Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  It was during just such a party that Jay fell in love for the third time, with a lady named Laura Hylan Heminway. Everyone called her Dolly. She was twenty-nine, younger than both Mae and Irene. She wore her brunette hair up, piled in curls around her ears, and had eyes that came brilliantly alive when her lips, one a perfect cupid’s bow, spread into a smile. Jay was absolutely enchanted by her. The problem was that Dolly was Julius Fleischmann’s wife.

  They had always seemed an odd sort of couple. The ceremony had taken place two days after Fleischmann had finalized his divorce from his first wife, Lilly. He had been with Lilly for twenty-three years, through his two terms as mayor, and had three children with her. Until in 1920, in his late forties, he fell head over heels for Dolly. She was two decades younger than him and had two children of her own from her first marriage. The split from Lilly cost Fleischmann a one-off payment of two million dollars, a summerhouse in Connecticut, and another twenty-five thousand dollars every year in alimony. He didn’t regret a cent. He said Dolly was “the most beautiful woman [he] ever met.” Fleischmann promised her that once they married, neither she, nor they, would ever want for money. He was almost twice her age, married, bald, beetle-browed, and needed a cane to walk. But for a single woman with two boys to support, his appeal was obvious, and irresistible. Especially since Dolly’s first husband had lost the money he made manufacturing silk and was now working as a cashier at a movie theater.

  Dolly, wrote a friend of hers in 1942, was a woman who had “always known what she wanted,” and if it didn’t come to her, “she went after it, delighting whoever she met with her charm, wit, honesty, and her perennial youth and beauty.” There is no doubt she went after Fleischmann. It took her a year or two to persuade him to separate from Lilly, who cited their affair in her testimony during their divorce proceedings.

  They said Julius was so smitten with his young wife that he never refused her anything—“a policy,” one paper put it, “that cost him a million dollars a year.” But it wasn’t enough. Rumors about the affair between Dolly and Jay ran around North Shore, and those “casual innuendos” were starting to spread to the gossip columns. Julius tried to protect her, and himself, by paying hush money to some of the grubbier papers—he handed over five hundred dollars to the “noxious periodical” Broadway Brevities. It didn’t work. Jay, the story went, had seduced Dolly over the course of his visits to the Lindens that summer of 1923. He was a decade younger than Julius, but the difference between them was so much more pronounced than even that gap suggested. When the scandal broke, several papers printed pictures of the two rivals side by side. Julius was shown in a heavy suit and hat, looking squat, short, and stoop-shouldered; Jay was pictured in his bathing costume, black hair swept back, a wry grin breaking out underneath his clipped mustache.

  The marriage broke that summer. Julius discovered that Dolly had given Jay twenty thousand dollars, money that, she said, he “had invested for her on Wall Street.” He snapped at that, astonished that she was willing to entrust her heart and his money to such a man. In public, at least, he was still warm toward Dolly, but he was icily disdainful toward her lover, whom he considered a playboy with a two-bit fortune. “What is he?” he asked. “He is just one of those strange figures on horseback who appear on the fringes of wealth and society and whose only means of support appears to be the four legs of a horse.”

  Dolly was insistent. “I don’t care who he is or what he is or how poor he is,” she said. “He alone understands me. He is the only person in all the world who ever did. I would gladly starve with him.”

  No one ever fell for Jay in a little way. We may wonder, especially after Mae’s account of her marriage to Jay, just what it was about him that was so irresistible. Jay, a friend explained, “possessed that curious and indefinable quality: charm. Call it the personal salt that makes an individual beloved by nearly everyone with whom he comes into contact.” Whenever he came up in conversation—which, as we’ve seen, happened rather a lot—“someone is sure to refer to him as ‘that perfect dancer.’ Or perhaps it is ‘the perfect rider.’ Or the man who makes ‘a perfect cocktail.’”

  The newspapers nicknamed Jay “the King of Hearts,” and “the Romeo of the Sporting World.” As far away as Utah, the Ogden Standard Examiner was asking, “Is the dashing polo player, so well-known in the gay life of New York’s Broadway and Paris’ boulevards, about to add a third famous beauty to the collection of women who have called themselves Mrs. Jay O’Brien?”

