New happiness went hand in hand with good fortune. Racing, again as the only woman, at Barcelona three weeks later, and enjoying a brief flirtation with one of her fellow racers and transport provider, young José de Villapadierna, she was on her fifty-fourth lap when a mechanical problem forced her to retire. At Comminges, she again came in ahead of Anne Itier before taking part in the Côte de Lectoure hill climb in the Pyrenees. Her placing in the second South African Grand Prix at East London, early in January 1936, is not established.* Later that month she had one of her greatest triumphs when she and the fearsomely hardy Russian driver Madame Marinovitch won the Ladies’ Cup in the Monte Carlo Rally after driving 4,000 kilometres in deep winter from Tallinn to a rain-drenched Monte Carlo. Only twenty-two competitors had opted for this, the toughest of all the routes – others wound back to Monte Carlo from Athens and Palermo – with only five days allowed for the completion of the run. Praise was given, in particular, to the fact that their powerful Matford Ford had been delivered to them just before the start of the Rally, allowing for no practice and no alterations to the car. This was the old-fashioned kind of competitive driving Hélène liked best, when expertise, stamina and guts counted for everything. It began with a headlong rush along the glassy roads of Estonia, black ice all the way. Headlights flaring into the mist, the women drove as if possessed, often having to rely on what could be seen by holding the passenger door open and shouting directions to the driver. Sleep was grabbed whenever five minutes could be spared; food was devoured at the wheel. The press shots of their beaming, oil-smirched exhausted faces – all repairs on the journey had to be undertaken by the two of them – show how worth the struggle it had been.
Further success lay ahead, when Hellé Nice came 1st in her class on the difficult La Turbie hill climb; again, the only secrets were skill, determination and her regular practice runs on the twisting, dizzily ascending Riviera roads.
But skill, by 1935, was no guarantee of success on the racing circuits, and her car was out of date. Even at Barcelona, a few rude remarks had been made about the fact that the beautiful Elli Nici was driving a Monza, a car which now had to struggle to find a place against newer, more dynamic models; at the Grand Prix of Pau, her last French race of 1936, she was hopelessly outclassed by the powerful machines which her competitors were driving and was forced to retire after only two laps with engine trouble. Philippe Etancelin won the race.
France, in 1936, remained fearful of taking any action that might provoke her powerful neighbours to retaliate. Reluctantly, she upheld the League of Nations in imposing economic sanctions on Italy, in order to register disapproval of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia. Ferment in Spain threatened her from the south; on the east, Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland made headlines in March. Rejecting Poland’s offer to join forces and make some aggressive show of strength, France clung to the hope of preserving peace, at whatever cost. To many, invasion by Hitler seemed preferable to war. At home, the new left-wing Prime Minister, Léon Blum, was confronted by increasingly strident demands for better working conditions, more pay, less hours. For the oppressed French workers, including underpaid employees in the car factories, the time for a change was long overdue. Seeking reforms which would improve their own welfare, few workers shared Blum’s concern about Germany’s increasingly militant stance. It was not their concern.
And yet the warnings were all there; Hélène’s favourite new song, ‘Madame la Marquise’, told of a lady who learns, by slow degrees, that her country estate has been destroyed. Each verse makes the news a little bit worse than the last, until absolute devastation is revealed in the final lines. The French loved the song, seemingly unaware that the Marquise represented their defiant blindness to the dangers which threatened them from every side. When they grumbled, it was about the expense of everything, the pay cuts, the jobs which they saw being snatched from them by a tide of recently dispossessed German-Jewish immigrants.
The clearest of all the warnings came from the heart of the automobile industry. Charles Faroux, the influential editor of L’Auto, visited Germany to inspect the Mercedes factories in the spring of 1936. What he saw terrified him. France, he wrote for his paper on 25 April, must make an immediate industrial commitment; it was crucial that the government should provide funds to this end. Even so, he concluded, the time might already have passed; no country could hope now to compete against the sophisticated technology of the Reich. To do so, Faroux estimated, would take a minimum of four years. His column was earnest in tone and eerie in its accuracy, but it made no impact on a troubled and divided government.
