Louis Renault was frantic. His brother Marcel was still out there somewhere. Was there any news of his brother? There was none. Nearly an hour passed, then a Mors driven by Gabriel streaked across the finish line, having averaged 65:3 miles an hour for 342 tuned miles. He had passed 79 cars which had started before him and appeared to be the winner.
Louis Renault rushed up and demanded news. His brother?
Gabriel didn't know. There were wrecked cars all over the road, he said.
As more cars came in, each driver had horrors to report. Loraine Barrow, driving a De Dietrich, had swerved to avoid a dog and crashed into a tree. He and his mechanic had been killed. He must have been doing 80. Leslie Porter, driving a Wolseley, rocketed around a corner only to find a railroad crossing with the gates down. Jamming on the brakes he had skidded into a house. His mechanic was dead. Tourand, trying to avoid a child in the road, had skidded into the crowd, killing the child and some spectators, perhaps half a dozen in all, no one was sure. Delaney wrecked his car on a heap of stones. Gras crashed into a railroad crossing. Mayhew rammed a tree. Stead's car brushed against Salleron's, then careened off the road and crashed, killing Stead. Marcel Renault, closing up on another car, approached a long curve at nearly 80 miles an hour. The other driver refused to slow down. So did Marcel. In blinding dust, Marcel forced his car by on the outside, sliding wider and wider in the curve until one wheel dipped down into the rain gutter. The car flipped and rolled. Marcel, mortally injured, was dragged out of the wreck and rushed to a hospital. Car after car stopped to help. The other Renault cars, coming upon the wreckage of Marcel's car and learning that their leader was dying, abandoned the race.
At Bordeaux the atmosphere was no longer festive. The crowd grew tense.
The whispering grew louder, bitter. Men began to mutter about the carnage the race had wrought and to cry out: "Stop it! Stop it!"
The world had not yet known two world wars in a row, or forty thousand highway deaths in a nation during a peacetime year. In those days violent death was rare.
The crowd became hostile. The drivers who had been part of the race slunk away. The officials huddled together, wondering if they could let the race go on. The matter was decided for them. Orders came in to Bordeaux by telegraph, first from Paris, then from Madrid. The Paris-Madrid race, begun so gloriously only a few hours before, was over.
Perhaps a dozen persons had been killed, perhaps more, no one knows for sure. Several were drivers. And now the press and the faint of heart took up the cry. Road racing had become a grim contest with death. There was nothing left in it of sport. The cars were going too fast. The roads were inadequate. The crowds could not be controlled.
The cars were sent back to Paris by train for "investigation." Men rose in parliament to demand that motor racing be abolished; it was not a sport, but a slaughter.
To many, the death of Marcel Renault seemed the most crushing tragedy of all. He was so young, so promising, had so much to live for. His brother Louis lived on until 1945 when, imprisoned as a collaborator, he fell seriously ill and was removed to a hospital. Examining physicians reported that death was only a matter of days, or hours. However, the hero of Paris-Madrid 1903, was not permitted to die in peace. Some righteous fellow citizens bludgeoned him to death in his bed.
Such was the horror of that May Sunday in 1903 that legislation banning motor racing for all time seemed certain. All were agreed that, even if motor racing survived on closed circuits, the day of the great town-to-town road races was over. There would never be another Paris-Madrid, or anything like it, and all who had loved motor racing, finding in it glory, glamour and excitement, were filled with gloom.
They need not have worried, for road racing continued to erupt in odd spots for more than 50 years. There were races from St. Petersburg to Moscow, from Bengazi to Tripoli, from Tobruk to Tripoli, through the back country of the Argentine, from Guatemala up the length of Mexico to the Texas border, and the Tour of Sicily. Moreover, for 30 years there was the Mille Miglia, the last and greatest of them all.
There have been, in fact, so many races since that "last road race of all time" in 1903, that it is difficult to imagine even now that there will never be another. Even the death of such a man as Portago in 1957, while perhaps capable of extinguishing the Mille Miglia, is probably not enough to crush road racing permanently.
