Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  Skirting Nice, Billy had to dodge between the traffic, which was moving so slowly in comparison with his car that it may as well have been standing still. There was no point stopping for it at this speed. Billy’s maxim was “Don’t brake, avoid.” Which he did. In, out, and around, his mind working overtime to find the ideal line, making a series of quick calculations, like a man running downhill over rough terrain—his thoughts moving as fast as his feet as he figures out a safe path across the rocks. The car shot on along the Basse Corniche, the sea on one side, the cliffs on the other.

  The Bentley’s beam axle made it a bumpy ride, and with the big silver supercharger weighing down the front, Billy’s model was particularly prone to understeer. On the turns, it spat up gravel as it pulled out wide, away from the road. On the tight horseshoe at Villefranche, he pushed the throttle down farther, forcing more torque into the back wheels, making the cross-ply tires bite in an attempt to balance out the drift. It was a double-or-quits move. And it worked. A bit more throttle. A bit more, and then the back of the car tucked in and the whole thing snapped back into line as they entered the straight road.

  He was into the last stretch, across the border into Monaco, and really screaming. The stopwatch ticked onward, fifty-two minutes, fifty-three minutes, up toward the hour mark. He sped on, past Beaulieu and Cap Ferrat, Eze, Cap-d’Ail, through the outskirts of Monte Carlo, that “sunny place for shady people,” as Somerset Maugham called it. Past the port and on to Avenue d’Ostende. And there it was, the Hotel de Paris. Billy eased the car back down, changing down the gears as the pace slackened off. He pulled to a stop, for the first time since setting off, just outside the front doors of the hotel. He glanced down at the dash, punched the button on the stopwatch. Fifty-eight minutes. Made it. And with almost two minutes to spare.

  —

  Everyone who knew Billy Fiske, however well, agreed on one thing: he loved speed; seemed, even, to live for it. In the 1980s, when the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was asked what he remembered about his friendship with Billy, the first thing that popped into his mind was that “he was famous for setting the speed record between London and Cambridge.” Henry Longhurst, Billy’s friend from his days at Cambridge University, said that Billy had “an uncanny eye for speed.” Like all Billy’s friends, Longhurst had a fund of stories about his journeys in the passenger seat of that big green Bentley. Longhurst was a golfer, a good one, and he and Billy used to make the run from Cambridge to the Royal Worlington Course at Mildenhall, a twenty-one-mile stretch. “Sometimes the time would be around 19 minutes,” Longhurst wrote in his memoirs. “And without a tremor of apprehension to public or passenger. Day after day, sitting on Fiske’s left, I would notice my own front wheel passing within an inch or so of its track the day before. The supercharger came in with a shrill whine at about 80, generally at the beginning of the long straight where the Cambridge road goes eventually uphill through the beechwood to join the London road short of the racecourse at Newmarket. Soon the needle would creep up into the red, staying for a while between 110 and 120 mph, till at precisely the same spot just short of the slope, Fiske would change down to third at exactly 86, and every time the gear would go through like butter.”

  The brothers Bobby and Charles Sweeny rode shotgun with Billy when he was making all those runs around the south of France, breaking records that weren’t set down in books but were swapped back and forth between members of the set—the fifty-eight-minute run from Cannes to Monte Carlo, the seventeen-minute run from Nice to Cannes. “As far as I know,” Charles Sweeny said much later, “that second record still stands.” There were no prizes to be won for these races, no cups or trophies, only bragging rights. Billy drove quick for the hell of it. Speed was his drug.

  Billy was too fast too young to have spent much time learning to drive that quick. His was a natural talent. He was blessed with an intuitive understanding of how to handle vehicles at speed. It didn’t matter whether he was in a car, a motorboat, a bobsled, or an airplane. He just relished racing, and always had, right from the first time he got behind a wheel. When he was fifteen, he pinched his father’s red Bugatti and took his sister, Peggy, out to race in a hill climb. It was a time trial, up a short, steep slope. He won, with plenty of time to spare. Peggy remembered how he had turned to her and said, “Don’t you dare tell Father about this.” Billy’s dad always hated the idea of his young son competing in track races. He thought they were just too dangerous. When he was still eighteen, Billy was asked to race a Stutz Bearcat in the Le Mans 24-Hour endurance race. But as Bobby Sweeny recalled, “his father soon put a stop to that.” Years later, the facts were forgotten, and the story of his race at Le Mans became one of many myths about him, passed on from one newspaper or magazine article to another, mentioned time and again in the various TV documentaries made about his life. He was someone people loved to tell stories about, whether they were true or not.

