The Bugatti Queen

by Miranda Seymour

  At 9.30 the mayor, visibly sweating in the full uniform he was obliged to wear for the occasion, gave the start signal; Hellé Nice was lying in third place as she roared into the view of Binelli’s camera for the first time. By the fifth lap, she had moved up to lie second, with Teffe on her tail. She was in perfect control; Arnaldo told her later that he had never seen her drive so well. Coppoli, the champion of the Gavea circuit, dropped out on the thirteenth lap. Hellé Nice was forced to make a stop when papers blew down from an official’s box and glued themselves to the front of the Monza, smothering the radiator grille; a couple of laps later she had regained fourth place. Arnaldo, bracing himself not to be pushed on to the track by the surge of bodies at his back, caught her in a familiar pose, lips parted to suck air like nicotine as she took a tricky corner. On lap fifty, she stopped to refuel, long enough to lose third place to the tall Brazilian; eight laps later, two from the finish, Arnaldo saw with delight that she had caught up again. Pintacuda had already passed the finishing post at record speed and entered Brazilian legend; Marinoni was coming up fast, but Hellé Nice was fighting Manuel de Teffe neck and neck for 2nd place, tearing along the straight avenues, sliding round the corners in a cloud of dust.

  Arnaldo had trained his camera on the last straight. All around him, the Brazilians were screaming for de Teffe, their hero; from the corner of his eye, he could see them pushing out, a spill of colour flooding on to the track. What he couldn’t see was whether the bale that suddenly appeared in the middle of the track directly ahead of the distant, speeding Monza, had been pushed, or thrown. A policeman broke through the crowd, stooped to lift it. But she wouldn’t have time to see the bale, or the policeman. Coming round the corner at 150 kph, all she could possibly see was that de Teffe had left just enough of a space for her to squeeze through and pass for position.

  Hélène’s crash at São Paulo.

  The camera caught her as she hit the bale. A body flew up, cartwheeling through a cloud of dust. The car jerked, spun and flung another body up, high over the screaming crowd, before it smashed into the jostling front line of spectators. They were too tightly packed for flight. They went down like reeds to a scythe.

  Afterwards, when they lifted her unconscious body off the corpse of the man who buffered her – his head had been cracked open by the force with which hers had struck it when she was hurled from the car – they laid her out with the dead at the roadside. The first count said that forty people had been killed. Later, it was established that six were already dead and thirty-four more were receiving emergency treatment at the local hospital. It was the worst incident in the history of South American motor racing.5

  Hélène was among those who had been taken to the Santa Caterina Hospital. Arnaldo, frantic with alarm, was told that she was in a deep coma. The doctors held out little hope that she would recover consciousness before she died.

  12

  THE ROAD BACK

  Excerpts from a letter written by Solange to her sister Hélène Delangle, 17 July 1936:1

  My dear Hellé . . .

  Well, I don’t need to say what a state we were in at Sainte-Mesme on 13 July. Monsieur Père* woke me at 8 in the morning, after he got the news from our neighbours on Sunday night’s radio. As the bulletin said you had a fractured skull and were in a hopeless condition, they decided to give us a night off . . .

  Now I imagine you must be getting better, but you certainly had a lucky escape. The accident seems not to have been your fault, but Henri [Thouvenet] will be discussing that with you as I don’t really understand it. I’m just thankful you don’t have to take responsibility for killing four [sic] people and injuring another thirty [sic].

  Henri gave me supper last night, just for the two of us, and Arnaldo’s telegram came while I was there. Pity it was so short. Henri took me home and we had a good gossip along the way. The weather’s stifling in Paris. It’s past midnight and pouring with rain, thunder rumbling away. It’s been like this for a month . . .

  Well that’s about it, except that I’m fine, although my acne’s come back. I’m pleased with the new apartment; two minutes to get to my desk, and that’s including the lift.

