The Bugatti Queen

by Miranda Seymour

  Deeper, perhaps, than she wished it to be. The inventory of her lovers could be expanded. Whatever the nature of her relationship with Mongin, she continued to sleep, on and off, with Lehoux, Moll, Thouvenet, the racing driver René Carrière and his near namesake, the artist, René Carrère, throughout the early thirties. Security, for this woman who spoke with such consistent passion of her love of solitude, lay in numbers, reassurance in the sense of being adored by a multitude.

  1933, the year during which Hélène stopped racing in Bugattis, marked a turning-point in France’s fortunes. Plunging always deeper into economic depression, the country remained paralysed by the growing threat of another war; her sufferings in the last had been too terrible for another to bear contemplation. A decision not to devalue, as other countries had done during the depression, kept the franc untenably high. Tourists retreated; French products were outpriced by foreign competitors; wages were cut and French defence, largely based on faith in the limited security provided by the Maginot Line, became a subject for sour jokes. In 1914–18 France’s major advances in technology had come from money poured into the aircraft industry; now, while Hitler and Mussolini focused all efforts on the production of superefficient machines, French expenditure was pared to the minimum.

  France’s triumphs on the racing circuits had been a demoralizing experience for her bankrupt neighbours in the mid-twenties. Defeat had taught them the value of racing as a propaganda tool; Mussolini lavished money on the state holding company that rescued Alfa Romeo from its creditors in the early 1930s and honoured Enzo Ferrari’s team of Alfa-driving champions; Hitler was ready to give half a million reichmarks to the company who could produce the first successful German car. Auto-Union and Mercedes met the challenge and, during their remarkable string of victories in the mid-thirties, changed the nature of racing. Until now, a brilliant driver like Tazio Nuvolari had been able to demonstrate that a race could be won by expertise and tenacity, even when the car was not the latest model; the Germans, bringing teams of mechanics, engineers and scientists to the track, put the car and its support team on a par with, if not above, the driver. By 1935, the age of the ace and the independent driver was virtually over; France, the country which had invented Grand Prix racing and excelled at it, now suffered the humiliation of seeing its finest drivers consistently defeated by Italian and German competitors. Grace was maintained, in the French sporting press’s reports of these events, with evident and increasing difficulty.

  Racing drivers are not, in normal circumstances, political animals; Hélène was not being intentionally disloyal to France when she began to take an interest in driving an Alfa Romeo.* She had loved driving Bugattis; her 35Cs were beautiful, lively and responsive, cars of a character which is unimaginable to the modern driver. But the newly designed 59 was too heavy for her to handle and the 35C could no longer match the more powerful Alfa Romeo which had been known as the ‘Monza’ since Tazio Nuvolari drove one to victory on the circuit of the same name, north of Milan, in 1931. Marcel Lehoux fostered her new enthusiasm; in August 1933, he invested in an Alfa Monza and gave it to his girlfriend to try before they both took it to the Milan circuit in September. The car, strikingly painted with a triple stripe along the side, was heavier to handle than the Bugatti and the pedals were differently laid out, with the throttle in the centre. Hélène mastered it with ease.† Delighted by the surge of power which she had been missing in the Bugatti and shrewdly aware that a more modern car would increase her value to sponsors, she agreed to a deal with Lehoux. There must, nevertheless, have been a moment when the brutal, squared-off lines of the Monza seemed a poor substitute for the spirited elegance and grace of the Bugatti in which she had driven with such pleasure at it its verve and almost animal response to her lightest touch.

  Hélène had been having a successful summer. In June 1933 she took the Woman’s Grand Prix title at Montlhéry and made the best speed of the day in a closed car competition of Peugeot 301s for the annual Championnat Féminin. (Perfect photographic opportunities presented themselves, as they always did when Hélène was around, as she kissed the lucky policeman who had won himself a Peugeot in the day’s lottery.) The photographers were there again when she came third out of 121 entries in the demanding Coupe des Alpes in July, co-driving a sporty T43 Grand Prix Bugatti with a new lover, Roger Bonnet, a Neuilly garage owner whom she had met through Marcel Mongin. The event, which made no allowances for sleep or nourishment, began and ended on the Riviera coast. Hélène, sexily dressed in silk harem pants and a tight striped jersey, struck a champion’s pose beside the car, while Bonnet discreetly absented himself from view. Two months later she and Lehoux drove to north Italy for their next Grand Prix.

