Shunt

by Tom Rubython

  Then he returned to London via Munich and went straight into the judging for Eric Morley’s Miss World contest. The Miss World contest was a very big deal in those days and scored the highest audience ratings on ITV every year. The judges were all famous people and it was considered a great honour when Morley invited Hunt to be one of them. Hunt couldn’t have enjoyed himself more that evening, and the smile never left his face. Photographs of him and the new Miss World appeared in virtually every newspaper in the western world.

  He went straight to Dublin, then Essen and onto Vienna. The Vienna trip was to open the Niki Lauda Racing Car Show at the behest of Lauda. Racing car shows in the seventies were very profitable events, and there were at least a dozen of them held in Europe across November and December. Hunt attended most of them that year. The public flocked to them until they lost popularity in the eighties.

  Hunt left Vienna and went straight for Zurich. Much of his schedule was dictated by awards that all sorts of people wanted to bestow on him. So Hogan went with the flow and organised his schedule around the awards ceremonies.

  Some of the awards and their names seem laughable now but, back then, Hunt was keen to scoop up all of them, especially if Marlboro cigarettes was paying his contracted daily rate of US$3,500. He couldn’t get enough of the ceremonies, as sometimes the organisers of the events paid him another US$5,000 on top of what Marlboro gave him. On one promotional day, Hunt was paid by three different companies for effectively attending the same event.

  John Hogan was well aware of what was happening but turned a blind eye to it, and paid Hunt for whatever days he was billed by his brother. Marlboro was reaping enormous rewards for winning the world championship, and Hogan didn’t care about Hunt’s occasional double or treble billing.

  Back in London, Hunt attended the Royal Automobile Club (RAC) prize-giving lunch. Normally, that event would hardly have been noticed. But Hunt decided to cock a snoot at the RAC for past slights dating back to his Formula 3 days. He was still bitter about how he had been disqualified at Brands Hatch in October 1971, when, although clearly guilty, he felt he had been singled out by the RAC stewards for punishment as an example to others.

  So he decided to inflict misery on the RAC and turned up for its awards ceremony in jeans, a t-shirt and, on this occasion, sandals.

  It’s impossible for anyone, even tradesmen, to get into the RAC club without a jacket and tie. Hunt wanted to be stopped by the doormen and had decided to leave immediately if he was barred entry, leaving the club’s directors to explain his absence at the dinner.

  But the RAC directors were cleverer than that and, suspecting there might be a confrontation, decided in advance to let him in and instructed the doormen not to react at all. There would have been difficulty turning him away since the dinner was in his honour. Hunt had calculated he had the advantage and revelled in his revenge, although he was surprised how easily they acquiesced.

  The annual British Racing Drivers’ Club (BRDC) dinner dance at the Dorchester Hotel was altogether different. The Dorchester had no dress code, so there was no question of him not getting in.

  Hunt had no grudge against the BRDC but decided that, having got away with it at the RAC, he would dress in jeans and an open-necked shirt and test the BRDC’s resolve.

  Adding to the contrast was his date for the evening: French model Valentine Monnier, who was in a beautiful pink chiffon evening gown and looked tastefully stunning in a way that only French women can. She was a total contrast to Hunt, and people had difficulty knowing where to look with this unlikely pairing of people. Monnier was on her way to becoming one of the world’s top models.

  Gerald Lascelles, the Queen’s cousin and the president of the BRDC, decided it was all too much and told Hunt exactly what he thought of him. But Hunt was already drunk and didn’t even know who Lascelles was. He proceeded to get increasingly more drunk and, by the time the Duke of Kent presented him with the BRDC award, he had no idea what was going on.

  It was no surprise when he later got into a scuffle with another BRDC member, who raced saloon cars. The member’s face was cut in the altercation and a gin and tonic spilt down his jacket. The driver retaliated, and as another guest tried to intervene, his glasses fell off and Hunt stamped on them. The farce continued when the intervenor informed Hunt he was the solicitor of the man with whom he had fought. Hunt’s reaction was to punch the solicitor as well and, by all accounts, both client and solicitor were on the floor nursing wounds inflicted by the world champion.

