"The care Bull demonstrates in developing each of the figures in this engrossing narrative is almost novelistic...A well-written and entertaining sports story."
—Kirkus Reviews
“Speed Kings is the best kind of sports writing: a vibrant tapestry of personalities that also provides an intimate picture of major historical events. In this compelling tale of winter athletes competing on the world stage, we also glimpse the threads that pulled Europe and America inexorably toward a catastrophic war. A fine piece of narrative storytelling with great characters and excellent reportage.”
—McKay Jenkins, author of The Last Ridge
“Speed Kings brings to life the fascinating creation of the Winter Olympics and dives into the psychology of early extreme athletes. Best of all, it's told through the eyes of thrillingly complex characters, some of them admirable and some of them deliciously devious. It's rare to be so educated on a forgotten part of history, yet so joyfully entertained. Andy Bull clearly did some painstaking research to weave together this epic narrative.”
—Reed Albergotti, co-author of Wheelmen
“Talk about a fast read! Bull’s tale starts at a breakneck pace and never lets up, taking in stories of playboys, princes, pilots, and prize fighters along the way. Speed Kings is not only a great adventure story of perseverance against the odds; it’s also a brilliant evocation of a romantic and riskier era.”
—Michael Blanding, author of The Map Thief
Speed Kings: The 1932 Winter Olympics and the Fastest Men in the World
Narrated by Eric Meyers
Andy BullUnabridged — 13 hours, 9 minutes
Speed Kings: The 1932 Winter Olympics and the Fastest Men in the World
Narrated by Eric Meyers
Andy BullUnabridged — 13 hours, 9 minutes
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Overview
A story of risk, adventure, and daring as four American bobsledders race for the gold in the most dangerous competition in Olympic history.
*
In the 1930s, as the world hurtled toward war, speed was all the rage. Bobsledding, the fastest and most thrilling way to travel on land, had become a sensation. Exotic, exciting, and brutally dangerous, it was the must-see event of the 1932 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, the first Winter Games on American soil. Bobsledding required exceptional skill and extraordinary courage-qualities the American team had in abundance.
There was Jay O'Brien, the high-society playboy; Tippy Grey, a scandal-prone Hollywood has-been; Eddie Eagan, world champion heavyweight boxer and Rhodes Scholar; and the charismatic Billy Fiske, the true heart of the team, despite being barely out of his teens. In the thick of the Great Depression, the nation was gripped by the story of these four men, their battle against jealous locals, treacherous U.S. officials, and the very same German athletes they would be fighting against in the war only a few short years later. Billy, king of speed to the end, would go on to become the first American fighter pilot killed in WWII. Evoking the glamour and recklessness of the Jazz Age, Speed Kings will thrill readers to the last page.
Editorial Reviews
★ 10/01/2015
Sportswriter Bull's (The Guardian) debut tells the story of America's 1928 and 1932 Olympic bobsled teams, emphasizing the years leading up to and after the squad's triumphant 1932 performance in Lake Placid, NY. Bull's engaging narrative skillfully intertwines a series of entertaining and richly detailed portraits of the colorful cast of characters who became America's first Winter Olympics stars, notably young, ambitious adrenaline junkie Billy Fiske; boxer-turned-scholar-turned-bobsledder Eddie Eagan; and the most fascinating subject, shady socialite Jay O'Brien. The wide-ranging but carefully crafted account also documents bobsledding's emergence as a popular Depression-era pastime and presents how business schemer Godfrey Dewey, son of library pioneer Melvil Dewey, brought the Olympics to Lake Placid in an attempt to turn his remote mountain hamlet into the country's premiere winter sports mecca. Much like Don Bragg's A Chance To Dare or David Maraniss's Rome 1960, Bull focuses on the compelling stories surrounding the games, rather than the actual competitions. VERDICT Highly recommended to general audiences with an interest in Olympic history or who enjoy a well-researched and well-told true sports tale.—Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia
Eric Meyers narrates the gripping story of four young men who became national sensations as members of the U.S. bobsledding team in the Lake Placid Olympics of 1932. Their exploits, both on and off the track, reflect the changes in this country from the 1920s to the Great Depression and also set the stage for the second terrible world war that follows. Meyers has a deep, resonant voice that rattles one’s speakers, and he can also portray characters with both British and regional American accents. He paces the story to create maximum suspense, emphasizing the personal details that keep it moving. There are twists along the way, and Meyers delivers them with aplomb. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
2015-07-27
Guardian senior sportswriter Bull recounts the history of modern bobsledding and the four men who led the American team to victory at the 1932 Winter Olympics. The late-19th-century development of the automobile primed popular taste for speed in both the United States and Europe. At this time, bobsledding became a craze on both sides of the Atlantic. By the early 20th century, it had gone from an "enjoyable pastime" to an activity that caused countless injuries and many deaths. Bobsledding also became a sport that helped revitalize the moribund tourist economy of St. Moritz, a Swiss Alpine resort that opened the first bobsled track in 1902. As sleds became faster and more dangerous, the sport became increasingly popular among spectators and sportsmen looking for the ultimate winter thrill. Against this backdrop, Bull tells the story of four individuals—Billy Fiske, the speed-loving son of an American banker; Jay O'Brien, a New York bon vivant; Eddie Eagan, a champion boxer; and Tippy Gray, a silent film star—who became some of the greatest heroes of early competitive bobsledding. He interweaves the story of their exploits with the behind-the-scene intrigues and boardroom politicking that characterized the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics, the first to ever be held on American soil. Part of an international group of 52 bobsledders dubbed the "suicide club," the team went on to not only beat local Lake Placid favorites, but also break speed records and win the gold medal. The care Bull demonstrates in developing each of the figures in this engrossing narrative is almost novelistic, but this attention to detail also causes the narrative to digress too much toward the end, where Bull elaborates on the short post-victory life of daredevil team captain Fiske, who went on to become a volunteer fighter pilot for the British and die fighting the Germans in 1940. A flawed but well-written and entertaining sports story.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169296822 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 10/20/2015 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
PROLOGUE
The lunch van arrived at a quarter to one. And about time too. Bill Littlemore’s stomach was starting to growl. They had been up before dawn again, fitting and rigging the fighters, loading the bullets, checking the repairs, running the engines. That was the job, so there was no sense complaining. Which never stopped them from doing exactly that.
Bill volunteered to run over to the van for his fellow mechanics. He could already see the queue starting to form as he trotted across the grass. He quickened his pace. Started to sweat a little. It was hot now. The early morning haze was long gone. This was the first bit of blue sky they’d had all week. He looked up. The pilots were up there somewhere, but he couldn’t see them. They must be out over the Isle of Wight. He said a quick prayer to himself, asking God to send them home safe. He often did that when they were in the air, and he didn’t mind admitting it.
He’d already eaten half his bun by the time he got back to the dispersal hut. He had to duck his mouth down to it because his hands were full and he didn’t want to spill the tea on his uniform. The lads were all idling around, waiting for news from Control. The squadron had taken off half an hour ago, when the radar stations had picked up a formation coming out of Cherbourg and heading across the Channel. By now they’d either be in the thick of it or already on their way back home.
“Any news?” he asked as he put the three teas down. He already knew the answer. No one was moving, so there was nothing doing.
He passed the buns around, one apiece for each of the two Jocks, Tyrrell and McKinley. They were firm pals, flight mechanics, like Bill, with 43 Squadron, the “Fighting Cocks.” And just then, they heard the distant hum of the engines.
