by Tom Rubython
Such changes lead to big problems in local communities, and James was not ready for the resentment it caused. These sorts of incidents and disagreements sour the joy of caring and living in a rural environment, and Hunt’s neighbours were soon sour on him. For Hunt, there was no way back from the fox-hunting ban, and he told reporters he found the idea of it “horrible.” One local, quoted anonymously in the local newspaper, said: “Wait until one of them gets in amongst his chickens and he sees the slaughter and havoc one small fox can create. Then he may think differently.” But Hunt, who had never witnessed the aftermath of a fox attack on a chicken coop, remained unmoved.
But the biggest problem in what became a local saga was that one of Hunt’s principal opponents was his would-be father-in-law, the brigadier Nigel Birbeck. Birbeck was a formidable man and just happened to be secretary of the Bicester and Warden Hill Hunt. The complications this altercation caused for his daughter were immense as the two men stopped talking for a while. It also added to the tensions in his and Jane’s relationship.
Park Farm also had a big tradition of keeping horses. But if there was one sport that Hunt didn’t participate in, it was horse riding. As a car man who actually enjoyed the smell of petrol, he just couldn’t see the point; and the smell of manure never excited him at all.
In truth, he was as unsuited to the life of a country squire as one could possibly be. He found the surrounding villages to be seriously boring, and the village of Olney was perhaps the one place in Britain where no one recognised him at all.
He decided to keep the villa in San Pedro as a holiday home and planned to split his time between all three. He decided that Oscar’s future would be at Park Farm and that his other two dogs would remain in Spain. Oscar began his six months in quarantine, which proved a very difficult time and added to the stresses of the period.
And so began his new life in retirement, and it was not a happy time. Hunt made the classic mistake made by many wealthy people of overcomplicating his life and trying to live up to the amount of money he had in his bank account.
Advised by Bubbles Horsley, he got it completely wrong. Horsley was a brilliant team manager, but not so great as a life adviser. It was to set the scene for years of unhappiness.
Six months after the move back to England, the subject of marriage was off their agenda and Jane decided to pursue a career full time. She started a photo agency business called ‘Domino’. But soon after starting the agency, she closed it down and went to work for Mark McCormack at the London office of IMG. She said: “Mark created an opening for me at IMG at about the same time as James had planned the wedding. And I said to James I’d rather have the wedding later because I’d just been given this job. And that was it really. It was finished. We never talked about marriage again. It was just sort of quietly ignored. We missed our moment.”
And after that, his relationship with Jane Birbeck slowly began to deteriorate, as she later freely admitted to Gerald Donaldson. She began drinking too much and worrying about what was happening to her, as she said: “I felt he was just pulling me down.”
Retirement wasn’t proving to be all James Hunt had thought it would be, and he didn’t have enough to do. In truth, as soon as he realised that, he should have made the move back to motor racing – as Niki Lauda would do a year later. And it wasn’t as if there wasn’t opportunity. Hunt’s chance came when Teddy Mayer approached him at the end of 1979 and offered him US$1.5 million to make a comeback with McLaren for the 1980 season. He turned it down, believing he had not given retirement long enough. In truth, he had been spooked by the chances of getting killed. He had had plenty of time to reflect in the six months he had been away on just how lucky he had been. He counted seven times he should have been killed in his race car from Formula Ford to Formula One, and he wasn’t so sure he would be eighth-time lucky. Although retirement had been miserable, it was better than being dead.
It wasn’t only McLaren that needed him; Formula One did as well. From the halcyon years of 1975 to 1978, the sport had collapsed into a period of unremarkableness. Thanks largely to Lauda and Hunt, those three years of rivalry had transformed Formula One into a top global sport. Gone were the days when the BBC weren’t interested in it. It was now being sold as pure entertainment. But all the entertainers had gone, and the most charismatic man on the circuits was Jody Scheckter.
Hunt told journalists who got wind of Mayer’s offer that he would consider coming out of retirement if the sport was not so dangerous. The rejection was a huge mistake, and again the hand of Bubbles Horsley could be seen in it.
