Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  It was true that this caused some to start taking the competition a little too seriously. In 1906, the SMBC ran trials of a new sled fitted with a squirt that sprayed a stream of powdered graphite out in front of the runners, the better to speed their passage over the ice. This was all part of the drive to make the sleds faster. There were amateur races in the United States in this era, too, down rough tracks rather than specially cut courses like the one they were using in St. Moritz. In Caldwell, New Jersey, the locals were amazed when, in 1909, “a richly appointed German” brought a “de luxe sled” to the town’s annual bobsled race. It was fitted with an electric searchlight, an automobile’s steering wheel, and rubber-coated runners. It weighed three hundred pounds, cost three hundred dollars, “and created a sensation among the racers.”

  In St. Moritz, such sleds were becoming increasingly common. In those years the course was five yards shy of a mile long, and between 1902 and 1912 the record time for covering it dropped a full thirteen seconds: from 1:46 to 1:33. That meant the sleds were traveling at an average speed of between 30 and 40 mph, which seems slow by the standards the riders were to reach in the 1930s, but at the time, it was still quicker than the vast majority of people could travel without boarding a train. It was as fast as the finest thoroughbred racing horse could run, and matched the speed records set by the earliest automobiles. The first car land-speed record was 39 mph, achieved in 1898, only a few years earlier. That particular mark was broken seven times before 1910, and by the end of the decade stood at 125 mph. The bobsledders couldn’t match those kinds of advances, but they, too, were driving one another on, faster and faster, toward the limits of what the sport would allow.

  Crew sizes had been fixed, by then, at five riders per sled—one to drive, one to work the brake, and three in between to make the weight. The basic body of the bobs stayed the same. They had a long flat iron frame supported by tubular runners, two long bars down either side to hold on to, and a series of shorter bars running across to lean on. At the back, the brake was essentially a metal comb attached to two bars, which the last man in the sled would pull on to make the teeth bite into the ice. But the steering technology was still evolving, with rival sledders using different mechanisms. Some preferred steering wheels, others bars that were attached to the runners. And the techniques were advancing too.

  At first most rode sitting up. Then they started to lie on their backs, heads laid flat on the chests of the riders behind. In 1912, an Englishman named Lord Carbery won a series of races in St. Moritz with a crew riding flat on their fronts, with the driver up at the front and the torso of each rider overlapping the legs of the person in front of him. The style became known as ventre à terre, and was adopted by anyone who reckoned himself a serious racer in that era. It was, according to the official history of the SMBC, “a pernicious habit, which drove many a would-be female bobber from the run.” Someone spread around the odd idea that it caused breast cancer. Still, it was, indisputably, fast. Carbery won his races by four seconds and more over the teams using the older methods.

  As the sleds got faster, the risks increased. In the winter of 1911–12, three men died on the St. Moritz bob run in the space of a month. A German engineer was killed when his sled “capsized” on a corner and the metal frame smashed into his head. Four weeks later, two riders were killed, and two more seriously injured, when their sled swerved to avoid a patch of rutted ice and shot off a bank into a tree. There were three more serious accidents the following season, and another death in 1914, when a rider crashed into the railway bridge. For any but the brave, bobsledding at St. Moritz was starting to become a sport to watch rather than one to participate in. “There is arising a new winter sport, ‘Spectatorism,’” reported the Times. “It flourishes in St. Moritz.” The reporter railed in particular against the ranks of “plump, bronzed, and jovial” Germans. In a large puff piece in 1914, the New York Herald gushed, “Who, on arriving at one of the many mountain villages frequented by tourists from almost every corner of the world, has not watched enviously those crews of bright-eyed, merry-faced men and women dashing madly down steep, snowy slopes, yelling from sheer exhilaration and healthy animal spirits as their long, low bob whizzes around a sharp banked bend!” And it was true: envious watching was now all most felt able to do. The brief heyday of popular bobsledding was over. It was about to become an elite activity, a sport for daredevils.