“That sounds like them now,” said Tyrrell. “That’s the Cocks returning.”
Bill put his ear to the wind, paused. And he knew, he just knew, that it wasn’t them. The pitch was off.
“They’re not ours,” he said. “They sound like bloody Jerry, don’t they?”
The loudspeakers burst into life. “Attention! Attention! Take cover! Take cover!” It wasn’t the first time they’d heard that today. But the announcer sounded a little more urgent this time.
Bill heard the words, but somehow they didn’t register. They’d done so many drills—he just couldn’t believe this was the real thing. Then the air-raid alarms began to wail. He stepped out of the hut and threw his hand up above his brow to block out the sun. And he saw it straightaway. A Stuka. Gull wings, fixed undercarriage, large glass canopy. The silhouette was utterly unmistakable. He watched as the plane turned its nose down toward the earth and swept into a steep dive, down toward No. 1 Hangar. He could hear the howl of the siren from across the field. When the dive reached two thousand feet, a small black orb fell away from the Stuka’s belly and carried on down toward the earth while the plane itself pulled up and away back into the sky. And then a pillar of fire and smoke filled the sky, followed, so quick you couldn’t tell which had come first, by the thump of the explosion. The bomb fell right by the van, at the exact spot where Bill had been standing a few minutes earlier.
There is no single, definitive account of what happened at RAF Tangmere on August 16, 1940. There are dozens of versions, one for every person who was there. Their memories of the raid don’t always add up. Often they contradict each other. Some say they heard the sirens earlier, that the Tannoy warned them sooner, that the first bomb fell in another spot. They are all right. Everyone made sense of the chaos in his own way. This is the story of the raid as told by Bill Littlemore, Leading Aircraftman, 43 Squadron, as he remembered it forty years later.
“From that moment on all hell broke loose, with bombs exploding, the noise of the Stukas strafing us as they dived and pulled skywards, and our ground defenses putting up a barrage of metal which must have made the Hun feel that he was not welcome,” Bill wrote. “For many of us at Tangmere that day it was our first baptism of fire, something I shall always remember as a very unpleasant experience when one considers we had no arms to hit back with except the tools in our tool boxes. And I can assure you these felt very inadequate when set against the bombs and cannon fire that was to be aimed at us by the Stuka 87s when they suddenly pounced on the airfield.
“For those of us on the flights, and I am sure I express their feelings as well as mine, we were shaken to say the least, and as per our orders for such a situation the only sensible thing to do was seek the protection of our air raid shelter which lay just to the rear of ‘B’ Flight dispersal hut. All sprint records were I am sure broken in our haste to reach the safety of the shelter and it is said that fear lends wings to those who need them. I grew a pair very quickly.”
Bill wasn’t thinking anymore. It was blind panic. He sprinted toward the bomb shelter, and safety. He was almost there when, through the machine-gun fire and the bomb blasts and the sirens and the engines, he heard, loud and clear, what he described as the “stentorian shout” of his boss, Flight Sergeant Savage.
“Stand by!” Savage barked. “Our aircraft are approaching!”
Bill stopped running. All those hours of drills, of unthinking obedience to orders, had their effect. Another instinct kicked in, one even keener than self-preservation: duty. The shout, Bill wrote, “had the immediate effect of doing away with all the panic and bringing us back to awareness that we had a job to do.” The Fighting Cocks were returning to base. The planes would need refueling and rearming. It didn’t matter that the raid was still going on around them. In fact, it made the work more important than ever, since the pilots might need to get right back up into the air.
“With the disappearance of panic came the opportunity to take stock and look around us,” Bill continued. “And it was then I became aware for the first time of burning hangars and the buildings, and a great pall of smoke hanging over the whole scene.” For those brief moments, Bill Littlemore stood still, feet rooted to the ground, while the fires raged around him. He was looking upward, scanning the skies for the returning British fighters. He saw four, though at first he couldn’t tell whether they were with 43 or one of the other squadrons flying out of Tangmere. “I have etched on my memory the picture of four Hurricanes flying in what could only be described as loose, strung-out formation approaching the aerodrome at about 2,000 feet from the south, and who were to be the first to land on the aerodrome while the three-minute raid was still in progress. Yes three minutes, and yet to most of us who witnessed it, it seemed more like half an hour.”
The fighters were in silhouette. “About 8 of us on ‘B’ Flight were watching the approach of these aircraft when to our horror we observed that one had begun to leave behind it a trail of white smoke.” This, Bill knew, was bad news. White smoke could only mean that the engine was leaking ethylene glycol, which burns with an invisible flame. The pilot wouldn’t be able to see the fire leaping up through the floor of the cockpit and lapping around his legs. And the smoke was even more dangerous. In those quantities glycol fumes cause, first, involuntary rapid eye movements, then short losses of consciousness. For a pilot, that was fatal. “The white smoke was the forerunner of things to come. For the pilot must very soon make a decision to bail out, otherwise he would be overcome by fumes leaking back into the cockpit, and oblivion would take over.”
Bill was transfixed. He started to scream: “Get out! Get out for Christ’s sake!”
The Hurricane continued its approach. The white smoke turned black. Flames started to burst up from the engine. It was so close now, right over the hedgerows at the distant side of the field. It was too late to jump. Perhaps the pilot had already lost consciousness. He was done for. Suddenly, the plane broke into a steep dive. The undercarriage was up. It was going to crash. “I felt that this could only be the start of that inevitable plunge toward earth, culminating in that awful crump and plume of smoke that would climb into the sky, marking the spot where yet another of our chaps had plowed into the ground and made his own burial site.”
And then, “at the moment when it seemed that this could be the only outcome,” the plane pulled up, and the pilot, “struggling to maintain control, leveled out only feet above the ground.” The plane landed flat on its belly, bounced up and down, and shot into a skid. A shower of sparks spurted out behind it as it swept across the runway, trailing a wake of great coils of thick black smoke. When it finally came to a standstill, the flames, held in check for so long, burst out into the sky. Two men ran across the turf toward the wreck.
That was the last thing Bill saw. Instinct kicked in again. He came out of the trance, remembered where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. The sky was full of vapor and smoke. Aircraft were coming in from every point of the compass. It was chaos up there. But down below, a kind of calm had fallen. The raid was over. “From that moment my immediate concern had to be looking for my own pilots.”
The day passed. The battle passed. The war passed. But that one image of the burning Hurricane making its belly landing always stayed in Bill Littlemore’s mind. It froze there, so crystal clear that he could still see, forty years later, the precise position he was standing in, the exact course the plane was flying, and even the specific spot where it finally came to a stop. The one thing he didn’t know was who had been flying the plane. Perhaps that was why he never stopped thinking about it. He even commissioned a local artist to paint the scene for him, just as he remembered it.
Some of the veterans preferred not to talk or even think about the war. They shut their memories away and sealed them off. They didn’t want to remember. Bill Littlemore wasn’t like that. He stayed in touch with his old colleagues, took the newsletters, bought the books, attended the annual meet-ups. And as he read and heard all those other accounts and memories of the raid, he slowly pieced it all together, until he realized, at last, that he had seen the final moments of one of the most remarkable stories of the war.
“It was,” Bill wrote, “the last landing of Billy Fiske.”