  Love, and get well soon

  Your Totote

  (10 rue Armand Moisant, Paris XV)

  No great interpretative skills are needed to see the unpleasantness of this letter. Her sister had, through no fault of her own, been involved in one of the worst racing incidents of the century; Solange Delangle’s response was to complain about the worry it had caused them, to nag her sister about her failure to communicate (‘We’re glad of good news, but we’d like it from you . . . I hope you’re going to write to our mother,’ she wrote in another part of this letter), to underline the horror of the death toll and injuries, and to stir up trouble with hints of the ‘good gossip’ she had enjoyed with Hélène’s lover after an intimate dinner with him.

  Marcel Mongin was, by contrast, tender and full of concern. ‘You can’t imagine the joy it gave me to see your own writing on the envelope,’ he told Hélène a week later. ‘You seem awfully low, but don’t be: everybody’s thinking of you and feeling so sorry for you. I’ve sent you some telegrams and you should have had a letter with two little flowers!’2 The ‘deux petites fleurs’ seem to have been a present of some kind, possibly some money.

  Arnaldo Binelli was too inexperienced to know what to do for the best; the man who took charge of Hélène’s affairs at the time was Henri Thouvenet. Still unaware of the non-professional nature of her relationship with Arnaldo, he was touched by a stream of uncharacteristically needy letters in which she begged for reassurances of his love, to know that she was not forgotten, that she would be taken care of if things went wrong. Thouvenet, a man who seems to have had considerable influence, pulled every string in reach to ensure that the Brazilians took appropriate measures. They had, for two days, tried to lay the blame for the accident on her driving; with Thouvenet’s help, the French Consulate was brought into play, lawyers were hired, meetings held. Arnaldo’s film was produced, offering incontrovertible evidence that excited and unwary spectators had run out on to the track ahead of the Alfa Monza* as they cheered on the home champion, de Teffe. No fault could be found with her driving; now, as Thouvenet lovingly explained in a series of long, carefully worded letters, it was essential that proper compensation should be made. ‘Please don’t think I’m asking you to attack people who are now being very kind to you,’ he wrote:

  But you must think of yourself. Your car is your investment, your breadwinner. Now it’s wrecked and you have nearly been killed, and it certainly wasn’t your fault . . . I don’t know when you plan to come back, but, even though I’m longing to see you, don’t push yourself. Get your strength back. Think about the compensation owed to you . . . Remember I love you more than you can ever imagine and that I’m hugging you as hard as I can from so far away. I adore you, M’amie.3

  It is not clear which wellwisher – her sister? – decided that she ought to be informed of another crash, a fatal one; the number of French cuttings about it which are pasted into the Hellé Nice scrap albums show that she was provided with a dossier of material. On 19 July, in the same week as her own terrible accident, Marcel Lehoux had been killed after colliding with another car in the minor Grand Prix held at Deauville, the very race which Thouvenet had been urging her to enter on her return. Just fifty, Lehoux was praised in his obituaries as one of the most respected and courageous drivers of his generation; his loss, they wrote, would be deeply felt by the many racers who had benefited from his readiness to pass on his skills. When the inexperienced young Duke of Grafton burned to death in his newly acquired Bugatti at Limerick the following month and eight spectators were killed by a swerving Riley at the Irish Tourist Trophy in September – Marcel Mongin narrowly escaped death in a collision during the same race – it became apparent that 1936 was going to be remembered as an unusually black year.

  No disaster compared with the awfulness
of the accident on the São Paulo course. Few of the thirty-four injured made a complete recovery and six were dead. Hélène herself was in a coma for three days; when consciousness returned, she had lost all memory of the accident. It pleased her, however, to be told that she had been given third place, after one of the leading competitors – Marinoni – was disqualified. ‘I would have been first across the finishing line, because the two drivers ahead of me were disqualified,’ she noted many years later in her private record of her racing history. The fact that Carlos Pintacuda had won by a full two laps was somehow overlooked.4

  Sympathy for the injured woman racer was widespread; stacks of letters and cables were delivered to the hospital, many from Brazilians who had been milling in the São Paulo crowds. Arnaldo Binelli, following Henri Thouvenet’s detailed instructions, was able to tell Hélène that a fund had been set up and that, rather gruesomely, miniature models of the wrecked Monza were being sold by subscription to help raise money for her. President Vargas visited the San Caterina hospital with his family and promised the patient that she would be allowed to stay there for as long as was needed, without charge; an invitation to race in the Argentine in September was a further indication that no blame now attached to her.