  Of course that very same year, 1914, the members of the SMBC had rather more pressing threats to attend to. During the First World War “the club temporarily ceased to exist,” as the official history quaintly puts it, “and the majority of its members were engaged in a more dangerous, more unpleasant, form of winter sport.” But Switzerland was neutral territory, and in the mountains there the ill feeling engendered by the brutal conflict didn’t intrude on the convivial relations enjoyed by the cosmopolitan bobsledding crowd. This was well illustrated by the reception afforded to Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany, eldest son of the kaiser, when he returned to the resort for the first time after the Armistice.

  Wilhelm had been a keen bobsledder before the war, riding a sled he named Red Eagle. The SMBC, described by its secretary Hubert Martineau as having “always retained its British feeling and organization,” had made the German prince an honorary life president in 1913. It was in St. Moritz, in fact, that he was given the nickname “Little Willie”—a handle the British tabloids delighted in using whenever they regaled their readers with lurid accounts of his frequent infidelities and affairs. The man was a well-known womanizer and, during the war, public enemy number two, second only to his father. In 1918 effigies of Wilhelm were strung up from the scaffold gallows in towns up and down England. And yet Martineau, now the SMBC’s president, recalled meeting Prince Wilhelm outside the Kulm Hotel in St. Moritz in the early years after the war.

  “Hullo Martineau, how are you?”

  “Very well, sir.”

  “I suppose after all the vices which the Daily Mail has laid at my door, you’ve kicked me out as honorary president?”

  “No, sir, we have no politics in the bobsleigh club.”

  The prince went off delighted, murmuring, “Good, good, good! I must come to the run.”

  And so, once the Swiss government had relaxed its wartime restrictions on foreign visitors—“terrifying formalities,” in the words of the Times—life at St. Moritz simply carried on. In fact a new passenger air service between Zurich and St. Moritz made it easier than ever before for the rich to get away there for the winter. The town was soon busier than it ever had been before the war. It was starting to swing.

  This was the beginning of the golden era of bobsledding in St. Moritz—“the gay old days,” as Martineau called them in his memoirs, the age when “gifted amateur socialites went down the run, partly for fun, partly because he or she had a lot of guts, partly because he or she was bent on trying anything going.” But the idea that bobsledding was a sport for everybody was long gone; it was now for those rich enough to afford it and bold enough to brave it. “Far more than the weather or the run,” Martineau wrote, “it is the people who count: they make the season. Everything was taken light-heartedly. All the bobbers stayed at the Palace Hotel. At 2pm they were all out on the run, and at 2am they were all out on the town.” Downhill skiing wouldn’t become popular until the tail end of the 1930s. Bobsledding was the fashionable thing. The roll calls run in the British papers listing who was in St. Moritz for the season began to read like a European who’s who. One week’s entry, entirely typical, included the following names: Prince Odescalchi, Princess Lowenstein, the Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston, the Earl of Northesk, the Baron and Baronne Napoleon Gourgaud, Comte Philippe de Marnix, and Sir Philip Sassoon. Only the young and brave would be out on the run to take part in the big races, but everyone would gather at the Kulm and the Palace in the evenings for the balls, dances, and dinners.

  As president of the SMBC, Martineau had
two things to do. The first was to try to raise the funds to keep the club running, through auctions, raffles, sweepstakes, and generally by twisting the arm of any rich visitors who came his way. It cost $1,500 a season to rebuild and maintain the run. The second was to try to keep the members in line. This was by far the harder job. In the winter of 1924 a mysterious newcomer arrived at the club, a pretty young Russian lady with “auburn hair, vermilion cheeks, and scarlet lips.” She went by the name of Mademoiselle Krasnowski. “She was, unfortunately, quite unable to talk or understand a word of any language except Russian,” but she insisted on racing in the Boblet Cup, a competition for two-seater sleds. “As the race proceeded it was evident from the accounts given by her partner, and from her time when steering, that she was no novice at the game; and it was soon seen that very good times would have to be done to beat her and her partner. These times were not forthcoming, and her boblet was declared the winner.” The problems started on the way back to the hotel, when Martineau was “waylaid by a horde of indignant wives” who accused Mlle Krasnowski, as she drove from the bottom to the top of the run, “of deliberately (to use a vulgarism) ‘giving the glad eye to their husbands,’ a statement which we are bound to confess was reluctantly corroborated by the lady’s partner.” It got ugly at the prize ceremony. When Krasnowski was called up to receive the cup, she was accosted by a hot-blooded Argentine, Arturo Gramajo, who grew so incensed at the way the rest of the company was shouting him down that he dashed forward and grabbed her hair “before he could be dragged from his murderous assault.” Those in the audience “were stricken with horror, a horror which changed to consternation a few seconds later” when, as Gramajo reeled back triumphantly with two curls of auburn hair in his hands, there stood revealed, with painted cheeks and lips, a man.