For the conviction is inescapable that the Mille Miglia was stopped not because Portago's car killed eleven persons, but because it killed a figure as glamorous as Portago. He had been a romantic in an age which had no time for romance. He had been a sort of modern conquistador, and much of the world watched breathlessly the fantastic things he tried and got away with.
Other races have killed more people (Le Mans, Argentina, Monza) but were raced again the next year. For no driver as renowned as Portago was killed, and the headlines had died out in a day or two. It was, to my mind, the Portago publicity which stopped the Mille Miglia--the grisly funerals at Guidizzollo, and then again at Madrid: the impassioned declarations of the movie actress he had been living with; the photos of his wife, his children, and the former mistress who had borne him a son; his fantastic wealth; the pronouncement of the grief-stricken Fangio, Portago's friend, that the Mille Miglia, first raced in 1927, must not be run again.
The harsh glare of such personal publicity focused the eyes of the world on this particular race day after day after day. It began to look uglier and uglier. Finally the organizers lost their nerve, their political backing faded away (as political backing always does in such cases) and it was agreed to cancel this last of the town-to-town road races.
If a lesser man had plowed into the mob, organizers could have called the accident a fluke, and asserted that the normal death toll on those roads on a Sunday is 30--that the Mille Miglia was not as dangerous as normal Italian motoring. This last argument was true, but it was not worth much against the international emotion aroused by the death of Portago.
Looking back, it is obvious that Don Alfonso Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, seventeenth Marques de Portago, was a fool, that he was rushing toward violent death with a grin on his face and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. But at the time one tended to admire his fierce belief in a man's right to play the game his own way, to envy the excitement he experienced, and to suppose that he—and he alone —could go on that way forever. Those older or wiser knew he couldn't, but some of them respected him for trying, and some loved his insouciance, his courage and his flair.
"If I die tomorrow," Portago remarked near the end, "nonetheless, I have had twenty-eight wonderful years."
Until the moment came when he was forced to throw in his hand, it was possible to believe that a man could live that way, without thought of consequences. Or rather, one wanted to believe it, and so one rooted for Portago against all the laws the gods had made.
He was a lithe, 170-pound 6-footer, and there was animal magnetism in the way he carried himself, together with a kind of arrogance to which women responded. The women--Portage's women—were all considered beauties, and were all five or more years older than he.
His fellow drivers considered him tenacious, daring. They were a little afraid of him, for he wanted to be world champion more than any of them, had less fear than they had, and did what he felt like doing at all times. He had burst upon their scene—in less than three full seasons he was the best known personality in motor racing, though far from the best driver.
To bobsledders he was a phenomenon, so adroit at guiding half-ton sleds down glazed ice chutes that he nearly stole a 1956 Olympic championship from men who had laughed at his inept driving only a week before. There too he had burst upon the scene—by losing control in a high-speed turn and being catapulted out of the sled at 60 miles an hour. He then admitted that he had had only two or three practice runs in Switzerland before buying a pair of thousand-dollar sleds, recruiting some cousins from Madrid, and entering his team in the Olympics for Spain. A week later
he was good enough to finish fourth—and was bitterly disappointed to miss by 17/100 of a second, the only Olympic medal at which Spain had a chance.
To journalists, Portago was a vein of gold.
At 17 he had piloted a borrowed plane under a bridge to win a $500 bet. Later he had been the foremost amateur steeplechase jockey in the world. More recently he had walked blithely away from some of the most spectacular auto wrecks on record.
As if he weren't colorful enough on his own, journalists noted that such flamboyance had been commonplace in his family. His ancestors had helped chase the Moors from Spain, then sailed to explore the New World. One of them, Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, being shipwrecked off Florida in 1528, marched his small band across the wilds of the American South to the safety of Spanish settlements in Mexico—an epic trek which took eight years. Portago's own father had been a Civil War hero, swimming out to a Loyalist submarine and blowing it up with a homemade bomb.
