The Bugatti Queen

by Miranda Seymour

  It hardly mattered, after that act of grace, that she came nowhere near to matching the time made by the fastest driver of the morning. The crowd was in love. The papers hailed her as ‘The Speedbowl Queen’.7

  Woodbridge was succeeded by a weekly procession of exhibition drives, sometimes in the DePalma Miller or the Miller which had belonged to the unlucky Bob Robinson, sometimes in Hermann Schurch’s Hoosier Pete, and occasionally, after his death while driving at Middletown, in her former teacher’s Duesenberg. Claims that she would break the records of the male drivers were not borne out; she still drove fast enough to delight crowds who were unfamiliar with the sight of a woman in a racing car, let alone a pretty, delicate-looking Frenchwoman who struck poses and had the radiant smile of a filmstar. Hankinson had promised an exotic attraction and Miss Helen, as she grew used to being addressed, fitted the bill perfectly. The drivers were entranced; she returned the compliment by telling journalists that she was enjoying being treated as a colleague, one of the boys. The telegrams from Hermann, lavishly peppered with ‘love and kisses’ and confessions of missing her ‘very much’ every time they were apart for as much as a week, show that she was not quite that.

  It’s a relief to know that the Hot News Agency men doted on her, and that she did have at least one steady relationship, and with a warm, affectionate man, to rely on; her life as she trailed from one dirt track to another, competing for attention against the regular state fair attractions of human cannon-fodder, acrobats, weightlifters and what were bluntly called freaks, was harsher and more lonely than any of her previous experiences.

  The loneliness was part of the attraction. In interviews, she continued to emphasize her passion for solitude and to identify it with her love of skiing and mountaineering. ‘I love being alone in a lively street, in a crowded town,’ she told one interviewer, and added that she would much rather watch a crowd than go to a cinema.’8* She sounded strong and confident, but Teddie Caldwell, a lively New Jersey girl who was friendly with both Hermann Schurch and Billy Winn and who often joined them and Hélène in a foursome, was anxious about her. What Caldwell saw was a woman of violent mood swings who drove because racing had taken possession of her, like a drug, and who revelled in her ability to attract attention, to draw both men and women to her. It was, Caldwell thought, all very well for the moment, while she was driving at the peak of her powers and looking gorgeous enough to be seen as an attraction on any track, but what about when her looks started to fade, the strength to diminish?9

  A hint of Hélène’s darker moments can be found in a poem which she snipped from a newspaper and pasted into her journal. It is an epitaph and it suggests that she was piercingly aware of the price that she might one day pay for the independence she asserted with such pride.

  When he died, nobody laughed, nobody cried.

  Where he went, how he fares

  Nobody knows, nobody cares.

  Ralph Hankinson was so delighted by his client’s performances in her first eight weeks that he offered to renew her contract immediately. The offer was made at Bloomsburg, the last exhibition which she had agreed to give, on 26 September. The racing, as so often at the state fairs, was wedged between vaudeville acts; coming out to salute the crowd, Hélène was given a standing ovation before she drove on to the track at the wheel of DePalma’s famous Miller. Returning to the local hotel with her contract signed, she sent a wire to her father’s brother Henri, asking if she could come and visit him and her aunt up in Calgary for her vacation. It is just possible that she had become pregnant and that she wanted to remove herself from the public eye until she had dealt with an inconvenient problem. It is more likely that she wanted to be among familiar faces, to go climbing in the Rockies and to indulge in the pleasure of talking in her own language. She may have felt more lonely than pride allowed her to admit.

  Hankinson’s strategy was to keep his female attraction on the move, ensuring that she would always have fresh press coverage and draw new audiences; one reason for this was that she was unable to fulfil the boast he had made that she would match or exceed existing speed records. Her times were good, but they were not spectacular.

  It was probably for this reason that the second half of Hélène’s American tour took her further south, starting on 11 October with the dirt track at Winston-Salem in North Carolina. Neither Schurch nor Billy Winn was on hand to give her advice about handling a car on this notoriously tricky fairground oval or to spend time, as one of them would often do, on giving her car a last-minute check.

