by Andy Bull
In 1920 Gray and Moore were in Europe with Pickford and his wife, Olive Thomas. She had been one of Ziegfeld’s girls from the Follies until she was signed by Selznick to star in his film The Flapper. “Two innocent-looking children, they were the gayest, wildest brats who ever stirred stardust on Broadway,” wrote their friend Frances Marion, who worked with Gray when he starred in the film The Heart of a Hero. “Both were talented, but they were much more interested in playing the roulette of life than in concentrating on their careers.” Gray was with the two of them in Paris when Thomas, after a night out at Le Rat Mort in Montmartre, drank a bottle of mercury bichloride. Pickford, rumor had it, had been prescribed it as a cure for his syphilis. A hotel valet found her the next morning, naked on a sable opera gown spread out on the floor of the Royal Suite.
Moore, Gray, and Pickford stayed by her side at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine. She died five days later. The American papers were full of wild innuendo. Even the New York Times reported “rumors of cocaine orgies intermingled with champagne dinners which lasted into the early hours of the morning.” The story spread that she had been out trying to score heroin for her husband and that they had fallen out after she had failed to find any. Pickford never escaped the idea that Thomas had committed suicide after having a row with him, though the coroner ruled it was an accidental death. The very same day that the verdict was announced, Gray, Moore, and Pickford traveled together to a memorial service at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in London.
Gray stayed in the UK. Pickford traveled back to the United States. He would soon marry Marilyn Miller, the star of Sally who had been working with Clifford Grey only a year earlier. It may have been a small world they were moving in, but it is still striking how the lives of the two Cliffords intertwined. Another odd link: the reason the American Clifford stayed on in the UK was so that he could make a film, Carnival, with Ivor Novello, who had been working with the English Clifford only a few months beforehand. It was Novello’s first feature film, a remake of Othello, shot in Venice and, a touch more prosaically, Twickenham, in south London. Gray had signed on to make three films with the Famous Players–Lasky British Producers. Carnival was the first of them, and then he had small parts in Dangerous Lies, whose production crew included a young Alfred Hitchcock, and, in 1922, The Man from Home. It was the last film he ever made, and the last time he ever acted. He was staying at the Hotel Cecil on the Strand when he was arrested after being caught, bizarrely, in possession of an opium pipe and a Colt automatic pistol. He told the police that the pistol had been given to him by a friend who had just left for America, and explained, a little unconvincingly, that he used the pipe as a cigarette holder.
After that little scandal, Gray drifted, away from London and away from films. He became, in Odd McIntyre’s words, “the most consistent of the international gadabouts.” A professional playboy, to put it another way. “Wherever there is excitement,” McIntyre wrote, “Tippy is more than likely to bob up suddenly, look about pleasantly, and as suddenly vanish.” McIntyre took great delight in regaling his readers with installments of the adventures of this “most ubiquitous New Yorker.” “Tippy fits the vague classification of a man-about-town. Everybody knows Tippy and he seems to know everybody. Wherever you go—Palm Beach, Paris, London, Hollywood, or New York—you will find him. He is natty, boyish, and a wizard thumping piano keys. He appears every inch the irresistible movie hero, and while I have known him a number of years his profession, save that of having a good time, is as nebulous as fog. A sort of human question mark is a fitting description. Tippy is always just arriving or just going somewhere. Not so long ago I talked to him in Los Angeles. He was hopping on a train in 10 minutes for New York. A week later at a New York pier he was going up the gangplank of a liner for Europe. He never seems to light. One night he might be found dining at a lunch counter with a vaudeville acrobat, and the next in immaculate evening dress at the Ritz with a group listed in the social register.”
Of course Gray was a friend of Jay O’Brien’s. They knew each other through Irene Fenwick, O’Brien’s second wife and an old pal of Clifford’s from his Hollywood days. He and Jay were both regulars at Harry’s Bar in Paris. Both men claimed to have concocted the Sidecar cocktail, a mix of cognac, Cointreau, and lemon juice, while drinking there. The records are patchy—as McIntyre wrote, Gray was “not the publicity seeker often seen among his ilk. He is just a play-boy, and seemingly having heaps of fun at the job”—but if anywhere was home, it was Paris. A month after he wrote the column in which he described Gray’s profession as “nebulous as fog,” McIntyre was surprised to receive an envelope stamped with a Paris postmark that contained only a single business card. It read, simply:
Clifford Gray
Compositeur de Musique
Moulin Rouge Music Hall
Paris
“Tippy” McIntyre wrote, “has put me right.”