  Then there were the crashes. In 1925 Martineau oversaw extensive renovations of the twelve-foot-tall bank at Horseshoe Corner to make it safer for the riders. “But unfortunately,” he wrote, “the work came to nothing when a bob drove right through it.” The following season a sled went over the top at Sunny Corner and flew into the crowd, scattering the spectators. Three were injured, one of them a German high court judge “who had several ribs broken.” The local authorities took a dim view of it all. They decided that the president of the SMBC should be held accountable. They collared Martineau. He was compelled to report to the police station twice a day for several days until the club’s insurers coughed up. “The idea of impounding all my wife’s jewelry, which was at the back of their minds, was thus, fortunately, frustrated.” Martineau was gratified when he was called down to the lobby of the Palace one morning to be met by the local mayor in full fig, bowler hat, and chain of office, who duly apologized and asked for his forgiveness. “The SMBC is British, and we do not receive much co-operation from the Swiss,” he wrote. “They regard us as odd-men out, with a certain amount of suspicion. The suspicion is, however, tempered with respect.”

  It was Martineau’s job, too, to smooth over some of the bust-ups that happened off the course—like mollifying the nameless businessman who was hoodwinked into playing dice on the billiards table at the Kulm by three con men who fleeced him of large sums and then cut out of town. Tricks like this seemed to happen quite a lot, though Martineau was too diplomatic, even years later, to share names. “An American who competed in one of the races asked a lady friend of mine to dine with him,” he wrote in his memoirs. “He did the thing in slap-up style, with caviar and champagne, and they both had a most enjoyable evening. Next morning, when she came down, she was presented with the bill for the two of them. The American had disappeared and was never seen again.” Then there was the case of “Andrew,” “Susan,” and “Paul,” none of them their real names: “Andrew was in St. Moritz with a very beautiful girlfriend, Susan, on whom he lavished all his time and a great deal of money. A generous chap, he did not grudge any of the expenditure till he found her in bed with a rather good-looking bobber, Paul. Even then he was civilized about the whole thing, and quite prepared to retire gracefully as long as Paul was prepared to recoup him for his capital outlay—£1,000 for a mink coat, £500 for clothes and another £500 for a bracelet: in other words for £2,000 Andrew was willing to relinquish the flaxen-haired Susan to Paul and there would be no hard feelings. Paul rapturously agreed. That afternoon Paul went down the Bob run, watched possessively by Susan, while Andrew hovered in the background waiting to collect his check. Paul returned to the start for a second run, and again, for a third, but he did not return for a fourth. His last descent had been nicely calculated to connect with the train at Celerina station, and by that time Andrew realized he had lost his £2,000 and Susan realized that she had lost her lover! He was well on his way back to England.”

  So, in St. Moritz in the early 1920s, anything went. Just so long as you had the cash. And even if you were broke, there was a chance that the Badrutts would put you up for free in the Palace if they took a shine to you. “It was easy for any man—especially if he was single and a good sportsman—to become quickly accepted by the sporting and social crowd which then flocked to St. Moritz,” wrote Martineau. Just don’t try it without that elusive extra quality “sportsmanship.” Bad manners didn’t wear. Martineau banned one man from the bob run for five years after he’d overheard him complaining that he had been cheated out of a victory by the race officials, whom he reckoned had fiddled the timing. “You think you can do this to me just because I’m a German,” he told Martineau, who took great satisfaction in noting that the man had gone on to become an officer in the Waffen SS in World War Two.

