The Bugatti Queen

by Miranda Seymour

  She was, she realized, being interviewed. He asked what she liked about driving: an easy one. Solitude, she said, and a goal. As for a husband, his next question, she didn’t plan on settling down. (No need, she thought, to mention the little ceremony she’d gone through with Mongin a year ago, to give herself some of the rights which a single woman was denied.) He seemed pleased by her answer and not, as she had first supposed, because he was worried about his precious son.

  ‘Poor Madame Junek – our Eliska.’ His bright blue eyes were studying her. ‘You know her husband died while they were both at the Nürburgring last year. Very distressing. And she says – it’s understandable, of course – that she’ll never race again.’

  ‘A great woman,’ Hélène said cautiously, wondering what he wanted to hear.

  He nodded. ‘A good model for you,’ he said. ‘A fine driver who took no unnecessary risks. We never lost a car through Elizabeth.’

  It chilled her a little to see that he was thinking not of the accident to Junek, or the distress to the widow, but of the cars. Smiling, she told him that she had never been involved in an accident yet and that this was one record she wasn’t aiming to break. He liked that small joke. Not enough, however, to give in to her wish. ‘No hurry,’ he said. The car could wait.

  A poster bringing together Ettore Bugatti’s passion for thoroughbred horses with his superbly designed racing cars was the inspiration of his daughter, Lébé. A private hotel called Le Pur Sang (The Thoroughbred) on the Molsheim estate also played on Bugatti’s twin interests.

  He was friendly, urbane and detached. A courteous and practised host who had already decided that she had no place in his inner circle. She wasn’t grand enough. He made her conscious of the rough edges in her voice; he spoke in a way which kept her at a distance and a disadvantage. She didn’t know what to say when he told her that her part of the little hotel had started out as a home for his pedigree chickens. Perhaps there was some sort of joke in the statement, a dig at the poule de luxe, the high class tart, she wasn’t. It was impossible to tell. She took refuge in a policy of silence and, after the first two days, he seemed content to let her alone. She went for long walks beside the yellow autumn fields which reminded her of childhood landscapes. Above her, the purple hills of the Vosges sloped up to calm bright skies; below, the red-tiled roofs of small Alsatian villages clustered together. Sometimes, the only sounds she would hear in a whole afternoon were the chink of cowbells and the whistle of a gooseherd, broken by the insistent whine of an approaching Bugatti, racing back to Molsheim from a trial run.

  And, at last, she was allowed to see her car, to sit in it, and, after the two mechanics had agreed that she needed a few alterations for it to suit her, the crank was turned, a pair of goggles were snapped down over her eyes and a warning was shouted in her ear to look out for animals on the road. Cecci, the smaller of the two mechanics, squeezed in beside her, just in case of a mishandling. Just like Ettore, she thought. The machines are all that matters.

  Even today, a well-maintained 35C can reach 200 kph. The modern version is almost certain to have been restored. To know what it was like for Hélène, it’s important to remember that the road, pitted with holes and clotted with cowdung, was visible through gaps in the metal floor; that the gear mesh would have crunched with every shift she made; that the wheels, standing well out from the body, were spindle thin and marvellously responsive, meeting each movement of the hand as if the car was a true thoroughbred, reined in by the turning wheel. The sensation was one of edgy, controlled poise.

  Think of the sound, the sudden yelp of connection, turning to the high whine of an old-fashioned sewing machine being pulled at speed along an endless seam, a white track. Think of the intimacy, the mechanic’s hand curving close over the tail, circling the driver to clasp the petrol tank’s projecting cap; think of the whine rising as the long lever grinds into fourth gear, taking the car into its stride, up, pushing for the maximum, dancing down the road like a pony with wings, jumping and skittering, both sexy and sinewy, at ease in its own excellence.

  To drive a car like this, she realized as she came racing back through the gates, fleet as a deer, was the nearest experience to pure joy that she’d ever known. Behind the mask of dust, her eyes were brilliant with pleasure.

  ‘And again?’ she said. ‘Now?’ And the drivers who had come out to watch her return nodded, amused and faintly touched by such guileless delight. She looked, laughing up at them and pulling her hands through her tangled hair, as though she and the car were one.