  The Standard Examiner’s readers didn’t have long to wait for an answer. Dolly had tried to leave Julius four times, and on each occasion he had persuaded her to stay. In June 1924 she sailed for Paris, ostensibly to visit her mother. Paris just happened to be the divorce mill of Europe. Jay headed out after her on the very next ship. The two of them were alone together for two weeks before Julius finally caught up with them. He tracked them to an apartment on the Rue Spontini in the 16th arrondissement. He did not stop there long. After a short conversation, he realized that he had lost Dolly. The divorce was rushed through the French courts. Julius’s legal counsel insisted that the decision was prompted only by the couple’s “incompatibility,” that they had, in fact, already been separated for the best part of a year. In a sense that was true, but only because she had been having an affair with Jay, which the counsel strenuously denied. “No scandalous allegations were discussed,” he said. “Any statement that any third person was the cause of these proceedings is untrue.” He also scotched the widespread reports that Julius was going to give Dolly a five-million-dollar fortune as a final settlement. No one believed that either. Instead, Julius Fleischmann was made out to be a man who had martyred himself for love, a man so magnanimous he’d refused to stand in the way of her happiness. His generosity to her, it was said, had ultimately extended to granting her the divorce she wanted, and on the grounds that he had abandoned her.

  The Fleischmann scandal was one of the single biggest news stories in the United States that summer. It spread from Boston to Dallas to Miami, Chicago to San Diego to Seattle. The bare bones were laid out underneath bold headlines on the front pages, and the details picked over in long, lurid features inside. Jay was the “prince of poloists, the most graceful of Manhattan’s masculine dancers, wielding his allurement over throbbing feminine hearts.” He was “a Greek god on a prancing steed,” the “Adonis of the polo field.”

  Julius Fleischmann returned to New York, alone, on the RMS Berengaria. He retreated to the Lindens. On July 12, he faced the press, who had been hounding him ever since his return. He met with a pack of hacks as he came off the tennis court. As they fired questions at him, he listened in silence, idly brushed a little dust from his trousers, then started to speak. “The idea seems to be that I am a hero. I have no desire to be such a hero. Just because my wife is divorcing from me in Paris and I’m not contesting it, someone is trying to picture me as the injured person. That isn’t fair—to the woman. Whatever my wife may do, she is my friend, and she is the loveliest woman I have met.” The divorce, he insisted, had come about simply because “a man and a woman may be devoted to one another and not be able to live together as man and wife, you know.” The story that he was going to give her five million dollars was, he said, “absolute bosh,” though “of course she has never lacked for anything, and she never will.”

  Was it true, someone asked, that he knew Jay O’Brien, that Jay had been a guest here at the Lindens?

  Julius smiled wistfully and leaned down to stroke the Sealyham terrier that was nagging at his feet. “Yes, it is true that he has been my guest here. He is a good player, and has played polo on my field. But it is foolish to suggest he is my friend.”

  Who introduced Mrs. Fleischmann to Jay O’Brien? Was it yourself?

  “Now, now, I am rather tired of hearing about Mr. O’Brien. Suppose we just forget about him.” And with that, he walked off, turning back only to urge the journalists to
“have a glass of lemonade and a look around the stables.”

  Just over a fortnight later, on July 29, Dolly and Jay announced their engagement. They traveled around France, to Deauville, Biarritz, and Monte Carlo, “in a style that seemed to show no reduction from her old one-million-dollar-a-year style.” They were married in Paris on October 20, in a small ceremony at a hall in the 16th arrondissement. Again, the only guests were the two witnesses, but this time there were no reports that Jay had to use a gun to get his bride down the aisle.

  As for Julius, he spent the rest of the summer with Edward, the Prince of Wales, who was first in line to the British throne and who had come over with the British polo team to play the United States for the International Cup. Fleischmann put them all up at the Lindens. No one mentioned that the mistress of the house was missing—because, as one paper put it, “a sportsman never would.” So it seemed at last, as summer eased into autumn, that life was starting to settle down. But there was still one final twist to come.