Given the state of gloom which prevailed in the car industry, and her eagerness to spend as much time as possible with her handsome young lover, it is not surprising that Hélène was delighted by an invitation* to spend the summer racing in South America, and being paid for it. At the beginning of June, the Alfa Monza was winched into the hold of the Augustus, sailing from Italy, via Boulogne, for Rio de Janeiro. On board were its owner and her lover.
FALLING
11
1936: ‘L’ANNÉE MALHEUREUSE’
‘Racing was what she lived for, racing and the sun.’
JANALLA JARNACH (IN INTERVIEW)
The Year of Bad Luck was how she described it later. But how could she have known that it would be remembered like this, that she would come to curse the day she had accepted the invitation to drive in Brazil?
On board the Augustus, sailing west at a leisurely pace, Hélène and Arnaldo Binelli sunned themselves, read, drank and made love; other passengers, seeing how tenderly they photographed each other, must have assumed they had a couple of honeymooners on board, off for a long holiday or to start a new life away from troubled France. It would not have been easy to persuade them that this vivacious, intensely Parisian woman with her scarlet fingernails, high-heeled shoes and fashionably blonde curls was currently regarded as the top woman racing driver in France. Not, that is, until she took off her jacket and they saw her muscular arms, bronzed from years of driving in short sleeves. Questioned, she explained that she was planning to compete in the Rio Grand Prix on the Gavea circuit, one of the most dangerous in the world. Told that South American drivers were ferociously macho, treating the racecourse as a bullfighter would the ring, she must have laughed: nothing new about that to anybody who had survived the war games fought on the dirt tracks of New Jersey.
Arriving at Rio, she heard that President Vargas wished to meet the first Frenchwoman to compete in their Grand Prix and to introduce her to his family. As a sincere admirer of Mussolini’s state, he was delighted to know that Mademoiselle Hellé Nice drove an Italian car and had chosen to come out on an Italian ship; there was no need for him to be told that the choice of shipping line had been a strategy to escape registering the car for customs. Wearing her best straw hat and cotton gloves, Hellé Nice was the perfect lady, posing beside the Vargas daughters and complimenting them on their beautiful country as she sipped better coffee than she had ever tasted in Paris. Despite the friendship extended to her by Vargas, it is unlikely that either Hélène or Arnaldo took a close interest in the complicated politics of Brazil in the 1930s. To them, as to most urban Europeans, Brazil was where coffee came from until the Depression damped down demand for Brazil’s most valuable commodity. Coffee and rubber exports had been the basis for Brazil’s phenomenal rate of expansion in the twenties; now, seeking industrial clout and ways to build up a powerful military force, Vargas found a supporter in Adolf Hitler, another of his heroes. By 1936 Nazi Germany had become Brazil’s biggest supplier of the machinery needed to create a military superstate.
France, in 1936, was useless as a supplier of modern technology; her power was in her legend. Many of the Brazilians Hélène met had never left South America, but they had heard of André Breton and Jean Cocteau, studied photographs of Schiaparelli’s newest German factory worker-style frocks, watched Henri Garat and Jean Gabin on screen. They spoke of evenings at Ciro’
s, of Django at the Hot Club, with all the authority of true Parisians. Economically, France was on its knees, but its charm never ceased to fascinate; who could better represent the true France than a blonde-curled former dancer who had known Chevalier and Mistinguett, who lived between Paris and the dazzlingly glamorous Riviera and who raced in France’s colours? Brazil adored her and Hélène became conscious of her function as an ambassadress. When she performed on the circuits of other countries, she told reporters, she sought success for herself and glory – la gloire – for France. New blue overalls, chosen to match the sky tint in the two-tone Monza, proclaimed her allegiance.
