By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  From 1935 to 1943 Aldo taught in New York, in two large rooms on the third floor of the Savoy Plaza Hotel. Then his friend the beautician Elizabeth Arden opened a salle for him in her premises in the heart of Manhattan. He was still able to live, as he put it, “in a princely manner,” going dancing with Dorothy Paley, the wife of William S. Paley, the head of CBS, and in due course remarried—to Rosemary, another Scot with an illustrious forebear (this time the warrior chieftain William Wallace). But the American fencing scene was totally different from that of Europe, and an older Aldo was no longer welcomed everywhere as a sporting phenomenon. “In their abysmal ignorance about fencing,” he hissed, “my compatriots and Hollywood seem nearly always to prefer fourth-raters to me.… This, of course, while not remotely affecting my vanity, shows the obvious truth that here whatever ability I possess is completely wasted.”9

  Some months before the outbreak of war he sailed for Europe, hobnobbing with Tyrone Power and “my old friend” Charles Boyer. In Venice he met up again with Fairbanks, “who happened to be talking with Goebbels, Hitler’s vitriolic minister of propaganda.” Aldo may have been an elitist, but he was no Nazi. After Pearl Harbor he tried to enlist in the American army but failed the physical.

  It was time to pursue a film career in earnest. According to his own account, Aldo had been offered an MGM contract by Louis B. Mayer at $300 a week, but his memoirs are full of proffered roles that never came to anything. He worked on Frenchman’s Creek with Basil Rathbone, training the leading man, Arturo de Cordova—his “co-ordination, thank God, was good”—then, having taught foil to Walter Huston’s wife when Huston came to Broadway to play Othello, he was put in charge of the swordfights in the opening act. And so it went on. Lillian Gish “fell in love with fencing at first sight. She took several lessons and I must say she was quite proficient at it.” He tried to sell a top nightclub act with “a (very) struggling actor named Cornel Wilde,” who was “anything but dependable”; Rosemary had to stand in for him.

  He was offered a part by Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Don Juan, doubling for him in the dueling scenes, but when Flynn said he would have to demonstrate his skills to the film’s director Aldo made it clear that “I did not care in the least to be examined by anybody, since my record as a fencer positively required approval from no one—least of all from movie fencing ignoramuses.” He never got the job and settled instead for putting on a display at Flynn’s home in front of a Hollywood audience, in which he and one of his pupils fought at foil and saber; afterward Gary Cooper complained that they hadn’t fenced épée too.

  The final ignominy came when Aldo was promised a leading role in Howard Hawks’s classic To Have and Have Not. He gave a copy of his book On Fencing to the film’s scriptwriter, William Faulkner, whose daughter, Faulkner told him, wanted to learn the sport. He then waited to see what role he had been given. It turned out to be that of a minor gangster, and he had just four words to speak: “Come with me, please.” In the final reel he is shot by the film’s hero, played by Humphrey Bogart. By the end of his first decade in America his arrogance had so alienated the fencing community that when the scene was played in cinemas fencers in the audience regularly cheered.

  All this time Aldo had been teaching, at his own salle on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, reached by a narrow staircase next to the dance studio on the ground floor. He proceeded to turn out champions at all levels within the small world of American fencing, but knew that all chance of performing on a world stage had disappeared. Aldo’s last years were spent alternatively teaching and firing off furious tirades against current fencing atrocities, Hollywood desecrations of real swordplay, and any attempt to raise other fencers above the record of himself or his brother. On the evening of November 10, 1965, students at the Aldo Nadi Fencing Academy were disturbed when their maestro failed to appear. A visit to his home disclosed that, quite out of character, the great champion had died peacefully in his sleep.