  Racing wasn’t in Billy’s blood, but he inherited plenty of other things from his father. His name, for one. In full, it was William Meade Lindsley Fiske III, following on from his father, W.M.L. Fiske II, and his grandfather, W.M.L. Fiske I. But everyone called him Billy, and those who knew him best of all often stuck at plain Bill. The Fiskes were an old American family. They could trace the tree right back to Phineas Fiske, who came over to the United States from England in 1636, just sixteen years after the arrival of the Mayflower, and settled in Wenham, Massachusetts. The “William Meade Lindsley” part was picked out by Billy’s great-grandfather, who gave the name to his son as a tribute to a close friend.

  Billy’s father was a banker. He studied at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and then at Columbia. After he graduated in 1900, he took a trip around Europe for the kind of education you can’t get in a lecture hall. While he was there, he fell in love with France and developed a fluency in the language that would serve him well later in life. When Fiske Sr. returned to the United States, he started work at the small Wall Street firm Vermilye & Co., which sent him out to its new branch in Chicago. “By then the passport to Wall Street’s investment banking elite was attendance at fashionable preparatory schools and Ivy League colleges,” notes the authorized history of the firm. “More often than not individuals with the proper social cachet would call upon a fellow fraternity member who through familial connections had obtained a post and, drawing on past favors and old friendships, have the door opened for him.” A couple of Fiske’s superiors at Vermilye had attended the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, including William Read, the top earner in the firm.

  It was in Chicago that Fiske met and married Beulah Bexford. That was in 1906. They took a house in Winnetka, up on the North Shore. It was a good time. Twelve months earlier there had been a schism in the ranks of Vermilye. Sensing that there would be more opportunities in the new firm, Fiske left to work for the new breakaway company run by Read. He was right. In 1905, Read made Fiske the bank’s head of operations in Chicago. Business was good. They had a small staff, but that didn’t stop them from expanding into Canada, Britain, and South America. And in 1909, Read made Fiske a full partner in the firm. By then he was a father. His daughter, named Beulah, just like her mother, but known to all as Peggy, had been born in 1907. Billy followed four years later, on June 4, 1911.

  Two years later, another new arrival made an even bigger impression on the Fiske family. In 1913, Read sent a young man down from New York to start work underneath him in the Chicago office. His name was Clarence Lapowski, though the world would come to know him as Clarence Dillon. He would become, in short time, one of the most influential men on Wall Street.

  Lapowski was the son of a Polish Jew, a dry goods merchant. He was educated at Worcester Academy in Massachusetts and then Harvard, though he failed the Latin portion of his entrance exam three times over. While there, he lost the Lapowski and adopted his mother’s maiden name of Dillon. Despite the switch, his friends said that Dillon never tried to deny his
Jewish heritage. Certainly, enough people knew to ensure that he was blackballed from plenty of members’ clubs in New York—which explains why he felt he should hide it in the first place. At Harvard, anyhow, his classmates knew him by the nickname “Baron,” given in recognition, he said, of his love of gambling, poker, and horse racing. Much as he enjoyed money, Baron Dillon never planned to work in high finance. The story goes that he bumped into a college friend out on a walk in Manhattan, and the friend asked him, “What are you doing nowadays?” Not much, was Dillon’s answer. “You should get into the banking business. Come on over and meet William Read. He is a man worth knowing.” So they strolled on over to Read’s offices. “I never had less intention of becoming a banker than on that day,” Dillon remembered. “But Mr. Read seemed well disposed.” Read was no less impressed. He asked Dillon to take a desk in the office and decide for himself whether he wanted to be a banker. Dillon replied that he would have to talk it over with his wife, since she would be reluctant to leave their home in the Midwest. So Read offered to fix him up with a job in Chicago on a starting salary of $250 a month.