Portago himself was courteous and articulate (in four languages) to journalists. He was also curiously gentle, and modest. Tales of his hair-raising exploits came from others, not himself, and when confronted by them he appeared embarrassed and was reluctant to elaborate.
Weekend after weekend he risked his life. It was a compulsion which he tried to explain by asserting that during moments of peril every nerve in his body seemed alive, alert to all the sounds, sights and smells around him.
But speed was more than a search for excitement. "A man has to find something he can do well," he insisted. "Not only well in itself, but well in relation to the way other men are doing it. I can drive that well." He predicted he would win the driver's world championship by the time he was 30. Then, before he was 35, he would quit racing.
After that?
"I don't know," he said restlessly. "There are many things." Politics interested him. He told some intimates that with his name, background and the world championship he could almost name his post in the Spanish government.
"The trouble with life," he remarked, "is that it's too short. But I'm certainly not going to spend the rest of my life driving race cars."
He had black curly hair worn so long it hid his ears. He often appeared unshaven, grimy from working in the pits all day. He did not care about luxury. He had black eyebrows, deep-set smoldering dark eyes. He chain-smoked. Often he dressed in black, to some he seemed as mysterious as a pirate--one who spoke English with a cultured, slightly British accent.
He was not always serious. Once I asked how he had met his blond American wife.
"One does not meet an American girl," he replied with a smile. "She meets you."
What did she think of his racing?
The smile broadened. "I do not ask her. I am Spanish."
The humor in the role of Spanish nobleman was apparent to him. Yet he enjoyed playing it sometimes.
He was off the road frequently, that last year of his life. Harry Schell, a fellow driver and his closest friend, told him he would kill himself if he kept on taking such chances. Nelson, the friend who was killed with him, predicted that Portago would not live to be 30: "Every time he comes in from a race the front of his car is wrinkled where he has been nudging other cars out of his way at 130 miles an hour."
But he was getting closer to the world championship and he ignored them. He passed a tiring winter, racing in Argentina, Nassau, Cuba, Florida. Then he went back to Europe.
Dozens of articles appeared about him. He wrote one himself, calling racing a vice, like any other vice. A man couldn't give it up.
The papers duly reported his "friendship" with Linda Christian, an actress. She said he would obtain a divorce and marry her. No one who knew him believed this. There had been other girlfriends.
April passed, and the early days of May.
Portago did not want to drive the Mille Miglia. He did not like long races to begin with and now he was bothered by presentiments of doom he could not shake off. He made a half-hearted effort to get out of the race, but the Ferrari factory claimed to be shorthanded.
So Portago shrugged, and wrote some letters tidying up his life. In one of them he remarked: "My 'early death' may well come next Sunday."
Friday passed, Saturday. Portage's premonitions must have grown stronger, for he confided them to a few friends. He booked tickets to Monte Carlo, where he was scheduled to race the following weekend, as if, with the tickets in his hand, he could feel assured of that much future at least.
At midnight May 12, the Mille Miglia started, the smaller cars shooting down the ramp at one-minute intervals. It was dawn when Portago and Nelson, who had come down to ride with him for luck, arrived at the starting line in Brescia. In the excitement, Portago appeared to cheer up. There were 301 cars entered. They were strung out on the road all the way to Rome. Why should anything happen to him among so many?
He was to drive a 3:8-liter Ferrari with the number 531 painted on its sides. As his turn neared, he climbed into it, new, low and a dull red in the dawn light. He started the engine, letting it idle powerfully, and Nelson settled into the seat beside him. The car ahead roared away and Portago wheeled his Ferrari onto the ramp. At the signal he surged onto the road, upshifting swiftly, feeling the power of the big engine.
Now, no doubt, as he responded to the demands of the race, he felt all of the old excitement and began once more to believe himself immortal. He concentrated on braking, shifting, accelerating. Death could not find him. He was moving too fast for it.