  A challenge, the old lady gallantly wrote from her attic, was what she had always enjoyed most: she had no hesitation about accepting an invitation to try out the new Alfa in September 1933 on the track it was named after. The Monza circuit, created during the twenties from a beautiful private park north of Milan, was one of the toughest in Europe. A rough surface on shallow banking pulled the racers up before they roared down to a winding, wood-bordered route and out into open country. All the great drivers had gathered at what French newspapers described with innocent good cheer as Fascism’s true home: Nuvolari, Chiron, Fagioli, Zehender, Pellegrini, Lehoux, Earl Howe and the American-born Whitney Straight who had made his home in England. Among them, and attracting considerable attention, Hellé Nice was the sole woman racer of the day. She was also the only driver with the presence of mind afterwards to provide a detailed telephone report to French newspapers of the most tragic day in Italy’s racing history.

  Marcel Lehoux, left, and Hélène at Monza, September 1933. Note the bows on short sleeves which had become her trademark.

  The trouble, according to her, began when a Duesenberg driven by dashing Count Didi Trossi, President of the Monza Grand Prix, spilt oil at a corner during the morning race. Guy Moll, she was eager to stress, had been the first to point out the danger after coming through the corner in a life-threatening full-turn skid. Sand should be spread on the surface, Moll insisted; instead, cautions were issued to the seven drivers in the afternoon races. Charming, lighthearted Giuseppe Campari, defying the stewards’ warnings with the statement that they all knew how to drive, reassured his fans that this was absolutely the last Grand Prix in which he would compete before he left the race circuits for the concert platform and his kitchen (Campari was a superb cook). It was a good moment to quit; a glorious year had culminated in his snatching the ACF French Grand Prix victory from Philippe Etancelin. Neither Borzacchini nor the Polish Czaikowski, who had also been racing well that year, had any such plans for retirement. Madame Czaikowski, an elegant woman who sometimes raced herself, had come, as she often did, to act as her husband’s timekeeper in the pits.

  The first disaster took place when Campari, driving at full speed, skidded on the oil-drenched corner of South Curve and shot into space over the high banking. Coming up alongside him, Borzacchini’s car overturned, trapping the driver underneath. Both men died and two more potential victims were lucky to escape with a few cuts; Hélène, skilfully avoiding the treacherous oil slick, brought the Alfa Monza home in 3rd place. Astonishingly, after further consultation and an attempt to mop up some of the oil, the afternoon’s races continued. In the last heat of the day, Count Czaikowski’s car skidded, flipped over and went up in flames; the driver, paralysed by a broken back, was burned to death.

  It was a day of hideous tragedy. Another woman might have paused to reflect on the dangers of a career in which death could come with such cruel ease. Even Hélène, thriving on the adrenalin-rush of a life which was always poised on the brink of death, was briefly shaken. By the following day, however, she was feeling sufficiently collected to drive back to France, deliver a detailed report of the disasters to the sports papers for a substantial fee, and to begin preparing herself to take the Monza south for the San Sebastián Grand Prix at the end of Septembe
r. As the car’s new owner, she banished Lehoux’s tricolour stripe and had the car patriotically repainted in two shades of French blue.

  During 1933 she lost one of her first mentors, Count Guy Bouriat, the Bugatti driver who had helped prepare her for the record-breaking drive at Montlhéry in 1929; Bouriat was killed at the Grand Prix of Picardy when his Bugatti’s wheel clashed with another competitor’s Alfa Monza, throwing him into a skid which ended when the car hit a tree and caught fire. In 1934 the brilliant young Guy Moll, driving an Alfa as part of the Ferrari works team in the Coppa Acerbo on the beautiful Pescara circuit, was overtaking a silver Auto-Union at 266 kph when he lost control in a gust of wind. Trapped in a ditch for 50 yards, the car smashed into the supporting pillar of a stone bridge before, careering on, it hit the side of a house. Moll, who had already built up a reputation as one of the great drivers of all time, even beating Louis Chiron once on his home turf at Monaco, was killed outright when his flying body hit a concrete post.

