The money being offered for her American tour was good, the chance to spread her name abroad was unlikely to come so easily again. But the prospect of an adventure was the main attraction for Hélène. She was thirty years old, with nothing to tie her down. Hankinson had promised that she would be the first woman to drive on the dirt tracks and board tracks of America. She had seen the English sportswoman Gwenda Stewart driving a Miller 91 at Montlhéry, and had envied her. Let Stewart keep the dull Montlhéry circuit: how much more glorious it would be to drive such a car in America, to be a daredevil among dauntless men.
FLYING HIGH
9
RALPH’S HONEY
‘Honey, Honey bless your heart
Honey that I love so well
I’s done been true My gal, to you
To my Honey that I love so well’
‘LA CHANSON DE MR HANKINSON’, TYPED OUT FOR HELLÉ NICE’S SCRAPBOOK
Both the France and the Paris, liners which had been sturdily crossing the Atlantic throughout the 1920s, were of pre-war design. Efficient as carriers, they lacked the aura of glamour which surrounded the Ile de France. Built after the war, the new passenger-ship was decorated, as befitted an ocean-going advertisement for French design, with Art Deco fleur de lys, from the walls of its staterooms to the linen and tablecloths. The dining room allegedly stood comparison with the best restaurants in Paris. The liner’s first voyage in June 1927 caused more of a press sensation in France and America than the news, three months later, that the great pioneer of modern dance, Isadora Duncan, had been strangled by a trailing scarf as she was driven along the Promenade des Anglais at Nice by a handsome young man whom she nicknamed ‘Bugatti’.*
Perhaps the company on the Ile de France went to Hélène’s head (her travelling companions included a French marquis who was currently surviving marriage to Gloria Swanson; the handsome heavyweight boxing champion, Georges Carpentier; a Broadway producer; a couple of actresses; and the odious Harry K. Thaw, the Pittsburgh millionaire who famously shot his showgirl wife’s lover and infamously escaped conviction). It was probably they who persuaded her that the only place to stay in New York was the Savoy Plaza, on Central Park. Arriving on 29 July, Hélène went straight to the city’s most expensive hotel, took a suite, and sent a few telegrams. Henri Lartigue, when word reached him in Paris of her accommodation arrangements, was ready to faint with horror. Hadn’t she been told that the Paramount had perfectly good rooms for $4 a night? Was she mad? Who did she think was going to pay? Softening, Lartigue admitted that she seemed to be making an excellent impression. Word had already reached him from the Hot News Agency that Hankinson, his partner, Frank Wirth, and their publicist, Harry Riggins, were all thrilled by her (‘enchanté de toi’).1
There is no doubt that the Hot News Agency were pleased with their new client. Publicity director Harry Riggins, a skinny, cheerful man with an endearing fondness for wearing baggy chequered knickerbockers and an oversized sports cap, thought she was gorgeous while his colleague Frank Wirth referred to himself as ‘your most ardent applesauce admirer’ and begged Lartigue to send over some of her friends. Even Hankinson, one of the toughest promoters in the sports world, was sufficiently charmed to insist, if everything worked out well, that she should come and spend some of the fall with his wife and children at the Daytona Hotel on the celebrated speed-trial beach.2
The invitation came as the sweetener at the end of an afternoon of harsh business talk. The Hot News Agency would not, Hélène was informed, cover her costs at the Savoy Plaza. Neither would they pay for her meals, her telegrams and telephone calls, or her shopping trips. Her contract would begin with a practice run out at Harrington, New Jersey, well away from the public eye; during her first week she would be expected to familiarize herself with driving on dirt tracks and wooden speed bowls. Her first appearance was set for 10 August at Woodbridge and she would receive $200 per appearance, before deductions, as agreed. This might not seem a large sum but she should bear in mind the very considerable expense that he, Ralph Hankinson, would be laying out on publicity and the acquisition, as always promised, of top cars for her use. Would she like to guess just how much Ralph DePalma, ‘the Silver Fox’, charged for loaning out his Miller 91? It was a pretty sizeable amount but he wasn’t going to stint her. He knew the thrill she got out of driving the best cars and the best were what he planned to have her drive.
Hélène’s bill from the Savoy Plaza, New York.