But in refusing McLaren’s offer, Hunt was playing a dangerous game. He was 34 and the clock was ticking. With the shortage of genuine stars in Formula One, he was at his peak attractiveness, and the folly of turning down such a lucrative return was proved when Lauda came back a year later to take the McLaren seat and win another world championship. Whatever advice he was getting and whomever from, it was wrong; just plain wrong.
CHAPTER 37
Disaster on the ski slopes 1980
Return to racing is thwarted by events
On 28th February 1980, during qualifying for the South African Grand Prix, Alain Prost crashed his McLaren-Ford M29B heavily into the barriers at Kyalami and got out of the car clutching his wrist in obvious pain. He had broken his wrist and could not start the race. It would be six weeks before it healed sufficiently to drive again.
The United States West Grand Prix at Long Beach, California, was a month away on 30th March, and that left the McLaren team with a big problem. The American races were important for Marlboro, and there was no obvious calibre of driver around as a replacement for Prost. Not unnaturally, Teddy Mayer immediately thought of James Hunt.
Knowing Hunt’s retirement was not working out, Mayer asked John Hogan to tempt him back into Formula One. He had seriously missed Hunt when he had left McLaren at the end of 1978. His replacement, John Watson, was a very able driver and as quick as Hunt on his day. But Watson was not in the same superstar class, and Hogan was not generating anywhere near the same amount of media coverage for Marlboro.
Hogan lost no time contacting Hunt and asking him to take Prost’s place in the race. He knew the publicity surrounding Hunt’s return, albeit for one race, would be huge.
Hunt was tempted by the offer but not keen to come out of retirement so soon, if at all. So he asked Hogan for US$1 million for the single race. Hogan had a very big budget, but US$1 million was out of the question. But Hogan, who had anticipated paying Hunt US$100,000 for his return, thought it through and decided that the publicity generated for Marlboro would be so huge that he counter-offered US$500,000 for the one event.
Hunt quickly decided it was too much money to turn down for what would be one week’s work. He figured that the Long Beach circuit would be safe enough for a single outing, even though the British tax man would take US$200,000 of the money now that he was back in Britain and paying UK taxes. So Hunt told Hogan he would do it and started training hard.
Then, at the end of the first week in March, he did something really stupid. He was on a skiing holiday in Verbier, Switzerland, with a large party of friends along with Patrick McNally, who worked for Marlboro. The party included a Marlboro-sponsored team of acrobatic skiers, called the ‘Marlboro Hot Dog Ski Team’. Hunt was drinking heavily that day. In the afternoon, he was taking incredible chances on the snow whilst under the influence. His luck finally ran out when he tried to do a back flip on a snowboard while completely out of his mind on alcohol he had consumed at lunch.
He fell down awkwardly in the snow, and the resulting impact detached the ligaments in his left knee. When it happened, he was so groggy from the effect of the drink that he couldn’t actually feel the pain and so he tried to get up. Getting up did even more damage to his ligaments. Gerald Donaldson described it as follows: “He was still under the influence of his lunchtime anaesthetic.”
But Hunt, completely oblivious to the extent of the
knee damage, attempted to carry on in the snow, making the injury significantly worse. John Hogan reflects: “If you ski when you’re drunk, it’s worse than driving when you’re drunk. You will definitely hit something.”
Eventually, he realised he was badly injured and lay down. He was taken to a nearby hospital on a stretcher. The hospital in Verbier was accustomed to all sorts of ski injuries but rarely had doctors seen such wholesale damage to knee ligaments. Unaccustomed to receiving inebriated patients, they were equally horrified when they realised that Hunt was drunk and slurring his words. As the ‘lunchtime self-administered anaesthetic’ wore off, the pain became increasingly worse. It was clear that it was a very nasty injury and there would be no more skiing for quite a while.
McNally phoned Hogan to tell him that any comeback at Long Beach was also out of the question.
