by Tom Rubython
But when the article was published, it was relatively harmless and stopped short of describing what happened that night when they went to bed. Surprisingly, it has never before been translated into English, and this is how it reads in full:
The doorman of the Marbella Club Hotel, where, in the high season, I heard only the beautiful, the rich and the famous of the world are allowed, knows immediately what I’m talking about when I ask where the villa of James Hunt is located. ‘La Casa de James Hunt’, the doorman says to the driver of the taxi that he has ordered for me. The taxi drives away carefully on the bumpy road to the secluded villa where the Formula One world champion lives. Due to the heavy tax on his income, Hunt had to leave the United Kingdom.
It is ten o’clock in the morning. The bright, but not yet burning sunlight creates an atmosphere that is totally different from the drizzly-driven wet weather I have left behind in the Netherlands. The birds chirping are a delight as I have not heard them in years.
At the beginning of the driveway stand three tremendous-looking, barking dogs. A German Shepherd, a Great Dane and a Dachshund. When I get out, they do not bite – fortunately.
Long, slim, blonde and barefoot, I see James Hunt with his dogs: Oscar, Gypsy and Barbarella. Acknowledging me, Hunt runs back into the house with the dogs behind him. I walk into the house after him, directly to the large sunny terrace.
‘A bit of drama going on here,’ he says in his very English voice. ‘My housekeeper is meeting someone at the airport and I’m not that domestically inclined.’ I notice his voice is beautifully modulated.
Hunt is not often at home. Apart from racing and testing, he is always away on promotional tours and making promotional films for his sponsors.
He has not swam in his pool on the terrace this year, and it has flies and wasps floating in the water. The mattresses on the chairs and sun loungers are soaked from the early morning rainfall. In the house, he has a Neil Diamond album playing. ‘That thing is running?’ he says, laughing, when his eye falls on my tape recorder. ‘It is recording’, I tell him.
I have no idea what kind of impression I am making on him.
‘Have you ever been shy?’ I ask.
‘I am,’ he says, ‘especially in big groups of people. I do not like big spaces. The last year has been worse because now everyone looks at me, which is very heavy and it makes me nervous.’
You freak out sometimes?’ I ask.
‘Until now, no,’ Hunt says, grinning. ‘But lately, I sometimes feel that it could happen. The fear of rooms with many people is not so bad because, if it becomes too much, I simply leave...but in the last eight months, so much has changed. I do not know which way I will go. So much happens at once that I hardly have time to take it all in. If everything goes too fast to notice, I have to teach myself how to adapt, and that is not easy.’
James Hunt is often described as a playboy or, as I read in a magazine, a Don Juan. In the time that the young eccentric Lord Hesketh sponsored him, he travelled with the Hesketh Racing team in a private jet, a helicopter and a green Rolls Royce. And, at the Monaco Grand Prix, there were two luxury yachts and Dom Pérignon champagne flowed copiously like water and tea was served in Limoges porcelain. And, of course, there were beautiful women.
‘Do you treat women differently than men?’ I ask.
‘I think everyone does to some extent,’ said James thoughtfully. ‘I do not mind, certainly not with women whom I like…’
‘And women whom you do not find nice?’
‘I treat them not at all.’
‘Why not?’ I ask.
But James did not answer because he is distracted by Oscar, his German Shepherd. ‘Oscar, what have you got there?’ he cries and goes to the dog to get something out of his mouth. ‘He is my youngest,’ he says. ‘He is just one year old.’ Meanwhile, Valerie, the housekeeper, came back from the airport. When she sees James with his dog, she winks at me and says: ‘The most important person in his life.’
But I do not want to talk about dogs.
‘Why not?’ I ask James again. He sits back down and thinks. Its obvious that he tries to use his dogs to evade my questions.
‘As you can imagine,’ he says unashamed, ‘there are many women interested in me for what I am. I treat women differently than men because I’m in the right way to defend against the charms with which they come down on me.’