Hankinson saw no reason to explain yet to his client that he would be making the Miller available to her only at events where another driver had hired the same car for a feature race and would be glad to split the costs of paying the owner. Hélène, while disappointed by the modesty of her fee, was ready to forgo an increase of wealth for the thrill and challenge of speeding along some of the fastest tracks in the world. Familiar only with the dirt track at the Buffalo velodrome in Paris, she had no grasp of what a life-threatening experience she was about to face. Her promoter was in no hurry to tell her.
Depression was biting deep when Ralph Hankinson signed Hélène up for her American tour. Over 13 million workers had already lost their jobs; millions more faced the loss of their homes through inability to keep up their mortgage payments. Light entertainment has always proved a good source of revenue in an economic slump. Movie theatres were packed in 1930; taking on the notoriously dangerous Woodbridge speedbowl as its director-general for the new season, Hankinson was ready to use all the glamour he could recruit in order to persuade a ticket-paying public to keep spending. For his opening event in May, he hired Ralph DePalma and Barney Oldfield to appear, an expensive investment guaranteed to thrill all those who knew that DePalma’s greatest triumph had been the day in 1914 when he beat the brilliant Oldfield to first place in the Vanderbilt Cup, run over the twisting roads of Santa Monica in California. Would Oldfield take revenge, twenty-six years later? Was the Silver Fox to be trounced at last? This was the kind of promotion at which Hankinson excelled.
It was with the same strategy in mind that Hankinson decided to proclaim his new client as the greatest woman driver in the world. Women were forbidden to participate in American championship races on either dirt or board tracks. Hélène, with her eyecatching background as a music-hall star and acrobat, would hit the headlines everywhere if she was presented as the first to break the rule. (In fact, she would be performing legitimately, as an exhibition driver whose stated intention would be to match or beat the fastest time made in a race that day.) She would drive notable cars and she would, if Hankinson had his way, drive them – as no man did – without a helmet, showing off her blonde curls. Any concern for the safety of his client was outweighed by the promoter’s eagerness to attract a good crowd.
Hélène evidently believed Ralph Hankinson when he told her that no woman had ever before driven on the American dirt tracks. She was not the first, even though rules did not permit women to compete on them in races. Little record remains of Joan la Costa, who had also been described by her promoter as ‘the greatest woman driver the world has ever seen’; her drive of a mile in 45.5 seconds was done on a dirt track in the 1920s, and she achieved the remarkable speed of 145 mph on what was then called a straightaway in Florida during the same period.3 Earlier still, Elfreida Mais had been presented at Wichita, Kansas, in the summer of 1916, as an exhibition driver on dirt tracks who already held the woman’s record for a mile in 53 seconds. (The daring Elfreida was killed in 1934 during a stunt which required her to crash through a burning wall.)
Left to right: Hermann Schurch, Ralph Hankinson, Billy Winn and Hélène in a very unusual customized car.
This does not diminish the challenge which was being presented to Hélène. La Costa and Mais do not appear to have been riding on especially difficult tracks, while she was scheduled to drive on some of the most notorious in the country. Langhorne, just north of Philadelphia, took twenty lives before it closed in the early 1970s; Woodbridge, the wooden speedbowl now also und
er Hankinson’s direction, was another Charybdis, its history littered with corpses. The danger of the sport cannot be overstated. Dirt-tracking in those days was, in the view of one historian, ‘the most hazardous form of a hazardous sport’;4 board tracks, while more widely used – Douglas Fairbanks* was, predictably, an enthusiast – were equally lethal. The fragile boards often trapped the wheels; chunks of wood flew loose; parts of the track caught fire from the overheated machines. Deaths were frequent; prizes of up to $25,000 guaranteed that there would always be entrants ready to take that risk.
Hélène, restricted to a salaried role as an exhibition driver, could only dream of such rewards. Hers, other than the thrill of the experience, was to be in the form of massive publicity. As a woman who revelled in being the centre of attention, she must have been entranced both by the advance coverage she received for her sensational first appearance at Woodbridge, and by hearing that she would be conducted on to the track by a motorcycle escort and greeted by a band of forty drum and fife players, all in dress uniform. It seemed for a time as though she only had to open a paper to find her face smiling out of it. Here, they showed her as a ballet dancer; there, she beamed out of a racing car, the record-breaking world champion. Feature writers competed with each other in the extravagant superlatives they lavished on her past achievements.