  There had already been an accident, although not a fatal one, in the feature race of the day. The winner was Bob Sall, described by the local press as ‘a rip-tearing demon of the dirt track’ and enthusiastically cheered by a grandstand crowd of eight thousand for his time (12 minutes, 10 seconds over twenty laps of the mile-long track). Hélène’s challenge was to beat the best timed trial of the day, a half-mile covered in 31·15 seconds.

  The fuzzy photographs suggest that she was driving a Miller; a new touch had been added to her appearance by wearing short sleeves trimmed with a feminine bow; the photographs also show that she was wearing only a beret to protect her head. She performed three laps before speeding up for her attempt to match the record.

  Accounts vary about the precise cause and nature of her accident; talking to a local journalist at the end of the day, she said that the steering wheel had not been correctly aligned. She had slightly dropped her speed for an approaching bend when she hit a pothole in the rough track. Swerving away from the spectators standing on the inner side of the track, she hit the barrier rail. The car overturned, hanging perilously above a high escarpment on the outer side of the track.

  This was the moment in which Ralph Hankinson saw his client’s remarkable professionalism. Crawling out from under the car, Hélène stood up, dusted herself down and ran back along the track towards the grandstand, waving her white beret and smiling. ‘And then,’ she told one of her interviewers, ‘I thought I might as well give them a bit of a song. So I did!’10 It was, the local papers declared, the biggest thrill of the day.

  Back in her room at the Robert E. Lee Hotel, Hélène bathed, ordered drinks, went through her English exercise for the day – she was studying the treacherous verb ‘to get’ – and changed into a dress before she went off to find the other drivers and gather tips about the next track.

  Looking back at her American tour after a gap of thirty years, she remembered it as life in a travelling circus. She remembered the smell of hot oil, the apprehension as she waited to start her run down another dusty track, wondering if she was going to survive it when each of them, at any moment, could end her life. Nothing, she said, could match the fear of death she had felt on those tracks, or the relief when she reached the finishing line.11

  No record survives to tell us how she fared at Langhorne in Pennsylvania, America’s most dangerous dirt track; the cuttings she preserved show that she thrilled a crowd – but where? – with her timed runs in a Miller Special belonging to red-headed Jimmy Paterson. ‘Red’ Paterson had replaced Hermann Schurch in her affections; a number of photographs taken at Kinston, North Carolina, on 24 October, show them arm-in-arm, looking well pleased with each other. Hellé Nice had, in this rough and ready masculine world, become almost like a mascot. When she ended her tour, she was presented with a silver cup carrying the signatures of all the men – Ralph DePalma was the exception – whose cars she had driven; it is anybody’s guess how many of them had been her lovers.

  And then what? As so often in Hellé Nice’s career, the trail comes to an abrupt end – in this case with her appearance at Spartanburg, South Carolina, on 11 November. Giving an interview the following year, she said that she had spent four months in America and that she had been given a wonderful welcome in the twenty states which she visited. In 1961 she airily referred to having raced at St Louis, Santa Fe and Houston. No record of these appearances has survived; it is probable that she was embellishing the
truth. In 1931, she had given a simpler account, explaining that her love of a hot climate had taken her down to Florida for the last weeks of her trip. Earlier still, she had hinted that further adventures were in store. ‘I shall be coming back to Paris in the middle of November,’ she told interviewer Maurice Berson in February 1931, shortly after her return to France. ‘I will tell you everything I have seen and what I shall be doing,’ she said and added tantalizingly that she would have to stop talking, ‘because it is a big secret.’12

  If there was a secret, it had lost any news value by the time she made her return to France towards the beginning of December 1930, after a long and happy vacation with Ralph Hankinson’s wife and their daughters at Daytona Beach in Florida. She had not become a film star or married a millionaire; she had, on the other hand, raised her profile as the only Frenchwoman to have raced on the American board and dirt tracks, while her record run at Montlhéry remained unchallenged. Ahead lay the gruelling and peripatetic life of a Grand Prix racer, in a world which was dominated by men.

