Speed Kings (30 page)

The sled hurtled down the mountain, 60 mph and still accelerating. There was a rattle from the metal frame, and a sharp rasping hiss from the runners as they cut through the ice. The wind whipped the sounds away from the ears of the four riders. Up front Billy Fiske was hunched over the wheel. He squinted through the early morning mist. He was thinking three corners ahead of the sled, trying always to urge it onto the right racing line. Behind him, Eddie, Clifford, and Jay were huddled together, with Eddie pressed right up against Billy's back.

They counted every one of those corners. One, two, three. Eyrie, a dogleg kink from left to right that snapped their heads from side to side. On around five, six, seven, eight, nine. Then Whiteface, where Max Houben had crashed. They passed the first grandstand. Out of that, then eleven, twelve, thirteen. Next, Cliffside, where the course ran right up against the rocky wall of the
mountain. Fifteen, sixteen, a dogleg right at seventeen, and then four hundred feet of straight. The pine trees flashed by in fast-forward. The sled was really racing now. Sixty miles per hour. Sixty-five. Seventy. As fast as a man could travel without a motor. And then Shady, where Grau had flown over the lip. The sled slid up the wall, pulled higher all the time, up and up, passing perilously close to the lip. Eddie remembered looking down, seeing the rim inches from the runner. He saw a picture in his mind of “a steel comet with four riders hurtling through the air.” And then the sled spat down and around, swept on toward Zig-Zag, where Zahn had lost control. Snap, snap, this way and that. Then the home straight.

In 1:56.59. The fastest run of the Olympics.

But there was one team still to come. If Hank Homburger and his Red Devils were going to beat Billy to the gold, they would need to match the world record set on this same course in the National Championship the previous year. Billy, Eddie, Clifford, and Jay climbed out from their sled and stood by the finish line. There was nothing they could do now but wait, watch, and listen to Homburger's times come over the PA.

“Twenty-nine seconds at Eyrie!” That was quick. Quicker than Billy.

“Fifty seconds at Whiteface!” World-record pace.

“One minute five seconds at Cliffside!”

Billy bit his lip. He could hear the roars rolling down the mountainside. The crowd was howling in excitement. Homburger was going to do it.

“One minute twenty-four at Shady!”

Homburger had done it. “It was a spectacular effort,” wrote Neil. “He was riding the curves high and taking every chance.”

Then he hit Zig-Zag. He took his sled so high on each bank of the chicane that the spectators thought, just for a moment, that he was going to fly over the top. Homburger had crossed the line. He was going to crash. He wrenched the wheel, hauled the sled away from the brink and back into the center of the track. It hit a bad patch of ice, rutted and torn from all the previous runs, and swerved around, almost turning sideways. The sled slowed. The thread broke. The clock stopped at 1:54.28. Billy Fiske was Olympic champion by all of 2.02 seconds.

Billy turned to Eddie, Jay, and Clifford. “Fellas,” he said, “I think I'm going to go check myself into a sanatorium. I think I've earned it.”

Just like 1928, there was no great ceremony. No band. No national anthem. No flags. Not even a podium. Just the bobsledders, gathered at the bottom of the
run, in celebration this time rather than in protest. Hans Kilian won the bronze, Hank Homburger the silver. Billy, of course, got the gold. “He had nerves of steel,” McLemore wrote. “But what a modest kid, all he did was smile and shrug his shoulders.”

The sweetest part of it? Godfrey Dewey was there to present the medals. He called Billy, Eddie, Clifford, and Jay forward from the pack. Billy made sure to look him right in the eye. “That two-faced, pedantic, hypocritical Dr. Dewey,” Billy wrote in his diary that night. “Thank God I managed to win that absurd event, otherwise his filthy, cackling laugh would have haunted me to my grave.”

After that they stopped to pose for a few photos, some with Jimmy Walker, others with Werner Zahn, his arm still in a sling. He presented them with the fine silver cup, the Martineau Trophy, which he had won at the World Championship the previous autumn. It seemed right, he said, that they should have it, since they were now the quickest men in the world. The papers carried a picture of the four of them kneeling around their sled, each flashing a broad grin, while Zahn, the old World War I fighter ace, handed Billy the trophy. Eddie Eagan had just become the first athlete in history to win a gold medal at both the Summer and Winter Olympics. Jay, at the age of forty-eight, had just become the oldest Winter Olympics champion in history. And Billy, only twenty, was the youngest male athlete ever to win a second Winter Olympics gold.