  Remote though Molsheim was, all French Bugatti drivers looked on it as their Camelot, a kingdom to which they all belonged and which they represented in that romantic spirit of the chivalrous knights. They all, during their racing careers, came back to Molsheim, and Ettore, like any shrewd ruler, saw to it that they were welcome, their triumphs praised, their ideas heard, if not followed. On such a visit in 1929, Hélène would have met the men who helped to create the Bugatti legend. Tall, easy-going Meo Constantini, although homesick for Venice, had almost replaced Ettore’s lost brother. Constantini was his favourite driver, the only man to whom Ettore would listen when Constantini spoke out for Jean, and for his right to a share of the control. But Constantini was a quiet, reserved character; she would have been more intrigued by the awkward-mannered Englishman with a French mother who had just taken the winner’s cup that year at the first Grand Prix ever to be held at Monte Carlo. Perched on one of the high bar stools at the Pur Sang hotel and drinking her favourite Gin Fizz or the hotel-keeper’s speciality, a Paradise Cocktail of gin and apricot brandy, Hélène might have listened to Charles Grover’s* account of his great victory that year over Rudi Caracciola’s intimidating Mercedes. Perhaps he spoke of his wife, Eve, the beautiful artist’s model with whom he fell in love while he worked as a chauffeur for the portrait painter, Sir William Orpen. The artist, secretly relieved to disentangle himself from a relationship with no future, gave them his splendid Rolls for a wedding present, but both car and bride were conspicuously absent from Molsheim. Wives, as Grover might have had to explain, were not especially welcome here. They got in the way. And, in any event, his wife had no interest in the mechanics of racing; few did.

  Hélène’s receipt for the Bugatti 35 from Molsheim, 1930.

  There is a possibility that Molsheim was where Hélène first encountered, face to face, the man who would one day destroy her, Louis Chiron. She knew him already as the man whose car had roared past as she cradled the dead body of Henri de Courcelles at Montlhéry, not a pleasant memory. Would she have liked him, meeting him again in 1929? It seems unlikely. Ambitious and flirtatious, Chiron was known as Louis the Debonair for his skills with women. They gave him another name for the viciousness with which he attacked those who rejected his advances. His relationship with Alice Hoffman, the beautiful and clever wife of his sponsor, the owner of the Nerka Spark Plugs Agency, was common knowledge by 1929. But Chiron, in a mere two seasons, had won eight Grands Prix for Bugatti, using Nerka plugs; that for Bugatti and Alfred Hoffman was what mattered most.

  There was bad blood between Chiron and Hélène Delangle from their first meeting; the reason has never been established. As a rival attention-seeker who visibly sulked when the cameras failed to focus on him, Chiron is unlikely to have shown his usual gallantry to a girl who was so adroit at capturing the interest of the press.

  More to her taste were two rich and charming Bugatti owners who made regular visits to Molsheim during this period, and who she could already have met through de Courcelles. André Dubonnet, heir to the family’s vermouth fortune and with his name emblazoned around every major circuit in France, was an exfighter pilot with the looks of a handsome pirate. His skills as a driver were matched by his engineering knowledge (the superb cars he designed in the late 1930s are now collector’s items). Philippe de Rothschild, with whom Hélène became involved in later years, was only twenty-seven when she visited Molsheim in 1929. Bold enough to have
already embarked on rescuing the family’s great Médoc vineyards from dereliction, he had started racing a year earlier, hiding himself behind the name Georges Philippe just as his father had masked himself as ‘André Pascal’ when he took part in the ill-fated Paris–Madrid race of 1903. Starting his love affair with automobiles with a Hispano-Suiza, grandest of all the touring cars, Philippe bought his first Bugatti in 1929 and raced it on the demanding Nürburgring, in the Grand Prix de Bourgogne (which he won), at Monte Carlo and at Le Mans, after crashing badly in Antibes. The Bugatti family had a high opinion of Philippe; in the summer of 1929, he was invited to drive as one of the works team on the Sarthe Circuit at Le Mans.

