Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  Gustavus Kirby approached Jay, and the two of them hatched a plan for the US bobsled squad. They decided that Jay would be put in charge and he would recruit a team of American ex-pats from the club in St. Moritz, and find a few willing men to fill out the ranks. They would all be in town already, and wealthy enough to pay their own way, something Jay was particularly proud of. “The men whom I selected were fine types of amateur sportsmen, brought together by me from throughout Europe,” Jay later wrote to MacArthur. “I think it is only justified that I call attention to the fact that the training and participation of these teams did not cost the Olympic Committee one penny in way of expense.” There were a few likely bob drivers in St. Moritz, but Jay still needed to find ten men to make up the two crews, with a couple left over for reserves in case of injury. He could take one seat himself, having picked up a little bobsledding experience; friends of his from St. Moritz, like his pal the old soldier Dick Parke, could fill a few of the other slots. But Jay was still short of a full squad. And then he had a bright idea: he would put out an advert calling for recruits.

  Jay traveled to Paris to meet up with an old friend of his, Sparrow Robertson. Sparrow was a sportswriter on the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune. He was a sinewy old fellow, half-cut as often as not, always on a cocktail of rye, dry vermouth, and Campari—he called the concoction an “old pal.” When he wasn’t at the fights or the races, Sparrow could usually be found in Harry’s Bar on the Rue Daunou. He styled himself as “a philosopher of sport.” He could hardly string a sentence together—he’d conned his way into the job, his only previous experience being his work as a small-fry fight promoter and a one-time coach for the YMCA—but once the copy editors stopped trying to make sense of his copy, his twisted syntax earned him a cult following among the American ex-pats in the French capital. The poet and publisher James Laughlin, who lived in Paris in the 1930s, laughingly called Sparrow the “great living master of American prose” because he so loved the “literary pearls” he would slip into the “dignified account of the last boxing match at the Palais de Sport or a hailstorm of statistics about horse racing results in 1910.” Reading Sparrow’s Sporting Gossip columns in the Trib was part of the daily ritual. “Back at home we would never have read the sports pages at all as a matter of principle,” Laughlin wrote in his autobiographical short story, “The River.” “But there in Paris at the big cafés, sitting and sipping, watching and reading, we came to be liking that part best of all.”

  Sparrow, Jay had decided, was just the man he needed to help beat up a little publicity for the bobsledding teams. He invited him over for supper one evening. The only problem was, if you wanted anything from Sparrow, you had to give him something in return. He wasn’t in the business of handing out favors for free. So Jay fed him a scrap of gossip for his column, a tall tale about a new sport he had encountered on the Riviera that summer. Sparrow didn’t believe it, but it made for enjoyable copy. Not long after they met, the following snippet appeared in the pages of the Paris Herald Tribune:

  The writer spent a very pleasant evening at the Paris home of Mr. Jay O’Brien, who a few years ago was the best of the American gentleman steeplechase riders. Mr. O’Brien’s bobsleigh and crew won the famous St. Moritz Derby last year, and also several other races at the Switzerland resort. It is the intention of Mr. O’Brien to organize two American crews for the Olympic championship bobsleigh event which will be given during the winter sport next year.

  Mr. O’Brien spoke of the latest sport which is called balloon jumping. A balloon about six feet high is strapped to the shoulders and with that contrivance one can hop around like a ballad [sic] dancer. One of the most expert of the balloon jumpers, Mr. O’Brien informed me, is Arthur “Bunker” Vincent, who is also one of the best American amateur golfers in France. Mr. Vincent puts the balloon attachment to his shoulders when he goes out on the links to sock the little pill around, and Mr. O’Brien says “Bunker” has a regular la-la time hopping around the links, feeling light as air. “It is a great sport, balloon jumping,” Mr. O’Brien says.

  “It is a good story, even if it is not true,” Sparrow wrote to a friend of his. And for him, that was all that mattered.

  For Jay, well, now word was out. Sparrow soon gave him another plug, calling for young male volunteers to ride on the US bobsled team. You needed to be American, in Europe, and athletic. Anyone interested should contact the paper. There were three responses. One was from a man named Geoffrey Mason, a student who was traveling through France on his way to Germany, where he was going to university. The second was from a man named Nion Tucker, a businessman from Hillsborough, California, who had studied at Berkeley.