  The invitation was declined; seven weeks after her crash Hélène was still bed-bound at the hospital, weak and in low spirits. Writing a few trembling lines in pencil to thank Henri Thouvenet for all his help, she told him that sleep had become impossible; in her dreams and every waking moment, she was haunted by the thought of the devastation she had caused, and of which she herself now had no recollection. ‘Don’t be so sad, dearest Mie [sic],’ Henri Thouvenet pleaded. ‘You must stop blaming yourself. Nobody in the French and German papers, or even the Brazilian ones after the first two days, ever said it was your fault. Don’t think about it. Try not to be so sad.’5

  Thouvenet was feeling fairly low himself as he faced the possibility of seeing his car firm at Nancy nationalized by France’s new left-wing government.* He wrote to the São Paulo hospital on 21 August, partly to apologize for the fact that the political situation made it impossible for him to come out to Brazil, partly to express relief that adequate compensation had been raised to buy a new car.* (Arnaldo, meanwhile, had managed to sell the twisted carcase of the Monza to a São Paulo garage; all machinery was welcome in an impoverished country, even from a wreck.†) Mongin, too, wrote comfortingly on 21 August to ask his ‘little Apple’ to ‘come back quick so I can cheer you up and give you a hug’. But her sadness was unassailable. A sharp pain in her jaw provided a daily reminder of the man who had been killed by the force of her flying body; over the years, she never ceased to refer to this aspect of the crash, always with a sense of piercing guilt. ‘I killed a poor man with my head, and his death saved my life. I broke his skull.’6

  In September, after almost three months in Brazil, Arnaldo Binelli and a noticeably agitated – ‘perturbée’ would be the word most frequently used to describe her from now on – Hélène sailed back to France on a Hamburg-bound steamer. With them, they took her compensation payment and a handsome silver trophy plate. In Brazil, once it was understood that no blame was going to be attached to their adored Manuel de Teffe for the crash, the French driver was remembered with sympathy and affection. Several baby girls who were born in the winter of 1936–7 were named ‘Ellenice’ in her honour; money was raised to build a new race circuit for São Paulo and invitations were issued for her to come back and open it. Understandably, perhaps, she decided against doing so.

  Temporarily, at least, she had lost her confidence. A friendly invitation arrived in January 1937, asking her to compete in the Algiers Grand Prix in the spring of 1937, together with another minor event. It was declined, even though the letter writer, a flirt who dwelt less on her professional skill than on the joy it would give his fellow sportsmen to see her trim figure (‘votre agréable physique’), had offered the services of Lehoux’s former mechanic, ‘le petit Bidon que vous connaissez’, free of charge.7 Instead, according to one account which appeared in a Parisian newspaper the following year, Hellé Nice simply went to ground on the Riviera, sunning herself and resting until she felt mentally and physically strong enough for rally-driving, and perhaps, for Grands Prix.

  A dearth of material during this period makes it difficult to reconstruct a clear picture of Hélène’s life. Some of her compensation money was spent on renting a new and even grander house in Beaulieu sur Mer, the Villa des Agaves on the steep boulevard Edward VII, next to the summer home of the Prince of Bourbon, Sicily. The prince, a sportsman who had once worked as a sales rep at the Bugatti showroom in Paris, was friendly, but Arnaldo and Hélène appear to have kept to themselves for much of the time; the photographs taken with her Leica camera leave little doubt that they were happy. Arnaldo, delicate-featured and dark-eyed, appears in shot after shot, playing with dogs, caressing a pet kitten, smiling at her across a sofa, marching purposefully down to the beach, or waving as he bicycles towards her. She had, for the first time in her life, found happiness in an exclusive relationship; at Arnaldo’s wish or by her own choice, Marcel Mongin and Henri Thouvenet were ruthlessly and thoroughly dropped. A couple of shots of a sour-faced Solange at Beaulieu offer a clue as to who brought the dogs down from the Paris apartment to be reunited with their mistress. Capricious though Hélène could be in her relationships with men, she was unswervingly devoted to her pets.

  Arnaldo, with pet, at Villa des Agaves, c. 1937.