Billy, Eddie, Clifford, and Jay never rode a sled together again. The National Championship was due to start at Mount Van Hoevenberg the very next day, and several of the overseas teams were going to stick around so they could take part as guests. Billy and his team turned the invitation down flat. They caught the first train back to Manhattan together with Jimmy Walker and Jack Heaton; picked up with Irv Jaffee, Peggy Eagan, and Dolly O'Brien; and went on a weeklong spree, from Delmonico's to the Silver Slipper to El Morocco and, of course, the 21 Club. “We certainly broke down our bodies well in New York that week,” Billy wrote, “just as well as we had built them up for the Placid campaign.”

—

A
fortnight later, when life in the small town of Lake Placid had returned to normal, a letter arrived at the Lake Placid Club lodge. It was to Godfrey Dewey from Gus Kirby. He was a scholarly old soul, a lawyer by trade, and a man who put great store in the amateur code. He was also an old friend of both Jay's and Billy's.

My dear Godfrey Dewey,

Being but human, I can't help but take considerable satisfaction in that we won the bob-sleigh events at the III Olympic Winter Games, and particularly, in that I am confident that even you will now admit that those “experienced drivers here” who did not concede Billy Fiske and his team “an outside chance in any event” were either dumb or prejudiced, and that those who offered “to raise $5,000” to bet that the St. Moritz group would not place either first, second, or third in the eliminations should rejoice in that they had not realized their money. And further that the drivers whose opinions you quoted when you said that “Fiske and Heaton and their crews, in the absolutely unanimous judgment of every driver who has watched their preliminary work on the run have not the slightest chance of qualifying for the teams” didn't really know what they were talking about. After all, it is not practice, but racing that counts, and that was the position taken by the bob-sleigh committee—and the results here have justified our conclusion.

Perhaps somewhat maliciously, but none the less sincerely yours,

Gustavus T. Kirby.

Godfrey Dewey, so far as anyone knows, never replied.

I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of “The Great Gatsby” I've found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to his daughter, Frances, June 12, 1940

Rose Bingham at El Morocco, New York, 1937.

THE NEXT BIG THING

L
ooking back from the stern, the ship's wake seemed to stretch all the way to San Francisco. Billy breathed in the sea air; held it, let it out in one long, slow puff. He felt some of the tension slip away. It was only now that he realized how much those couple of months in the United States had taken out of him. After the Olympics, the bobsled team went their separate ways. Jay traveled down to Palm Beach. He had his eye on a house down there. Eddie was supposed to get back to work, but he was full of big talk about getting back in the boxing ring. As for Tippy, he had some half-baked idea about signing up as a crewman on a yacht for a race across the Atlantic. And Billy? He just wanted to get far away from it all—from Lake Placid, from bobsledding, from Godfrey Dewey. One morning in New York he picked up a copy of the
Times
and saw a picture of Hank Homburger and his crew in the sports section. “The Saranac Red Devils,” read the caption underneath, “who retained their North American bobsled title yesterday.” Billy thought about the gold medal on his bedside table. The national title? Hank was welcome to it.

Billy was twenty, had two Olympic titles, a degree from Cambridge, an allowance of five thousand dollars a year, and a one-way ticket to the South Seas with his friend Jack Heaton. The two of them cut out for the West Coast. Their plan had been to hole up at a friend's ranch just outside San Francisco for a little rest and relaxation. But the city turned out to be just too tempting. “Without doubt the most charming city in America,” Billy wrote in his diary. “They still
have that old pioneer hospitality and good will.” Their last night there had been one of the wildest yet. They'd been drinking in a speakeasy run by an old Basque chap. He had invited them along to a party at the local police station. They'd thought it was a joke, but went along anyway, and an hour later they were knocking back beers in a back room of the district headquarters with the local lieutenant and a couple of his sergeants. They'd even taken their guests for a tour of the cells. “They were full of drunks and hop-heads,” Billy wrote, “ordinary humans who have had the bad luck to exaggerate a bit and be caught.” Then they'd gone on to the morgue. It had seemed like a swell idea until the moment they got there. The corpses had smelled like stale fish. “I guess,” Billy said, “God doesn't think too much of us after we're dead.” It had sobered them up sharp enough.

“America,” Billy thought to himself as he walked up to the bow. “What a swell country. So law-abiding!” His thoughts turned again to Godfrey Dewey. “I never knew such human beings existed on this civilized earth,” he wrote in his diary that night. “I insist it is over-civilization that has taught humans to be so damned crooked.” And, ah, well, imagine caring. Billy and Jack were on their way now, and all that was well behind them, back beyond San Francisco.