PART ONE
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure. True, men have always enjoyed speed; but their enjoyment has been limited, until very recent times, by the capacities of the horse, whose maximum velocity is not much more than thirty miles an hour. Now thirty miles an hour on a horse feels very much faster than sixty miles an hour in a train or a hundred in an airplane. The train is too large and steady, the airplane too remote from stationary surroundings, to give the passengers a very intense sensation of speed. The automobile is sufficiently small and sufficiently near the ground to be able to compete, as an intoxicating speed-purveyor, with the galloping horse. The inebriating effects of speed are noticeable, on horseback, at about twenty miles an hour, in a car at about sixty. When the car has passed seventy-two, or thereabouts, one begins to feel an unprecedented sensation—a sensation which no man in the days of horses ever felt. It grows intenser with every increase of velocity. I myself have never traveled at much more than eighty miles an hour in a car; but those who have drunk a stronger brewage of this strange intoxicant tell me that new marvels await any one who has the opportunity of passing the hundred mark.
—from “Wanted, a New Pleasure,” in Music at Night and Other Essays, by Aldous Huxley, written on the French Riviera in 1931
Billy Fiske, Lake Placid, 1932.
CHAPTER 1
THE KID
September 1930. Afternoon on the Riviera. In Cannes, outside the Carlton Hotel, a small crowd of people have gathered on La Croisette. They’re standing around a brand-new, racing green Bentley “Blower,” exceptionally pretty and extraordinarily fast. Bentley had made only fifty or so of the cars, and this one was especially rare. It was a road model built to racing specifications. The hood was a little longer, the tank a little larger, the dash a little sleeker than was standard. It was fourteen feet long and weighed almost a ton and a half. A good chunk of that came from the silver supercharger mounted at the front, which gave the car its unusual name. The car was so big that the boy in the driver’s seat seemed a little lost inside it. The steering wheel was too broad for his chest and too thick for his fingers to wrap around. He was nineteen and he looked it. His mouth was spread out in a broad grin, which puckered up little dimples in his smooth cheeks. He wore his sandy hair swept back beneath a cap, peak turned up so that the wind wouldn’t pluck it off his head.
He tugged on the magneto switches, sent a pulse of current into the engine, slipped his hand across the dash to flick the Bakelite switch that controlled the fuel pump, and then pressed the starter button. The crowd stepped back as the engine exploded into life, and the long, square panels of the hood rattled underneath the restraining straps. Dust rushed up off the road and coated their clothes. They had to shout to be heard above the roar.
“Good luck, Billy!”
He watched the dial. He had to wait ten seconds while the oil pressure rose. Oh, and one more thing. He reached across to the little clock on the far side of the dash. There was a stopwatch set into it, three little dials inside a small square window. He’d paid an extra shilling to have it installed. He twisted the cog that flipped the counters back to zero. Immediately, the cylinders began to roll back around again, counting upward. He took a last glance at the St. Christopher’s medal strapped to the dash. Then he put his foot down and slipped the car into gear. He had forty miles to travel on a winding road, and sixty minutes to do it. Make that a second under sixty minutes, since he didn’t just want to beat the record, he wanted to be the first man to break the hour barrier.
The French authorities had recently scrapped their speed limit, which had been set at just over 12 miles per hour in built-up areas. Billy passed that before he was even a little way down La Croisette, with the sunlight flickering off the silver fittings as the car accelerated out toward the coast road. The new regulations insisted only that vehicles must be driven at “moderate speed.” This, Billy felt, was a subjective sort of stipulation, one that entirely depended on what you understood “moderate” to mean. His conception of moderation was a little different from that of the men who had written the rule. But then they had said, too, that “the driver must remain in total control of the speed at all times.” And he always was, even as he shot out of Cannes onto the road to Antibes, where he pushed the car so hard that the needle on the rev counter shot up past the red line and the supercharger kicked in. At around 80 mph, it started firing compressed air into the engine, with a high-pitched whine that cut right across the low growl of the engine, which was why they called it a “blower.” The car kicked on again, as though it had been booted up the trunk. Up above 100 mph, and faster still, to 110 mph, 115 mph, where the needle held and started to flicker up and down.
As he came into Antibes, Billy reined the car in again. It had a crash gearbox, a bugger to work. Billy pressed the clutch, came out of gear into neutral, revved the engine till it was in synch with the cogs, and slipped back into a lower gear. A double de-clutch. He did it unthinkingly. His foot danced on the pedals, and his practiced hand worked the stick down by his right side, moving, as his friend Henry Longhurst put it, “as smooth as butter.” Of course, Longhurst said, “if you got it wrong, you could break your wrist, let alone your gearbox.” But Billy was in rhythm with the car. He worked it as a good drummer does his instrument, hands, feet, and thoughts all moving together in time.
Skirting Nice, Billy had to dodge between the traffic, which was moving so slowly in comparison with his car that it may as well have been standing still. There was no point stopping for it at this speed. Billy’s maxim was “Don’t brake, avoid.” Which he did. In, out, and around, his mind working overtime to find the ideal line, making a series of quick calculations, like a man running downhill over rough terrain—his thoughts moving as fast as his feet as he figures out a safe path across the rocks. The car shot on along the Basse Corniche, the sea on one side, the cliffs on the other.
The Bentley’s beam axle made it a bumpy ride, and with the big silver supercharger weighing down the front, Billy’s model was particularly prone to understeer. On the turns, it spat up gravel as it pulled out wide, away from the road. On the tight horseshoe at Villefranche, he pushed the throttle down farther, forcing more torque into the back wheels, making the cross-ply tires bite in an attempt to balance out the drift. It was a double-or-quits move. And it worked. A bit more throttle. A bit more, and then the back of the car tucked in and the whole thing snapped back into line as they entered the straight road.
He was into the last stretch, across the border into Monaco, and really screaming. The stopwatch ticked onward, fifty-two minutes, fifty-three minutes, up toward the hour mark. He sped on, past Beaulieu and Cap Ferrat, Eze, Cap-d’Ail, through the outskirts of Monte Carlo, that “sunny place for shady people,” as Somerset Maugham called it. Past the port and on to Avenue d’Ostende. And there it was, the Hotel de Paris. Billy eased the car back down, changing down the gears as the pace slackened off. He pulled to a stop, for the first time since setting off, just outside the front doors of the hotel. He glanced down at the dash, punched the button on the stopwatch. Fifty-eight minutes. Made it. And with almost two minutes to spare.
—
Everyone who knew Billy Fiske, however well, agreed on one thing: he loved speed; seemed, even, to live for it. In the 1980s, when the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was asked what he remembered about his friendship with Billy, the first thing that popped into his mind was that “he was famous for setting the speed record between London and Cambridge.” Henry Longhurst, Billy’s friend from his days at Cambridge University, said that Billy had “an uncanny eye for speed.” Like all Billy’s friends, Longhurst had a fund of stories about his journeys in the passenger seat of that big green Bentley. Longhurst was a golfer, a good one, and he and Billy used to make the run from Cambridge to the Royal Worlington Course at Mildenhall, a twenty-one-mile stretch. “Sometimes the time would be around 19 minutes,” Longhurst wrote in his memoirs. “And without a tremor of apprehension to public or passenger. Day after day, sitting on Fiske’s left, I would notice my own front wheel passing within an inch or so of its track the day before. The supercharger came in with a shrill whine at about 80, generally at the beginning of the long straight where the Cambridge road goes eventually uphill through the beechwood to join the London road short of the racecourse at Newmarket. Soon the needle would creep up into the red, staying for a while between 110 and 120 mph, till at precisely the same spot just short of the slope, Fiske would change down to third at exactly 86, and every time the gear would go through like butter.”