James Hunt was married to Suzy Miller for sixteen months, the woman who now is married to Richard Burton and is expecting a child. By marrying and divorcing, James says he came to realise that he loves friendship and is not a fan of the traditional roles of men and women. His current girlfriend, the beautiful New York resident Jane Birbeck, is with him because of that.
‘I treat her like a man,’ says James. ‘And she would not want otherwise. Therefore, we also agree with each other. She is independent and she does her work and I do mine. I don’t want a slave because I have a housekeeper, and I also do not want someone who follows me all the time, because I already have a dog.’
‘Are you saying that sometimes you love her?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ says Hunt, a little surprised. ‘Not as often and not in a ponderous way, but we say it now and again. It has taken a year before we said it to each other, however after eight months we already knew. You should always be very sure before you say it.’
I tell him: ‘I’ve never known what it means.’
‘That’s right,’ says Hunt. ‘It could mean anything. The only thing we currently do is enjoy the friendship we have and hope that, in a couple of years, when I withdraw from racing, we still feel the same for each other. But we are both aware that, by then, our time may have passed. She may have met another, or me.’
‘Are you jealous?’ I ask.
James does not answer the first time, as he is distracted: Gypsy is showing romantic interest in Oscar.
‘Gypsy, don’t,’ James calls, laughing. ‘You’re a girl...Oscar, bite her’, he laughs.
‘Are you jealous?’ I ask again.
‘Now, that’s an interesting point’, says James Hunt. ‘The last eight or nine years, I never have been. I have no reason to be jealous because I have everything I want. But, my friend, I am sometimes a little jealous when I think what she is doing in New York...but I know what she does, so really it’s no problem. I think you’re always a bit jealous when you love someone, and that is very important to me.’
‘Have you ever thought you could not really love someone?’
‘Yes, I was worried about it. For a few years it is not bad, but then, you still wonder whether you’ll ever love someone and therefore I find it nice that I’m a little jealous.’
‘Do you tell her everything?’ I ask him.
‘All that she wants to know,’ James says diplomatically.
I ask again: ‘You conceal things that you think are painful for her?’
‘I think so, but it’s never been presented as she would not ask me such things. She is too intelligent. She would not like to be in the position where I tell her something that would upset her...But I always try to avoid lying.’
The housekeeper has returned, and brings us two giant cups of coffee.
I am trying to feel completely at ease with James and, while we are posing for the first photographs on the edge of the pool, we get close to each other. Despite his blonde hair, he has very dark eyelashes. There is a mutual understanding developing between us, and we both know that in the course of the day we both expect more than a light touch.
‘It is dangerous to be interviewed by you,’ says James. ‘You make talking to someone too easy.’
That does not stop him from inviting me to lunch at the port of San Pedro.
We drive to the port in his Porsche. Hunt does not like to be noticed in his car. My legs are raised high as the seat does not go back. He has bare feet and his safety belt on as he safely speeds the car over the bumps in the road. He says he does not plan to be killed in a road car.
> ‘Were you shocked by Lauda’s accident?’ I ask.
‘Not really,’ says Hunt. ‘You know it can happen, we are mentally prepared and we know the risks. It’s just sad that your friend is injured, but professionally it does not matter. But if, for example, three major accidents in quick succession were to happen, we should start worrying because then something has changed. The only way to protect yourself against the dangers of a race at Grand Prix level, is simply not drive. Whether you ride hard or soft does not matter. I drive better when I drive very hard, because then I concentrate better. But most accidents happen because of something with the car. Drivers do not make mistakes, they make errors, but mistakes do not cause serious accidents statistically. When you make a mistake, at least you have the car under control. But if one wheel of your car flies off, you have no control anymore.’
James is quite serious about his job and now he talks at a stretch, and he forgets that he has ordered a sandwich and I forget my omelette.
‘Your omelette is cold,’ says Hunt. ‘But maybe you’ll find that good.’