They were sailing on a ship named the
Monowai
—“the ugly duckling,” her crew called her. There were twenty-five passengers, made up, in Billy's words, of “pansies, would-be-businessmen, nondescripts, and two very ugly girls.” He was putting all his thoughts down on a typewriter, a decrepit old thing he'd picked up in San Francisco. He thought that a regular supply of letters would go some way toward assuaging his parent's worries about his whereabouts. Or, as he put it in a letter to his sister, Peggy, “the only reason I bought the damn thing was to enable me to write a little more balls for the family.” He spent so much time at it that he was suffering “from writer's cramp and sore nuts.” He was actually trying to write a little poetry. His first efforts had proved to be . . . well, they hadn't worked out quite as he had hoped:

The din of America behind

The dreams of youth ahead

And drivel in between

NEW TITLE—Two Boys Set Out

Twas close of day,

The fog, dull, damp, cold,

Came rolling slowly down the bay

A ship enveloped in its fold.

Twas dawn next day,

Hot sun, trade winds, the sea a sapphire blue,

The course Sou'west by South, to islands far away.

Could it be, their dreams came true?

Billy, Jack pointed out after he had read it though, was a man with many talents. Poetry wasn't one of them. That was one career he could cross off the list.

His father, of course, wanted him to come to work at the bank under Clarence Dillon. But Billy wasn't sure that bank work was quite his speed. He'd sold this trip to his father on the grounds that it would give him a little time to make up his mind about what he wanted to do with his life. Some of those “would-be businessmen” on board had twigged that Billy was looking for openings. One of them tried to persuade him to invest in a “new system of teaching piano by training the ear,” the theory being, Billy explained, “that the ear is the mechanical outlet to the soul in music.” The man was planning to open a series of music schools and “guaranteed that with two lessons a week for six months anyone with any ear at all will be able to play music moderately well.” Another huckster tried to convince him that the Kenyan coffee trade was the thing. Billy passed on both. The only idea that had stuck with him so far was the silly one he'd had when the
Monowai
was sailing past the American fleet outside San Francisco. “Passed a lot of battleships of the American Atlantic Fleet today, out here for battle-practice,” he wrote that night. “Great sight—always makes me want to join the airforce just so I could drop bombs on 'em.”

On March 26, they made their first stop in Tahiti. They landed in Papeete, which Billy had imagined as a land of blue seas and skies, with white beaches sprinkled with coconut palms, but found it to actually be a “tawdry, ramshackle, dirty sea-port.” It was all black cinder streets and matchbox buildings, filled with men who “would rob their grandmothers' pants,” and women who would “sleep with Vincent Astor one night and the third engineer on the cargo boat the next.” The worst by far, he thought, were the expatriates, who could be found gathered
around at one of the town's three hangouts. There was Tony's Cabaret, “which boasts an old and tinny piano”; Quinn's bar, “the toughest spot this side of Barcelona and woe betide the fellow who tries stealing the stoker's gal”; and the Tahiti Yacht Club, “the meeting place of the town's elite, and a more annoying spot I can't imagine.”

So Billy and Jack didn't linger there long. Driven on by Billy's “weakness,” as he called it, “for doing things and going places nobody else had gone,” they headed down the coast to Punaauia, country rather more like the images they'd had in their heads before they arrived. They rented a house on a stretch of white beach backing onto the mountains and in front of a lagoon sealed off by a coral reef, with a gap just big enough for a canoe to pass through. They spent their days diving for fish, which terrified Billy in a way bobsledding had never done. “In the water one can go on indefinitely thinking about all the things that can hurt one,” he wrote. “I was swimming inside the reef a few days ago and I dove to about 15 feet when a scurry of small fish came out from behind the coral about 20 feet away. I started to swim under water in their direction, harpoon clutched firmly, when suddenly a ‘small' swordfish about 8ft long came out in pursuit. I took one jump from the bottom of the ocean and landed in the boat.”

Other times they were off exploring the interior, hunting boar with local guides. It was there, up in the hill country, that Billy found the peace he had been looking for. In a camp, with a belly full of fish and shrimp they'd just fetched from a river, “the boys got together and had a little chorus around the fire. The moon, nearly full, was just coming over the Arohena mountains, and the last purple glows of the sunset lit the western skies; the stars seemed to grow brighter and brighter by the minute; the stream rattled along on its journey down the valley and the three coconut palms stood like sentinels on a nearby hilltop, outlined against the sky. And the boys seemed to be inspired by it all because their songs blended so perfectly with this marvelous scene. I thought then of how much those poor old fools, who labored their lives away worrying about New York Central dropping two points, were missing.”

He was happy here, among the “pure-spirited Tahitians,” and besotted with the women. “Their eyes! Great big long lashes that look as though they had been painted on a piece of china. They can say more with their eyes than any race I have ever come across . . . Now cross, now fascinating, now quizzical, now hurt, now amorous, now happy, now tearful. Yes, the Tahitian eyes are a thing that one seldom forgets, and the same is true of their skin. Like the most marvelous silk, it's so smooth one is scared to touch it for fear of scratching it.”