In the mid-1920s Gray was working at the Moulin Rouge, writing revue songs for the famous French singer and showgirl Mistinguett. She had just returned from her first US tour and wanted to incorporate a few jazz numbers into her show. Clifford wrote a couple for her, including a foxtrot that he called “California Rose.” He had always been, as McIntyre noted, a wizard at the piano: “For appreciative listeners he will often occupy the piano chair all night to improvise.” Mistinguett was almost fifty then, “an old lady with young ankles,” though as famous as ever. And as flirtatious too. Not that there was ever a suggestion she and Gray were involved. McIntyre stated his friend was “not a roaming Don Juan. In fact Tippy seems to appeal to the maternal in all women. He is the sort they trust.”
Certainly one did. In 1929 he married Clara Louise Cassidy in Paris. She was the heiress of Charles Whelan, who owned United Cigars, a man then reckoned to be worth around fifteen million dollars. The Whelan family moved to Paris and began living high on the hog. They had started poor but had done so well in the tobacco business that they were able to spend one hundred thousand dollars on the wedding of their second daughter, making it, in the words of the Schenectady Gazette, “one of the most elaborate society affairs seen in years.” Clara had been married before, to her father’s business partner, John C. Cassidy, and had five children with him. They’d divorced after seventeen years together. It seems she latched onto Clifford, or he onto her, in the immediate aftermath of the separation. The brief marriage notices described Clifford as a “musical comedy producer from Chicago,” which seemed as good a formal description of what he did as any other. With Clifford Gray, the details are always vague.
The marriage didn’t stick. Neither did the Whelan family fortune: they lost everything in the fallout from the Great Crash of 1929, almost at the time when Clara and Clifford were getting married. Clara’s grandnephew, Frank Whelan, remembered how his grandfather used to tell stories about “yachts, big houses, and servants,” but he always ended them with the phrase “but that was before 1929.” Frank remembered how he’d once seen “my father look at the paper one day and throw it down in disgust and stare into space. In the space of one day he had lost several million dollars.” The family had to cut their cloth to suit after that. “We’re all going to have to live a little more simply now,” Charles told his children. It was, Frank wrote, “Bye-bye Paris, hello Jersey Shore.”
Clara had a nervous breakdown not long after and ended up in hospital. Clifford Gray drifted away. Soon he was back, McIntyre wrote, living as “a plump bachelor,” “a lone wolf among globe trotters. He knows almost everybody but nobody seems an intimate. He is a side-line looker-on at life, gazing with the detachment of a modern Punch and murmuring the same immortal line, ‘What fools these mortals be!’” It’s not clear if he and Clara actually divorced. She was still going by the name “Whelan Gray” as late as 1938.
Gray returned to what McIntyre described as “the blow-torch life,” only now it was more extravagant than ever. McIntyre claimed to ha
ve heard reports of people bumping into Tippy “moseying out of a movie theater in the Bronx,” “on the veranda at Shepherd’s in Cairo,” “casually strolling the Shanghai bund,” in “the South Seas, Singapore, and the Arctic circle,” and a “Gibraltar bazaar.” Gray was, McIntyre added, “the man-about-the-globe,” a “zooming devastator of space.” And of course he met him in St. Moritz, too, where Gray “won trophies for his skiing.” Which was news to at least one of his pals, the journalist Arthur “Bugs” Baer. “I never knew Tippy to go in for the outdoor life unless it was an estaminet table or a garden party. Even at the Coconut Grove, he benched out every dance.” But then we shouldn’t be surprised by the contradictions and confusions. Gray was the “anthology of human paradox,” noted McIntyre. “Loving life, he seems constantly fleeing from it.”