  10

  SEX AND CARS

  ‘The only unnatural sexual behaviour is none at all.’

  FREUD

  ‘I was the only woman who raced in Grands Prix in a Formula 1 car,’ Hélène Delangle boasted to a friend in 1977 long after her career on the circuits was over.1 This was hyperbole. The term Grand Prix was freely used during the 1930s to describe many races, both on circuits and on public roads, which did not have international status; the term Formula 1 did not come into existence until after the Second World War. Of the 76 ‘Grand Prix’ in which she allowed it to be proclaimed that she competed, several – Nîmes, Dieppe, Biella – justify the name only in the substantial amount of prize money they awarded. This should not obscure the fact that Hélène drove on Europe’s most demanding courses and that she did her best to drive, without the concession of a handicap, against the best male drivers of the time.

  A handful of women raced in the thirties; few had the guts and stamina to trespass on the masculine domain which lay beyond rally driving and record-breaking. Fiery, red-headed Anne Itier drove in several Grand Prix events, competing against men; other French women followed the English example, preferring to test their skills at races set on steep hills, or at endurance rallies and speed trials. Even Itier, when questioned about her ambitions, hoped only to see three English women drivers competing against three French women. Hélène, asked the same question, ignored her own sex, naming the great Tazio Nuvolari, Louis Chiron and Philippe Etancelin as the racers against whom she wanted to test herself. Her wish was granted and few of her contemporaries would have disputed the view of the German authority Erwin Tragatsch that she was, with Elizabeth Junek, the finest female racing driver in Europe between the wars – and Junek had left the field after seeing her husband killed on the Nürburgring in 1928.2

  Supremely feminine in her extravagance, her love of pretty clothes and ornaments, and the flirtatiousness which had male interviewers (figuratively) eating out of her strong little hands, Hélène made regular appearances in articles which targeted a female audience. She was admired by her own sex; men, her chosen rivals, remained the companions of her choice.

  Visitors to Paris in 1931 might have thought that the country was doing remarkably well. The huge and faintly absurd Colonial Exhibition out at Vincennes vaunted France’s imperial strength, with an almost full-scale replica of the temple at Angkor Wat representing Indochina and gardens of date palms symbolizing North Africa. This looked good, but signs of prosperity, once the visitor strayed from the capital or the booming Riviera Coast, were scant. Towns like Pau and Vichy, blighted since the war by the loss of a whole generation of young men, were struggling, short of money and of visitors. Genteel travellers who came to taste the waters, to look at the architecture and be on their way, were of no value; what these towns needed to help their businesses thrive were big captive crowds. Nothing brought them in so reliably as a Grand Prix weekend event, but the size of the crowd depended to a significant degree on the attractions they were offered. Hellé Nice, blonde, brave and fiery, superb at establishing a rapport with the spectators, was a driver worth her weight in gold to a town which was trying to establish its name in the Grand Prix season.

  Among the most poignant of the relics that the old lady in Nice preserved were the sheets of paper on which, with meticulous care, she kept track of her racing invitations, the money offered and the expenses she would have to pay. They are poignant because, despite the fact that she was sometimes offered as much as 6,000 francs in start money – payable so long as she began the race – the struggle was always hard. ‘Not enough!’ she angrily wrote beside one offer of 2,000 francs, and, since she often had to cover the cost of transport, maintenance, finding a garage, paying a mechanic, licensing, new tyres – they seldom survived a race intact – the response seems reasonable.

  The fact that she also had to maintain one of the world’s most extravagant touring cars, a Hispano Suiza, probably added to the sense of urgency. But Hélène was lucky in some ways and resourceful in others. She must, since there are no references in her accounts to any expenses for a Bugatti, have been looked after by Molsheim to some degree; she also had a special arrangement with Marcel Mongin’s garage, which allowed her to have special rates for repairs and maintenance. Her lovers were almost invariably well-off members of the racing community, and in a position to offer financial support.

