‘Seymour’s account is that of a scholar and a novelist, eye-opening as to fact, both thrilling and poignant in evocation. It also has the best illustrations – the most eloquent, apt and abundant – of any biography I have read’
ALAN HOLLINGHURST, Guardian
‘In writing this enthralling book, Miss Seymour has given the forgotten “championne du monde automobile” the tribute she has so long deserved’
The Economist
‘Miranda Seymour [has] proved both dogged and fortunate in pursuit of Hellé’s own dispersed collection of cuttings and memorabilia . . . Sometimes it seems that fame looks after its own, but here is a very well-told tale that shows us otherwise’
RUSSELL DAVIES, Sunday Telegraph
‘The Bugatti Queen offers a gripping account of motor racing in Europe and America in the Thirties. It also has the charm and fascination of a fairy tale, being the story of a country bumpkin who transformed herself into a glamorous and much-courted star . . . Her downfall was shocking and irrevocable, and Seymour’s account of her final years is as compelling as the history of her triumphs . . . The quality of the writing is, indeed, one of the great pleasures of the book, as is Seymour’s well-informed commentary on a wide variety of related matters. She presents a dazzling portrait of the racing scene and its wealthy patrons and enthusiasts . . . There is no doubt that Hélène Delangle would have been proud to have her story so eloquently and sympathetically retold’
PAMELA NORRIS, Literary Review
‘This engaging memoir brings alive the energy, excitement and viciousness of the racing circuit, and Hellé’s constant struggle to remain part of a world dominated by rich men’
Observer
‘What a life! Hélène Delangle was not just the best woman racing driver in Europe between the wars, she was a life-force, exuberant and irrepressible . . . [Miranda Seymour] scrupulously documents the speculative passages, while creating a narrative which captures the helter-skelter gaiety of Hélène’s career . . . It has taken an English biographer to rescue Hélène from the footnotes. Less famous lives are often more engrossing than big biographies, and this one feels like an act of restitution. “I shall miss her,” writes Miranda Seymour. So will her readers’
CHRISTOPHER HUDSON, Daily Mail
‘Motor sport might be a man’s world nowadays, but it wasn’t always so, as this beautifully written account of the 1920s racing legend Hélène Delangle proves’
Glamour
‘This is biographical gold dust, and Miranda Seymour [is] perfectly qualified to sweep it all together nicely. There is a minimum of dreary petrolhead statistics, and a maximum of memorable little trackside nuggets . . . Seymour also walks a delicate tightrope between the horrors and the wonders of racing’
HARRY MOUNT, Times Literary Supplement
‘Miranda Seymour re-establishes [Helle Nice] as an alluring, charismatic woman and a gifted racer’
Metro
‘Reads like a detective story . . . The use of background detail throughout Miranda Seymour’s book is superb, highlighting the skill of a brilliant biographer . . . This model biography will ensure that her extraordinary life will not be forgotten’
LUCINDA BYATT, Scotland on Sunday
‘Completely detailed . . . The amount of research carried out by Seymour was clearly tremendous . . . For anyone who needs to know more about Hellé Nice, here is the book . . . A good read, and not only for motor-racing folk’
Motorsport
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2005
This ebook edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
A CBS company
Copyright © 2005 by Miranda Seymour
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Miranda Seymour to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
www.simonandschuster.co.uk
Simon & Schuster Australia,
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7434-7859-2
ebook ISBN: 978-1-47114-970-2
Typeset by M Rules
To my mother,
with love and admiration
‘The thing I like best in the world is adventure’
– Hellé Nice
CONTENTS
Introduction
THE POSTMASTER’S DAUGHTER
1 Beginnings
2 1903: The Race to Death
3 Loss and Learning
THE DANCER
4 Paris
5 The Dancer
THE RACER
6 ‘La Princesse des altitudes, reine de vitesse’
7 Interlude at Molsheim
8 Lapping the Goldfish Bowl
FLYING HIGH
9 Ralph’s Honey
10 Sex and Cars
FALLING
11 1936: ‘L’Année malheureuse’
12 The Road Back
13 And what did you do during the war, Mademoiselle?
DISGRACE
14 The Accusation
15 Sans Everything
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Appendices
Notes
Picture Credits
Index
List of Illustrations
INTRODUCTION
A collection of photographs spreads across my desk this morning. Three are of places. Three show an attractive woman with a film star’s sense of how to make her face speak to a camera. One is of a car crash.
Places first. 1900. A sepia-tinted postcard shows what is plainly intended to be a typical everyday scene of the time in Aunay-sous-Auneau, a tiny village forty miles west of Paris. Three women stand in the road, hands on hips, thickly stockinged legs set well apart. Aunay’s local historian, Raymond Barenton, wants me to look, not at the gossiping ladies, but at the building behind them. Small, low and shabby, this is the house in which Hellé Nice (Hélène Delangle) was born in 1900, although 1905 was her preferred year of birth. Peering closer at the card and using a magnifying glass, I can make out the words ‘Postes et Télégraphes’ on the wall of the drab little rectangle. Not a cheerful home in which to start a glorious career.