  Seeing the carnage beneath his feet, Hunt momentarily sobered up and apologised to the two men profusely. Amazingly, they picked themselves off the floor, forgot their injuries, wiped away the blood and were instantly charmed. According to a witness, the solicitor simply said to Hunt: “Think nothing of it.” Hunt jested that they should call it “a racing incident”, and they all laughed. Deciding enough was enough, Monnier led her boyfriend home to bed.

  To Hunt, it was just a jape. More serious were the explanations he undoubtedly must have had to give to Jane Birbeck the following day, when the next morning’s newspapers printed photographs of him and Monnier whooping it up.

  By the next day, Hunt had recovered sufficiently to appear on the BBC for a live interview.

  He went from London to a presentation in Bologna and, after that, he opened Giacomo Agostini’s motorcycle show, also in Bologna. At every event he attended in Italy, he needed at last twenty policemen on hand to control the crowds. Hunt marvelled at the contrast to when he had last been in Italy for the Italian Grand Prix, when he had been booed at every opportunity. As he said: “I was the villain at Monza, but when I went back after I had won the championship, you would have thought I was the biggest hero ever to come into Italy.”

  In the end, the police would only allow him five minutes at each event – such was the frenzy he created. The presence of him and Agostini together in Bologna created a mini-riot, which led the Italian news bulletins that evening and was treated as a national incident.

  The show was followed by a round of press interviews in Milan, where he had flown to attend the annual Autosprint magazine awards. Hunt, however, was very cross with the hypocritical attitude of the Italian journalists, saying: “They treat racing like a religion, get very passionate, and are fed a complete load of rubbish by their press.”

  The Milan trip, generally, was not a great one. John Hogan’s rental car was broken into while he and Hunt were attending an official Marlboro lunch in the city. Both his and Hunt’s passports and visas for Poland, their next stop, were stolen. Hunt’s diary was also taken. With the British consul unwilling to issue quick replacements, they sneaked over the Italian border without papers to Switzerland, where they found the British consul in Geneva much more amenable. Everything was replaced quickly and Hunt was able to continue his tour virtually uninterrupted.

  The biggest loss from the robbery proved to be his diary. As a tax exile, Hunt was allowed only 90 night stopovers in Britain a year and kept detailed records to prove his whereabouts to the British Inland Revenue. He had to recreate the diary from memory. It wasn’t easy.

  Hunt was exhausted by the non-stop pace, and the frustrations of the stolen passport brought it home to him. As he said: “I feel like a bloody ping-pong ball being bounced all over the place. Everybody is tugging at me from all sides and I seem to be moving in a world that’s gone completely mad.” But he knew he was a very well-paid ping pong ball, and endured it.

  The robbery was the only sour moment in the whole two months. With barely a blip in the schedule, Hunt was off to Geneva for a press conference and then more one-to-one interviews.

  With the frenetic schedule, Hunt was often giving interviews with up to ten journalists a day and was being shuffled here, there and everywhere by the very serious Philip Morris PR people, who realised they were hot and that this was their one moment to reap the rewards of it. Consequently, a host of exclusive James Hunt interviews began appearing around the w
orld and his image graced countless magazine covers.

  The only respite came when he flew down to Marseille for three days testing at the Paul Ricard circuit in the south of France. Alastair Caldwell wanted to try out the McLaren M26 that he had been developing over the winter. Hunt pronounced it a dog and slower than his M23, so Caldwell decided to start 1977 with the old car.

  But the big one still awaited Hunt. The one award he desperately wanted to win was the BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill had won it before him and he desperately wanted it too. He was dressed in a very fetching purple suede jacket and white heavy polo necked sweater, fashionable at the time. He was very much the British hero and hot favourite when he took his seat at the BBC Television Centre to hear the results. But, just like Lewis Hamilton would be 32 years later, was visibly shocked when the Olympic skater John Curry’s name was called instead of his. He later said to producer Jonathan Martin: “Why didn’t I win? I don’t understand.” Martin said to him: “Well, James, all the women voted for Curry – they like him.” Hunt looked at Martin and said: “And they don’t like me?” He was affronted and simply didn’t understand how a Formula One driver champion could be beaten by a skater.

