The Fast Times of Albert Champion

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The Fast Times of Albert Champion Page 36

by Peter Joffre Nye


  The journalist W. F. Bradley wrote in Automobile that Murphy’s win, averaging 78.1 mph, had bettered the average speed of the winner of the last grand prix, held in 1914, which had been 65.5 mph. Advancements had been made over the past seven years, and American cars and drivers were at the fore-front of international motorsport.84 Forty-one years would pass before another American, Dan Gurney, would win the Grand Prix de France.

  Legend has it that Albert Champion was back in Paris taking care of last-minute business before returning to America when two gendarmes knocked on his hotel room door.85 They came to arrest him for deserting the French army. Although the matter of his military duty had been resolved years earlier, the United States Embassy, so it is said, intervened to spring the spark-plug tycoon from the rap, and he never returned to the land of his birth.

  There is no record that he left Flint for the grand prix. Nevertheless, if he had gone and the incident with the gendarmes had persuaded him to remain permanently in America, it might have saved his life.

  MY MILLIONAIRES WERE AS BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED AS THOMAS HARDY’S PEASANTS.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE CRACK-UP1

  As Jimmy Murphy made motorsport history at the Grand Prix de France, a private detective hired by Elise reported that Albert was carrying on an affair in New York with Edna Crawford, a seamstress.2 Elise had been suspicious about her husband since the New York Auto Show in January.3 Champion had met Edna, single and twenty-four, at a party in the gilded Waldorf-Astoria Hotel one evening during the auto show.4 Elise turned the detective’s mounting evidence over to her attorney and grew troubled.5 In early August she totaled the Cadillac coupé she was driving in a head-on collision in Flint with a heavy truck.6 Her sister Gabrielle suffered a cut to an eyelid that required stitches.7 Soon after, the detective phoned to say Albert was driving with Edna from Niagara Falls to a lakeside hotel in the southwest corner of New York State.8 Elise said she would meet the detective there the next day so she could have her husband arrested.9

  Elise boarded a train bound for New York. The detective waited for her at the Beamus Point station, on Chautauqua Lake outside Jamestown.10 On their drive to the Beamus Point Hotel, where her husband and Edna had a room, the detective’s car passed their vehicle traveling in the opposite direction.11 The detective continued to the hotel, where he and Elise ascertained that Albert and Edna had registered as Mr. and Mrs. A. Chapman.12 Then the detective drove Elise to the sheriff’s office in nearby Mayville.13 She filed a complaint with a justice of the peace,14 charging her husband and Edna Crawford with disorderly conduct.15

  While Elise waited in the sheriff’s office late on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 24, her husband parked his car across the street. The sheriff walked over with the warrant,16 arrested him, and escorted him to his office. Elise sat in an adjoining room.17

  Albert realized what was taking place when his wife stepped out and confronted him.18 He blushed in surprise, but said nothing.19 He was arraigned before a justice of the peace.20 He pleaded guilty and paid a fine of $50.21

  Later, when Albert returned to their house in Flint to pick up his things, he said he had found a woman who understood him.22

  “Understands you!” Elise retorted. “Why, I understand you, Albert, after all these years.”23

  Champion protested that he wanted to live large and take advantage of his growing wealth like other motor magnates in Flint and Detroit.24

  Elise was cautious about money and uninterested in the role of grand social hostess. She and Albert had recently bought their house from Walter Chrysler after his General Motors contract expired and he moved to Toledo with an unprecedented $2 million contract ($23.2 million in 2014) to rescue the Overland Automobile Company following John Willy’s disastrous reversal of fortune,25 which had left him indebted to 127 bankers for $46 million ($599 million in 2014) due to Billy Durant–like mismanagement. Companies were rising and falling with the regularity of the change of seasons. Twice in ten years Elise had seen General Motors narrowly miss bankruptcy.

  She must have been brokenhearted. Nevertheless, after enduring Champion’s liaisons and his recent affair, she filed suit in the Genesee County circuit court to divorce her husband of eighteen years on grounds of extreme cruelty.26

  The case of Julie Elise Champion vs. Albert Champion added to Albert’s pending case with the Stranahan brothers.