  THE ITALIAN TRADITION OF REMARKABLE FENCING FAMILIES WAS far from ended by the deaths of the Nadis. At the turn of the century Giuseppe Mangiarotti, the prosperous son of a celebrated soprano, was sent by his mother on a six-year European tour to acquire commercial experience. Upon his return home to Milan he opened a garage specializing in De Dion–Boutons, the superb French automobiles. Dining out one evening with his friend Alberto Costamagna, who edited the French sports magazine La Ciclette, he was introduced to Olderico Rizzotti, the magazine’s fencing correspondent. Mangiarotti, unimpressed by Rizzotti’s spindly appearance, maintained that he could destroy him with his little finger if ever they had to fight. As the two started to argue, a diner at the next table leaned forward to introduce himself as Baron Lancia Di Brolo, assistant master to Eugenio Pini in Buenos Aires. He was on holiday in Milan for the next four weeks. If Mangiarotti were willing, he would instruct him in the noble art. Giuseppe accepted and after a crash course defeated Rizzotti 20–17.

  Enjoying this new hobby, Giuseppe went on to study in Turin, Paris, and Budapest (under Italo Santelli) before returning home when Hungary went to war in 1914. In 1919 he founded his own salle. He also produced three sons, Dario (born 1915), Eduardo (1919), and Mario (1920), who took up from where the Nadis had left off. Mario fenced with three weapons, Eduardo with foil and épée, and Dario as an épéeist.

  It was épée that Giuseppe Mangiarotti loved the most, and the school he founded dominated international competition for nearly four decades. His middle son, Eduardo, was the strongest and by 1936 was on the Italian team. He was still at high school in Milan and had to be given special leave as “an excellent young Fascist” to take a month off to train for the Berlin Games. Although as a seventeen-year-old he was judged too young for the individual event, where the three fencers selected came first, second, and third, he was put in against the French in an attempt to upset the reigning champions. He proceeded to win his first three bouts 3–0 (every single hit made by a perfectly executed taking of his opponent’s blade and flèche) and tie his last 3–3—an exemplary performance for a fencer of any age. Two years later he took the épée silver in the world championships in Slovakia.

  Then came the war. In September the Italian government transferred its young champion to Malnate, on the Swiss border. With Italy’s change of side, Eduardo, rather than be taken prisoner by the SS, voluntarily led several hundred infantrymen to internment in Switzerland. Soon he was appointed camp lieutenant and was spending weekends training with the leading Swiss fencers in such cities as Berne, Zurich, Lausanne, and Geneva while during the week attending to his duties as an internment officer.10

  As soon as the international situation allowed, he was back into his stride, coming third in foil at the 1947 Lisbon world championships and, the following year, third in épée at the London Olympics. How the French must have hated these Italian dynasties, one rising up even before its predecessor disappeared. Not to be outdone, Mario fenced on the 1951 épée team that took the silver in Stockholm, while Dario won individual épée gold at Cairo in 1949 and the silver in both 1950 and 1952, plus a 1952 team gold. During his Cairo victory the heat was so intense that Dario twice collapsed with cramp, and his thighs had to be bound with string to prevent his muscles from seizing up.

  It was Eduardo, however, who lays highest claim to a special place in fencing history. Over an international career lasting twenty years he won six Olympic and thirteen world-championship golds. Then there were his thirteen silvers and seven bronzes. His thirty-nine-medal tally makes him the most successful fencer in world history—despite six of his prime years lost to the war. He has been criticized as an automaton, a Pavlovian specimen put together by his father,‖ but a young American fencer, Maria Tishman, who would reach the Olympic final in 1948 and knew good fencing when she saw it, vividly recalls her first trip to a European championship: “I had always thought of men’s épée fencing as two long-legged figures standing around for a long time poking and jabbing at each other. Then all of a sudden t
his guy—Mangiarotti—comes along, sleek and good-looking and—magnificent. He made it all look like a different game. He made it so exciting.”

  Eduardo Mangiarotti executes a flèche attack against his father, Giuseppe. In 1925 Giuseppe had shared the Italian professional épée title with Aldo Nadi, and in 1926 with Nedo Nadi. (illustration credit 16.5)

  No one piles up a record like Mangiarotti’s on technique alone. It requires character too. For instance, he had originally been right-handed, but from the age of ten his father made him fence with his left, modeling him on Gaudin. In Stockholm in 1951, in the foil semifinals, a German opponent struck Eduardo on his left index finger, with two bouts to go. Changing to his right, he went on to win both matches and take the silver medal in the finals. A couple of days later, reverting to his left hand, still heavily bandaged, he won the épée title.