Letters awaiting her arrival at the Rio Car Club reminded her how wise she had been to take a summer away from France. Her two chief correspondents, Marcel Mongin and Henri Thouvenet, knew each other well. Each was devoted to her; neither knew her real plans, nor the romantic role that Arnaldo Binelli was playing in her life. Mongin wrote in an almost illegible scrawl, sending details of strikes in all the car factories, including Delahaye, for which he had recently become a works driver. You might, studying the well-known photograph of French strikers doing country dances in women’s clothes, stripey dresses and petticoats, while they occupied a factory and forced a shut-down, be fooled into thinking they were lighthearted. The fact was, as an apprehensive Mongin told Hélène, that the situation was desperate; Léon Blum, the newly appointed President from the Left, was at his wits’ end to know how to appease his supporters. Even Ettore Bugatti’s loyal Alsatian team had downed tools and taken over ‘le Patron’s’ Renaissance-style workshops. Word was that Jean Bugatti had been left to reason with them while EB had returned to Paris in a sulk, outraged by such disloyalty. The weather was foul, Mongin wrote; two weeks of incessant rain had lifted only for the Sunday of the French Grand Prix in which Jean-Pierre Wimille had just beaten him to second place. Allusions to visiting Marcel Lehoux’s friends, the Brunets – Robert Brunet did a lot of business deals with Mongin – and plans to go to the Marne Grand Prix at Reims with Henri Thouvenet show what a tightly knit circle of friends this was.
The domestic side of Mongin’s letters shows him functioning as a surprisingly tame house-husband to Hélène. He sent news of the dogs, Nono and Mimite, and of how well they were being looked after by himself and his sister Nelly; he warned her that the new cleaner at the Rondpoint Mirabeau apartment didn’t deserve the title. For a spouse, however, he was a little detached. He mentioned plans for taking a holiday home for the two of them in the Midi, but urged her not to hurry back if she had the chance of getting down to Buenos Aires, where Hispano Suiza had an agency and might have a good offer to make to such a well-known devotee of their cars. Requests for precise details of her race results make him sound more of a manager than a lover; his joking injunctions to her to live it up on her holiday (‘Au revoir, mon Poucet, sois sage toi aussi! Reviens en bonne santé et amuse-toi bien.’) convey no hint of jealousy.1
Henri Thouvenet was more passsionate. ‘M’amie chou je pense et j’ai pensé beaucoup à toi,’ he wrote, ‘et j’ai toujours attendu tes lettres avec une grande impatience.’ He had heard that she was due to arrive back on 27 July, docking at Villefranche. How would it be, he asked, if he came and met her off the boat and they spent a couple of weeks together? (He seems to have been unaware that Marcel Mongin was making an almost identical proposal.) Uninformed of the new relationship with Binelli, Thouvenet was evidently aware that their own affair needed some repairwork and he was willing to make the required effort.
OK M’amie, I admit it. I miss you. Neither of us is exactly perfect but I think I even miss our bust-ups. The bottom line of it is that I love you, M’amie sweetheart, and I think you’re fond of me . . . I’m pretty sure of that. Anyway, write and tell me what you think of our spending some time together [in the Midi, at a house he would rent] because we really haven’t made enough time this year, what with the Monte Carlo rally, your holidays at Beaulieu, my work with the elections* and now your trip to Latin America. We might as well be the nightwatchman and the daily cleaner, with the kind of relationship we seem to have got into.2
The reluctance of ‘M’amie chou’ to come clean about her new relationship or even to admit that she was planning to stay on for another month in Brazil becomes more understandable when we see what Henri Thouvenet has to say at the end of his letter. Like Mongin, he evidently believed in mixing business and pleasure; after suggesting that they make more effort to spend time together, he turned to the subject of a new Grand Prix being run in July at Deauville. ‘I got you a good offer in start money,’ he told her; ‘4,000 francs. The mayor is quite a friend of Marcel [Mongin’s] and mine. Still, that will keep for another year and you’ll probably get 5,000 if you stay on to race at São Paulo, and a much better chance of winning a prize; all the big boys are going to be running at Deauville.3 She might even, he added, use the prize money to get herself a more modern car after three years of driving a secondhand Alfa Monza.