  On February 5, 1925, Julius was in Miami, where he had just ordered the construction of a new winter house on the beachfront. He and his old friend Carl Fisher were supposed to play polo that afternoon at the Nautilus club, but Julius was unsure about whether he was up to it. Fisher talked him round over a long lunch. After fifteen minutes of the game, Julius was flagging. He took a break to catch his wind, then returned to the field with his teammates. He was laughing. He had just asked them all to join him for dinner on board his yacht that evening. Moments later Julius pulled up and dismounted. He sat on the grass while play went on around him. A friend came over. Julius asked him for a glass of water. Then he lay down flat on his back, put his hand over his chest, and died.

  Julius was fifty-three. His heart attack, it was said, had been brought on by “the excitement and strenuousness of the match.” His death was the lead story in the New York Times and almost every other paper in the United States the next day. Inside, the Times ran a long article on the mood in Cincinnati, “a city in mourning.” Exhaustive reports related his philanthropic deeds, his political accomplishments, his achievements in business, and his glories in sport. And then, as soon as his funeral was over, the papers began to address the question that everyone was asking: What was going to happen to his sixty-million-dollar fortune?

  The will was opened and read on February 12, and this, too, was front-page news. It was just a little more than seven months after Dolly and Julius had agreed to their divorce, and a little less than four since she had married Jay. A short time, to be sure, but more than enough for Julius to have had it completely rewritten. In it, he explained that he had intended to bequeath the near entirety of his fortune to her, but since she had left him, most of the money would instead be split between his two children. Almost everyone got a cut: the captain of his yacht, his valet, his chauffeur, his stable hands. His factory employees got twenty thousand shares in his company, valued at $82 each, to split between them, and there was $200,000 for whichever Cincinnati charities his executors thought fit for it. Dolly got nothing. The date alongside his signature was August 29, 1924—nearly two months after their divorce.

  Jay wasn’t the romantic hero anymore. He was the man who had cost his wife something between a $35 million and a $50 million fortune, depending on who you listened to. Either way, it would have made her one of the richest women in the world. “Thirty-five million dollars!” exclaimed the Seattle Daily Times. “Divide that by the 200 pounds Mr. O’Brien weighs and you get the rate at which it now turns out the former Mrs. Fleischmann paid for him—$175,000 a pound. If she really thinks she got a bargain, she can truthfully say he is worth his weight in gold.” If only “she had resisted his impassioned beseeching a few months more,” she could have “had Jay O’Brien and the great fortune Mr. Fleischmann planned for her to have.”

  “If only they had waited another six months!” agreed the Pittsburgh Post. “The interest on this sum at 6% is $8,000 per day,” it noted. “Every time Mrs. O’Brien gazes at her husband at the breakfast table, it must be apparent to her that within the next 24 hours he must deliver $8,000 worth of tenderness, gallantry, wit, sympathy, attention, amusement, or satisfaction of some sort, or she has made a bad bargain. Can he possibly be worth it?”

  The answer, it seemed, was yes, he could. Jay and Dolly stayed out on the French Riviera, far away from the brouhaha. When one particularly persistent reporter finally found them, in Nice, Dolly simply told him, “I have heard all about it and I don’t propose to do a thing. I am happy. And that is all that matters.”

  Jay may not have been guilty of the crimes Mae Murray accused him of, but there was no doubt he was a rogue, a fast-living, freewheeling rake with a violent temper. But he had finally met his match. As his friend Park Benjamin said in 1926, “You never can tell about re-marriages. The beautiful Dolly and her dashing swain were, last I heard, living abroad in permanent and luxurious peace. They seem to have made a go of matrimony after all. It was a love match, pure and simple.” Dolly, said her friend Suzy Knickerbocker, “was very happy to be the ultimate female. Her beauty, her chic, her wit, her charm, her radiant sex appeal, her marvelous sense of humor, and, most importantly, her kindness to others.”