  In Chicago, working as a bond salesman under Fiske, Dillon made a name for himself when he convinced the millionaire William Horlick, president of the malted milk company, to let the firm handle his investment portfolio. That was just the start of it. Dillon said he found the banking business “more fascinating than a game of no-limit stud poker,” and he went on to make a series of remarkable deals, most notably when he set up a chemical firm to produce phenol, needed for the manufacture of TNT—a shrewd move given how great demand would be once war broke out. It made him the best part of his eight-million-dollar fortune. By then Read had summoned him to New York.

  By 1916 Dillon had been made a partner at Read & Co., just three years after he started working at the firm. He was thirty-three and already, as the company history puts it, “considered not only the critical banker there but one of the brightest and most promising individuals in financial history.” William Read died of pneumonia the very next month, leaving each of the partners—including Fiske—twenty-five thousand dollars, but the company without a head. Dillon, despite being the junior partner, took over from him. He’d always said that he was reluctant to take on the job. But according to the Wall Street gossip of the time, the partners had been discussing the succession when Dillon simply stood up, walked into Read’s vacant corner office, and took his seat. Which sounds about right. Certainly when he decided to rename the firm Dillon, Read & Co. in 1920, the first Fiske and the other partners heard of it was when Dillon told them, “Gentlemen, I have bought in 85 percent of the business here. Those who do not like it can withdraw.”

  Dillon was infamously ruthless, “hard and inhuman” according to his associate Hugh Bullock. “The stories about Dillon being a mean, tight-fisted bastard were true,” he said. “I have never met a man that was as tough and hard-boiled.” And the economist Eliot Janeway memorably described Dillon as “nothing but a money guy” who “wouldn’t have bought God with a whorehouse attached if it wasn’t a bargain.” Long before Jordan Belfort borrowed the title for his book, or Martin Scorsese used it for his movie, Dillon was known as “the Wolf of Wall Street,” a name he was given by his employee James Forrestal. But Dillon was well known, too, for the fierce loyalty he showed to his old friends. He personally bailed out a bunch of his old partners and associates during the Wall Street crash a decade later. And he never forgot the debt of thanks, and friendship, he owed Fiske from their early days in Chicago, when Dillon got his start in the industry as a bond salesman. He liked Fiske—saw in him qualities he admired, even desired. As Dillon’s grandson put it, “My grandfather had brains but he always wanted to be socially acceptable . . . It was the one thing he didn’t have himself. So I think he was conscious about doing things for himself and for his children and grandchildren to make them socially acceptable.” William Meade Lindsley Fiske II, worldly, well-spoken, from old blue-blood stock, could teach Dillon a thing or two, even, while working alongside him, lend him a little of his social standing. So long as Dillon was in charge, Fiske had a job for life. And so did his family. Dillon employed Fiske’s nephew, Dean Mathey, right out of college. There was always a job waiting for Billy, too, whenever he wanted it.

  Back in Chicago, Fiske and his family thrived. They had a house on East Chestnut, just a couple of blocks up from the lakefront. They lived there with three female staff: a cook, a servant, and a nurse. They had a couple of dogs too: a dachshund they called Riley Grogan and a border terrier, Billy’s, who went by the name of Cuddly Demon. In 1919 they traveled up to Canada for a vacation in Banff National Park, a trip Peggy documented assiduously in her scrapbooks. Happy days, these. Billy was eight. It was here, up in the Canadian Rockies, that he got his first taste of life in the mountains, as a small blond boy scurrying around the hiking trails on Big Beehive and around Lake Louise. Their father was a keen horse rider, swimmer, and golfer, and he encouraged a love of the outdoor life in his children. Billy, Peggy remembered, “was always interested in keeping fit.” He used to prop his feet up on the top edge of the large freestanding tub in the bathroom and do push-ups. She was a bit of a tomboy herself, who wore her hair cut short, and the two of them would rough-and-tumble together, wrestle.