The brothers Bobby and Charles Sweeny rode shotgun with Billy when he was making all those runs around the south of France, breaking records that weren’t set down in books but were swapped back and forth between members of the set—the fifty-eight-minute run from Cannes to Monte Carlo, the seventeen-minute run from Nice to Cannes. “As far as I know,” Charles Sweeny said much later, “that second record still stands.” There were no prizes to be won for these races, no cups or trophies, only bragging rights. Billy drove quick for the hell of it. Speed was his drug.
Billy was too fast too young to have spent much time learning to drive that quick. His was a natural talent. He was blessed with an intuitive understanding of how to handle vehicles at speed. It didn’t matter whether he was in a car, a motorboat, a bobsled, or an airplane. He just relished racing, and always had, right from the first time he got behind a wheel. When he was fifteen, he pinched his father’s red Bugatti and took his sister, Peggy, out to race in a hill climb. It was a time trial, up a short, steep slope. He won, with plenty of time to spare. Peggy remembered how he had turned to her and said, “Don’t you dare tell Father about this.” Billy’s dad always hated the idea of his young son competing in track races. He thought they were just too dangerous. When he was still eighteen, Billy was asked to race a Stutz Bearcat in the Le Mans 24-Hour endurance race. But as Bobby Sweeny recalled, “his father soon put a stop to that.” Years later, the facts were forgotten, and the story of his race at Le Mans became one of many myths about him, passed on from one newspaper or magazine article to another, mentioned time and again in the various TV documentaries made about his life. He was someone people loved to tell stories about, whether they were true or not.
Racing wasn’t in Billy’s blood, but he inherited plenty of other things from his father. His name, for one. In full, it was William Meade Lindsley Fiske III, following on from his father, W.M.L. Fiske II, and his grandfather, W.M.L. Fiske I. But everyone called him Billy, and those who knew him best of all often stuck at plain Bill. The Fiskes were an old American family. They could trace the tree right back to Phineas Fiske, who came over to the United States from England in 1636, just sixteen years after the arrival of the Mayflower, and settled in Wenham, Massachusetts. The “William Meade Lindsley” part was picked out by Billy’s great-grandfather, who gave the name to his son as a tribute to a close friend.
Billy’s father was a banker. He studied at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and then at Columbia. After he graduated in 1900, he took a trip around Europe for the kind of education you can’t get in a lecture hall. While he was there, he fell in love with France and developed a fluency in the language that would serve him well later in life. When Fiske Sr. returned to the United States, he started work at the small Wall Street firm Vermilye & Co., which sent him out to its new branch in Chicago. “By then the passport to Wall Street’s investment banking elite was attendance at fashionable preparatory schools and Ivy League colleges,” notes the authorized history of the firm. “More often than not individuals with the proper social cachet would call upon a fellow fraternity member who through familial connections had obtained a post and, drawing on past favors and old friendships, have the door opened for him.” A couple of Fiske’s superiors at Vermilye had attended the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, including William Read, the top earner in the firm.
It was in Chicago that Fiske met and married Beulah Bexford. That was in 1906. They took a house in Winnetka, up on the North Shore. It was a good time. Twelve months earlier there had been a schism in the ranks of Vermilye. Sensing that there would be more opportunities in the new firm, Fiske left to work for the new breakaway company run by Read. He was right. In 1905, Read made Fiske the bank’s head of operations in Chicago. Business was good. They had a small staff, but that didn’t stop them from expanding into Canada, Britain, and South America. And in 1909, Read made Fiske a full partner in the firm. By then he was a father. His daughter, named Beulah, just like her mother, but known to all as Peggy, had been born in 1907. Billy followed four years later, on June 4, 1911.
Two years later, another new arrival made an even bigger impression on the Fiske family. In 1913, Read sent a young man down from New York to start work underneath him in the Chicago office. His name was Clarence Lapowski, though the world would come to know him as Clarence Dillon. He would become, in short time, one of the most influential men on Wall Street.
Lapowski was the son of a Polish Jew, a dry goods merchant. He was educated at Worcester Academy in Massachusetts and then Harvard, though he failed the Latin portion of his entrance exam three times over. While there, he lost the Lapowski and adopted his mother’s maiden name of Dillon. Despite the switch, his friends said that Dillon never tried to deny his Jewish heritage. Certainly, enough people knew to ensure that he was blackballed from plenty of members’ clubs in New York—which explains why he felt he should hide it in the first place. At Harvard, anyhow, his classmates knew him by the nickname “Baron,” given in recognition, he said, of his love of gambling, poker, and horse racing. Much as he enjoyed money, Baron Dillon never planned to work in high finance. The story goes that he bumped into a college friend out on a walk in Manhattan, and the friend asked him, “What are you doing nowadays?” Not much, was Dillon’s answer. “You should get into the banking business. Come on over and meet William Read. He is a man worth knowing.” So they strolled on over to Read’s offices. “I never had less intention of becoming a banker than on that day,” Dillon remembered. “But Mr. Read seemed well disposed.” Read was no less impressed. He asked Dillon to take a desk in the office and decide for himself whether he wanted to be a banker. Dillon replied that he would have to talk it over with his wife, since she would be reluctant to leave their home in the Midwest. So Read offered to fix him up with a job in Chicago on a starting salary of $250 a month.
In Chicago, working as a bond salesman under Fiske, Dillon made a name for himself when he convinced the millionaire William Horlick, president of the malted milk company, to let the firm handle his investment portfolio. That was just the start of it. Dillon said he found the banking business “more fascinating than a game of no-limit stud poker,” and he went on to make a series of remarkable deals, most notably when he set up a chemical firm to produce phenol, needed for the manufacture of TNT—a shrewd move given how great demand would be once war broke out. It made him the best part of his eight-million-dollar fortune. By then Read had summoned him to New York.
By 1916 Dillon had been made a partner at Read & Co., just three years after he started working at the firm. He was thirty-three and already, as the company history puts it, “considered not only the critical banker there but one of the brightest and most promising individuals in financial history.” William Read died of pneumonia the very next month, leaving each of the partners—including Fiske—twenty-five thousand dollars, but the company without a head. Dillon, despite being the junior partner, took over from him. He’d always said that he was reluctant to take on the job. But according to the Wall Street gossip of the time, the partners had been discussing the succession when Dillon simply stood up, walked into Read’s vacant corner office, and took his seat. Which sounds about right. Certainly when he decided to rename the firm Dillon, Read & Co. in 1920, the first Fiske and the other partners heard of it was when Dillon told them, “Gentlemen, I have bought in 85 percent of the business here. Those who do not like it can withdraw.”