Addressing readers to whom job security now meant everything, they emphasized the courage she had shown in abandoning a successful stage career – no mention was made of her nude dancing – for the risky and unpredictable life of a racer. But it had always been her dream. Even as she danced, they suggested, this graceful girl had been dreaming of the moment when she would break land speeds in a car. Since then, sitting at the wheel of her ‘specially constructed’ Bugatti racing car, she had achieved ‘miraculous exploits’. The fact that all racing cars need some form of reconstruction to suit the requirements of the individual driver was presented as a homage paid uniquely to her by the manufacturer; much emphasis was laid on the fact that she had never before driven in the kind of conditions she now faced. ‘Aviation has its Elinor Smiths and Amelia Earharts,’ began one of these rhapsodic items:
Motor-boating has its Betty Carstairs, the brilliant and daring Englishwoman who has recently driven her boat at a speed approximating 90 miles an hour. For sheer dare-deviltry [sic] and reckless abandon, however, it has remained for Mlle Hellé Nice, a beautiful young Fresh [sic] woman to eclipse all her sisters in the flesh by abandoning the stage for a career on the automobile racing tracks of Europe and America. Both motorboating at high speeds and flying airplanes pale into comparative insignificance at the feats which Hellé Nice has performed on the racing courses of Europe.5
Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed a strange similarity in many of these articles; the old lady in her Nice attic must have laughed when she came to the page she had preserved from that time. Harry Riggins, the Hot News’ publicity director, had let her have the scrawled draft, just as he wrote it: ‘Aviation has its Elinor Smiths and Amelia Earharts . . .’
Hankinson and Riggins fed information to the papers; Hélène, meanwhile, was given a brutal introduction to the danger of the world she had stepped into. ‘Wild’ Bill Albertson, one of the most experienced drivers on dirt tracks and speedways, was the man Hankinson had chosen to act as her teacher. He taught her on the Harrington course and was there to watch her drive at Woodbridge the following week. On 16 August, only an hour after he had scrawled a portrait photo with an affectionate message ‘To my racing pal Hellé Nice’, Albertson was killed while driving on the Middletown track. Like most racing drivers, she was superstitious: Courcelles; Harcourt; Albertson. Who next?
Albertson’s photograph was eventually stuck into the scrapbook, dated and annotated; his smiling face looked up at the old lady from what she decided to call the American page. Beside each face, ornamented with a personal dedication to herself, she set about writing a note or two to hint at their place in her affections. Fred Frame had been a dashingly suave man who always wore a bow-tie and who had twenty victories on the Woodbridge oval to his credit; Billy Winn of Atlanta, Georgia, was a fearless driver with a notorious temper and an off-track record for womanizing, drinking and drug-taking. Billy was, she thought, the bravest of the drivers she had known: she remembered watching him on the Brockton track in September, covering two full laps with a missing wheel and in a hailstorm of clay clods, struggling to snatch the victory from Frame. He should have been killed; it was his own pit-stop attendants, scenting a share of the prize-money, who waved him on. She saw them do it.
A sample of Hélène’s notes from her scrap albums; here, she describes Schurch’s car and explains that the accompanying photograph (see page 124) shows her at the wheel but with no helmet because the crowds always liked to see her hair when she was driving.
The race at Brockton was won, not by Frame, but by Billy Winn’s best friend, a handsome young Californian called Hermann Schurch who had already beaten Frame at Woodbridge in June and now looked set to become a champion in this risk-filled sport. Schurch, the wealthier of the two men, owned a sensationally fast machine called a Hoosier Pete* which Billy Winn often drove; Hélène was allowed to make free use of it whenever the DePalma Miller was not available. It went, she remembered, equally fast – 245 kilometres an hour, a speed which could easily be achieved on the slippery wooden bowls but which became impossible on the pitted clay ovals which had once served as trotting circles for horses at the state fairs.
