Speed Kings (2 page)

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.

THE KID

S
eptember 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.

—

E
veryone 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.