There were few faster ways to flee than by riding a bobsled—which could well be why Tippy responded to Sparrow Robertson’s column when he saw it, in one of those idle estaminet moments, in the Tribune. In January 1928 he set off for St. Moritz, to meet up with Jay O’Brien, his drinking buddy from Harry’s Bar. Jay duly roped him into the US bobsled squad. Gray was a big man after all, his waist well upholstered after all his hard living, and the sleds needed ballast.
As for his English namesake, who knows? He may have been in Switzerland that winter—it wouldn’t be the most surprising of the many coincidences in this curious tale. One thing is for sure though: Clifford Grey never got into a US bobsled, and he never raced with Billy Fiske.
Sunny Corner, St. Moritz, 1927.
CHAPTER 6
THE RACE
The envelope was slim and stamped with a Paris postmark. Geoff Mason guessed it was from the offices of the Herald Tribune. He had written to the paper a few weeks earlier, putting himself forward as a volunteer for the US Olympic bobsled team. Mason had never been near a bobsled, but he had been a fine athlete and football player in his college days. And besides, he had time to kill. He had come over to Europe from the United States the previous summer to take up a place at the University of Freiburg, in Germany. He’d brought his family with him, his wife and their two young daughters. They had done a little traveling. Now they had settled down in their new hometown, only a short distance from the Swiss border. The new term wouldn’t start till later that winter. So when Geoff saw Sparrow’s column, his first thought had been “Why not?” His second had been . . . well, he hadn’t had a second thought. He’d sent off his letter and forgotten all about it.
He opened the envelope and took out the short note inside; it was signed “Jay O’Brien” and sent via Sparrow Robertson at the Trib. Geoff skimmed his eyes over it once, and again, slower, a second time. He was on the team. It didn’t mention anything about a physical exam or a trial run in a sled. It just said, “Come down to St. Moritz, soon as you can.” It was late January 1928, a little over two weeks before the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.
Mason took a morning train to Zurich, and a second on to St. Moritz that same afternoon. By the time he got in, it was ten at night. He trudged through the snow to the Palace Hotel, where, so the letter told him, his new teammates were staying. It looked a little grand for his budget, but rates had been fixed for the Games: $1.50 a day for the cheap rooms, $4.50 for a suite. It was already full, so Mason made his way down the road to a cheaper place. He found he was sharing it with the Canadian ice hockey team. He was over six feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds, but for once, he wasn’t one of the bigger men in the room.
The next morning, Mason walked back through the town to the Palace. He passed the ice rink, where an army of carpenters was working on the new grandstand, and went on through the busy streets, where painters and decorators were prettying things up, hanging up bunting and flags. He met with the rest of the US team at the Palace. First, Jay O’Brien. He was whippet thin, with a fine pencil mustache that hung over the long ebony cigarette holder that was always tucked between his teeth, cigarette smoldering at the far end. It was such an effort to keep it there that his face, already leathery from the sun, often seemed to be bunched up in a scowl. But he was a friendly man, and he made the introductions. There were a couple of other men who had replied to Sparrow’s column: Nion Tucker, an unlikely-looking athlete, a portly chap with pebble-lens spectacles; and Clifford Gray, whom everyone called “Tippy,” short and stout but with a warm grin and a wickedly quick sense of humor. And then there was Billy Fiske, youngest of the bunch by far. O’Brien and Tucker were both in their forties, Gray was a little younger, Mason was twenty-five, but Fiske was just a kid. Nonetheless, he struck Mason as “an extremely mature young man,” “very sophisticated,” “very smart but not a smart alec.” And he was, they said, “a crackerjack bobsled driver.” The others seemed to have “utter confidence” in him.
Mason would soon come to think of Billy as “unquestionably the best anywhere.” O’Brien, who had to pick three teams for the Olympics—USA 1 (the top sled), USA 2, and a reserve crew—didn’t quite agree with that. Jay was a good friend of Billy’s father, and he felt that the boy, talented as he was, was still a touch too young to be No. 1. Billy had, they said, actually approached Jay and asked to be his sled driver in the Olympics. When Jay knocked him back, Billy had replied, “Well, sir, what shall I do with the bobsled my father gave me?” He was certainly sure of himself. But Jay had an idea that either Jennison or Jack Heaton would be the best pilot. The three of them were all good friends; Jennison was still dating Billy’s sister, Peggy.