  And yet, and yet … if one steps back from the long list of medals won and honors gained, there is one obvious lacuna. Despite placing second four times, he never won an individual foil gold. Someone would always come to take that great trophy away from Italy. And that someone was French.

  FRANCE HAD BEEN LONGING FOR A SUPERSTAR OF ITS OWN EVER since Gaudin’s retirement, and when the new prodigy arrived he turned out to be everything his country could have desired. Christian d’Oriola was graceful and technically masterful, with an extraordinary sense of time and distance. And in individual competition not once did he have to bow the knee to any Italian, as had Gaudin. Once asked the secret of his success—he garnered more world championship and Olympic medals than any other foilist in history—he replied, “I don’t know. I was certainly extremely quick and I always had a fighting spirit.” He might have added that being a left-hander helped; and he provided his countrymen with something more than medals—he exemplified the quintessential French style, which many other fencing cultures have tried to copy but never achieved.

  D’Oriola’s early years were markedly different from those of his Italian rivals. He began to fence when his father told his three children that they were all to take up the sport for a year; after twelve months Christian was the only one who wished to continue (a cousin, Pierre Jonquères d’Oriola, would become an Olympic show jumper, winning gold in 1952 and 1964). He was then eight years old. His father, a farmer in the southern city of Perpignan, was a club-level fencer and soon handed over coaching duties to two local professionals.

  D’Oriola won his first competition in 1942, a local under-fifteen event. “The night before, I lay awake thinking only that I would go all out on attack, but during the competition I got most of my hits with defensive movements.” After a second competition his father’s presence made him so nervous that he asked him not to watch, which he wouldn’t do again until after his son had won his first Olympic title.

  Christian was training just three times a week and only for two hours, a regimen that hardly changed throughout his career (now, a top fencer would expect to train six to eight hours a day). In 1947, at eighteen, he was runner-up in the national championship. “When I phoned my father to tell him, almost his only comment was ‘Why didn’t you win?’ ” Later that year d’Oriola went to Lisbon for the world championships—his first appearance in international competition. He won the foil outright. “I was surprised how hard the Italians hit. They all tried to beat me by closing distance and using their superior weight.” The next year, in his first Olympics, he was runner-up to his fellow Frenchman Jehan Buhan but won the world title again in April 1949. The following month he collapsed with severe kidney pains and withdrew from competition for two years. During his time in hospital his then master, Michel Alaux (later U.S. national coach) would smuggle foils into d’Oriola’s ward to give him lessons simply on hand actions.

  Having missed gold in London, d’Oriola traveled to Helsinki in 1952 determined to make amends. The foil’s nine finalists numbered three Frenchmen—d’Oriola, Buhan, and Jacques Lataste—three Italians, two Egyptians, and a Hungarian. According to one of the losing semifinalists (who was also one of the judges in the final), the Egyptians had already arranged to give their fights to Eduardo Mangiarotti, whose compatriots were also under orders to donate their fights to him. So the Italian champion had four of his eight bouts already in his pocket. At this point the French captain, René Lévy, elected that d’Oriola should be given victories by his two teammates. Buhan objected, saying that it was the usual practice in international finals for such fights to be ceded to whoever was that year’s French champion, and that was he. Lévy ruled that he would examine his judgment halfway: whoever in their encounter reached three hits first, Buhan or d’Oriola, would be given the bout, plus Lataste’s. (If one was a good fencer, losing a bout was an art in itself.) D’Oriola got there first. In the crucial bout against Mangiarotti he won easily, 5–2, and ended the final undefeated. Witnesses said that as finely as Mangiarotti fought, it was like watching a master class. D’Oriola merely commented, “I didn’t make any special hit against him—I could guess easily what he was going to do.”11 It was a simple statement of fact.