Dillon was infamously ruthless, “hard and inhuman” according to his associate Hugh Bullock. “The stories about Dillon being a mean, tight-fisted bastard were true,” he said. “I have never met a man that was as tough and hard-boiled.” And the economist Eliot Janeway memorably described Dillon as “nothing but a money guy” who “wouldn’t have bought God with a whorehouse attached if it wasn’t a bargain.” Long before Jordan Belfort borrowed the title for his book, or Martin Scorsese used it for his movie, Dillon was known as “the Wolf of Wall Street,” a name he was given by his employee James Forrestal. But Dillon was well known, too, for the fierce loyalty he showed to his old friends. He personally bailed out a bunch of his old partners and associates during the Wall Street crash a decade later. And he never forgot the debt of thanks, and friendship, he owed Fiske from their early days in Chicago, when Dillon got his start in the industry as a bond salesman. He liked Fiske—saw in him qualities he admired, even desired. As Dillon’s grandson put it, “My grandfather had brains but he always wanted to be socially acceptable . . . It was the one thing he didn’t have himself. So I think he was conscious about doing things for himself and for his children and grandchildren to make them socially acceptable.” William Meade Lindsley Fiske II, worldly, well-spoken, from old blue-blood stock, could teach Dillon a thing or two, even, while working alongside him, lend him a little of his social standing. So long as Dillon was in charge, Fiske had a job for life. And so did his family. Dillon employed Fiske’s nephew, Dean Mathey, right out of college. There was always a job waiting for Billy, too, whenever he wanted it.
Back in Chicago, Fiske and his family thrived. They had a house on East Chestnut, just a couple of blocks up from the lakefront. They lived there with three female staff: a cook, a servant, and a nurse. They had a couple of dogs too: a dachshund they called Riley Grogan and a border terrier, Billy’s, who went by the name of Cuddly Demon. In 1919 they traveled up to Canada for a vacation in Banff National Park, a trip Peggy documented assiduously in her scrapbooks. Happy days, these. Billy was eight. It was here, up in the Canadian Rockies, that he got his first taste of life in the mountains, as a small blond boy scurrying around the hiking trails on Big Beehive and around Lake Louise. Their father was a keen horse rider, swimmer, and golfer, and he encouraged a love of the outdoor life in his children. Billy, Peggy remembered, “was always interested in keeping fit.” He used to prop his feet up on the top edge of the large freestanding tub in the bathroom and do push-ups. She was a bit of a tomboy herself, who wore her hair cut short, and the two of them would rough-and-tumble together, wrestle.
For much of their childhood, Billy and Peggy were taught by private tutors, which meant that their parents also took on a lot of the responsibility for their education. Their father, in particular, tried to inculcate a strong set of values in his children. He was a Presbyterian, a staunch Republican, and had a furious work ethic, but instead of forcing them to adopt his beliefs wholesale, he urged them to develop inquiring, independent minds. Their father used to instigate debates at the dinner table. He’d ask one child to explain why it had been a good day and get the other to explain why, on the contrary, it had been a bad one. The next night they would swap roles. “Bill got his tremendous curiosity and drive from his father,” Peggy said. “They both wanted to learn about everything.”
The twist of fate that would shape Billy’s life wasn’t brought about by his father, however, but by the work of his father’s boss, Dillon. At the very same time the Fiskes were up in Banff, Dillon’s work with the War Industries Board had taken him to France for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. While there, he fixed on the idea of expanding his bank’s business into continental Europe. He settled on Germany. It was a bold decision, and one that would ultimately have horrendous consequences for both Dillon’s firm and the Fiske family. But in 1921, all Dillon saw was opportunity.
The Germans made a first war reparations payment of $250 million in 1921 but were unable to make the second, of another $250 million, let alone the $500 million that was due in 1922. The economy collapsed, the currency with it, and so many new notes were printed that the German mark was soon worth less than the paper it was made of. By November 1923 you could get five million marks to the dollar. Brigadier Charles Dawes, director of the US Bureau of the Budget, concocted a repayment plan under which Germany would start paying annual reparations of $250 million, rising to $625 million within four years. The country would also get a new currency, the reichsmark, and a new German central bank, which would have a fifty-year monopoly on the issuance of paper money. Crucially, there would also be a foreign loan of $200 million to the German government. This was where the American banks, Dillon Read among them, stepped in. The loan was floated in Britain and the United States by a syndicate led by US banks J. P. Morgan and Dillon, Read & Co. For Dillon himself, this was just the opportunity he had been looking for. The loan was a preliminary step that would enable him to begin serious business in the German market. “Our opportunity lies in industrial Europe,” he told the New York Times. “The railroad and public utility financing that is to be done in Europe is tremendous . . . and lucrative.”
Dillon, then, needed a man to head up his new European operation, which was to be based in Paris. He had hired Colonel James A. Logan, who had been involved with the Reparations Committee, because he felt Logan had excellent connections in France and Britain. But Logan was, in the words of Dillon’s biographer, “aggressive, and crude, and lacked the diplomacy needed.” Dillon required someone with finesse who was familiar with French culture and had a good grasp of the language. He chose William Meade Lindsley Fiske II. So, in 1924, the Fiske family moved to France. They sailed on the SS Belgenland in April, stayed for a time at the Hyde Park Hotel in London, then went on to Paris. They bought a house on the Avenue Bugeaud, and a little later a château in the south, just outside Biarritz.
Billy’s father wasn’t exactly engaged in banking work as we understand it today. Dillon, Read & Co. were busy funding loans to Belgium, Italy, and Poland as well as to Germany, and much of his time was spent schmoozing with European aristocrats and diplomats. In the summer of 1924 he traveled with Dillon to Warsaw to negotiate with the Polish government over a $35 million loan. They were given use of their own personal train to travel to Lancut, in Galicia, where a man named Prince Alfred Potocki met them. Potocki walked them down a red carpet, then drove them to his castle “through streets lined with peasants, heads bowed in supplication.” Potocki was still living in nineteenth-century splendor. His wife and daughters apparently sent their lingerie to Paris by coach so that they wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of knowing the local laundresses had touched their underwear.
Years later, the son of one of Fiske’s colleagues, Ferdinand Eberstadt, recalled his father’s stories about the visits to Potocki’s castle: “When they arrived a sumptuous ball was under way with scores of beautiful women, lavishly dressed, footmen carrying champagne and great heaps of caviar and other exotic food on silver trays, all accompanied by music from wandering minstrel groups and string orchestras playing waltzes. Everyone was dancing, eating and drinking and having a fine old time which continued to dawn . . . The following day the men mounted their horses and went off to hunt wild boar for exercise and to rid themselves of their hangovers from the night before. The following evening another gala took place; revelry appeared to be the normal state of life in the castle—contrasting sharply with the austere peasant surroundings outside the castle grounds. The Polish cavaliers rode out early each morning, eager for sport, in spite of night after night of drinking and wenching.”
This, then, was the kind of company the Fiskes were keeping. Even Dillon seemed a little overwhelmed by their high living. Billy’s father was entirely at ease in their company. The Polish government rewarded him with a medal, the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, “for furthering good relations between Poland and the United States.” He was in his element.
While his father was swanning about Europe, and his mother was making a home in Paris, Billy was packed off to boarding school in England. He was thirteen when he arrived in the village of Sutton Courtenay, just outside Oxford, to study at what he called “a somewhat unorthodox school.” The boys were allowed to keep pets, and he got himself a little Welsh terrier. Billy wasn’t there long, but these teenage years shaped him. At Sutton Courtenay, he began to grow into a man with the kind of independent mind that his father had always encouraged him to have. Billy came to settle down there, saying, “Altogether my roots are almost stronger here than any place I know.” He thought of it as home, perhaps because it was during the school holidays that he first started to travel on his own.