  It must have been a bitter blow, at a time when she was still haunted by the deaths at São Paulo, to learn that she was to be summoned to court for car-smuggling. The first indication that a group of well-known drivers were being investigated had come just before the July race at Deauville in which Marcel Lehoux was killed; in the autumn of 1936, the news broke in the press. ‘L’affaire de Menton’, as it was generally called, focused on a number of celebrated racing drivers who had been making a suspiciously large number of journeys through the borderpost in a variety of cars. The charge was that they had been acting as transporters for vehicles which were then sold without import duty having been paid. Hélène’s passport shows that she visited Italy more than twenty times during the period under investigation. The public were on the drivers’ side; nevertheless, Hélène, along with her racing colleagues, Robert Brunet, Philippe Etancelin, Benoît Falchetto and Raymond Sommer, was summoned to court and each of them was found guilty and given a substantial fine, a thousand pounds.* In France, the news temporarily overshadowed the announcement of Edward VIII’s enforced abdication and his plans to move himself, his Buick and his mistress – they married the following year – across the Channel.

  In January 1937, at the time of the trial, Hélène was feeling too depressed to contemplate even a minor race in Algeria. It speaks volumes for her stamina and resilience that she was ready, only two months later, to contemplate entering some of the most challenging events in the racing calendar. Visiting Italy, she announced her plans in an article written for the popular evening paper, Gazzetta del Popolo della Sera. Opening with an account of the hundreds of devoted Brazilians who came from distant villages to visit ‘la prima vittima’ of the São Paulo acccident during her stay in hospital, she saved her surprise for the end:

  Now I have come to Italy to prepare for the new racing season: the Mille Miglia, the Grand Prix of Turin, Pescara, Monza and Tripoli. I’m especially keen to take part in the XI Mille Miglia, the longest speed-race on open roads in the world. But I always feel at home in your wonderful country. All your finest drivers are my friends, true friends of the best sort.8

  Teddie Caldwell had been prescient when she wrote that Hélène had racing in her blood. Some might call it foolhardy; this was also a display of uncommon, and superb, courage. Eight months earlier, she had been involved in one of the worst accidents in the history of racing. Now, she proposed to enter the most demanding races which Italy could offer, yet she had no car and, at the time of writing
, no invitation to any of the events she so optimistically mentioned. Perhaps, by announcing her availability in this way, she aimed to proclaim her return to health and attract offers from a racing stable such as Ferrari. If this was the case, the ploy failed. No manufacturer wanted to risk engaging a driver who had recently suffered serious head injuries and loss of memory; the risk of calamity and bad publicity was too great. She came back to her home at Beaulieu sur Mer empty-handed and began to plan other ways of staging a triumphant public return to the circuits she loved. An opportunity arose almost immediately, when she was approached by the marketing team for Yacco Oil.

  Yacco then, as now, promoted itself as the oil used for demanding driving. Women were always good for publicity and it had become apparent by 1937 that women did better than men as drivers in trials of endurance. Eager to demonstrate that a car using their oil could outrun and outlast all competitive makes, Yacco were recruiting an all-female team to drive at Montlhéry with the aim of breaking as many world records as possible. They were to drive in relays over a period of ten days, without halt. The car they were to drive was a 3.621-litre monster, the first Matford V8 to be produced in France after Ford joined up with Ettore Bugatti’s old colleague, Mathis of Alsace: thus Mat-Ford.

  It is not clear how the four drivers were selected or whether the Matford received its nickname of ‘Claire’ from Madame Claire Descollas, a member of the team. Simone des Forest, the youngest, was a tiny and fiercely competitive aristocrat who had already proved herself on the Monte Carlo Rally and in the 1934 Rallye du Maroc, winding back to Casablanca from Rome. Interviewed for this book in 2001, Madame des Forest still found it difficult to withhold her dislike of Hélène Delangle. She had, she remembered, the manners of a film star; everybody was expected to stand around in the shadows while she posed for the camera. Not that she was anything so special to look at. Yes, she drove well, but the obsession she had with men: ‘it was ridiculous, the way she went on. Frankly, I don’t believe she ever thought about anything but sex and showing off.’9