With friends as useful as this to look after her interests, Hélène saw no value in disclosing more than was strictly necessary about Arnaldo. Her letters were carefully vague; to Henri Thouvenet, she said only that she would stay on to compete at São Paulo; to Mongin, she wrote asking if he might be able to give her new mechanic some work with Delahaye when he came back to France. And Mongin, failing to register that Binelli had any significance, said kindly: why not? Arnaldo could work with his own mechanic, Fernand; Mongin would even let the young man handle a few of his own clients.4
Hélène, pleased to have taken care of her lover’s future, continued to enjoy herself. She and Arnaldo went swimming and dancing together; they hired a couple of horses and went riding in the hills behind Ipanema. The president, charmed by Brazil’s most attractive visiting racer, gave a dinner in her honour; Arnaldo, uninvited, stayed behind at the hotel. Possibly, he took it out on her later; Hélène’s letters make it clear that he had a violent streak and was capable of being fiercely jealous. This added to his charm for a woman with a temper of her own; years later, she rudely undercut his sexual prowess by nicknaming him ‘Mr Three Minutes’, but in the summer of 1936 she was under his spell.
Hélène riding with Arnaldo in Brazil.
Love affairs never undermined her professionalism; in the run-up week for the Rio Grand Prix on 7 June, Hélène was out practising on the circuit every morning. Practice was even more vital than usual; known as ‘The Devil’s Springboard’, the circuit began on cobblestones and tramlines in the hill-town of Gavea before heading down to a narrow strip of road overhanging the sea and back into the mountains in a tortuous series of hairpin bends. It was just the kind of challenge that Hélène most relished; a personal photograph taken just before the race shows, not the camera-conscious star but a professional sportswoman, taking a quick drag on a cigarette and narrowing her eyes as she focuses on the circuit which she has already filmed – the reel survives – and committed to memory. Here, as in a photograph taken at Biella of her holding out blistered hands after the race, we can see why admiring reporters often simply said: ‘Elle a du cran! (The girl’s got guts).’
Hélène enjoys a quick drag before taking part in the 1936 Rio de Janeiro Grand Prix on the ‘Devil’s Trampoline’.
Most of the South American drivers had arrived with sturdy Ford V8s, the only cars they were able to get, reduced to their metal bones for speed. The V8 referred to the layout of the eight-cylinder engine, the first to be mass-produced. Two Italian drivers, Carlo Pintacuda and Attilio Marinoni, came with stripped-down Alfa sports cars from the Ferrari stable; Vittorio Coppoli, from the Bugatti agency at Buenos Aires, was driving a Bugatti, whilst the Brazilian favourite, tall, glamorous Manuel de Teffe was driving an Alfa Monza. Spectators were everywhere, and seemingly unaware that the start signal required them to keep away from the cars. Photographs taken at the beginning of the Gavea race show no barrier ropes; the drivers, as the Europeans must have realized with some alarm, were expected to take their cha
nces in finding a safe way through.
It seemed to be her lucky year. For the first hours of the race, she held her place at the head of the pack; Vittorio Coppoli won but the crowd were almost as loud in their shouts for the only female competitor, who had driven her old Alfa Monza with such skill and panache on the country’s most dangerous circuit. The news that she was to compete at the São Paulo Grand Prix the following month was enthusiastically reported in the local Brazilian press.
The race was to be the biggest in São Paulo’s history. At nine in the morning, the broad streets of the city’s sophisticated Jardim America district were already crowded with well-dressed paulistanas who had come to cheer on their home champion, Manuel de Teffe. Arnaldo Binelli, having helped to check the car, left Hélène chatting with her fellow racers outside the elegant building which housed the city’s Car Club while he pushed through the throng towards the finishing line from which he planned to film the event. Above his head, speakers blared warnings to the crowds of pedestrians to keep away from the cars. A few strategically placed straw bales on sharp corners were the only gesture which had been made towards safety; instead, large numbers of policemen lined the sides of the track.
The Bugatti Queen Page 15