When Billy turned fifteen, his father arranged for him to go to South America to spend a summer working on a sheep farm in the countryside outside Buenos Aires. He sailed in May, with a chaperone, and spent the summer with family friends his father had made through his work in the region with Dillon, Read & Co. “My first real trip by myself was when I went to South America,” Billy later said. “And I have commuted between continents ever since.” He did it, he explained, “just to see what it was like.” He didn’t seem to learn much about sheep farming, but he did feel the first stirrings of the wanderlust that would later lead him to travel around the world. He came back from Argentina through Rio, a city that made such an impression on him that he was idolizing it a decade later. When he first saw Sydney, he wrote that the harbor there “vies with Rio de Janeiro for the honor of being the most beautiful in the world. Any Australian will tell you Sydney is by far the winner whether he has seen Rio or not. But in spite of this I think Rio comes in a fairly easy first. Sydney Harbor seems to have more little ‘high-ways’ and ‘by-ways’ than Rio, but it has not got the marvelous sugar-loaf mountain or the background of high mountains. Its promontories and islands seem too well-covered by cheap houses, and somehow flat and squalid by comparison. After all I had heard about the beauties of Sydney Harbor I was just a bit disappointed. But perhaps I had been spoiled by seeing Rio first.”
Billy was blessed with the means to indulge his appetite for adventure and to satisfy his inquiring mind. Later, he would write in his journal a couple of lines that served as a personal creed: “The two great characteristics to develop in any child are courage and justice. Broadly speaking, with these well-developed a person can face the world and be successful.” He came, over time, to be irritated by his father’s conservative streak and the way he put his banking work before his family, but he would never forget the pains his father had taken to teach him those very qualities, courage and justice. And whatever measures of them he possessed, he owed to his father. And, while he never would have said it about himself, everyone who knew him agreed that Billy had plenty of both. Years later, when Billy’s name was on the front pages of the papers and the tongues of American high society, “a young San Francisco society matron,” who had known him when she was a little girl in the south of France, told one reporter that “when he was 14 years old, Billy saved a man’s life at Biarritz—a drowning swimmer. The surf was too rough for the rescue boats, but not for Billy. He went out and got him.” There’s no way of knowing now whether her scanty story, like that of Billy racing in the Le Mans 24, is one of the many myths that grew up around him as the years went by. Whether the details are correct or not, the spirit of it is in keeping with what we know. Billy, just back from his travels in South America, was a brave young man in a hurry to “face the world.” And if he didn’t have any idea where he was heading in the long run, he at least knew where he was going to make his first stop: Switzerland, and St. Moritz.
Billy Fiske and crew on the run, St. Moritz, 1928.
CHAPTER 2
A NEW SPORT
To understand why St. Moritz came to hold such a fix on Billy Fiske’s mind, we need to turn back the best part of a century. The town, high in the Engadine valley, was once a sleepy sort of place. Tourists came for its mineral springs, which had been famous since the early sixteenth century, when Pope Leo X promised to grant absolution to anyone who took the waters. As late as the 1850s there were only two hundred year-round residents, their ranks swollen each summer by the tourists who came to soak their bones in the waters. The locals were perplexed that so few of their visitors stayed on once the summer was gone, since the sunshine carried on right through the winter, and were vexed by the fact that their trade fluctuated so wildly from one season to the next.
Johannes Badrutt, the son of a local craftsman, bought a hotel in St. Moritz, the Pension Faller, in 1856. And like everyone else in the town, he soon found himself despairing about the seasonal slump in business. So, in the summer of 1864, he decided to make a wager with four of his British guests. They were deeply skeptical about the idea that the town would be a pleasant place to stay in the winter. He told them that if they returned to St. Moritz later that year and found that the weather wasn’t better than what they got in London—a low bar, that—then he would pay all the expenses for their trip. They took him up on it, and they arrived by horse-drawn sleigh that December “perspiring and nearly blinded by the sun.” Badrutt met them on the terrace of his hotel, in his shirtsleeves. He was so delighted to have won his bet that he paid their expenses anyway.
Badrutt’s gamble worked. Word spread, and by the 1870s winter tourism was beginning to grow in St. Moritz. Badrutt, certainly, was doing well enough to find several thousand Swiss francs to spend on a rudimentary electric lighting system that he spotted at the Paris World’s Fair in 1878. By that Christmas, the grand dining room of his hotel was illuminated by electric lights, the first of their kind in Switzerland. They burned for only ninety minutes, and once they were on, you couldn’t turn them off again, but Badrutt wagered that the novelty and glamor of it would bring in extra customers. And he was right. The trouble was that once his guests had admired the lights, the lavish views, and had a long dinner or two, there wasn’t much else for them to do. A lot of his guests were invalids who came because they had been told the dry mountain air would be good for their tuberculosis. But, as one observer put it at the time, “the real disease that the people suffered from in St. Moritz was boredom.”
With so much time on their hands, and so little to do, Badrutt’s British guests took to racing each other on little toboggans around the winding streets of the town. This was the start of the famous Cresta Run, a course that involved a headfirst trip downhill on a one-man sled, known today as a skeleton. The Cresta would become the most iconic winter sports venue in the world, but in its early years it infuriated the locals, who took to calling the riders the “English devils”—or at least so the Brits liked to think. It seems just as likely that they were saying “to hell with the English” and something got lost in the translation. The British riders set about organizing this new sport. They developed sleds with metal runners to increase the speed, and primitive steering mechanisms so they could exert at least a measure of control. Still, though, there were so many complaints from the imperiled locals that Badrutt felt compelled to have his staff carve out a couple of toboggan tracks down the slope that ran from the front of the Kulm Hotel, just to keep his guests off the roads. And it was there, in December 1888, that an Englishman named Wilson Smith found the best cure yet for the St. Moritz ennui. Smith had the lunatic idea of lashing together two of the toboggans and a plank of wood. He invited three of his friends to hop on with him, and they all took a run down the mountain together. Just like that, he invented the sport of bobsledding. The name comes from the way the riders had to rock back and forth to build up their momentum, just as a child rocks to gain height on a swing. Once going, the new bobsleds were by far the fastest thing on the slopes.
Or so the story goes. Like many origin myths, this one is likely to have gained a little and lost a lot in the telling. The sleds certainly existed before Wilson Smith came along. In Canada and New England, bobsledding dates back to at least the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1887 the New York Times reported that the playwright Denman Thompson included a bobsledding scene in a production of his play The Old Homestead. When the producer suggested they use a toboggan instead, Thompson told him, “New Englanders don’t use toboggans, they use bobsleds.” So there was already a tradition of bobsledding in parts of North America. Earlier in that same decade, the sport had started to spread across to Europe. In February 1881, the British weekly newspaper the Graphic had run a story about “a new and most enjoyable pastime, namely, riding on a bob-sleigh” being practiced at Harrow School. “The fun consists in seven or eight people going downhill on a sleigh at a rate of 35 to 40 miles per hour.” The bob itself was made of “two cutters, or small sleighs, and between these a plank is laid about nine feet long, and fastened to the hind cutter by two bolts, thus rendering it stationary, and to the front one by one bolt, which enables this one to turn around on a pivot.” The pilot steered the sled by holding the front runners and pulling them to the left or right. “Though new to England,” the Graphic noted, “this ‘coasting’ is one of the favorite winter amusements in Canada, where it is alike popular with ladies and gentlemen, young and old.” This, then, seems to have been exactly the kind of contraption Smith was riding in St. Moritz nearly eight years later. And so the Wilson Smith story can be consigned to the “good if it’s true” pile, along with that of Abner Doubleday inventing baseball, and William Webb Ellis creating rugby by picking up the ball during a school soccer match.
