Speed Kings (32 page)

Later that summer, Billy, Paddy Green, and a third friend, Robert Rowan, a renowned real estate developer, took a trip out to Aspen. Billy's brother-in-law, Jennison Heaton, flew them out there in his little four-seater monoplane. Flynn met them, just as soon as he could find them, in his truck. He took them up past the Midnight mine to Richmond Hill, where they got out to walk. Billy and Paddy were so excited to be there that they broke into a sprint for the final five hundred yards of the climb to the peak, racing against each other like a couple of kids. Rowan and Flynn followed them up in their own sweet time, found them both wheezing at the top, doubled over, a couple of husks. When they'd got their wind back, they stood up and saw the summer snows on the fields of Mount Hayden, the Swiss meadows running down to the junction of the two creeks, Castle and Conundrum.

“This,” Billy said, “is the place.”

His dream, so very similar to the one Godfrey Dewey had once held for Lake Placid, was to turn the sleepy little town of Aspen into America's leading winter sports resort. Perhaps, for Billy, the fact that they would be competing with Dewey's resort was part of the appeal. Certainly Billy threw himself into the work. “Without Bill Fiske, the whole skiing area would probably be as hopeless today as it was in 1936,” said Ted Ryan in a 1965 interview. “Bill came through without question.” He coughed up the first lump sum of money. His contacts were even more valuable. “Billy,” Ryan said, “knew just about everybody.” He persuaded Robert Benchley, once a key member of the now defunct Algonquin Round Table, to write them a promotional pamphlet. Harold Ross, Benchley's editor at the
New Yorker
, was actually from Aspen, though, according to Ryan, Ross never cared to admit it if he could help it. He was amazed when he saw the brochure. “However did you get into this, Benchley?” Ross asked. The answer was, of course, that Billy had charmed him into it.

The little lodge they built on their new land was designed by a friend of his from Pasadena, G. B. Kaufman, who had designed the grand old Jockey Club at the Santa Anita racetrack. And it was decorated by his pal Jimmy Bodrero, the man who wrote
White Heat
. Bodrero had given up screenwriting and turned, instead, to drawing and painting. He was a lot better at it too: he was working as one of the chief artists over at the new Walt Disney studio at Burbank. The lodge was only a little place, but Billy wanted it to make a big impression, since the idea was that they would be bringing potential investors out to stay there for a week. There was a pump house, a ski room, a barn, and a hayloft that housed a team of horses and a sleigh. There were two bunkrooms, which, the adverts promised, housed “beds fitted with box spring mattresses, down pillows, patch quilts” and built on—a Billy Fiske touch, this—“frames constructed from Philippine mahogany.”

Aside from swish bed frames, what they needed were a couple of real winter sports experts, men who could chart the weather, mark the trails, and map the mountains, men who really understood the work that would need to be done to turn the empty slopes into a first-class skiing resort. They couldn't think of anyone in their circle in the United States with the necessary experience or qualifications. But Billy knew just where to look. The same place he'd first come up with this wild idea of building a ski resort—St. Moritz. Billy recruited Swiss mountaineer Andre Roch and the Italian Gunther Langes, the man who had laid out the fastest downhill ski piste in Europe, at Marmolada. Billy was so
committed to the Aspen plan that he paid Roch's and Langes' wages, $125 a month, out of his own money. They got to work the following winter, once the log cabin had been built.

Roch had mixed news. The land at Aspen Mountain, around the old Little Annie Mine, was good and could provide, he said, some of the best skiing in the United States. But there was another spot, at Ashcroft, six miles up Castle Creek, that could well be the finest ski site in the whole world. They were, Roch reckoned, building in the wrong place. They were going to need more time and more money. So Billy hadn't found his path yet—but wherever he was heading next, he wouldn't be representing his country in any more winter sports. Since he had won the gold medal in '32, so many new doors had opened for him, but that one had been firmly shut.

