Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years

by Brock Yates

  "Get on!" yelled Diana over the din, kicking off her high heels. "Five laps around the square," she said, pedaling into the swarm.

  Not having ridden a bicycle since my college days, I threw a leg over and fell in near the back of the riders, now numbering nearly thirty. I had read that Italians were mad for cycling and that several of their greatest race drivers, including the immortal Tazio Nuvolari and Giuseppe Campari, had begun their competition careers on bicycles.

  Pedaling hard, I swept into the first corner around the square. Traffic was mercifully light. A few bystanders began cheering as the field huffed and puffed down the wide avenue. Breathing hard, my stomach full of pasta, my bladder bulging with wine, I tried to keep up. After two laps I saw Diana glide to a stop in front of the hotel. Up front, half a lap ahead, Ferrari and a few lean young men pedaled mightily for the lead. I could see Coltrin, his skinny frame leaning into the handlebars, flailing to keep up.

  As we slanted around a corner, Coltrin's bike clipped the curb and he took a wild tumble onto the hard, lumpy bricks of the Via Amelia. Taking advantage of his accident as an excuse to stop before my heart failed completely, I jerked up beside him. He lay groaning and holding his left ankle. "Damn, I think it's broken!" he howled.

  A cursory examination by myself and several interested pedestrians indicated otherwise. A bad sprain, but no breakage. Coltrin hobbled back to the bar, where he downed two tumblers of Scotch and claimed to feel better.

  The race completed, Ferrari and his crowd carried on a celebration at the bar. In the middle of the melee I spotted Diana, leaning on the arm of a rotund, balding man I did not recognize. The party went on, with me a silent bystander, until Ferrari and a small group of men broke away and headed for the grand staircase leading to the mezzanine.

  Diana suddenly appeared and grabbed my hand. "This will be fun," she said, hauling me toward the stairs.

  "More racing?" I laughed.

  "Better yet;" she said. "There's a guy in town named Alessandro deTomaso. Argentinian. Wild man. Escaped to Italy when he and some other revolutionary nuts apparently tried to bomb Peron's palace with a stolen airliner. Now he's here with his girlfriend, Elizabeth Haskell. Ford family. Big money. Everyone thinks he's got her on the line to back him in the car business. He and Enzo don't get along, as you might expect."

  "So what's going on?"

  "More Italian messing about." The group, numbering perhaps ten, including Diana and myself bringing up the rear, climbed more stairs to the second floor, where Ferrari made a gesture for silence. Skulking down a darkened hall, he stopped in front of room 202 and silently signaled to a small man behind him. He was handed a wad of newspapers, which he carefully stuffed under the door.

  "Oh my God, he's going to light them," whispered Diana in horror.

  Ferrari scratched a large kitchen match and set the papers on fire. Stepping back from the little inferno, a wide smile on his angular face, Ferrari waited in silence with his co-conspirators until the inevitable screams began issuing from inside the room.

  The sound of furious stomping and the shrill voice of a woman ended with the door bursting open. A naked man in his thirties, wellmuscled, his face stiff with rage, kicked the smoldering papers toward Ferrari. Behind him, frantically draping herself in a bed sheet, was Miss Haskell. DeTomaso made a move toward Ferrari, his fists clenched and in prize-fighter's stance, until he realized he was completely naked in front of an audience now bent over with laughter.

  "Bastard! Bastard!" DeTomaso yelled hysterically, followed by curse words in a jumble of Italian and Spanish drowned out in the hilarity of his tormentors. Realizing that the confrontation was hopeless, deTomaso slammed the door.

  Easing toward the stairs, Diana said, "Now you can see that the great Commendatore isn't quite the regal `pope of the north' that some people envision." She stopped and, before I could say a word, pecked me on the cheek and said, "Now it's past my bedtime. Early day tomorrow at the Autodrome. Sleep tight."

  She swept away down the darkened hallway, taking with her any fantasies I might have harbored about being asked to follow.

  My room was small and airless. I thought of my lodgings in Le Mans, along with the sound and fury of the crash and the hysterical cries of the wounded. But they were soon overwhelmed by more pleasant thoughts of the beautiful woman who had brought me here. Images of Diana Logan would not leave me as I tried futilely to sleep and put an end to the erotic dreams about what might have been.