  The excitement of such encounters offered welcome relief from the relentless discipline of her coaching. Hélène prided herself on never showing a sad face in public. On several occasions at Molsheim, however, with her bedroom door locked shut and a pillow clutched to her face to muffle the noise, she might have allowed herself to weep. It tortured her to be so endlessly reminded of the responsibility she now carried. What if she failed in the speed test? Failure was not, Ettore told her, an option. The car would do what it could do; she had only to guide it. And besides, all the final preparations were now in hand. A film crew had been enlisted to record the occasion; the newspapers were all alerted. The car had been provided with a support for her back and a lengthened handbrake to increase her sense of control. Cecci would be driving the car to Montlhéry, Ettore told her; the Paris managers, Guy Bouriat and Albert Divo, would supervise her progress. A second car would be available at the track, in case of mechanical problems. There was no room left for turning back.

  And what, she boldly asked as she said her farewells, would be the prize, the reward for her achievement? The honour, said Ettore with one of his suavest smiles. The honour of joining the élite who drove for the greatest marque in the history of the car. And that, to her incredulity, was where he chose to leave the conversation.

  8

  LAPPING THE GOLDFISH BOWL

  ‘Few women, I think, have perfect control of a car at anything over 80 mph . . . only half a dozen women may be capable of driving an abnormally fast car.’

  WINIFRED M. PINK, WOMAN ENGINEER, 19281

  Montlhéry, built in six months in 1923 as France’s first purposemade circuit and speed bowl, lies 24 kilometres south of Paris. In summer months, the track was in perpetual use (English drivers were among the most regular users, preferring it to the battered surface of Brooklands for their attempts at record breaking on motorcycles and in cars). On an icy afternoon in December 1929, however, the grandstand was empty, the sharp-angled circuit bare as the branches of the trees which strained against the relentless pressure of a bitter north wind. The fiercely banked concrete speed bowl, thinly coated with ice, looked more menacing than usual under a pewter sky. A hoarding which extolled the superior merit of Dunlop tyres had been stripped by rain and wind of everything bar the letter ‘D’ and ‘du championnat!’ Using it as a windbreak, a group of heavily coated men huddled like plotting gangsters, iced breath and cigarette smoke trailing wreaths around their black hat brims. Two boys from the Pathé crew, sent down to record the breaking of the women’s world record for speed, began chasing each other to keep warm, hands stuffed deep in their pockets as they swerved and jumped.

  The man from L’Auto2 sauntered over to borrow a mike and stayed to help them identify some of the group: Joseph Cecci the mechanic was the little skinny one, Count Bouriat, the taller, languid man, Albert Divo, the burly fellow with the cigar. The three of them had been coming out from the Paris showroom to supervise the girl’s training for the past week. That was Carpe, the timekeeper, leaving the group now to walk towards his glass booth. All paid for by the Bugatti factory. The man from L’Auto winked. Very special treatment.

  The high scream of an engine turned their heads. A small, pale blue car with a tail like an engorged dagger shot past them and braked. The driver, rosy-cheeked and cheerful under her white wind-cap, jumped out to embrace Bouriat and Divo while Cecci folded back the side of the car bonnet to squint at the gleaming row of pipes. One of the Bugatti team took a couple of photographs of the girl standing beside the car, hands on hips, head cocked to one side as Divo gave her some advice. The man from L’Auto had been at the clubhouse lunch, paid for, like everything else today, by Maison Bugatti. The girl was on good terms with everybody, he said, a real little charmer, chatting, smiling, drinking gin and lemonade, giving out gossip from the music-hall circuit. When one of the journalists asked how she kept fit, she stood up and flipped into a backwards somersault, landing light as a cat. Lovely smile. You wouldn’t have thought she had a care in the world.

  The Pathé cameraman, worried about the best angle from which to track the car, climbed his stepladder and propped the heavy apparatus on his shoulder, tilting it skywards. Below him, the engine yowled. Smoke burst upwards with a spit of flame; when the Bugatti reached his circle of vision, it was racing around the top of the bowl like a fly on a string.

  Hélène’s record certificate from Montlhéry in 1929.