  He had better luck with the Sports Writers’ Association, which named him the Daily Express Sportsman of the Year and 300 people cheered him as he arrived to receive the award at the Savoy hotel. This time, there was no sign of Valentine Monnier. Jane Birbeck, sensing the competition, was dressed to the nines in a stunning gown which left little to the imagination. She certainly delighted the motor racing establishment with her look that night.

  By then Hunt was getting very tired and even his legendary reserves of energy were being depleted, as he said: “ My personal freedom is something I had worked for for so long, and now it seems completely gone. I am simply not my own man anymore.”

  In mid-December, he flew to Paris with John Hogan for the FIA Awards, where the championship trophies were officially bestowed on the winning drivers. By the time they got to Paris, Hogan was exhausted and close to a breakdown. He said he was too tired to accompany Hunt to the prize giving. He remembers: “I flaked out and I said to James: ‘Listen, you’re on your own, I’m not doing this.’ I went to sleep in the hotel and James said: ‘I’ll go.’ God knows why he was so bright eyed and bushy tailed. Anyway, he went.” And so on 17th December, he finally got his hands on the world championship trophy and saw his name engraved upon it, where it would remain for all time. He was the 37th winner and couldn’t have loved it more. Hogan recalls: “I heard him come back at about 3 o’clock in the morning.”

  The two men had to catch a 6am flight for the final engagement of the tour in Brussels. They were picked up by Belgian Claude Begoine in his Rolls Royce at Brussels airport. When the Brussels promotion was over, Hunt and Hogan got on the plane for London, where Hunt turned round to Hogan and said: “Hogey that’s it, I’m outta here.” With that, it was over and Hogan didn’t see him again for four months. As they shook hands at Heathrow, it was a signal that the mission the two had hatched exactly a year ago had been accomplished. It was an emotional moment, and both men had come a long way together in those 12 months.

  Hunt went from Heathrow to his parents house to spend a few days with them before Christmas.

  When Hunt got back to Marbella a few days later, he went to bed and stayed there for two days recovering and getting ready for Christmas and the New Year, Hunt said: “I have never been so relieved to get to my home and my dog, and I had a very quiet Christmas.” He vowed never to put himself through that again, and he stopped taking John Hogan’s phone calls for a few weeks.

  Back home in Spain he contemplated the events of the past two months and he realised there was a serious downside to the career path he had chosen. Up to winning the world championship, it had been all positive and he had never believed there would be such a drawback. But the number of promotional events that he had been forced to attend was almost inhuman; sometimes he was doing three or four events a day.

  Although many of the events were choreographed and private – designed to impress and entertain a few important people – there were also some highly public events which he found draining and depressing. As he explained: “I am still very new to this, and the massive invasion of privacy is worse than being at school.” He was getting rather fed up with having to sign as many as 500 autographs in a session, something that could take two hours even at full speed. At one point, he asked John Hogan not to organise any more such events and told him forthwith he would be charging Philip Morris per autograph instead of per day. On the plus side, he admitted it was “a wonderful ego trip” but warned people close to him that his “ego was getting seriously over-fed.”

  Even close friends changed because he was now a famous celebrity. When he wanted a quiet supper in front of the television, or to be on his own, he would find himself the centre of attention at a dinner party for ten or 12.

  He also could not believe the number of gifts that were showered on him. But, with every gift, came a problem – especially with the expensive, useless ones. He instantly became responsible for them, which was often a nuisance hundreds of miles from home. He said: “What do I do with them? I don’t want a lot of useless bowls cluttering up my life.”