  The last was from a man named Clifford “Tippy” Gray, and his isn’t the kind of story you can sum up in a line or two. No, the life of Clifford Gray is one of the great mysteries of the Olympics.

  From left to right: Jay, Eddie, Clifford, and Billy. Lake Placid, 1932.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE MUSICIAN?

  She stared at the photograph, asked herself again whether the man in it really could be her father. When June Grey had first opened the envelope and read the note inside, it had seemed like such an unlikely story. He died when she was young, and she had pieced together his life from the little she and her sisters remembered, bits they had heard and read about him, tales he had left behind in his memoirs, which he’d never finished. There was so much she didn’t know about him. But this was too much. Even he couldn’t have kept this secret. Could he? But the more she looked at the grainy black-and-white image, the more she began to wonder.

  She picked up the framed picture of him. Normally she kept it on her mantelpiece, but she had taken it down so that she could look from one photo to the other. The two men had the same full face, the same high forehead, the same hair swept back flat behind it, and those same deep folds in the flesh on either side of the nose, running down to the corners of a broad mouth. It must be him. But it just seemed so incredible. And besides, it was all so long ago. He had been dead for nearly forty years, and this picture was a decade older still.

  Tim Clark had been waiting a long time to find a story as good as this. Scoops didn’t come along too often in the monthly magazine trade. This one was fifty years old, but it was perfect material for a feature, a human-interest story.

  It was 1978, and the Winter Olympics were coming back to Lake Placid in 1980. Tim was reading up on the last time the Games had been held there, back in 1932. He had a connection to the widow of one of the athletes who had competed in the four-man bob. He planned to pull at the thread, see if he could unravel an article or two. He began looking into the participants in that four-man bobsled competition and the name Clifford Gray caught his eye. He had been a member of the United States’ team in 1928 and 1932. There wasn’t too much detail on Gray in the contemporary reports, but the few clues he could find seemed pretty intriguing. Gray, known to everyone by the nickname “Tippy,” was described as a “song-writer,” an “actor,” and a “tune-smith.” Tim looked up the name in an old edition of Who’s Who of the Theater. And there was his man.

  Clifford Grey, born Birmingham, England, 1887. Died Ipswich, England, 1941. Composed over 3,000 songs for stage and film in a 30-year career, notably If You Were The Only Girl (in the World), Spread a Little Happiness. Married Dorothy Gould, 1912.

  Three things didn’t fit. The first was the spelling: The bobsledder was known as Clifford Gray, with an “a”; the composer was Clifford Grey, with an “e.” That could just have been an error, a slip of a pen somewhere, or a vowel switched in translation between the UK and the United States. The second, harder to explain, was that the composer, Grey, was English, yet he had been competing for the United States. And the third, oddest of all, was that Tim couldn’t find any mentions of Grey’s Olympic career in the reference books. Curiouser and curiouser.

  Tim pulled out a couple of photos of the two men, Grey and Gray. S
ide by side, they looked so similar. But he needed proof. He had an idea. Someone must be collecting royalties on Grey’s songs, so he called the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. They refused to give out any contact details but told him they would be happy to forward a letter. So he wrote, explained what he had found, and sent it off.

  The letter made its way to Riverview, Florida, and Mrs. Eugene Silver, maiden name June Grey, Clifford’s eldest daughter. June got in touch with her younger sister, Jill. She had an older sibling, too, a half-sister from a relationship her mother had before she met and married Clifford. But the half-sister, Dorothy, wasn’t talking to June. They had fallen out over Clifford’s estate. Dorothy, whom they all called Babs, had been in England with him when he died and had, June suspected, sold off a lot of his possessions and kept the proceeds. Then there was the issue of royalties and who got what from his songs. That always seemed to rumble on.