  Far below her, hurtling into her second lap, Hélène caught a glimpse of upturned faces, a ring of startled moons.3 The rev counter showed 5500: good. Keep it steady. Her ankle throbbed as she clamped the rubber sole of her shoe to the throttle, gluing it down; the tyres swivelled on loose grit, bringing a shriek of rubber into the roar of the wind. Her small gloved hands held the wheel tight and high, twisting it hard as the bonnet reared at the barrier; she leaned forward a little, eyes wide and intent behind the goggles.

  Third lap, fourth. A rat in a cage, that was what she felt like. Was the speed dropping? No warning flags showing from below. She didn’t dare risk another glance at the rev counter; all she could do now was to keep it up, not let her concentration drop, even for a second. Think of nothing else, Divo had said. You’re part of the machine. Feel everything it tells you. Listen to it and when you reach the limit, keep pushing. Up at the top of the bowl, when you’re at top revs, your foot stays down on that throttle and you’ll spin like a top. Just go with it.

  And it was true. The thrust from behind her was being met by an invisible force in the bowl, pulling her round the rim, giving her, as she glanced swiftly down, the impression of a grey cliff falling away from the wheels. A pillar of wind was leaning out from the centre of the bowl, spinning the car around the bank of concrete at a speed so regular that she could catch the high note of its passage, echoed in the wail of perfectly replicated revolutions.

  Six, seven. The heat of the wheel was scorching through her gloves. She caught a hot whiff of something unfamiliar in the cockpit. Her eyelids flickered with tension, her arm muscles tensed. With a grunt of relief, she registered the source, the singed cloth of her overalls where her thigh was pressing against the gearbox. Not pleasant, but nothing major.

  Her eyes smarted in the dry vacuum behind the goggles; she swallowed, trying to force cooling saliva into the baked funnel of her throat. A bar, heavy as iron, was bending her shoulderblades forward as she struggled to hold the wheel at exactly the angle to keep the car below the barrier line. Beyond it, above her, darkness had begun to reshape the sky. Lights flickered, distracting; she kept her eyes fixed on the invisible ring laid down by the Bugatti, staying high on the edge, making the bowl work for her.

  Ten. She heard something unfamiliar. Adrenalin crackled along the back of her scalp as the car started to vibrate. Fragments of black rubber, thin and mean, snapped across her vision line as she wrestled to keep control, slithered down the bank, braking and swerving, over the red line, and down to the flat. She reached for the handbrake, snapped off the power. Silence, while the wind whined. She dropped her head on the wheel for a moment, steadying her nerves for the disappointed stares, the rehearsal, useless now, of all the things she should have done.

  So sure was she of failure that she shook her head when they told her the results, thinking she had misheard. But Carpe the timekeeper had wr
itten the figures down: there was no mistake. 197.708 kph for her fastest lap and an average over ten miles of 194.266. Divo, whose praises were rarer than strawberries in December, told her that he had never seen a woman drive better. But she could get the speed average up, she whispered urgently; give her a new wheel and she’d take it over 200. But they refused to let her go: too late, too demanding and, anyway, irrelevant. Hadn’t she already made a new Montlhéry record?

  Hélène with Joseph Cecci, shortly before making her record-breaking drive in December 1929.

  Everybody, even Cecci, wanted photographs. The man from L’Auto shook her hand and said he’d be watching her career with interest, no stopping her now. A couple of women, arriving late, asked if she could explain the sensations to them. There weren’t, she realized, many words which would describe the feeling of joy and excitement and terror, so intense, all confused. She could strike a pose, cross her legs and throw her head back as well as Mistinguett. Asked about driving, she could only tell them that racing was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. Nothing, not dancing, or skiing or mountain-climbing, could touch the exhilaration of the moment when the car and the driver fused.

  For a whole week, she had been the most famous woman in France. Everybody wanted to meet her. Everything she said was noted down as of remarkable interest: her favourite food, her most enjoyable holiday, her most admired book, her ideal car. One woman writer had insisted on being driven around the Montlhéry circuit so that she too could experience the thrill which had been so winningly described. As an old lady, Hélène still grinned at the memory of the poor creature, holding on to her wind-cap with one hand and the safety-handle with the other, her face the colour of wet cement. She lasted half a lap before she passed out.