  The next morning, as I finished a customary Italian breakfast of hard bread rolls and coffee strong enough to power a locomotive over the Alps, Coltrin hobbled in, employing a small cane to support his swollen ankle.

  "You look like you just spent two years on the Russian front," I joked.

  "Make it that and the Gulag and you'd be right," he said, lighting a cigarette. "Where's Diana?"

  "Haven't seen her. Maybe she left early."

  "No score last night?"

  "Niente."

  "She's a hard one to figure."

  "What's Castellotti doing here? I thought he was driving for Lancia," I said, changing the subject, but still wondering if he had been with her last night.

  "Weird things going on. He was Ascari's teammate at Lancia, but now there's word that the company is in deep shit financially and, with the death of Ascari, the owner, Gianni Lancia, is rumored to be quitting racing. Rumor has it he'll turn over the race cars and equipment to Enzo. That would be a godsend, because his current cars aren't worth a shit against the Germans."

  "I thought all the Ferraris were world-beaters. That's what you hear in America."

  "His Grand Prix cars are rejiggered versions of a four-year-old design. And Mercedes-Benz is cleaning the table. Enzo is in a panic. Worse yet, he's about to lose his long-term tire contract with Pirelli. I think Castellotti is coming back with the Lancia deal. That could save his ass."

  There was a guttural rumble outside the window, and a carbinari began waving traffic to the side of the street as he tooted frantically on his whistle.

  "Here it comes, the big parade," said Coltrin.

  "An Italian holiday?" I asked.

  "Hell, no. Ferrari is headed for some testing at the Autodrome. They're driving the car to the track."

  "A race car on the street?"

  "No problem here. They paint a prova number on the tail, meaning it's an experimental car, and drive the damn thing in the middle of traffic. Like right now."

  Snarling like a leashed tiger was a squat, long-nosed, single-seat racing car, its wire wheels glistening in the morning sunlight.

  "The new Tipo five-five-five Super Squalo Grand Prix car, out for another test run," said Coltrin as the outrageous shape rolled up in front of the hotel, its engine howling at high revs to keep its spark plugs from fouling.

  "Who's that driving?" I asked, spotting a gray-haired man with a blue beret tucked over his ears.

  "Bazzi. Luigi Bazzi. Ferrari's longtime shop chief. His best friend and confidant. The only really steady hand in the whole operation. He'll drive the car to the track, but somebody else-maybe Castellotti-will actually drive it at speed."

  Directly behind the Ferrari race car idled a large Fiat four-door sedan. In the passenger's seat was the unmistakable profile of Enzo Ferrari.

  "That's Ferrari. But who's driving?"

  "His chauffeur, Pepino Verdelli. Been with him for thirty years. Knows all his secrets. Ferrari seldom drives himself. After all, why should a man of his stature go anyplace without a chauffeur?" Coltrin asked, his voice thick with irony.

  Behind the race car and the sedan came a ragged fleet of honking automobiles. Among them I spotted what seemed to be Diana's Mexico.

  "That mob scene behind them. They must all be going to the track," I said. "Is that Diana's coupe?"

  "Yeah, all the press and the mechanics are headed out there, too. That's Diana all right. She wouldn't miss a show like this. We'll head out there in a while. They won't start any serious runnin
g for another hour."

  The Mexico drew up parallel with the window. Seated beside Diana was Eugenio Castellotti. I stared in shock, trying to deny my senses.

  "Little Gino got himself a ride," chuckled Coltrin. "And you were wondering what happened last night?"

  My stomach churning, I tried to make light of the scene. "Well, I guess he had to get to the track somehow. Better than taking a bus."

  "A lot better."

  Suddenly my interest in going to the Modena Autodrome disintegrated. It was the last place on earth I wanted to be. "I've changed my mind. I don't think I'll go to the track. There's a ten o'clock train to Milan. If I catch it I can get a late-night flight to London. I'm wasting too much time here," I said weakly.

  Coltrin looked at me, his eyes squinted knowingly. With a crooked smile he said, "So, of Gino's got himself a beautiful babe's Ferrari and the best you can do is a coach seat on an Italian train. But you're probably lucky. The more beautiful they are, the more trouble they are. You can quote me on that."