  On November 1, the court granted Elise’s divorce decree. She and Albert had settled out of court, granting her the house, which they had purchased for $40,000 ($521,000 in 2014) along with $250,000 cash (worth $3.25 million in 2014).27 She and Gabrielle shipped out to Paris to spend time with their family.

  Walter Chrysler and Champion occasionally played golf together at the Flint Country Club, and when Chrysler left Flint to work in Toledo, he sold Albert and Elise Champion his house. Courtesy of General Motors Media Archive.

  Edna Josephine Crawford had wide-set brown eyes, a broad forehead, and a straight nose. Similar to other young women, she had her brown hair cut short and wavy. Whenever possible, she wore high heels, their tapping sound following her around.28 In stocking feet, she measured five feet six; in heels next to Champion, she stood a little taller than him.29

  They had met by chance. Edna had delivered a dress she had sewn to a society woman who told her there was a gasoline-society swanky event at the Waldorf-Astoria, the grand hotel at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street (present site of the Empire State Building).30 Edna brought along her sister, Emily, one of the eye-candy Ziegfeld Girls from the Ziegfeld Follies vaudeville productions.31 Emily acted under the stage name of Emlee Haddone in theater and one-reeler movies,32 including Hitchie Koo, and Broadway Brevities.33

  She gave her age as twenty-four to Albert’s forty-four,34 although she was actually thirty-two.35 Somewhere in the chitchat between Edna and Champion she mentioned that they shared the name Champion.36 Her mother, born Elizabeth Jane Champion, of Welsh descent,37 had married Wylie Crawford. Like Albert, Edna was the eldest of her siblings; she had two brothers and two sisters.

  She likely told him about growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, which would have registered with Champion. His sister-in-law, Prosper’s wife Flora, was from Kansas City, Kansas.38 Edna attended Northeast High School.39 By age thirteen she was working full-time as a cashier in a dry goods store.40 Her early marriage at seventeen to Arba K. Mills was best forgotten.41 She had divorced him by her twentieth birthday and moved to New York, where her mother took the family following the desertion of Wiley Crawford.42 Elizabeth Crawford had decided that the prospects for marrying her lovely daughters off to wealthy men were superior in America’s city of cities, already nicknamed the Big Apple for its bounteous prizes. Edna helped support the family by running a power machine in a shirtwaist factory.43 Long arduous hours motivated her to take advantage of her talent for needlework,44 necessary to make clothes for herself and her siblings, and to improve upon it for employment as a seamstress.45 She sewed costumes for Emily to wear on stage.46

  What Champion cared the most about was Edna’s rapt attention. She was a pretty, younger woman, and this fit the new decade’s accent on youth. And she cherished his wealth and the casual way he could buy her clothes, an emerald ring, and a pearl necklace.

  Following the collapse of his marriage, Champion stayed in New York to be near Edna. He took advantage of the office building that General Motors owned at 224 West 57th Street.47 It became his base while trusted Basil De Guichard ran the factory in Flint. Champion kept up a brisk work schedule during the day and courted Edna in the evenings. New York was the gaudiest, greatest city, and it continues to be the nation’s center of theater, the arts, and jazz. Congress had passed the Eighteenth Amendment outlawing the sale of alcohol,48 but, for a price, New York restaurants dodged Prohibition and kept liquor, beer, wine, and champagne flowing—thus fulfilling the fundamental economic chase of supply meeting demand.

  Champion submitted another application with the US Patent Office, th
is one for producing spark-plug shells from cast metal, which reduced material, eliminated waste, and lowered costs.49 Over the past year, he had filed five other patents for spark plugs, including terminator connectors. One patent application introduced rotary grinders that fashioned spark-plug exteriors, which saved time and money over the previous system of rotating knives that had needed constant replacement. His surge in applications would raise the count of his total US patents to eleven.50

  In early February 1922, Champion announced his engagement to Edna Crawford,51 described as the daughter of a Kansas City wholesale grocer and a student in the National Academy School of Fine Arts.52 Tuition for the academy, dedicated to aspiring professional artists, was nominal, but the academy has no record of her attending.53 Nonetheless, the cover story played well. A photo-studio portrait of Edna, glamorous in a fur coat, made its way across the wires, enriched by the stirring caption, “Art Student to Wed Millionaire.”54

  Champion had always examined how best to organize himself for more and better work. He would have assessed his stressful divorce and his planned marriage to Edna. The economy had recovered. Car sales had jumped, proving not only that autos were here to stay but also that the market was far from approaching saturation. His factory output was thriving. General Motors had finally moved out of Flint to the large new limestone office building, officially designated as the General Motors Building.55 Champion looked to the future with optimism.