Place Two is the Villa des Agaves, Hélène’s home on the Côte d’Azur in 1937. A white house, up-to-the-minute in its curvaceous design, it juts out from the side of a cliff above Beaulieu-sur-mer, looking down on the elegant spit of Cap Ferrat. The Villa des Agaves stands near the summit of the climbing, serpentine route of boulevard Edward VII, where neighbours in Hélène’s heyday included a handful of European royals and a gang of sports stars. Below, almost overlooked from the terrace of the main bedroom, lies the magnificent Villa Tunis, bought by Hélène’s patron Ettore Bugatti from Jean-Pierre Wimille, one of his most successful drivers. Bugatti’s thirty-year-old marriage to a Milanese opera singer was in bad shape by the mid-thirties; the Villa Tunis was bought as a bolthole, a seaside palace just made for a man who collected houses as easily as carriages and racehorses.
Place Three jumps forward almost fifty years. This house lies at the back of the port in old Nice, an area where the tobacco-workers used to rent rooms in the thirties. The handful of streets separating rue Edouard Scoffier from the mountains behind the town are shady and mean. Opposite the tatty façade behind which Hélène’s life leaked away in ob
scurity, a garage keeps itself in business by respraying trucks. This was the house where she lived on charity, although not the landlord’s, for almost twenty years. In 1984, she died in a public ward at the local hospital. Among her few possessions were two large, stained boxes full of old newspaper cuttings, letters and photographs. The landlord, impatient to clean the place up and relet, sent them off as rubbish. Her trophy cups and her treasured book of stamps, collected over seventy years, were either sold or given away.
So much for places: now for personalities. The first of the second clutch of photographs shows a gorgeous young woman with no clothes on, laughing, and raising her arms to capture a fluttering white dove. It isn’t indicated exactly where she is performing, but it clearly isn’t the town hall of Aunay. She is probably in her early twenties; she has a glow on her skin that makes you want to reach out and touch her.
The next photograph shows the same young woman, but in a startlingly different pose. Here, she is sitting at the wheel of what, as I have learned to appreciate, is the supercharged version of the world’s most beautiful sports car, Ettore Bugatti’s model 35. She is wearing white overalls and a cloth helmet hides her blonde curls.Her smile has a nervousness which is rare in her photographs. You can’t tell the time of day (other evidence shows that it is early on a December morning in 1929). The weather forecast is bad: the men lined up like a row of Chicago heavies behind the car are shrouded in waterproofs. The smallest of them, looking anxiously at the car, must be her mechanic, Joseph Cecci, to whom she has inscribed the photograph in her bold looping writing.
We need to spend a little more time with this photograph. It is a record of the celebrated day when, driving at an average of 198 kph over ten laps on the uneven surface and high banked walls of France’s first speed track, Hélène Delangle, now calling herself Hellé Nice, became the fastest woman in the world, skidding around the top of Montlhéry’s goldfish bowl at a rate of 48 seconds a lap with the knowledge that a blown tyre, a loose screw, a faulty brake could send her flying over the concrete rim. Steering a Bugatti at that speed was, they said, like trying to slice a knife through hot butter.
And how did it feel? It’s a shame and a puzzle that so few of the novelists who could have done justice to the subject chose to do so. Racing was, after all, one of the biggest entertainments the 1920s had to offer. Artists from Lautrec and Matisse to Tamara de Lempicka, painter of the iconic Woman in a Green Bugatti, relished the challenge of how to express speed in a linear form. Writers, if we set aside some poems that Paul Eluard and Apollinaire might have preferred to be forgotten, and a few set-piece scenes, kept away from it.*
The best-known account of a woman driving at speed comes in Vile Bodies, which Waugh wrote in 1929, the year of Hélène Delangle’s record-breaking run when she was just short of thirty. Chapter 12 describes young Adam Syme and Myles Malpractice setting off for a long, grubby day at the track with their friends Agatha Runcible and Archie Schwertz. Sporting Miss Runcible – Waugh modelled her on his racing friend Elizabeth Plunket Greene – enters the race as a co-driver and beats the champion before leaving the road at speed. Carried off to hospital, she continues to relive the experience for as long as the nurses will permit:
There was rarely more than a quarter of a mile of the black road to be seen at one time. It unrolled like a length of cinema film. At the edges was confusion; a fog spinning past: ‘Faster, faster,’ they shouted above the roar of the engine. The road rose suddenly and the white car soared up the sharp ascent without slackening speed. At the summit of the hill there was a corner. Two cars had crept up, one on each side, and were closing in. ‘Faster,’ cried Miss Runcible, ‘faster’.