  As I checked out of the Albergo Real, I couldn't resist leaving my business card. "Would you mind delivering this to Miss Diana Logan's room?" I asked the concierge. And then Coltrin drove me to the station and I headed back to California and an attempted re-entry into the real world.

  BY THE TIME I TUMBLED OFF AN AMERICAN AIRLINES DC-8 at Burbank airport, my whole world had changed. Two days of semi-sleep on a series of flights that had zigzagged from Milan to London's Heathrow to New York's Idlewild to California had left me semi-comotose. The incessant din of the big radial engines that powered airlines in the pre-jet days had left me with a piercing headache, while days would pass before my digestive track purged itself of airline food.

  After a day of sleep in my apartment, I rose to face a the gray assault of smog that blanketed the Los Angeles basin. Relief came only after a Santa Ana wind boiled off the high desert, shoving the acrid clouds into the Pacific and replacing them with sunny, 100degree temperatures. I tried to write, but my thoughts were too fragmented by the nightmare at Le Mans, the wacky frivolity at Modena and, worst of all, the incredible Diana.

  She had been right about James Dean. East of Eden had opened to rave reviews for the sulky kid who played Steinbeck's Cal Trask with an intensity that rivaled another new Method actor, Marlon Brando-who had already attained stardom with his debut the year before in another Kazan masterpiece, On the Waterfront. East of Eden opened at New York's Astor Theatre in all its Cinemascope grandeur on March 9, 1955. No less a superstar than Marilyn Monroe was stationed in the lobby to hand out programs to the black-tied VIPs who had been invited to the premiere. The reviews were mixed, mostly due to the complex plot, which offered Kazan little time to broaden the characters played by veterans Raymond Massey, Burl Ives, and Julie Harris. But Dean's performance as the wayward, outcast son elicted raves. Said the master French director and cinema immortal Francois Truffaut in his Cahiers du Cinema review, "James Dean has succeeded in giving commercial viability to a film that would otherwise have scarcely qualified, in breathing life into an abstraction, in interesting a vast audience in moral problems treated in an unusual way ... this shortsighted star prevents him from smiling, and the smile drawn from him by dint of patient effort constitutes a victory."

  One American movie critic exclaimed that Dean radiated the "innocent grace of a captive panther," while another labeled him the possessor of "bastard robustness."

  A local horse trainer, movie wrangler, and occasional stunt man was amazed at Dean's performance. While shooting Eden in Steinbeck's home town of Salinas, Monty Roberts had been employed by Kazan to work with Dean in an effort to acquaint the small-town Indiana kid with the ways of the West. Dean was an adept student for the man who would rise to world fame of the creator of a revolutionary form of passive horse training called "the language of Equus" and who would be the basis for the Robert Redford character in the hit movie The Horse Whisperer. Dean was quick to learn complex rope tricks like the butterfly, but to Roberts, who had worked on numerous films, including the "Red Ryder" serials and "My Friend Flicka," Dean seemed to possess no talent as an actor. They became good friends, but Dean was so introverted, so blank an emotional canvas, that Roberts seriously doubted Kazan's judgment in enlisting the young man for the starring role. During the Salinas shooting, Dean bunked with Roberts and his new wife, Pat, in their small spread near the local airport. A strong bond developed between the trio, but Roberts remained skeptical about Dean's future in the movie business. One day, he was invited to watch the daily uncut film. He watched in stunned silence as the explosive personality of James Dean lit up the screen.

  So introverted off the stage and screen that he seemed talentless to Roberts and others, Dean's performance in East of Eden was so vivid, so electrifying, so overwhelmingly commercial that Jack Warner and company immediately signed him to a long-term contract and announced that he would star in Rebel Without a Cause, while plans were laid to give him major roles in productions of Giant, Somebody Up There Likes Me, and Left-Handed Gun. (The latter two films would later be handed off to Paul Newman.)

  With the Warner Brothers publicity machine in top gear, Dean was billed not as an existential outsider but as a bobby-soxer idol in the mold of Tab Hunter, Robert Wagner, Rock Hudson, and Paul Newman. Dean, deeply serious about his acting, hated the vapid typecasting and resisted Hollywood culture. He was living with his father, Winton Dean, a widowed dental technician, at 1667 South Bundy (a street to become infamous forty-five years later, thanks to O. J. Simpson) and was becoming increasingly interested in sports car racing as a way to escape the glitz. Following his mother's early death in 1940, when he was nine years old, Dean had been moved to the tiny Indiana town of Fairmount, where his aunt Ortense and her husband, Marcus Whitman, raised him through high school. Riding his Whizzer motorbike and driving a friend's "souped-up" 1934 Plymouth through a series of ess-bends they dubbed "Suicide Curve," Dean quickly displayed the balance and daring to become the fastest driver of the lot.