The two big questions were who would get to drive which sled, and who would have to sit it out, and Jay decided that the best way to settle the issue was to wait until the Derby was run on the St. Moritz track, just a week before the Olympic race was due to take place. Billy had won it the previous year, on his very first attempt. And he had made an astonishing start to the Olympic season. He had already won the Netherland Cup on January 9 and the Argentine Cup on January 17. That very week, with Mason watching, Billy triumphed in the prestigious Gold Cup, the ornate trophy presented to the club by Jay’s good friend Princess Vlora. So Fiske was the man in form. But O’Brien insisted on basing his decision on the results of the Derby. As the UK Times reported, “The Derby is the biggest race of a normal year, and will provide an excellent pointer for the Olympic race, since most of the crews competing in it are to engage for Olympic laurels.” The top two Americans to finish would be Jay’s first and second drivers for the Olympics, and the third would be the reserve.
There was always a little gambling action around the bob run. Couldn’t but be, what with all the money around the town, the idle rich spectators with nothing else to do for kicks till the bars opened and the balls started in the evenings. The St. Moritz Bobsleigh Club made most of its money that way, running auctions and sweepstakes on the results of the races. The 1928 season, though, was something else. St. Moritz was overflowing. The Olympics tourists were spilling out into the nearby towns of Celerina, Samaden, and Pontresin. The crowds weren’t too popular with the regular guests. One British journalist complained about the new breed of swells, the “fur-collared males” and the “painted lady with her dog, her fat ankles, discontented face and bejeweled sports clothes.” But the townspeople loved it. Especially the bookmakers. The big money on the Derby was behind Jack Heaton. Second in the running was the crazy Belgian Ernest “Henri” Lambert. Fiske, despite his good form so far that year, was fourth. He was only sixteen, after all, and no one knew how he would handle the pressure of the competition.
The race was scheduled for a Thursday. On Wednesday night, someone—and no one ever discovered who it was—broke into the shed where the sleds were kept and fiddled with Henri Lambert’s bob. Or so Lambert said once he had finished the race. He came in second, in the end, behind Jack Heaton. Billy finished third, though he did win the Olavegoya Cup, because he recorded the single quickest run during the competition. Each sled had taken four runs, and the winner was the one with the lowest co
mbined time. None of which mattered much once Lambert’s story got out. The journalists swilling around town, who had never seen a bobsled race before, smelled a more interesting story than the straight results of the race. “Here’s fun,” wrote John Kieran in the New York Times. “It appears that some miscreant, under cover of night, strolled into the stall in which the Belgian bobsled expert keeps his iron steed and gave the runners a severe twist. It is most important, of course, that the runners of the sled should be parallel, otherwise the speed is much diminished, and there is a tendency on the part of the sled to separate into several segments. Should the sled divide itself into several segments, the rider has a choice of evils. He can slide the next forty yards either on his nose or on his ear. Neither method is particularly comfortable, especially if the icy coating is inclined to be rough and bumpy. There are straw mats to catch those who fall off their sleds at various points, and the telegraph poles along the route are wrapped in many thicknesses of burlap placed for the reception of distinguished guests. Even so, many rich Americans and titled Englishmen miss the mats and the upholstered telegraph poles and have to be dug out of the common or garden variety of snowdrift.” It was no joke, this, as funny as Kieran made it sound.
Lambert had spent the morning of the race readjusting the runners on his sled, but still felt that the delicate calibration was out of kilter when he started. One punter won twenty thousand dollars on Heaton’s victory. The rumor ran around town that someone was trying to fix the results of the races. Afterward, Jack Heaton declared, “This bob is going under lock and key. Anyone tampering with it must pick a lock and know the combination of my safe deposit box.” The Times reported that the sleds were “guarded like thoroughbreds . . . locked up in sheds as a result of heavy betting on the international event.” Billy certainly took the threat seriously: Peggy remembered that he spent the next few nights sleeping in the stall with his sled, buried beneath a mound of fur blankets, to make sure no one could get their hands on his equipment before the Olympics.