  Moll had just taken part, during a weekend of blistering heat, in a Pescara event which was regarded as the toughest of all the ‘24-hour’ races, the Targa Abruzzo. This followed the Le Mans pattern in starting with all the drivers running across the track the moment Air Marshal Italo Balbo dropped his flag. Balbo, famously, had an eye for a pretty woman and the newspapers were full of pictures of the celebrated pilot beaming at Hélène, who had brought her new Alfa Monza to Pescara to co-drive it in the Targa Abruzzo with Marcel Mongin. (She had been invited independently and was paid 6,500 francs and 5,000 lire for this appearance; Guy Moll, by comparison, was still driving on a retainer fee of 1,500 lire a month from Ferrari.)

  She was out of luck on this occasion; the Alfa’s fuel tank came apart during the race and the Mongin–Hellé Nice team was forced to withdraw. This was, nevertheless, one of her most successful years and one in which, despite the emergence of Germany’s powerful spaceship-style Auto-Union cars and a futuristic, exquisitely streamlined W25 Mercedes, the Alfas continued to hold their own. Hélène had started the year by joining Odette Siko, one of the best – and sweetest – of her female competitors, for the Paris–Saint-Raphaël rally, driving a recently acquired Alfa 1750 before she headed south to take her car by sea to Morocco. Lehoux was at the docks to see her being decked with garlands of flowers, a tribute which was not extended to the only other woman racing in the Casablanca Grand Prix, Albertine Derancourt. But Hélène, known to be Lehoux’s companion and protégée, could expect to enjoy special treatment in his home territory; Derancourt must have seethed on the day of the race when the photographers pushed past her to reach the Ferrari pitstop where Hélène, sporting her usual short sleeves tied up with bows, was sharing a joke with Lehoux and their mutual friend Madame Brunet before sauntering off to climb into the two-tone Alfa Monza which she had nicknamed Bidon, or petrol can. But it was ever so, and Derancourt was not the only driver to detest the blonde girl with the glorious smile who always took the star’s role, whatever the quality of her performance.

  The King of Morocco was passionate about cars and large sums of money had been spent on improving the Casablanca course; even royalty could not control the weather and a cyclone was predicted for the day of the race. It was not the route or the weather but a humped bridge taken at too great a speed, smashing the rear axle, which knocked Hélène out of the race on this occasion. Her subsequent performances that summer at the Grand Prix of Picardy and at Vichy, in driving rain, were not remarkable, although she was paid good start money to drive in both races; much more impressive was the fact that she was the only woman invited, and paid, to take part that June in the Eifelrennen on the Nürburgring. She failed to complete the German race, but this was a cruelly demanding course, a high and fiercely convoluted route through densely wooded hillscape, allowing the drivers no moment of respite. Many considered it to be the greatest test in Europe of a racing-driver’s skills.

  Hélène’s Monza being loaded at Marseille for the Casablanca Grand Prix.

  The weather improved, at last, when she arrived at Dieppe for the July Grand Prix of 1934, a race which always brought a flood of English drivers across the Channel. Driving in the second of the preliminary heats, she witnessed one of the tragedies which litter the annals of pre-war racing, when her friend Jean Gaupillat, a handsome and kindly middle-aged man with a Légion d’Honneur for military achievements, hit a tree while trying to pass the British driver, Earl Howe. Perhaps in recognition of her friendship with the victim – Gaupillat died of his injuries at the local hospital that day – a rare concession was made and accepted. Having failed to reach the agreed average time in the heat, Hélène was still allowed to participate in the afternoon race; she came 7th in an all-male field which included Louis Chiron, Lehoux, Etancelin and Earl Howe. Racing at Comminges a week later, she was praised by L’Auto for having achieved some of the best laps of the day in a car which was relatively underpowered. This, from the chauvinistic L’Auto, was high praise.

  Hélène with Mme Brunet, second from left, and an unidentified friend at the Casablanca Grand Prix, 1934.

  Germany was victorious once more at the Mont Ventoux hill climb in September, when Hans Stuck’s Auto-Union took first place. Here, once again, Hélène was the only woman participant, coming 2nd in the sports-car class as she roared up the precipitous bends to set a new women’s record. At the Algerian Grand Prix, the last race of the year for her, she came 7th while Jean-Pierre Wimille took the winner’s prize in a Bugatti.