It is clear that in the early years there were two separate schools of bobsledding: one in Canada and the United States, where it was seen as a hobby; and another in Switzerland and St. Moritz, where it soon become a sport. One early historian of the sport described it as “a pastime characterized by perfect liberty and constant variety of incident and scene.” You simply “gathered your crew, set out in any direction you wished, and returned when Providence of the weather or good pleasure decreed.” You just made sure to “avoid the precipices, if you could, and trust to luck to meet no other vehicles in the darkness.” A far more perilous business, this, then he makes it sound. In the United States, the bobsledding craze led to a spate of deaths. Between 1892 and 1906 the New York Times alone carried reports of twelve deaths in bobbing accidents, as sleds, sometimes laden with as many as sixteen riders, hurtled around busy streets, weaving in between—or as often as not colliding with—cars, trains, trams, horses, milk wagons, and pedestrians. The casualty list in that period ran into the hundreds. It’s one long litany of broken arms, smashed legs, fractured skulls, twisted ankles, crushed hands, gouged eyes, and gashed scalps. In the winter of 1908 there were so many crashes in the small town of Montclair, New Jersey, that the police banned bobsledding. “Public sentiment,” the Times reported after the latest smash-up between a bob and a trolley car, “will probably lead to an ordinance being adopted by the town council which will permanently abolish coasting on the streets of Montclair.”
Back in Europe, the British were also looking to impose some kind of order on the fledgling sport. In 1897 the St. Moritz Bobsleigh Club was formed; the cost of subscription was ten Swiss francs per person per season, worth around two U.S. dollars at the time. At first the preferred run was down the Cresta Road, along the very same route used by the tobogganers, not to mention all the other traffic through the town. Rule six in the SMBC’s book stated that “as far as is possible traffic will be directed to give each bob a clear course, but no allowance can be made for the fact that a bob has been delayed by meeting a sleigh.” The SMBC soon realized that it needed to build a dedicated bobsled run.
By now St. Moritz had become a busy place. Business had been so good for the Badrutt family that in 1892 they’d purchased a second hotel in the town, the Beau Rivage. Johannes’s son, Caspar, ran it. He traveled to Zurich to hire the leading Swiss architectural firm of Chiodera & Tschudy to convert it into the Palace Hotel. It took a team of five hundred Italian workmen four years to finish it. When they were done, the Badrutts were the owners of two of the very finest hotels in Europe.
With so many idle rich around town each winter, the SMBC soon found a few wealthy sportsmen willing to stump up 20,000 Swiss francs to help pay for the construction of a dedicated bobsled track, the world’s first. The backers were a cosmopolitan and aristocratic bunch. There were 200 francs from a German prince, 500 from a fellow count. An Irish marquess and an English army captain provided another 500 each. Finally, Count Larisch contributed 650 francs. His wife, Countess Marie Larisch, was a niece and confidante of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Later Marie Larisch’s descriptions of sledding in the Alps so enchanted the poet T. S. Eliot that he used them as inspiration for these apt lines from The Waste Land:
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
The new course opened in 1902. It started at the top of the hill, in what was now known as Badrutt’s Park, up by the Kulm Hotel. From there it wound down through avenues of pine trees into the valley below, until it made a sudden turn to dip down beneath an arch of the railway bridge, and then ran onto the finish by Cresta village. Now that St. Moritz had a specialist bob track, it meant that most of the people who crashed—and plenty did—were unlikely to suffer anything much worse than “a sudden nose-rubbing in the snow,” as one observer put it. Crowds gathered around the key corners, named Devil’s Dyke, Sunny, and Horseshoe, where the bob would swing round in about twice its own length, hoping to catch a glimpse of a crash so they could enjoy a “Roman holiday,” their schadenfreude made all the sweeter by the fact that the sled’s occupants “would usually be seen within a few seconds completing their journey with great cheerfulness.”
The development of a dedicated course and a few rudimentary safety measures meant that the sport was a lot less dangerous than the ad hoc version they were practicing in the United States at this time. In St. Moritz, during this brief period after the move off public roads and before it became too fast for anyone but the brave to try, bobsledding was a sport that almost anyone could have a go at. And almost everyone did. The Cresta Run, which used single-seater toboggans, may have been more thrilling, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was more fun. Bobsledding was altogether more sociable. In fact, it was a perfect sport for flirts. In the early days, the SMBC had a rule stipulating that every bob should contain at least one woman. “She is not permitted to steer or brake, man-made law debarring her from her natural functions,” reported an especially wry “Special Correspondent” in the Times in 1909, “but in an early Victorian way she adds to the amenities of the bobbing life. The sleighs which pull the bobs back hold only two, and it is hers to decide which of the crew shall drive with her up the hill. She attends to the crew’s apparel, and decorates it further with the badge of the bob. Further she likes bobbing, and the bobbers like her; as the heroine of ‘Josephine vendue par ses soeurs’ said to her sister when suggesting that she should marry the guardian of the hareem, ‘There is not much to do, and after all it is a position.’” A turn on Badrutt’s bobsleigh run was now the key attraction in the burgeoning winter resort of St. Moritz. “The track is the meeting place of the whole population, regardless of age, rank, or nationality,” the Times reported. There, the tourists would often wager with one another on the races.
Some felt that the specialist course was a step too far, a perversion, almost, of the amateur spirit of the sport. “The fact is,” ran a 1904 editorial in the Alpine-Post, “that the expert, record-breaking, almost professional element has laid its hands on bobsleighing.” The Times agreed: “There can be little doubt that the true sport of bobbing is best enjoyed on a road, but there can be none that a public road is the most unsuitable place for a bob race.” It bemoaned, too, “the almost excessive number of cups and prizes to be won” since, while “it is an easy matter for well-to-do people taking a holiday in Switzerland to offer some prize, and it is a form of spending that offers obvious attractions,” it “engendered a spirit of pot-hunting,” which the paper considered altogether too vulgar. Bobsledding, only a few years old, was already starting to become a serious sport. The British press began to carry regular reports on the races in St. Moritz. A timing mechanism was introduced. Threads were strung across the start and finish lines. When the sled broke the first, the clock started, and when it snapped the second, the clock stopped.
It was true that this caused some to start taking the competition a little too seriously. In 1906, the SMBC ran trials of a new sled fitted with a squirt that sprayed a stream of powdered graphite out in front of the runners, the better to speed their passage over the ice. This was all part of the drive to make the sleds faster. There were amateur races in the United States in this era, too, down rough tracks rather than specially cut courses like the one they were using in St. Moritz. In Caldwell, New Jersey, the locals were amazed when, in 1909, “a richly appointed German” brought a “de luxe sled” to the town’s annual bobsled race. It was fitted with an electric searchlight, an automobile’s steering wheel, and rubber-coated runners. It weighed three hundred pounds, cost three hundred dollars, “and created a sensation among the racers.”
In St. Moritz, such sleds were becoming increasingly common. In those years the course was five yards shy of a mile long, and between 1902 and 1912 the record time for covering it dropped a full thirteen seconds: from 1:46 to 1:33. That meant the sleds were traveling at an average speed of between 30 and 40 mph, which seems slow by the standards the riders were to reach in the 1930s, but at the time, it was still quicker than the vast majority of people could travel without boarding a train. It was as fast as the finest thoroughbred racing horse could run, and matched the speed records set by the earliest automobiles. The first car land-speed record was 39 mph, achieved in 1898, only a few years earlier. That particular mark was broken seven times before 1910, and by the end of the decade stood at 125 mph. The bobsledders couldn’t match those kinds of advances, but they, too, were driving one another on, faster and faster, toward the limits of what the sport would allow.