Portago had never before completed the Mille Miglia and he was hardly more familiar with its thousand miles of turns and straights, cities and mountains than any citizen who had studied a road map. To win he would have to shave the margin for safety more closely than the others would. He rocketed through Verona, Vincenza. At mid-morning the Adriatic rose blue and shining into view. He was going well. With luck he would win on sheer virtuosity.
At Pescara there was a check point and the road swung west toward the Apennines and Rome. Portago was in excellent position. He had passed many cars that had started earlier and knew he was making good time. He climbed up the Apennines, punishing his car. He was fourth by then, only a minute and thirty-five seconds behind Piero Taruffi, the eventual winner.
The road plunged down into Rome—for a moment there was a vista of the city, the spires and churches, the monumental ruins. Portago must have felt himself enormously in tune with life as he saw it. He had beauty and speed in his hands, and love waiting for him ahead.
At Rome Miss Christian waved to him from the crowd. And then Portago did something that was not like him-he halted in a screech of brakes and swirling dust. Linda ran up and Portago pulled her down to him and kissed her. He murmured something—
Valuable seconds, perhaps as long as a minute, were lost before he had regained speed and rejoined the race. Why did he stop, he who was hurrying to win above all things? Why waste seconds which so often in past Mille Miglias had meant the difference between victory and defeat?
It could have been for show—Portago was always aware of his public. Or perhaps somehow he sensed that this last kiss was more precious than all the others, and so had seized it.
Miss Christian waved to him until he was out of sight. A sudden silence filled the air. Along the road lime trees were in bloom. Their white petals fluttered towards the earth.
Portage's car sped north toward Guidizzollo.
In the mountains again, he climbed along the broken spine of Italy, fled through the sinuous Futa and Raticosa passes, until at last the road began to fall once more. Across a fertile valley he raced toward Bologna, two hundred miles from the finish and a scheduled fuel stop for the Ferrari team. There he skidded to a halt and sprang from the ear. Mechanics swarmed over it, dumping gas, checking tires.
"How do I stand?"
"Fifth."
"How far behind?"
They told him seconds. Furthermore, two of the cars ahead were faltering and might not finish.
The gas was poured. A mech
anic, grimy and sweating, writhed out from under the car. "Look at this!" be cried, pointing. "The shaft which supports the left front wheel is cracked! The tire is actually rubbing against the frame of the car."
"I hit a curb," explained Portago impatiently.
He had come 800 miles. The tormenting mountains were behind him and he had scarcely two hours left to drive. Ahead stretched a plain so flat a man could see practically to the Alps.
The shaft, the tire, would hold. They always held. He knew of dozens of instances—"There isn't time to fix it now," he said, and jumped into his place. The car's unmuffled engine thundered. It leaped onto the road.
And so he raced across the valley in the sun. At Parma he passed Peter Collins' broken Ferrari beside the road, and was fourth. By Mantua he had beaten Olivier Gendebien's time and was third. How far ahead were the others? The road turned north like an elbow for the last dash to the tape.
Moments later he rocketed across the narrow bridge into Goito and on the straightaway beyond it, pressed the accelerator into the floor. Now the walls of Guidizzollo loomed before him, the finish line less than 30 miles ahead.
His life was intense and, at 28, complete. There are those who wrote afterwards that he was in love with death but they did not know him and this statement is absurd. Alfonso de Portago was in love with life. "Perhaps we appreciate life more," he wrote of racing drivers, "because we live closer to death."
He seemed to me the most alive man I had ever known. He was sensitive, restless, curiously gentle, and it is impossible to describe that impression of straining vitality which he communicated, nor to do justice to the overwhelming disbelief his friends felt when news of his death arrived.
It seemed he had everything a man could need with which to challenge life: charm, looks, wealth and courage. If he failed, his friends thought, what chance has anyone? The answer was obvious: none. Portago was not merely killed. In the wreck the hood of the car lashed back and cut him in two.
CARS AT SPEED - Grand Prix's Golden Age Page 3