I put a bite in my mouth and say that I have read that he wants to be world champion again. Many people think that Lauda would have been if he had not had his accident.
‘That’s right’, says Hunt. ‘Autocourse, for example, a directory of races, set an annual ranking of their own and have Niki placed first and me second. They love to be controversial, but I am very satisfied.’
I ask him: ‘Would it not have been an elegant gesture to surrender your title to Lauda in view of what happened?’
James gets indignant: ‘That’s a ridiculous question. If we’re not racing then we could just as well all go home at the start of the season.’
Calmer, he says: ‘Niki and I both have a very good year behind us. He had the sympathy of the audience and he knows he could have been world champion. Moreover, he has learned a lot since the accident. He is less closed and he now enjoys more of his life. Like me, has become aware that in life there is no time to lose. As for me, I find that I am world champion right now. If you have the string of statistics, you will see that no one has lost the world championship. After all, he has won four Grand Prix races and I’ve won seven of last year. It would have been ridiculous if I had won half of that number. And I have a chance this year, but it may be that this year it is Niki.’
It is time for James’ daily training. With stopwatch in hand, he runs the distance back and forward from his house to the main road. ‘I’m fitter than I actually need to be,’ he says, ‘but I force myself to do it every day. It’s more a mental workout.’
Oscar declines to join his master this time. ‘He’s too lazy,’ he says. ‘Once he sees me press the stopwatch, he falls on the ground.’
I try to run it with him; I want to see how far I get. Except that I’m hobbled, as I am not wearing training shoes. I get a cramp after a few hundred metres and go back. James disappears behind a hill in the road. The sun is already setting, and slowly I walk back to the house and sit on the grass in front of the door.
Drowning in sweat, James returns fifteen minutes later. At the gate, he presses his stopwatch and stands on the grass next to me. His face lights up with pure joy as he tells me he has broken his own record. Panting and breathless, he reaches out to my hand to help me to get up.
‘Your skirt looks great on your legs,’ he says. ‘Very sexy.’
‘Shall I show you the rest of the house?’ James asks, still out of breath from the run. I nod and ask myself if he will push me onto the bed when showing me the bedroom, but he doesn’t do that. His house is beautiful, though not cosy. It is rented and it contains furniture belonging to other people; a deep sofa made of light material with orange and green flowers on it.
There are some pictures of James in his racing car which remind me of a boy’s room.
‘Do you think of yourself as a man or a boy?’ I ask.
‘A boy’, he says promptly. ‘That is logical because all my life I have done nothing other than have fun. I have never outgrown it.’
‘You have worked very hard as well, haven’t you?’ I say.
‘Yes, very hard’, says James. ‘I have been working for eleven years as a professional driver and only in the last three years have I started to earn money.’
‘The last two years I have started to see myself as a woman,’ I say.
‘How old are you?’ asks James.
‘Thirty-one’, I reply.
‘I am twenty-nine,’ he says. ‘Maybe in about two years I will feel like a man.’
He has undressed and climbed into the bath that he had been filling. I have flipped the lid of the toilet down so I can sit on it.
‘Do you mind looking the other way?’ asks James, when he stands up in the bath to wash himself. ‘Otherwise, I will become very shy.’
‘Yes,’ I say, smiling, because the wall opposite the bath consists entirely of mirrors. James is laughing too.
‘Now I am ready for anything,” says James after he has put on clean clothes, combed his hair and put a necklace with a coin around his neck. We will be going out to dinner with two friends of his. James and I are sitting on the back seat of their car. During the drive, he puts his hand on my knee. Softly, he begins to tickle my thighs as he sums up the courage to do so. ‘All day, I have been looking at your legs,’ he says.
I have to laugh about his. ‘You are stroking nicely,’ I say.
‘I would like to stroke you all over your body,’ he says.
I say: ‘That sounds wonderful.’