  It was rare for a lover to be able to influence the amount of money Hélène was offered to take part in a Grand Prix; the fact that she was receiving between 5,000 and 6,000 francs per race, a considerable sum in 1932 and again in 1934, can be tied to the fact that these were the years during which she established new women’s records on the demanding hill climb at Mont Ventoux in Provence; with each major success, her start-money increased. Conversely, after an operation for a burst appendix had kept her away from racing and the public eye for five months at the beginning of 1933, her start-money suffered a sharp drop.

  Negotiations were tough and not always to her liking; many mechanics resented working for a woman racer and the cost of keeping a car in peak racing condition was considerable. Occasionally, Hélène dropped her guard of breezy confidence to admit despair. Teddie Caldwell, the friend she acquired on her American tour, was a regular correspondent. Teddie kept Hélène up to date about Billy Winn’s continuing battle against alcohol – he quit drinking in 1934 and achieved some of his greatest successes thereafter – and sent the news in 1931 of poor Hermann Schurch’s death during a time-trial in California, ‘a big shock to all of us’, less than three weeks after his marriage.3 In the autumn of 1933, Teddie received an uncharacteristically despondent letter from France. ‘Yes, Hellé [Teddie pronounced it ‘Ellie’], I suppose you do have it hard,’ she wrote back, ‘trying to meet expenses on what the promoters want to pay and once in the racing game, it gets into your blood and you just don’t want it to stop. Maybe, next year things will be better.’4 Happily, she was proved right; 1934 and 1935 were two of Hellé Nice’s most successful years: ‘I was,’ she wrote later of her triumphant past, ‘received like an ambassadress whenever I travelled abroad to race. They played the Marseillaise when I drove on to the track, honouring France in the welcome they gave me.’5 But Teddie’s observations were prescient. The thrill of competitive racing had become her friend’s drug, as necessary to her as breathing. However tough the conditions this was her source of joy, her way of life. She would never, now, consider any other. She could not.

  Few family letters have survived from the period after Hélène’s return from America, but an old inhabitant of Sainte-Mesme remembers the sports celebrity making occasional visits to the old-fashioned family house on the main street in which the couple always known as M. and Mme Bernard had lived since 1926. Hélène’s most regular escort on these visits was the man who may have already become her civil law husband. Solid, prosperous and good-humoured, Marcel Mongin was a good friend to the family
. In Paris, he brightened Solange Delangle’s drab life as a telegraph clerk by taking her out to supper and an occasional visit to the cinema; at Sainte-Mesme, he was ready to take a turn at pumping water from the well at the back of the house or to stroll, with a gun under his arm, through the glades and rides of the Rambouillet woods with Henri, the gentle, purposeless young man who was still little ‘Didi’ to his older sister.6

  The contrasts in the family character had, with time, become marked. Henri, like Hélène, was usually cheerful and buoyant; all he lacked were her explosive rages and ambition.* Solange, intense and reserved, had inherited her mother’s depressive streak. Increasingly nervous, and angry with a life which seemed to have bestowed all its gifts on her sister and none on her, she ate like a bird and behaved like one, picking fretfully at the bloody rashes of psoriasis which covered her arms and hands and legs. A curious photograph taken with Hélène’s treasured Leica shows her mother and sister in the front parlour of the house at Sainte-Mesme. Solange, ghostly in her emaciation, stands by the window and stares out with the eyes of a prisoner; Alexandrine Delangle seems unwilling to confront the black eye of the smart little camera. Instead, she stares into the room, hands clasped on her lap. The good-looking young woman of twenty years earlier is hard to reconcile with this gloomy, monumental figure: it is not surprising to discover that this was when Hélène began to collect diet sheets. A racing driver needed to remain in peak condition and few – the exuberant, opera-singing Giuseppe Campari was among them – were overweight. Only 1·62 metres and 57 kilos in 1933, she worked hard to maintain her slight figure.