  Edna Champion in a glamour photo, from seamstress to millionaire’s wife in the Jazz Age. Photo courtesy of Kerry Champion Williams.

  On February 15, 1922, he ended his legal hassles with the Stranahans by signing papers in Lansing, the state capital, which officially changed the name of the Champion Ignition Company of Michigan to the AC Spark Plug Company of Michigan.56 Like Ransom Olds, David Buick, and Louis Chevrolet, his name continued in business without him.

  A week later, he and Edna were married by a justice of the peace in New York City.57 His wedding present to her was $40,000 worth of General Motors stock.58 They sailed to France to begin their honeymoon aboard the recently completed French liner S.S. Paris, which, at 764 feet in length, was the largest liner under the French flag.59

  Their time overseas stretched to five months, and it included business trips to shop for factories in England and France.60 In his absence, Basil De Guichard ran the day-to-day operations. De Guichard had married Mae Nash, daughter of esteemed automaker Charlie Nash, who produced Rambler motor cars.61 De Guichard ranked among the auto industry’s nobility.

  Edna Crawford Champion, Albert’s second wife, strikes a flapper pose, 1922. Photo courtesy of Kerry Champion Williams.

  Once Albert and Edna returned to America, they moved into a custom estate called Colberry on Woodward Avenue in Flint’s tony neighborhood of Bloomfield Hills.62

  Champion lived large at his Colberry Estate in Flint. Looking dapper and casual in his customary pose to conceal his left leg being two inches shorter as a result of injuries from his near-fatal car crash. Photo courtesy of Kerry Champion Williams.

  Champion came back full of ambitions and was encouraged by the changed attitude he’d seen in Europe. “The fine service of American automotive equipment during the war undoubtedly helped to awaken this appreciation,” he told the Flint Journal. “The victory of the American car in the Grand Prix last year also had its effect.”63

  Champion acquired a spark plug company called Oleo, which was located on the Seine in Levallois-Perret outside Paris, and renamed it Société des Bougies A.C.-Titan.64 He arranged for shipping American machinery and clay from Flint to the Paris operation.65 In six months, A.C.-Titan was making AC-Titan spark plugs using the same shell and electrode operations, assembly, and inspection processes that were used in the home Flint plant.66 AC-Titan spark plugs were installed in more than two dozen French auto brands, including Peugeot, Renault, Bugatti, De Dion, and Ballot, and they were also distributed to French-controlled countries in Africa and Asia.

  Champion also took over the Sphinx Manufacturing Company in Birmingham, England.67 He purchased the business, reorganized it, and rebuilt the plant with the latest American machinery. It was renamed A.C. Sphinx Sparking Plug Ltd. Its A.C. Sphinx sparking plugs were produced from American clay.68 The plugs were used in cars made in England, including Talbot, Vauxhall, and Morris-Cowley. The Birmingham factory supplied A.C. products to wholesalers and dealers in the British Isles, the Scandinavian countries, Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Australia, and New Zealand.69

  Champion and his three younger brothers united for the last time in March 1924 at the funeral of their mother, who’d passed away at the age of seventy-one and was buried in the north Paris section of St. Cloud.70

  Brother Prosper, a machinist at AC Spark Plug, became a naturalized US citizen in January 1924.71 Prosper and his French-speaking wife had three sons, all brought up to speak French at home.72 The eldest was Albert Prosper Champion, who was then nine years old and talking to his uncle Albert about working in the factory when he grew older. Albert’s other nephews were Louis and Paul.

  Albert talked to his brother Prosper about setting up a trust for his three nephews.73 It was something he meant to get around to when nephew Albert Prosper Champion turned thirteen.