—

T
ryouts for the 1936 Winter Olympics had been held at Lake Placid back in February of 1935. Billy had had no desire to go back to Godfrey Dewey's little patch, and besides, he'd never been too interested in racing for tin-pot titles anyway. Hank Homburger had retired, and in Billy's absence, the trials had been won by a new crew led by, of all people, an undertaker from the Bronx named John Donna Fox; second place had gone to Hubert Stevens, and third to Frank Tyler, who was a policeman from Lake Placid. Dewey, in a way, had achieved his aim of making bobsledding a popular activity, insomuch as the track at Mount Van Hoevenberg was open to all, so there were now plenty of blue-collar crews, men who raced for weekend kicks when their work was done. You didn't need to be rich to be a bobsledder anymore. But Billy was still a two-time Olympic champion. The USOC knew what he could do. If they wanted him, they could just go ahead and pick him.

And they did. Jay O'Brien was still in charge of selection at the time. He'd named a fifteen-man squad that included fourteen who had raced in the trials at Lake Placid, plus Billy. But Jay had been stood down soon after, since he was too busy socializing in Palm Springs to make it over to Germany for the 1936 Games. He'd been replaced as head of the bobsled committee by Jack Garren, a Lake Placid local, and the only contact Garren had with Billy was a letter forwarded from Avery Brundage, the president of the USOC. In it, Fiske explained that he was planning to make his own way to Europe that winter, sailing from California for Germany via the Pacific. He'd signed off with “See you there.” And that was the last they'd heard.

On the day before the US Olympic team sailed from New York, Clifford
Gray turned up at the Olympic Committee's bustling office on the twenty-seventh floor of the Woolworth Building. The committee had been trying to contact him for weeks now, to check on his availability, and they hadn't heard anything back. Now he had turned up out of the blue, and with a proposition. He had made his mind up the night before. He was willing to pay his own way to the Games, just so long as the USOC would add him to the official bobsled squad list.

It just so happened that at that precise moment, Clifford was caught up in an especially lurid scandal and had been in the papers far more than he cared for. He'd had a fling with an actress—at least, that was what she called herself—the previous November. Her name was Ruby Lockhart. He'd made some rash promises to her in the heat of the moment, and when he hadn't come through, she'd threatened to sue him. Her lawyers were demanding ten thousand dollars on her behalf. They called it a “heart balm.” It seemed like a good time to go to Europe.

Garren was delighted. The bobsledders they'd selected, off the back of the trials at Lake Placid, were a raw lot. “And by the way,” Tippy told them as he was on his way out, “Eddie says he'll be happy to come too, on the same terms, of course, so you should expect a call from him sometime soon.”

Gray was right. Half an hour later, the phone rang. It was Eddie Eagan. He told Garren that he, too, would be traveling to the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the German Alps, so they should add him to the squad list as well.

Now that Eagan and Gray had turned up, Garren made plans to put the three of them in a sled together and to fill out the final seat with another squad member. Then they could race against Fox and Stevens to see who got to compete in the Olympics proper.

It turned out that the track at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the site of the '36 Games, wasn't ready for use. If the bobsledders wanted to get any practice in before the Olympics, they would need to up sticks and move the 120 miles west across the Alps to St. Moritz. But, without Jay's money behind them, they couldn't even afford the train fare. The manager of the team had to send a telegram back to the USOC office in New York pleading for extra funds. He promised that the team “would travel third class and sleep in a barn” to keep costs down. The USOC agreed, so they all set off for Switzerland. And, well, guess who was waiting for them at the other end? “The mystery concerning Billy Fiske has been solved,” reported the
Times
on January 18. “It was thought he was
in California. Yesterday it was learned that Fiske was already in St. Moritz, ready for training, and would meet his American teammates there.”

For Billy, St. Moritz had always felt like home. It had been almost a decade since he'd first seen the town, and the more things had changed in the years since, the more they seemed to stay just as they were. If anything had changed, it was him. He was older, of course, twenty-four now, and had seen more of the world than most of his age. But it was those two Olympic medals that marked him out, as well as the manner in which he handled all the success he'd had. “He was a gentleman,” remembered Paul Dupree, another American bobber of that era, “what a fine man. He took all his glory in his stride. And he was very well respected by the Europeans, who were a tight little circle. He certainly had the respect of his fellow man, which was unique among bobsledders. They looked up to Billy as though he was an idol.” Some of the officials, on the other hand, couldn't stand him. Especially Brundage, who ran the USOC much as the Dewey family had the Lake Placid Club. Brundage was irked by the offhand way in which Billy had skipped the trials and then refused to respond to his selection for the 1936 Games, and his attitude trickled down to the men on the ground, team managers Fred Rubien and Dr. Joel Henry Hildebrand. As soon as they arrived in St. Moritz, a row broke out.