  The social mix was enriched by Americans who came over from the French Riviera, among them the extraordinary Helen Kelly, known at the time as the Princess Vlora because the third of her ex-husbands was an Albanian prince. She was also the widow of Ralph Hill Thomas, ex-president of the American Sugar Refining Company. And before that she had been Mrs. Frank Jay Gould, wife of one of the richest hoteliers on the Riviera. She divorced him because of his insatiable jealousy of “the homage paid her by other men.” At least that was what they said in the smart papers; the yellow press reckoned it had more to do with the fact Gould felt there was “too much mother-in-law” in the marriage and so started an affair with an English actress. Helen Kelly had a fortune of her own, inherited from her father. What she wanted, though, was something money couldn’t buy: social rank. That’s why she settled on Prince Nourredin Vlora. “She soon learned to her sorrow that being an Albanian Princess is far from the advantageous thing she thought it was when she was being wooed,” one journalist wrote. “Albania is a mere tenth-rate principality, with no great standing in the courts of Europe.” So they, too, were divorced. By 1926 she was on her fourth husband, the soap manufacturer Oscar Burke. Martineau didn’t give a damn about any of that. Princess Vlora loved to watch the bobsledding, and she was wealthy, so he welcomed her onto the committee of the SMBC. She presented the club with the Gold Cup, one of the grandest of the many trophies the bobbers would compete for over the course of the season.

  The Dolly sisters, Rosie and Jenny, according to Martineau, “managed to make most of the European capitals hum when they passed through them.” They were identical twins, born in Budapest but brought up on Broadway, where they had both been dance girls. They were a hard-living, high-rolling pair, neither ever seen out and about without some rich, smitten man for company. In 1925 they were both supposed to be having an affair with Harry Gordon Selfridge, the man behind the department store, who was said to be bankrolling their gambling habits.

  And then there were the three Heaton brothers, John (known as Jack), Jennison, and Trowbridge, and their sister, Ninette, from a New England family who had made their fortune in the clipper trade. “The boys—Trowbridge, Jennison, and Jack—were all well-known in winter sport and motor-racing circles,” Martineau wrote. “Fairly quiet and withdrawn in the daytime, except on the run, they were as gay and carefree as anyone when they had glasses in thei
r hands at night.” The Heatons were three of the finest riders the run had seen yet. Remember them, because we’ll be seeing them again.

  And of course there was that charming family from Chicago by way of Paris, the Fiskes: William Lindsley Meade II, wife Beulah, daughter Peggy, and young son Billy, “blessed with all this world’s goods” and “beloved by all who knew them.”

  Every galaxy needs a star. And at the center of this little American ex-pat scene in St. Moritz was a man described by the journalist Odd McIntyre as “a good-looking fellow with a soft southern drawl, the life of the party, at which he seems to be the perpetual host.” Martineau found him “a very affable and good-looking young man about town” and took a shine to him from the first, picking him to serve along with Princess Vlora on the SMBC’s committee almost as soon as he first popped up in St. Moritz, in 1926. And Martineau’s great friend Harry Hays Morgan remembered him as “a very popular American,” an “excellent overall sportsman.” That wasn’t the half of it. He’s the second of our heroes: the infamous, and extraordinary, James Jay O’Brien.

  The USA’s No. 1 crew in St. Moritz, 1928. Jay O’Brien is far left.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE PLAYBOY

  Jay didn’t have to look back—he could feel them coming. He cracked his whip hard into his horse’s flank. “Come on, Kersey!” The water jump was up ahead, and the chasing pack was strung out behind. They were gaining. The brown mare, Simper, was first among them, and almost up level now. The water came and went. Then Liverpool, the stiffest fence on the course. After that they would be into the homestretch. If he could just hold his lead. In the corner of his eye he caught glimpses of the crowd flashing by on the far side. He could hear their cheers over the pounding of the hooves. Virginia Vanderbilt herself was there somewhere, along with the rest of the Great Neck smart set. And his mind turned, just for a moment, to the thought of all the glory that would soon be his. The silver cup. The kisses on the cheek and the claps on the back.