  For much of their childhood, Billy and Peggy were taught by private tutors, which meant that their parents also took on a lot of the responsibility for their education. Their father, in particular, tried to inculcate a strong set of values in his children. He was a Presbyterian, a staunch Republican, and had a furious work ethic, but instead of forcing them to adopt his beliefs wholesale, he urged them to develop inquiring, independent minds. Their father used to instigate debates at the dinner table. He’d ask one child to explain why it had been a good day and get the other to explain why, on the contrary, it had been a bad one. The next night they would swap roles. “Bill got his tremendous curiosity and drive from his father,” Peggy said. “They both wanted to learn about everything.”

  The twist of fate that would shape Billy’s life wasn’t brought about by his father, however, but by the work of his father’s boss, Dillon. At the very same time the Fiskes were up in Banff, Dillon’s work with the War Industries Board had taken him to France for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. While there, he fixed on the idea of expanding his bank’s business into continental Europe. He settled on Germany. It was a bold decision, and one that would ultimately have horrendous consequences for both Dillon’s firm and the Fiske family. But in 1921, all Dillon saw was opportunity.

  The Germans made a first war reparations payment of $250 million in 1921 but were unable to make the second, of another $250 million, let alone the $500 million that was due in 1922. The economy collapsed, the currency with it, and so many new notes were printed that the German mark was soon worth less than the paper it was made of. By November 1923 you could get five million marks to the dollar. Brigadier Charles Dawes, director of the US Bureau of the Budget, concocted a repayment plan under which Germany would start paying annual reparations of $250 million, rising to $625 million within four years. The country would also get a new currency, the reichsmark, and a new German central bank, which would have a fifty-year monopoly on the issuance of paper money. Crucially, there would also be a foreign loan of $200 million to the German government. This was where the American banks, Dillon Read among them, stepped in. The loan was floated in Britain and the United States by a syndicate led by US banks J. P. Morgan and Dillon, Read & Co. For Dillon himself, this was just the opportunity he had been looking for. The loan was a preliminary step that would enable him to begin serious business in the German market. “Our opportunity lies in industrial Europe,” he told the New York Times. “The railroad and public utility financing that is to be done in Europe is tremendous . . . and lucrative.”

  Dillon, then, needed a man to head up his new European operation, which was to be based in Paris. He had hired Colonel James A
. Logan, who had been involved with the Reparations Committee, because he felt Logan had excellent connections in France and Britain. But Logan was, in the words of Dillon’s biographer, “aggressive, and crude, and lacked the diplomacy needed.” Dillon required someone with finesse who was familiar with French culture and had a good grasp of the language. He chose William Meade Lindsley Fiske II. So, in 1924, the Fiske family moved to France. They sailed on the SS Belgenland in April, stayed for a time at the Hyde Park Hotel in London, then went on to Paris. They bought a house on the Avenue Bugeaud, and a little later a château in the south, just outside Biarritz.

  Billy’s father wasn’t exactly engaged in banking work as we understand it today. Dillon, Read & Co. were busy funding loans to Belgium, Italy, and Poland as well as to Germany, and much of his time was spent schmoozing with European aristocrats and diplomats. In the summer of 1924 he traveled with Dillon to Warsaw to negotiate with the Polish government over a $35 million loan. They were given use of their own personal train to travel to Lancut, in Galicia, where a man named Prince Alfred Potocki met them. Potocki walked them down a red carpet, then drove them to his castle “through streets lined with peasants, heads bowed in supplication.” Potocki was still living in nineteenth-century splendor. His wife and daughters apparently sent their lingerie to Paris by coach so that they wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of knowing the local laundresses had touched their underwear.

  Years later, the son of one of Fiske’s colleagues, Ferdinand Eberstadt, recalled his father’s stories about the visits to Potocki’s castle: “When they arrived a sumptuous ball was under way with scores of beautiful women, lavishly dressed, footmen carrying champagne and great heaps of caviar and other exotic food on silver trays, all accompanied by music from wandering minstrel groups and string orchestras playing waltzes. Everyone was dancing, eating and drinking and having a fine old time which continued to dawn . . . The following day the men mounted their horses and went off to hunt wild boar for exercise and to rid themselves of their hangovers from the night before. The following evening another gala took place; revelry appeared to be the normal state of life in the castle—contrasting sharply with the austere peasant surroundings outside the castle grounds. The Polish cavaliers rode out early each morning, eager for sport, in spite of night after night of drinking and wenching.”