Crew sizes had been fixed, by then, at five riders per sled—one to drive, one to work the brake, and three in between to make the weight. The basic body of the bobs stayed the same. They had a long flat iron frame supported by tubular runners, two long bars down either side to hold on to, and a series of shorter bars running across to lean on. At the back, the brake was essentially a metal comb attached to two bars, which the last man in the sled would pull on to make the teeth bite into the ice. But the steering technology was still evolving, with rival sledders using different mechanisms. Some preferred steering wheels, others bars that were attached to the runners. And the techniques were advancing too.
At first most rode sitting up. Then they started to lie on their backs, heads laid flat on the chests of the riders behind. In 1912, an Englishman named Lord Carbery won a series of races in St. Moritz with a crew riding flat on their fronts, with the driver up at the front and the torso of each rider overlapping the legs of the person in front of him. The style became known as ventre à terre, and was adopted by anyone who reckoned himself a serious racer in that era. It was, according to the official history of the SMBC, “a pernicious habit, which drove many a would-be female bobber from the run.” Someone spread around the odd idea that it caused breast cancer. Still, it was, indisputably, fast. Carbery won his races by four seconds and more over the teams using the older methods.
As the sleds got faster, the risks increased. In the winter of 1911–12, three men died on the St. Moritz bob run in the space of a month. A German engineer was killed when his sled “capsized” on a corner and the metal frame smashed into his head. Four weeks later, two riders were killed, and two more seriously injured, when their sled swerved to avoid a patch of rutted ice and shot off a bank into a tree. There were three more serious accidents the following season, and another death in 1914, when a rider crashed into the railway bridge. For any but the brave, bobsledding at St. Moritz was starting to become a sport to watch rather than one to participate in. “There is arising a new winter sport, ‘Spectatorism,’” reported the Times. “It flourishes in St. Moritz.” The reporter railed in particular against the ranks of “plump, bronzed, and jovial” Germans. In a large puff piece in 1914, the New York Herald gushed, “Who, on arriving at one of the many mountain villages frequented by tourists from almost every corner of the world, has not watched enviously those crews of bright-eyed, merry-faced men and women dashing madly down steep, snowy slopes, yelling from sheer exhilaration and healthy animal spirits as their long, low bob whizzes around a sharp banked bend!” And it was true: envious watching was now all most felt able to do. The brief heyday of popular bobsledding was over. It was about to become an elite activity, a sport for daredevils.
Of course that very same year, 1914, the members of the SMBC had rather more pressing threats to attend to. During the First World War “the club temporarily ceased to exist,” as the official history quaintly puts it, “and the majority of its members were engaged in a more dangerous, more unpleasant, form of winter sport.” But Switzerland was neutral territory, and in the mountains there the ill feeling engendered by the brutal conflict didn’t intrude on the convivial relations enjoyed by the cosmopolitan bobsledding crowd. This was well illustrated by the reception afforded to Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany, eldest son of the kaiser, when he returned to the resort for the first time after the Armistice.
Wilhelm had been a keen bobsledder before the war, riding a sled he named Red Eagle. The SMBC, described by its secretary Hubert Martineau as having “always retained its British feeling and organization,” had made the German prince an honorary life president in 1913. It was in St. Moritz, in fact, that he was given the nickname “Little Willie”—a handle the British tabloids delighted in using whenever they regaled their readers with lurid accounts of his frequent infidelities and affairs. The man was a well-known womanizer and, during the war, public enemy number two, second only to his father. In 1918 effigies of Wilhelm were strung up from the scaffold gallows in towns up and down England. And yet Martineau, now the SMBC’s president, recalled meeting Prince Wilhelm outside the Kulm Hotel in St. Moritz in the early years after the war.
“Hullo Martineau, how are you?”
“Very well, sir.”
“I suppose after all the vices which the Daily Mail has laid at my door, you’ve kicked me out as honorary president?”
“No, sir, we have no politics in the bobsleigh club.”
The prince went off delighted, murmuring, “Good, good, good! I must come to the run.”
And so, once the Swiss government had relaxed its wartime restrictions on foreign visitors—“terrifying formalities,” in the words of the Times—life at St. Moritz simply carried on. In fact a new passenger air service between Zurich and St. Moritz made it easier than ever before for the rich to get away there for the winter. The town was soon busier than it ever had been before the war. It was starting to swing.
This was the beginning of the golden era of bobsledding in St. Moritz—“the gay old days,” as Martineau called them in his memoirs, the age when “gifted amateur socialites went down the run, partly for fun, partly because he or she had a lot of guts, partly because he or she was bent on trying anything going.” But the idea that bobsledding was a sport for everybody was long gone; it was now for those rich enough to afford it and bold enough to brave it. “Far more than the weather or the run,” Martineau wrote, “it is the people who count: they make the season. Everything was taken light-heartedly. All the bobbers stayed at the Palace Hotel. At 2pm they were all out on the run, and at 2am they were all out on the town.” Downhill skiing wouldn’t become popular until the tail end of the 1930s. Bobsledding was the fashionable thing. The roll calls run in the British papers listing who was in St. Moritz for the season began to read like a European who’s who. One week’s entry, entirely typical, included the following names: Prince Odescalchi, Princess Lowenstein, the Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston, the Earl of Northesk, the Baron and Baronne Napoleon Gourgaud, Comte Philippe de Marnix, and Sir Philip Sassoon. Only the young and brave would be out on the run to take part in the big races, but everyone would gather at the Kulm and the Palace in the evenings for the balls, dances, and dinners.
As president of the SMBC, Martineau had two things to do. The first was to try to raise the funds to keep the club running, through auctions, raffles, sweepstakes, and generally by twisting the arm of any rich visitors who came his way. It cost $1,500 a season to rebuild and maintain the run. The second was to try to keep the members in line. This was by far the harder job. In the winter of 1924 a mysterious newcomer arrived at the club, a pretty young Russian lady with “auburn hair, vermilion cheeks, and scarlet lips.” She went by the name of Mademoiselle Krasnowski. “She was, unfortunately, quite unable to talk or understand a word of any language except Russian,” but she insisted on racing in the Boblet Cup, a competition for two-seater sleds. “As the race proceeded it was evident from the accounts given by her partner, and from her time when steering, that she was no novice at the game; and it was soon seen that very good times would have to be done to beat her and her partner. These times were not forthcoming, and her boblet was declared the winner.” The problems started on the way back to the hotel, when Martineau was “waylaid by a horde of indignant wives” who accused Mlle Krasnowski, as she drove from the bottom to the top of the run, “of deliberately (to use a vulgarism) ‘giving the glad eye to their husbands,’ a statement which we are bound to confess was reluctantly corroborated by the lady’s partner.” It got ugly at the prize ceremony. When Krasnowski was called up to receive the cup, she was accosted by a hot-blooded Argentine, Arturo Gramajo, who grew so incensed at the way the rest of the company was shouting him down that he dashed forward and grabbed her hair “before he could be dragged from his murderous assault.” Those in the audience “were stricken with horror, a horror which changed to consternation a few seconds later” when, as Gramajo reeled back triumphantly with two curls of auburn hair in his hands, there stood revealed, with painted cheeks and lips, a man.
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