These observations were drawn from intimate experience, though in his letters home he cloaked in generalizations the details of his affair. But Billy's sister found a photo tucked into the back of his diary with the words “Billy's Tahitian girl” scribbled across the back. They met, he said, in the most peculiar way. “If a girl takes a liking to some man at a party where they happen to be singing, she will stand up and command attention and then start singing an ode to the man's sexual organs! It is an old Tahitian custom and the man doesn't feel the slightest bit embarrassed. How natural and how unspoilt by all the plots and intrigues that it takes to win a European girl!”

Soon, they were living together in his shack on the beach. Billy was bewitched. “In the presence of strangers the girls, especially, are inclined to be very introspective and will remain absolutely silent for some days. It takes a great deal of patience and forbearance to draw them out, but when they feel at ease they are always giggling and happy and can talk far more intelligently at the same time than many white girls. Likewise they are extremely clever in their treatment of men. They make him feel he is entirely their lord and master, and of course by doing so they usually get away with nothing short of murder. For what man on earth is not a sucker to a woman's flattery, especially if she is good-looking!”

They stayed three months, longer than they had planned. Billy made it a habit to move on before he grew too attached. “I hate to be sorry to leave a place or person.” He broke the rule for her, and for Tahiti. “Never,” he wrote, “was departure so painful. As we sailed away, and the last rays of the sun made a kaleidoscope of colors over the island, and then the lights began to twinkle all along the coast from Arué to Papieri. I made a solemn vow, to nobody in particular, that some day I should return. And then suddenly the whole beach on which our house stood, and from which we had taken a tearful farewell a few hours before, was lit up by colossal bonfires, the flames leaping high into the air. Our neighbors, the inhabitants of Punaauia who had made us love that place so much were signaling us a last farewell. Gradually, the light faded away in the distance and all was darkness.”

Jack was sure that they would find the cure for Billy's broken heart in the Cook Islands. No such luck. “We made a complete tour of the island,” Billy wrote, “and didn't see a single pretty girl.” At first, he thought that it was just bad luck. Especially when he was told that the island's most “exquisite” women would be at a big dance that same night. “I arrived on the scene of the party, shoes polished and full of hope, but the minute I entered the room my ardor was
thoroughly soaked. If I had tried my best to collect all the ugliest female undergraduates of Newnham and Girton, I could not have done better.”

From there they traveled to New Zealand, then on to Australia, where Jack insisted that they get back to more civilized pursuits, and they spent their time at a club in Rose Bay, playing golf and tennis. Billy, too, was soon back in his old ways. “I was constantly impressed by the extraordinary beauty and healthy good-looks of the girls,” he wrote. “Their dress is a little loud and eccentric—the Australians call it ‘individual'—but then as most of life is spent in bathing suits, it really doesn't matter.” They went on up around the coast to Brisbane, traveling on a tired old ship with a permanent list to port, the SS
Marella
. She carried a cargo of “ministers, miners, and dyspeptics,” who spent their evenings arguing about the Aboriginal question. Billy was minded to agree with the missionary who argued that “the whites were inclined greatly to underestimate the Aboriginals' intelligence” and who “claimed they are a race who have been and still are grossly mistreated and misunderstood.”

Darwin on Australia's northern coast was “conspicuous only owing to its state of decaying uselessness,” so they were happy to reach, at last, the Dutch East Indies, where they spent their time and money gambling on horses, on kite fights, and in casinos, “where the Chinese foregather with anyone else who can stand a good skimming.” Billy saw one Chinese businessman lose “five sugar refineries, six beautiful new cars, and about $100,000 in cash on one poker hand.” Which was a little fast, even for him. In Bali, he was back on the “beautiful women” again, these ones “working in the sugar refineries, so damn good looking I nearly fell into a vat myself.” He especially admired their eyes. “They not only have beautiful eyes, but they also have the art of using them. For what good is a magnificent pair of eyes if they are not properly manipulated?”

They had to cut out of Manila quick sharp when, in a story Billy kept from his diary but shared with his friends, he became, as one of his pals put it, “involved with a lady whose husband was an oriental diplomat.” The husband had been recalled to his home country but “very quickly heard about Billy and the affair with his wife and sent some countrymen to pay him a visit. Subsequently, Billy and Jack decided it was in Billy's best interest to depart Manila sooner than planned.”

They fetched up in Hong Kong. By now, Billy's travel trunk weighed around four hundred pounds. He'd stuffed it full of presents for his family and
friends: vases for Peggy from a shop in Canton; a sacred idol for his father, “full of stories, magic and poison, which I am sure he won't appreciate”; a diamond ring that “really looked worth a million in the suppressed light of the pawn shop” and which he'd imagined “selling to Cartiers at a thousand percent profit”—which had turned out, of course, once seen in the light of day, to be quite worthless. He also had a duffel bag stuffed with gifts, so many of them he was still handing them out a year later.