  Jay had always been, as Julius said, “on the fringes of society.” Now he was down in the gossip columns as “a perpetual host” on the south coast of France, fast friends with the Prince of Wales—a situation that, one reporter wrote, “must cause the Queen of England to stay awake many a night worrying about her son.” In those days Prince Edward was, his assistant private secretary wrote, engaged in “an unbridled pursuit of wine and women, and of whatever selfish whim occupied him.” That same secretary thought he was “going rapidly to the devil” and “would soon become no fit wearer of the British Crown.” His friendship with Jay and Dolly—the three of them were often seen out playing golf together—did nothing to assuage these worries. What tainted the prince in British papers, though, only burnished Jay and Dolly in US ones. Now that they were friends with royalty, their only appearances in the American papers were in the reports of what the fashionable set was wearing in Europe. Here was Dolly “on the beach at Lido, Venice, garbed in an up to the minute beach costume,” or at “a social function for the Florida Club in Paris wearing a cornflower blue lace gown.”

  “Love,” Knickerbocker wrote, “was the most important thing in the world to Dolly. And she and Jay, beautiful creatures, were dazzling and brilliant and golden. And very much in love and very happy.” They were “soon the toasts of Paris and London and the darlings of the south of France.” And, of course, of St. Moritz, which was, after all, where everyone who was anyone on the Riviera went to play in the winter.

  Billy’s new crew in their Satan kit, St. Moritz, 1928.

  CHAPTER 4

  A CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS

  Billy Fiske arrived in St. Moritz for the first time in January 1927. He was still a boy, only fifteen, but his puppyish face had filled out a little, making him more handsome, and his slim, wiry body was hidden beneath the thick white polo-necks and cricket sweaters he wore to keep out the cold. His solo trip to South America had toughened him up, which was apparent in his gait. He walked with his shoulders back and his head up. But he was still too young to make much of an impression on the social scene in the grand ballrooms and great dining halls of the Palace and the Kulm. He left that to his parents and his sister, Peggy.

  At that age Billy didn’t drink or smoke. His father had offered both his children a thousand dollars each if they would refrain from either vice until they were twenty-one. Peggy decided she’d rather look “sophisticated and grown-up” than rich, so she took up both, but Billy collected the money. All that really meant, though, was that he did a good job of hiding his vices from his family. Peggy said that Billy could be “just as happy on orange juice at parties” when everyone else was drinking champagne. And he never smoked. But while he didn’t depend on drink or drugs for
a good time, he certainly wasn’t averse to a binge, especially when he had something to celebrate. He just liked to measure them out against spells of clean living. He was reckless with other pleasures: he always loved to gamble, and he would, in time, become an insatiable womanizer. But all that was a few years away. At this stage of his life, speed was the thing.

  St. Moritz provided him with plenty of opportunities to slake that thirst, even at the age of fifteen. Billy took his first trip down the St. Moritz bob run in January 1927, driving a little two-seater known as a boblet. The course started up by the Kulm. It ran into “the Snake,” a chicane that buffeted the sled from side to side—“a horrible piece of architecture,” as one of the riders called it. From there it went on into Sunny Corner, a twelve-foot-high bank. This was where the spectators gathered. There was a telephone station here, and the times for the sled were shouted out through a megaphone as it shot past. Tom Webster, a journalist who rode the course once for a feature article, reckoned, “If nobody goes over the top here then the spectators rush to the railway company and ask for their money back.” They had come, after all, to see a crash. Then came Horseshoe. “All (except the spectators) shut their eyes here. At Horseshoe, a good driver needed to turn late, to gain height as easily and effortlessly as is possible. You need to be brave enough to let the sled run right up to the lip before pulling it back down out of the bend.” From there, the sled went into Devil’s Dyke. “I don’t remember going through that,” Webster wrote. “Think we leaped it.” Then it was on into the straight, under the railway bridge. “This,” Webster continued, “is supposed to last five seconds but not one member of the crew would be surprised if he found himself in a different climate” by the time it was over. Officially, Webster noted, the course was just under a mile. “But I thought it was never going to finish.”