Both of her new friends died young and on the track. Billy, having won a long war against alcohol, was killed driving at Springfield in 1938; Hermann crashed at Legion Ascot, California, in November 1931; it was where he had chalked up his first major victory the previous year. He had been married for just nineteen days. She looked down at the photographs and smoothed them absentmindedly with her fingers. She had enjoyed Billy’s company; her relationship with Hermann was more intense. Telegrams flew to and fro between the events of each week; photographs of her smiling at Hermann, sitting in his car, leaning over the side as he prepares for a race, tell their own story. His face looks open, boyish and kind. He also looks heartbreakingly young.
Her first appearance was to be made at Woodbridge on Sunday 10 August. Knowing her love of style, Billy promised to send a car and driver (‘my boy’) to the Savoy Plaza to take her to the track. The staff who worked downstairs at the hotel were treated to the spectacle of her dressed for action, a beret pulled low to shade her cornflower-blue eyes from the morning sun as she swaggered down the Plaza steps, to be greeted by a driver with a mustard-coloured sedan.
It was a three-and-a-half-hour drive out to Woodbridge and the last part of the journey was slow, as Billy’s driver was trapped in a stream of cars, carts and old-fashioned carriages heading for the speedway. They arrived late, missing the first race of the day. The grandstand, which offered 10,000 spectators a clear view of the entire oval of the high-banked track, was already packed. High above one of the stands, fluttering in the wind, she saw a giant image of her face, confident and smiling at the wheel, above the announcement: ‘For championship performance give me ESSO.’
It was, Hankinson had decided, to be her day. Her face was in the programme, on the flags, and on the free leaflets which were being handed out with the admission tickets. She appeared, as promised, with a cavalcade of outriding motorcyclists, surrounding the Miller – not DePalma’s on this occasion – that she would drive in a high-speed dash at the end of the day.6
The band played, a cannon was fired, the celebrity, pleasingly starlike in her white costume and with her Harlow-blonde hair, demonstrated her stage training by waving, blowing kisses and making gestures of delight and admiration at the beauty of the car she was to drive. Since the elegant racing machines designed by Harry Miller were America’s version of the Bugatti, seductive, powerful and successful – Millers won the majority of board-track races recorded between 1915 and 1931 – the crowd were ready to applaud her good ta
ste.
Hélène appears in the 1930 Esso campaign.
None of Hélène’s experiences in America can have been more testing than this first exhibition drive, closely watched by the man who had her under contract and who had already strongly objected to her extravagance. She knew the history of the Woodbridge track; no woman had driven on it before. Every newspaper report she read told her that it was lethal. Hermann Schurch, who had won here on 1 June, must have described his own first race here under Hankinson’s directorship when, with a front wheel beginning to loosen from its moorings, he spun round three times on the track and plunged down into the dust before managing to right the car. A year earlier, a brilliant young driver had shot through the top barrier rail and into a nosedive of 35 feet. Like Henri de Courcelles, he died on the way to hospital.
Hankinson had a more recent tragedy in mind. Only two weeks before Hélène’s appearance here, one of Woodbridge’s most popular drivers, Bob Robinson, had swerved to avoid an out-ofcontrol car and crashed through the barrier to his death. A shadow had been cast over the day. Tragedy was not good for business. Just before Hélène set out to make her exhibition speed run, Hankinson dropped a friendly hand on her shoulder and explained the situation. Make a nice gesture, sweetheart, he urged her; something to please the crowd; she’d worked audiences before this; she’d know what to do.
And then the pistol cracked the signal.
Drivers on the notorious Woodbridge speedbowl.
Driving on a near cliff-face of slippery, lightning-quick boards, she had no time for reflection; forcing the car up, she straightened it and pressed down hard, remembering DePalma’s cheerful declaration that he could go round a speedway with his eyes closed, once the pace was right. Easily said; she could feel the wheels skidding and sliding, resisting her wishes. Faces flashed past like strips of white ribbon as she searched the rail and saw where Robinson’s car had smashed through it. Pulling the scarf from around her neck, she managed to throw it so that it caught on the splintered rail. The crowd roared approval; on the last of her ten laps, she pulled off her white beret and tossed it out at the same spot. It skimmed over the barrier into the darkness of the drop in a second, perfect display of homage.
The Bugatti Queen Page 11
