Speed Kings (3 page)

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.