While we are sitting at the bar in the restaurant, my legs are being tickled again.
He tells me: ‘I am doing it in a way that nobody will notice.’
‘I actually find it nice when people can see,’ I say. That comment makes James laugh. ‘But doing this in secret is nice too. Is it possible to stroke my legs when we are sitting at our table?’
Enjoyment, Enjoyment!
That is exactly what he does even while we are having a serious conversation, poker faced.
Later on, when we are lying on the bed, I hold James to his promise.
The article, although never translated, received wide coverage when it appeared. But its content was exaggerated and readers were lead to believe that Morrien had described Hunt’s sexual performance, taking readers through all the nuances of his lovemaking. She hadn’t, and she didn’t rate his performance either. But the article left no one in any doubt that they had made love. Morrien later told friends that Hunt was an expert lover and very satisfying.
What Jane Birbeck thought to all this has been never been recorded, but it certainly seemed to play a part in her decision to come to live with him permanently in Spain.
In fact, there were two triggers. Birbeck found she was pregnant in mid 1977, while she was still living in New York. When she told him on the telephone, she expected trouble. But the opposite happened, as she told Gerald Donaldson: “When I found out I was pregnant, I became terribly excited and rang him up to discuss it. When I told him, he just assumed I would come back and there was no more discussion. He appeared in New York to pick me up and we set up home in Spain.”
Birbeck’s pregnancy was the trigger for them to live together, and she gave up working in anticipation of the baby. By then, Hunt had put down more permanent roots and given up his rental villa and bought an old villa in San Pedro that needed renovating. Birbeck took charge of the renovations, as she said: “We got the builders in and made the house all nice.”
But the domestic bliss was disturbed when Birbeck suffered a miscarriage. The miscarriage changed all their plans, but the pain of it brought them closer together. And so began one of the most tender periods in Hunt’s life, when he stopped being unfaithful and became more devoted to her. She found his new sensitivity irresistible, as she said: “His sensitivity to my feelings became one of James’ most endearing qualities.” She says she learned so much about herself from him and that he helped her “grow up.”
David Gray remembers Hunt’s time with Birbeck as his happiest: “They were both very funny together very. It was all extraordinarily funny, and he was very loyal to her.”
The relationship with Birbeck was to last for five years and would be the most enduring of his life; it spanned his remaining time in tax exile in Spain and his return to Britain.
CHAPTER 30
A desperately disappointing title defence 1977
Over the top behaviour costs him dearly
As soon as the 1977 season opened, it was clear that Jody Scheckter, apart from Niki Lauda, would be Hunt’s new main rival. But there would be many rivals that season in an extraordinary year of close racing, when any one of seven drivers could easily have been world champion. Scheckter’s decision to join Walter Wolf ’s new team from his established perch at Tyrrell looked a good one. Patrick Head, the young Wolf designer who had designed the new Wolf-Ford WR7, was a coming man. Head, virtually unknown in 1977, was to become the dominant Formula One car designer of the eighties and nineties.
However, by the time Scheckter arrived at his new team, Head had resigned. But fortunately for Scheckter, he had left behind his new car, the Wolf-Ford WR7, a legacy that Scheckter was to exploit most effectively during the season.
The 1977 season opened in a hurry with the Argentine Grand Prix on 9th January. The race had only been confirmed on the calendar a few days before Christmas, after the financial problems that had caused its cancellation in 1976 had been resolved.
It was a very different James Hunt who arrived in South America in 1977. A year earlier, he was a new boy in the McLaren team but now he returned as world champion. He was now being paid US$250,000 a year by Marlboro to drive. Only Emerson Fittipaldi and Niki Lauda were earning more. It the first time in his life that he believed he was being paid what he was worth. The bonus structure was also impressive. With that carrot in front of him, he had attended every promotional event and party that Marlboro’s John Hogan requested. In truth, it was not too much of a burden for, despite his complaints, James Hunt loved being world champion.