The Swiss doctors decided to operate and knit the knee ligaments back together. When he came round after the operation, Hunt found the pain unbearable, and a morphine pump was set up by his bed. The doctors confirmed that he had endured the worst sort of ligament injury possible, and it would mean months in a full-length leg plaster cast and, when that came off, many more months in rehabilitation therapy. The doctors told Hunt to cancel his plans for the rest of 1980. But that, of course, fell on deaf ears.
He was forced to stay in the hospital in traction for 12 days. As he lay immobilised in hospital, he was attended to by Jane Birbeck, who did what she could to relieve the boredom.
At the time of the accident, Jane Birbeck was trying to get herself straight and give up alcohol and cigarettes. By now, she was deeply in love with Hunt to the point of unhealthiness, and was distressed by the pain he was suffering.
But, as she witnessed the extent of his pain and felt unable to help, she withdrew into herself. She also started losing her own battle to give up drinking. As she told Gerald Donaldson: “I didn’t go to see him in the hospital as often as I should have. I was terribly selfish. When he needed me, I really wasn’t there for him because I was trying so hard to straighten myself out.”
Things improved when he came got out of hospital and got back to Britain. When he got home, the time he spent in bed wasn’t entirely wasted as he and Jane took the time to talk and to get to know each other better. But whilst she was able to confide in him and discuss her problems, he found it very difficult to open up. Convinced that his innermost feelings should remain private, Hunt didn’t feel comfortable discussing them, especially with women. It was not in his nature to ask for help to overcome a personal problem. His sense of self-reliance had become so highly developed that he had never learned how to need anyone.
Determined to cheer himself up, he decided to attend the United States Grand Prix West at Long Beach, where he should have been driving but for the accident. Getting there with a cast that was almost the full length of his leg was difficult and painful, but he managed it with the aid of crutches. It was a stupid decision to go to the race and, even though his knee was immobilised by the plaster, the stresses of a long flight did not help the healing process.
He was to be deeply affected by what had happened during the Grand Prix.
After he had been rendered unable to drive, McLaren gave the seat to a young, up-and-coming driver called Stephen South. But he wasn’t good enough to be able to qualify. John Watson, then McLaren number one, could only qualify 21st, although he did drag it up to fourth in the race. The McLaren-Ford car, then in M29B designation, had not improved since Hunt’s exit.
But all that was secondary compared to what happened to Clay Regazzoni in the race. The Swiss was driving an Ensign-Ford. Ensign was a small team run by a character called Mo Nunn, who had originally been inspired by Lord Hesketh to enter Formula One, albeit with far less success. Regazzoni was down on his luck and at the end of his career. He was racing simply because he enjoyed it. He couldn’t give up the drug it had become to him. For Nunn, Regazzoni was a star, albeit a fading one, who drove for nothing and gave the team some resonance.
But it all went wrong for both of them on lap 50 of the race, when the car’s brakes completely failed at the end of the long, high-speed straight where Regazzoni was doing in excess of 165 miles per hour. Although there was an escape road at the end of the straight, precisely to cope with this sort of failure, it was unfortunately already occupied by a retired car that the marshals had failed to move. The Brabham-Ford of Ricardo Zuniño had stopped after a first lap accident. Regazzoni hit Zuniño’s car and bounced off it into the steel Armco barrier. He was immediately unconscious, as the huge impact had knocked him out. He regained consciousness as the marshals lifted him from the car, but was in terrible pain. He was rushed to hospital and operated on, but it was hopeless. He would never walk again. Regazzoni had been paralysed from the waist down.
Seeing the accident scared Hunt out of his wits, and he resolved there and then to make his retirement permanent. He was well aware it could easily have been him instead of Regazzoni, without brakes and helpless to control the crash. He just couldn’t imagine a life of paralysis and not being able to have sex. At that moment, he finally defined a question that had been vexing him for the whole of his adult life: whether he preferred sex or motor racing.