  ‘Hellé Nice drove with flawless skill,’ the admiring correspondent from L’Auto wrote after watching her race in the Picardy Grand Prix at Péronne in the summer of 1935; Anne Itier, meanwhile, was given the cool compliment of having managed to bring a relatively modest car to the finishing line without breaking down. Hélène had achieved her goal. She was now acknowledged as the most professional and competitive of the tiny band of female racers; her start fees escalated again and her former agent, Henri Lartigue, planning to set up a new Grand Prix himself, wrote to suggest that she, with her influence and reputation, might be able to help him. Writing to her on 30 March, Lartigue reproached her for being so continuously engaged on the telephone that he had been reduced to using the mail for his important – and highly confidential – proposals. Her telephone bills were, indeed, enormous, sometimes almost matching the upkeep of her cars. For a woman who liked to have several love affairs on the go at once and hated writing letters, the telephone was no luxury but one of life’s most essential ingredients. Her skill at flirting down the wire was legendary. Many a dazed interviewer could testify to that.

  In March 1935 Hélène had just arrived back in chilly Paris from a sunny week at Pau near the Pyrenees where she had done well to come 8th against, among others, the brilliant Nuvolari, René Dreyfus and Benoît Falchetto, the driver who, as a young man, had been unlucky enough to be driving the car in which Isadora Duncan was killed. In a fortnight, Hélène would be driving south again, to compete on the steep ascent to La Turbie, a beautiful and ancient village perched high on the Riviera heights above Nice; in the meantime, Lartigue wanted her assistance.

  Lartigue had used his own connections to become a successful impresario who provided star performers for cabarets and theatres at Biarritz, where he and his wife, Madeleine, had been living for some years. He was well placed to promote a new Grand Prix; what he wanted Hélène to do was to approach the great drivers of the racing world and persuade them to come to the opening race. Lartigue had a high opinion of his friend’s negotiating skills; he also thought she might persuade the Bugatti factory to send their new sports variation of the T57, the sensationally beautiful touring car designed by Jean which had dazzled visitors to the Paris Automobile Show in the autumn of 1933. If she could pull this off, Lartigue told her, he would see that she was well-rewarded.12

  Hellé Nice was interested, sufficiently so to put forward several practical suggestions as to how the event should be set up; for reasons which are unclear, however,
the Biarritz Grand Prix failed to make it to the international calendar of racing events. There may have been a dispute; Hélène could have felt that too much was being asked of her for too little gain. The Lartigues disappeared from her life after the summer of 1935, never to be mentioned again.

  The new Alfa served her well at the steep 17-kilometre La Turbie hill climb, where she came 2nd in her class, and at Péronne, where she had the pleasure of beating her nearest rival, Anne Itier, in the Picardy Grand Prix. It was for Biella in northern Italy, however, where she was again the only woman racer, that Hélène would remember the year 1935. The grandstands were crowded, the weather was glorious and she was given a warm welcome by the Duke of Spoleto and Prince of Savoy, the president of the track, who was enthralled to discover that the charming woman he had drunk cocktails with in Monaco was a French racing champion. Hélène was quick to tell the papers that she and the Duke were old friends, but it was not on this account that photographs taken at Biella show her suddenly looking about ten years younger than her age – she was thirty-five – and appealingly vulnerable. The giveaway is a publicity shot of her sitting at the wheel of the Alfa. She signed it, with a flourish, to Arnaldo.

  Hélène racing at Biella, 1935.

  Arnaldo Binelli was the Italian-speaking son of a Zürich-based family. Considerably younger than Hélène, he had thick curly dark hair, almond-shaped eyes, a lean body and a manner which charmed all who met him. Lacking any ambition to become a driver, he was in love with speed. He had plans for improving the designs of engines; he had pockets filled with drawings of electric bicycles, power-driven skis, mechanized trailers. He came to Biella to watch the race and to find a backer for his schemes; he left as Hélène’s lover. To the other men in her life, she said no more than that she had found and appointed a new mechanic who would be travelling to races with her from now on; neither Marcel Mongin nor Henri Thouvenet appears to have been aware that there was a more intimate side to the relationship, although they may have wondered why she suddenly decided to eschew the free use of Marcel Lehoux’s excellent young Algerian mechanic. Her reticence was self-interested: Thouvenet was a prosperous businessman and Mongin, who had now joined the Delahaye factory, was invaluable as a supplier of cars and connections. They were too useful for her to risk the loss of their friendship.