  He was also fed up and got annoyed with the constant sycophancy: “I get incredibly embarrassed when very successful men come up to me and start gushing. Okay, I have done a good job in a racing car, but some people get it all out of proportion. I don’t want to abuse people. I don’t want to start believing all the flattery. It can lead to bad behaviour, and I could end up a very objectionable person.

  “Still, there’s a temptation, when the seventy-fourth person grabs you and gives you an earful of bullshit, to tell him: ‘Fuck off and leave me alone.’ But that person’s probably travelled three hundred miles and especially wanted to talk to you. You need their support and it’s nice to have, and it’s not their fault they’ve caught you at a bad moment. They didn’t mean any harm, you have to remember that. But sometimes it’s very wearing, very tiring.

  “Short of locking myself up in a room, I can’t get away from it. And the problem is that the nice people don’t often come up and talk. It’s the pushy ones who barge through and make you perform. You feel like some sort of mechanical toy. When they confront you, it’s like throwing the switch and you’re supposed to do or say something clever.”

  And he had another problem on his hands. People, all sorts of people, were throwing money at him.

  Straight after his world championship victory, Paul Hamlyn, the well known publisher, who owned his own eponymous imprint, offered him a deal he couldn’t refuse to write an autobiography of his winning season. Hamlyn put US$75,000 on the table; payable when a final manuscript was delivered. It was an extraordinary offer, and more than what Philip Morris had paid him to race that year.

  Hamlyn explained that Hunt would not have to write the book himself. Instead, they would hire a ghost writer to do the job. He would simply have to spend a few hours answering questions into a tape recorder, and the writer would do the rest – but it would be his book.

  The idea had merit, and his brother liked the number that Hamlyn had quoted as the advance. It was at that moment that Peter Hunt truly realised his brother’s earning potential over the following years as the reigning world champion. Up until then, Hunt had believed he would be able to earn around US$500,000. But now he revised that to US$800,000. The cachet of being world champion was making a huge difference to his earnings already.

  Peter Hunt estimated that James had earned US$150,000 in the ten months up to the Japanese Grand Prix as an ordinary driver – but he had managed to trouser the same amount again in the last two months of the year as world champion. And the offers kept piling in. It was no longer necessary to go out and promote his brother. A single decal on the front of his overalls now went for US$60,000, up from US$5,000 just a few months before. It
was an extraordinary change in earning power, and it took everyone by complete surprise.

  Much of it was down to CSS. Barry Gill and Andrew Marriott had immediately seen Hunt’s potential when he entered Formula One in 1973, and they signed Hunt to personal deals with car manufacturer General Motors and Aurora, which made slot car racing kits. Vauxhall was one of CSS’ proudest deals, as Marriott recalls: “He was driving a car with a Ford engine and we did a great deal promoting Vauxhall cars.” Marriott can still not believe they pulled that off – Vauxhall paid Hunt US$120,000 a year and Aurora paid around US$50,000.

  Gill and Marriott were both journalists and they set up Hunt with a string of regular motor racing columns in newspapers all over the world. Marriott saw it as extra exposure for sponsors, and there was rarely a column where all of Hunt’s sponsors were not mentioned at least once.

  Hunt had been extremely savvy signing up the CSS agency so early. The agency had been founded by Marriott, Gill and publisher Michael Tee. From late 1974 onwards, they effectively built the agency around Hunt, and the relationship came into its own in 1976 and 1977 and endured until he retired in 1979.

  But, crucially, the agency was kept out of the book deal with Hamlyn, as Peter Hunt did not want to pay it commission on the deal. CSS received up to 20 per cent of every deal in which it was involved and, despite the strong editorial background of Marriott and Gill, plus Michael Tee’s publishing connections, Peter decided to do it himself and save the cash.

  But Peter Hunt, so efficient in financial matters, was immediately out of his depth, and, with no external support from CSS, he floundered. The book was important to James, not only for the money, but because it could be important to his image and reputation, and would define his world championship year. But it was now early November and the book needed to be ready in four weeks to be out for the crucial two-week buying season before Christmas. Hamlyn owned a printing plant and it would take a few days to print and bind once it was written and typeset.