. . . Another frightful corner. The car leant over on two wheels, tugging outwards; it was drawn across the road until it was within a few inches of the bank. One ought to brake down at the corners, but one couldn’t see them coming lying flat on one’s back like this. The back wheel wouldn’t hold the road at this speed. Skidding all over the place.
‘Faster. Faster.’
The stab of a hypodermic needle.
‘There’s nothing to worry about, dear . . . nothing at all . . . nothing.’
Hellé Nice – her professional name – was the most audacious woman driver of her time and she first proved it on that chilly morning at Montlhéry in front of a group of cynical sports writers and select members of the Bugatti works team. Ettore’s signature brown bowler hat isn’t visible in the photograph, but he was taking a close interest in her achievement. Her courage and skill were remarkable; what interested him still more were the seductively half-closed eyes and joyful smile which were already her trademark on stage. Put the saucy, radiant face together with the speed at which she was prepared to risk her life for a record or a win and Hélène Delangle became an irresistible commodity for a car company which relied on personality as much as victories for its sales.
The third of the photographs is a romantic mystery and not by any means the only one in Hélène’s promiscuous life. It has been taken on a liner bound for South America in 1936, and we know that the man who has snapped her in close-up is her new lover. The photograph is an exact match to the one in her album of a man on a liner, sitting in an identical chair. ‘Naldo’, she has written helpfully at the side. Her lover, Arnaldo Binelli, is a young man of arresting beauty, dark-haired, soft-lipped, a mouth, you’d guess, that was used to laughing and kissing. Like her own. They must have had fun, those two. Always photogenic, Hélène looks young and vulnerable here, hair tucked back, head slightly tilted. Her large eyes are dreamy, liquid with love.
The last photograph on the desk is of a crash. This is a horrifying shot, taken at the moment of disaster, by Hélène’s lover, who was standing by the finishing line. The place was São Paulo in Brazil and the year was 1936. She was racing an Alfa on that occasion, and racing well. But something has gone terribly wrong. The picture shows a figure like a doll, legs and arms stiff as star spokes as it whirls through the dusty air. The car is hidden in a blur of smoke. After the race, they laid her body out with the dead beside the track. Incredibly, she survived and went on to help set ten new world records the following year. ‘Elle a du cran,’ the papers said, as they had when she went to race on the speedbowls and dirt tracks of America in 1930. ‘The girl’s got guts.’
Acknowledged in her time as the fastest woman driver in the world, Hélène Delangle’s career was destroyed, not by a crash but by the moment when one of the most famous racers of the prewar years chose to denounce her as a Gestapo agent. Disgraced, despite a fight to clear her name, she was banished from the racing community. Her reputation never recovered, her former lovers deserted her and she was reduced to selling tickets for a charity at seaside cinema matinée performances. She died in complete obscurity. Her name does not even appear on the family gravestone.
The search for her story is told here in the Afterword. It has, for a writer who knew little about cars, music halls or life under occupation in France, all of which are vital elements in her story, been a wonderful adventure. My aim has been to do some kind of justice to one of the boldest and most attractive women of the last century. Hélène deserves to be remembered and, more than that, celebrated. She liked reading: I think this is a book that she might have enjoyed.
I shall miss her.
London, June 2003
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Researching the life of Hellé Nice has led to the discovery of a treasure-trove of material about her life and career, most of which has never been gathered together or published until now. The Bugatti Queen therefore represents the most comprehensive account of her life we have ever had – or, I like to think, are likely to have. There are, inevitably, gaps in the archive, details of her early life which will remain forever unknowable; in the interests of creating a narrative that does justice to her remarkable story, there are occasions in the pages that follow where I have had to employ some creative reconstruction. I hope to have made it clear where fact
dissolves into speculation. I feel that, having been immersed in Hélène’s story for several years, I am probably better qualified than most to make such assumptions. And, since we are talking about someone who continued to reinvent herself throughout her fascinating life, I feel that she herself would not disapprove too much.
The French franc lost or changed its value during the years of Hellé Nice’s career. Below are shown rough equivalents to today’s sterling.
One franc of the year
Equivalent in present-day sterling
1901
£2.06
1914
1.79
1915
1.49
1916
1.34
1917
1.11
1918
0.86
1919
0.70
1920
0.50
1925
0.44
1930
0.30
1935
0.41
1939
0.25
1940
0.21
1941
0.18
1942
0.15
1943
0.12
1944
0.09
1945
0.06
1950
0.014
1955
0.011
1959
0.008
1960
0.84
1965
0.70
1970
0.56
1975
0.36
1980
0.21
1990
0.12
1995
0.108
The Bugatti Queen Page 1