Billy's position hadn't changed. If the USOC wanted him in the team, they should go ahead and pick him, but he had three conditions. The first two were that he wanted to drive the United States' No. 1 sled, and without being made to win his place in a trial. The third was that he wanted final say on the makeup of his team, as he'd had at Lake Placid, so he could be sure he would be riding with Eddie and Clifford. The officials quibbled. They insisted that Billy would have to win a series of qualifying races to get the No. 1 spot, and said that they couldn't promise him the right to pick his own team, since the other eight men in the squad deserved their shot—despite the fact that Billy had won the last two Olympic competitions and was the only pilot there who had ever driven on the snow-covered European tracks. So they cut him. They were mindful, just as Dewey had been, of “the impracticability of eliminating without trial the men who are identified in the public mind” with brilliant victories, so they made sure to make it look as though Billy was to blame. The Associated Press reported that Billy had “notified the officials that he would compete if appointed captain with full authority and if he could drive both the four and two-man teams. His offer was not accepted.” Even the
New York Times
quoted Billy, secondhand, as saying, “I have two gold medals and several other championships. I've everything to gain
and nothing to lose by staying out. So if I drive I'll be the driver of the No. 1 sled. I won't compete in the elimination trials. I'll also choose my own team. The rest of you will be at liberty to compete for bobsled No. 2. Take it or leave it.”

Jim Bickford, a member of that Olympic team in 1936, remembered it all a little differently. “Billy was a quiet, calm type of fellow, liked by all the sportsmen. I never saw him be demanding or disruptive.” Bickford couldn't imagine that Billy would ever say anything like the quotes attributed to him by the USOC. “There were,” Bickford recalled, “a lot of politics that I didn't go along with, even though I was from Lake Placid and had grown up there. Things were all screwed up.” As Bickford remembered it, Brundage and the USOC told Billy that he could be a reserve, but wouldn't be allowed to drive because he hadn't competed in the trials. “But Billy didn't want any part of that, he wanted to compete.” For Billy, no doubt, all this was an unwelcome reminder of the nonsense he'd had to put up with before the Lake Placid Games. He decided he was happy enough without it. With Billy out, Eddie and Clifford also stepped down. Tippy stayed on in St. Moritz; Eddie never even left New York. The US team went ahead and competed without them. Neither of its two four-man teams managed to win a medal.

There was, and still is, another theory about why Billy decided not to compete in 1936. It was put about by Billy's old pal Irv Jaffee, who insisted, “Billy just didn't want to go to Germany. Way back in 1932 after the Lake Placid Games, Billy was talking to me about his hatred for Adolf Hitler. Almost every day he would tell me how important it was that he won at Lake Placid because it would be his last Olympics. He didn't want to compete in front of Hitler. When the USOC insisted that he enter the trials, Billy had a graceful way of saying “nothing doing.” This is certainly possible. Jaffee is the only one of Billy's friends and family members who went on record with the story, though Virginia Cherrill recalled that “Billy often spoke about Hitler coming to power, and how there would be another European war” when the two of them were working on
White Heat
together. According to Peggy, her brother's antipathy toward Nazi Germany came about a little later in his life, in 1938, when the two of them went to watch England play soccer against Germany in Berlin. The match is infamous now, for the Nazi salute made by the English team before the kickoff, under orders from their ambassador, as a token of respect. Peggy remembered how “amazed and distressed” Billy had been by the “aggressive militarism of the young children, their uniforms, their marching, and their grim faces.”

Jaffee, proudly Jewish, certainly decided early on that he wouldn't attend
the Games. He was one of thousands who believed that the US should boycott the Nazi Olympics. The movement was led by Jeremiah Mahoney, former New York supreme justice and head of the Amateur Athletic Union. He had serious support, from the likes of New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia and the governors of both New York and Massachusetts. Newspapers and magazines, too, lined up behind him. Mahoney, an enlightened man, argued, “There is no room for discrimination on grounds of race, color, or creed in the Olympics.” On his watch, the AAU had voted, back in 1933, to attend the 1936 Games only if Germany pledged that there would be no discrimination against Jewish athletes.