting married, and Hesketh lectured him on his obligation to perform as expected of him and to not let people down. Hesketh employed some ridiculous analogy and convinced him that he would be disappointing his many fans if he pulled out. Hunt, of course, was too inebriated to argue, and Hesketh continued to assure him that “it would all work out in the end.”
Hesketh now vehemently denies having encouraged the marriage. He said to Christopher Hilton, one of Hunt’s biographers: “I think the truth of the matter is that James had rather changed his mind by the time he got to the church, and he wouldn’t have been the first or last person to have done that and survived.” But Hesketh admits: “He said it to me on the way to the church, and I said: ‘It’s a bit late now.’ It was a very big wedding. I said: ‘You know, everyone feels like this.’” Shirking responsibility for what happened, Hesketh says: “I think it’s probably always easier to shift the blame onto others, and I’ve got a broad pair of shoulders.” He does, however, concede that: “I’m not sure James was perfectly suited for married life, really.”
As for Hunt, he would say afterwards that he remembered little of the event. At the wedding reception, Hesketh and Horsley supported him when he had to stand up. According to other guests, he was virtually incoherent as he addressed the invitees and it was all rather embarrassing. Suzy just smiled her way through it all, convinced it would be different now that he was a married man. Given how much he had had to drink that day, the portents were not auspicious.
The following day, they left for their honeymoon and, once more, the occasion proved to be anything but straightforward.
Horsley had also married just a few weeks earlier and the two men planned a joint honeymoon in Antigua, in the Caribbean Sea. While both their brides had dreamed of a romantic honeymoon on the golden sands of Antigua alone with their new husbands, the two men seemed to prefer each other’s company. It was an entirely selfish gesture.
What Donaldson called the “essential incompatibility” of James and Suzy was immediately apparent by this deliberate arrangement of Horsley’s presence in Antigua. It was no accident of dates. Hunt simply didn’t want to be alone with Suzy for a fortnight. He knew she would want conversation and he knew it would have little to do with motor racing, which was all Hunt lived for.
The honeymoon happened, and that was the best that could be said of it.
When they returned to Spain as man and wife, things did not improve. Hunt was absent most of the time. Suzy just wanted them to settle down and enjoy each other’s company. She longed for a relationship, followed by three children and a settled family life. Having found a rented villa to move into, Miller desired nothing more than to be a wife and to build a home. The result, however, was catastrophic: the harder she tried to please him, the more he tried to shake her off.
The new Mrs Hunt did attend some motor races during 1975 and did her best to be a racing driver’s wife. But, mostly, she led her own life and her husband led his. He became consistently unfaithful and was not particularly good at hiding his infidelities. And she learned not to ask. Hunt recalled later: “It was a matter of clashing lifestyles and personalities. I am very much into racing and doing my own thing, and I move very fast. She wanted a slow pace, a good solid base and a solid relationship. Ironically, these were the very things I married her for in the first place.”
Within a few months, Suzy realised that the marriage was not going to work. Still, she was prepared to give it time in the unlikely event that she was wrong. At races in early 1975, Suzy admitted she was “bored stiff”, saying to friends: “I literally felt like a spare part. I was just there for the show.”
The couple began to spend more and more time apart. Sensing that the union was coming apart, Hunt’s parents, Wallis and Susan, travelled to Marbella for a long stay to try to make running repairs to the marriage. Upon their arrival, their son was absent, and he appeared only sporadically thereafter. Susan Hunt was entirely on Suzy’s side. She knew precisely where the fault lay, conceding: “Suzy is absolutely gorgeous, most of his girls are. But I can see that, for James, to be married is impossible. His lifestyle doesn’t suit it. I’m bound to say I love him dearly, but I’d hate to have him for a husband.” Susan Hunt had just about summe
d it up.
Hunt tried to explain what had gone wrong: “I thought that marriage was what I wanted and needed to give me a nice stable and quiet home life, but in fact it wasn’t. And the mistake was mine. I really wanted to go racing on my own, and it wasn’t much fun for Suzy to sit at home and wait for me all that time. It was also a terrible hassle for her to come racing because race meetings were probably the most relaxing time in my schedule. The rest of the time, you tend to be leaping on aeroplanes once a day and that made it even worse. It’s bad enough organising one person to get on an aeroplane; organising two gets to be twice as much hassle. It got to the point where it was a problem for Suzy to come travelling and a hell of a deal for her to stay at home. It was making life miserable in the extreme for her and, since I felt responsible for her, it was making me miserable too.”
Despite that, as far as his personality would allow, Hunt desperately wanted to please her. Whatever he said later, he was clearly in love with her. As he said: “If she stayed at home while I rushed around the world, it was boring for her. If she came with me, it was no fun for her. I was always looking over my shoulder to see if she was there, and she was always struggling to keep up with me. It was a heavy deal for both of us.”
Hunt knew he had to get out of the marriage and he prayed for a miracle. The miracle he hoped for, quite simply, was that she would meet someone else. Hunt did not want to desert her and was also wary of the money situation. In the case of a divorce, Suzy would have been entitled to a large share of his wealth, which he had moved to Spain to protect. A divorce would have relieved him of half of his UK£100,000 net worth just as he had started earning good money. He literally couldn’t afford a divorce.
Meanwhile, Suzy began to feel the same. Facing the possibility that James was not for her and that she had likely married for the wrong reasons, she wanted out as well. Nevertheless, Suzy remained supportive and sympathetic to Hunt’s feelings. But her understanding only ened his sense of responsibility for her, as he said: “I was very, very anxious not to hurt her. There are nice ways and nasty ways to do things, and I hope I can never be a hurtful person.”