  During the first four years of his second marriage, Champion filed thirteen more patents for improved spark plugs and dashboard speedometers, including lighting the speedometer after dark—a breakthrough in 1926.74 His company’s products were factory installed in more than two hundred brands of autos made in America, France, and Great Britain, and across Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and Japan.75

  By 1926 he had twenty-five US patents, and more testing was under way for further improvements, and he was broadening his products into air filters and oil filters. General Motors that year would manufacture more than 1.2 million autos.76 Leading the way were sales of nearly seven hundred thousand Chevrolets.77 Champion’s payroll expanded to thirty-five hundred employees.78

  General Motors had started the same year that Henry Ford introduced his Model T, the nation’s biggest-selling car, with more than 2 million Model T sales between 1923 and 1925. Yet Ford’s advantage of selling Model Ts for prices as low as $500 was a competitive liability in the used-car market, and consumers preferred more modern autos such as GM’s Chevies, Buicks, Cadillacs, and Oldsmobiles. General Motors was one year away from surpassing Ford.

  Champion’s career was soaring. His domestic life, however, had turned fractious. Even though Edna was a Midwesterner, she chaffed at living in Flint. She preferred the bright lights and hustle of New York. The wives of Champion’s colleagues gave her the cold shoulder as the “other woman.”79 Elise still lived in the house on Kearsley Street.

  Edna discovered that her multimillionaire husband thought nothing of buying a new car with cash, but he refused to give her money of her own.80 He allowed her to purchase clothing and merchandise from stores around Flint and charge it to his account.81 Edna wanted to give money to her widowed mother, Elizabeth. Albert provided Edna with $50,000 to buy a big house in Flint and allowed his mother-in-law to live in one half and rent the other half for income.82

  At the end of the summer in 1926 Champion prepared to attend the annual Paris Auto Salon in October as well as its counterpart in London. For the 1926 edition, Edna elected to stay in Flint with her siblings for a few weeks before joining her husband in Paris. Albert agreed. He would ship overseas with GM big shots after the first of October to attend the trade show, and she would follow.83 He had to inspect his factories in Levallois-Perret as well as those across the channel in Birmingham.

  Champion always had a lot of friends to visit in Paris. He was surprised to discover Barney Oldfield, honeymooning with his third wife, Hulda Rae Braden, a San Diego woman a decade younger than Oldfield.84 Champion took a break from the grind of morning-to-midnight meetings and conferences and dinners to go with Oldfield on an outing at the Atlantic coastal resort of Deauville. They were
photographed together on the shore—America’s famous racecar driver and the inventor-manufacturer enjoying cigars.85

  On the day Edna’s ship arrived in Le Havre, some 130 miles from Paris, Albert was too busy to meet her train from Le Havre to the Gare du Nord.86 He wanted Oldfield to meet her. He knew where to find Oldfield—at the bar of the famed Hôtel Crillon in the Tuileries. It was late in the afternoon and Old-field, good friend that he was, had settled in to enjoy drinks with an American expat he had recently met, a war veteran from San Francisco named Charles Brazelle. Oldfield hated the idea of being a messenger, even for Champion. Albert pleaded with Barney to collect Edna until Barney relented, as long as he could be accompanied by Brazelle.

  Oldfield and Brazelle made it to the train station on time. There, on the crowded train platform, the handsome Charlie Brazelle and Edna met. “I loved her the moment I set eyes on her,” he admitted afterward. “Later, she told me it was the same with her.”87

  Brazelle minded his manners in front of Oldfield as they escorted Edna by taxi to the Hôtel Meurice, in the Tuileries, where Champion had a suite. He joined them for a drink.

  Charlie Brazelle was living in Paris, trying to sell stock shares in a company to launch a new casino near France’s Atlantic resort of Biarritz.88 He was estranged from his second wife, St. Louis socialite Roberta Acuff, owner of a mansion in Biarritz. He’d had no employment since mustering out of the army after the 1918 armistice.

  To bask in Oldfield’s celebrity, he ingratiated himself by throwing a dinner party at the fashionable Henry’s restaurant.89 Brazelle even invited reporters willing to accept a free meal and the chance to report gossip. The November 21, 1926, Seattle Daily Times ran news from Europe about the dinner for Oldfield.

  “It was Charles Brazelle’s farewell to Barney Oldfield, and among the guests was Albert Champion, whose name is inseparably connected with the spark plug industry.”90 Line art depicted men laughing, but the fun would soon turn tragic.

 

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