Meanwhile, back in England, Birbeck was suffering from miscarriage after miscarriage as they tried to conceive a baby. A baby would have altered the course of their personal history, and Hunt put his formidable intellect to the problem. They discussed for many hours how a baby was made and what Jane’s problem might be.
But the accident and his hospitalisation had done permanent damage to the relationship. She revealed: “We were still very close – there were moments when we were incredibly close – but I just thought that something went out of our relationship after that.”
In the background was the absence of Hunt’s dog Oscar, in quarantine. Hunt adored the dog and every hour thought about Oscar’s forced imprisonment, and it troubled him. Both master and dog missed each other desperately.
He found he could speak more freely to outsiders than he could to Birbeck. One of his confidants at the time was April Tod, the young tennis journalist who had presented him with a garland at Rouen all those years before. They met again at a party with both their legs in plaster. She, too, was nursing a nasty leg injury from a skiing accident, and they compared notes. Hunt couldn’t immediately remember her until she reminded him of their first meeting and that memorable kiss. Tod – then 28 – was, and still is, an extremely attractive woman with a warm, endearing personality. She remembers: “I had just come back from skiing and had a skiing injury, and there was he on crutches and I was on crutches, so we sat and chatted about our various injuries and he was really sympathetic. From that moment onwards, we bonded and we were always great friends.”
John Hogan doesn’t recall him being particularly depressed over the skiing accident, as he says: “I think he quite enjoyed that. He was hobbling around on his one leg – although it was very painful.” Hogan and Birbeck’s entirely varying accounts of those times indicates the ease Hunt felt with his male friends, and the unease he felt communicating with Birbeck, the closest companion he ever had.
One brief respite from the agonies was Hunt’s debut for the BBC Grand Prix programme on 18th May. With his leg still in plaster, he managed to get to Monaco and enjoy his customary good time, free from the driving duties although hobbled by his crutches. He was sozzled the entire weekend, including during the live television broadcast, where he deeply upset Murray Walker by resting his cast on Walker’s lap for the entire two-hour duration of the broadcast.
In the end, he spent nearly 12 weeks with his left leg encased in plaster. When the plaster finally came off, his leg was set in a straight position and he was faced with months of physiotherapy to get it back into proper working order. After that, he went to San Pedro to recover but was in pain he could hardly bare. The Spanish heat meant he could not sleep at nights, making him very depressed.
The trea
tment in itself was also very painful, and Hunt rushed the process as he couldn’t believe it was taking so long. The rush made the injury worse and he injured his ligaments again, which necessitated another operation.
The change in his circumstances was profound. Only a year earlier, he had been a top racing driver at the peak of fitness, and now he was virtually a cripple. It was not what he had expected in retirement. He later described the whole thing as a “shattering experience.” He was also taking a cocktail of prescription drugs to relieve the pain.
Jane Birbeck was shouldering the burden of all this, and, as his fitness deteriorated, so did his mood. He descended into the condition known as ‘black dog’. He admitted later: “Poor Jane. My brain became so addled with pain I couldn’t talk to her. But as much as she wanted to help, there wasn’t much she could do.”
Upon recollection, Hunt was sanguine about what had happened to him, saying: “An ordeal of pain is something very personal. It has to be seen through alone.”
The injury and its painful aftermath changed their relationship completely. They saw new sides of each other. It was a turning point in his life, which coincided with his change of status from golden boy racing driver to fallible ordinary citizen.
He didn’t know it then, but it was the moment that his life would begin its long descent into a downward spiral he would not pull out of for nearly ten years – by which time Jane would be long gone.
Birbeck was by then approaching her thirties and beginning to wonder what the future held. Despite all the advantages and being blessed with extremely good looks, she had done nothing with her life. And she was full of regret that, after so long resisting her boyfriend’s bad habits, she had sunk to his lows, drinking and smoking to excess. She worried she had developed an addictive personality as well.
And now, at this crucial moment in her own life, her boyfriend had been crippled in both mind and body at a time when they had three houses to look after and no income.