  This scrawny high school basketball and track star from Fairmount, Indiana, exploded on the American scene as the newest anti-hero, radiating repressed, volatile anger and rejecting the increasingly plastic and vinyl "good life" permeating the national psyche. At the same time that a gaudy group of writers and poets were gathering in Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury coffeehouses and calling themselves Beatniks, young male actors like Brando, Dean, Newman, and Sal Mineo brilliantly expressed the latent restlessness, alienation, and anxiety that helped trigger the angry, drugfed revolution of the hippies, which lay ahead in the next decade.

  Dean had come to Hollywood in 1954, carrying his meager belongings in a paper bag, after starring in an adaption of Andre Gide's The Immoralist on Broadway and making a mark in a number of television dramas. In April he signed with Warner Brothers for the East of Eden part, receiving an advance of $700. He used some of his newfound wealth to purchase a used MG TD roadster and began dating Italian starlet Pier Angeli. The romance ended when the dazzling brunette married singer Vic Damone in late November of that year. By then, Dean had become the source of enormous buzz in the film colony and had no trouble finding dates-including the exquisite German actress Julie Harris, Eartha Kitt, Ursula Andress, and Liz "Dizzy" Sheridan, who would find stardom forty years later playing Jerry Seinfeld's mother on television.

  His first motorcycle was a small single-cylinder purchased in Indiana, but he soon traded up to a series of faster, British-built Nortons. He then moved on to a larger English Triumph, like the one Marlon Brando had ridden in the Stanley Kramer hit of 1954, The Wild One. Brando's role as the outcast leader of a motorcycle gang that terrorized a small California town (based on the actual Hollister riot of July 4, 1947) had introduced the American public to disaffected youth, and surely influenced Dean's acting style, if not his entire public persona.

  Using his Truimph motorcycle and later his MG, Dean honed his skills on the notorious Mulholland Drive, where he vented his frus
trations with the movie business and what he believed to be its crass commercialism. In late May 1954, he wrote a girlfriend in New York named Barbara Glenn about his new possession. "Honey!! A new addition has been added to the Dean family. I got a red '53 MG (milled head, etc. hot engine) My sex pours itself into fast curves, broadslides and broodings; drags, etc. You have plenty of competition now. My motorcycle, my MG and my girl. I have been sleeping with my MG. We make it together. (signed) Honey."

  Before East of Eden had been released, Dean began studying for the Rebel role, and on March 1, 1955, traded the MG for a new, 1,500 cc Porsche 356 Speedster-S roadster-a lightweight German sports car built by the son of Volkswagen creator Ferdinand Porsche. Dean became a fixture on Mulholland, sometimes running the nearly forty-mile round trip on the insanely convoluted roadway as often as twenty times a week.

  One of his regular passengers was Lew Bracker, an insurance salesman who Dean had met in the Warner Brothers commissary restaurant. The same age as the young actor, Bracker was loyal and unthreatening. His connection to the movie business came through his cousin, Leonard Rosenman, who had composed the music for East of Eden. Bracker, who was driving a Buick convertible when he met Dean, was soon drawn into the world of high-speed driving and sports cars.

  Bracker accompanied his friend to Palm Springs on March 26, where the California Sports Car Club was staging an amateur road race on a 2.3-mile circuit laid out on the runways of the local airport. Dean drove his new Porsche to the fashionable high-desert resort and entered a "novice" race for the first time. There being no formal training required for racing in those days, Dean simply dropped the Porsche's convertible top, snapped a seat belt in place, donned a helmet, and went racing.

  The skills he had demonstrated on Mulholland were instantly apparent on the racetrack. Wearing glasses to correct his nearsightedness, Dean started sixth in the twenty-one car field. Before halfway in the six-lap race, he had powered his way into a solid lead. When the checkered flag fell, he had a full straightaway lead, with the second-place car barely in sight.