  D’Oriola’s performance in the team final against the Italians was even more impressive: he won 5–0, 5–0, 5–1, 5–2, giving the French the match, and the title, 8–6. The last two bouts didn’t even have to be fought. The young Frenchman was in his pomp. Contemporaries speak of him as having so fast a hand that one could not always follow his actions; “He moved like a giant cat ever ready to pounce or spring away”; “It was like fencing a telescope—suddenly a long arm would come out and hit you.” I have a picture of him from a world final, extended in a full lunge. His rear leg seems to go on forever, almost touching the ground for its entire length: like Spiderman in the cartoon strip.

  After his Olympic victory in 1952 he won the world title again in 1953 and 1954. From the decade beginning in 1947 he dominated foil fencing as surely as the Nadis had in the 1920s. Unlike Aldo but like Nedo, he was modest and unassuming—though perfectly able to fight his corner: in the first round of the Helsinki Games he was badly off form and seemed likely to be eliminated. His referee was an Italian, Terlizzi, and it was obvious that any doubtful hits were going against the French champion. Finally d’Oriola put down his mask, went up to Terlizzi, and took him by the lapel, saying in his harsh Gascon accent (as one of the side judges heard it), “I’m fencing quite badly enough on my own account without your help!” (D’Oriola’s version is that he was simply explaining that the Italian’s refereeing was increasing his motivation.) He went on to gain promotion by the narrowest of margins, eventually winning the competition. By 1955 he had come first six times and second once in his seven world championships—still a record. Then something happened that precipitated a revolution in the way foil was fenced: the world championships went electric.

  The three foil medalists at Helsinki: Eduardo Mangiarotti, Christian d’Oriola, and Manlio Di Rosa. Di Rosa’s brother Livio was to become Italy’s leading foil coach, helping to transform the sport and producing a stream of world and Olympic champions. (illustration credit 16.6)

  To appreciate the effect requires a little history. Electric foil had been around in various forms for more than seventy years (as opposed to “steam” foil, so called from the language of the railways when a “steam” engine was outmoded compared to the more modern electric locomotive). In 1885 a Belgian inventor appears to have constructed such an apparatus for scoring hits. Eleven years later a British surgeon developed “an automatic electric recorder,” involving a special jacket with wires attached to the collars of each fencer. “To accomplish his responsible work satisfactorily,” reported the Daily Courier of June 25, 1896, “it is necessary for the judge to possess the eye of a hawk and the agility of a tiger.” Although an exhibition at Salle Bertrand in London was judged “an unalloyed success,” nothing came of the experiment, and for the next forty years other inventors tried their hands, none with success.

  In May 1939 Béla de Tuscan, a former Hungarian army saber champion by then ba
sed in Detroit, who was in London to perform with his wife—“the only professional woman sabreur in the world”—demonstrated an electric foil with a deep bell-shaped guard made of red transparent plastic. There was no central apparatus, no reels or outside wires, and each fencer carried on his hip his own control unit, battery, and relay in a compact the size of a cigarette case, plus, mounted on top of his mask, a “signalization unit.” It may have worked, but it offended the purists, still smarting from the effects electric épée had caused on its introduction at the Berlin Games three years before.

  By 1954 the FIE decided that the chief technical difficulties had been overcome and was further encouraged by a demonstration held in Milan between French and Italian fencers. It showed that 75 percent of hits were decided at once by the electric box alone; 22 percent where lights went on for both fencers were decided clearly by the referee without difficulty; and only 3 percent gave rise to differing interpretations.

  Even after the introduction of the new equipment, including the special lamé metallic jackets that had to be worn over the usual clothing and the new foils themselves, there were severe teething problems. The foil, slightly shorter than the nonelectric version, was point-heavy and whippy, its lack of balance impairing the quality of its use. Worse, unlike electric épée, with its simpler wiring system, the new equipment inflicted shocks whenever a fencer perspired heavily. “The men sweated so much that they caused short circuits through the mask,” recalls Gillian Sheen, the Olympic gold medalist of 1956. “They had to wear our shower caps to protect themselves.”12 Even if the shocks were “almost always” confined to those who used all-metal handles, fencers were advised to change their clothes in midcompetition.