  Jill contacted Babs about Clark’s letter, and Babs remembered that Clifford had visited her in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she had been sent to finishing school between 1926 and 1928. Which meant he could well have been in the vicinity of St. Moritz for the 1928 Olympics. More tellingly, Babs recalled that their father “adored bobsledding.” She even vaguely remembered meeting some of his teammates. That seemed to settle it. Of course there was the confusion over the spelling of his name, but that was a common enough mistake. It had been spelled “Gray” with an “a” in the latest edition of Who’s Who. June finally felt ready to reply to Tim’s letter with one of her own. “Dear Mr. Clark,” she began. “More and more, it appears to be our father.”

  Clifford Grey never told his children that he had been an Olympian. It seemed so strange that he should keep such deeds secret from his own family. But, as June explained in her letter to Tim, it really wasn’t so odd. Clifford was, she said, “a very modest man, gentle and quiet, he never boasted.” June had only recently discovered that her father had once toured Russia and China with the great violinist Efrem Zimbalist. She and her sisters had never really known their parents. “They traveled a great deal,” she explained. “I crossed the Atlantic 19 times before I was 12 years old—and never once sailed with my parents. So you see, English children do not always know as much as American children.” She ended her letter to Tim, “Thank you for your interest. It is exciting—and, from the photograph, I find it hard to doubt.” There was a final PS: “So many thanks.”

  Tim Clark had his proof, and his story. Clifford Grey, an English composer, had, unbeknown to his own family, ridden incognito on the United States’ Olympic bobsledding team. The lack of evidence in the reference books and the discreet, fleeting references to his career as a composer in the contemporary newspapers began to make more sense: he was hiding a secret, one that, if exposed, would have disqualified him and his teammates. In those same Games in 1928, the US Olympic Committee refused to field an ice hockey team because the squad, drawn entirely from Augsburg College, included the five Hanson brothers, who were all born in Canada. Grey, born and raised in England, would surely have suffered the same fate if he had been caught.

  Tim Clark’s article was published in Yankee magazine in February 1980, the same month as the opening ceremony of the second Lake Placid Winter Olympics. It was a beautiful piece of writing. And its revelations about Clifford Grey’s double life caused ripples that were still spreading years later. They were seized on by other historians from across sport, music, and theater. David Wallechinsky, president of the International Society of Olympic Historians, picked up on it. So did an academic, James Ross Moore, who was researching Grey’s life for the American Dictionary of National Biography. Between them, working independently, they set about piecing together the jigsaw details of Clifford Grey’s life. It was clear that he was a man who kept a lot of secrets—that, as Tim Clark said, “there were a lot of things his children did not know about him.”

  —

  Clifford was born in Birmingham, England, in 1887, in “an unromantic spot,” as he called it, on St. Luke’s Road. His real name was actually Percival Davis. And this was the first real clue about the kind of man he was. He changed his name when he was twenty because he wanted to reinvent himself. He had grown up in a humdrum middle-class household.

  His father, George Davis, was a whip manufacturer, and though he couldn’t afford to send his son to university, he did at least allow him to stay in school till he was seventeen. “Quite a concession on his part,” Clifford wrote. “He had been brought up in the sterner Victorian tradition and had been put to work at the ripe old age of nine.”

  Clifford found a job with the local water department for a while, but realized it wasn’t for him when he confused two telephone calls, sending a gang of men with tools, horse, and cart to repair a leaky tap in a kitchen, and then dispatching a lone plumber, armed with nothing but a spanner, to cope with a burst water main in a public square. As funny as the ensuing flood was, he found the work pretty dry.

  He had a young man’s hunger for adventure. So he quit the office and threw in with a local musical troupe, the Refined Set. It was then he changed his name from Percival Davis.

  His range was pretty limited. Clifford sang only a couple of numbers, “Violets” and “Love Me and the World Is Mine,” but that didn’t hinder him. Back then “no program was complete without some amiable young man in evening dress who dispensed drawing room ditties in a mildly amusing manner,” so he got plenty of bookings to perform at parish halls and temperance parties—“I always had to resist the urge to run on stage and shout ‘BEER!’ at the top of my voice,” he wrote. Finally, he began writing his own material, and “finding that I could get a laugh or two,” he said, “began to think seriously of burning my amateur boots.” He was being modest. Clifford had such a gift for writing comedy lyrics that he soon found work on the circuit.

  While traveling, he met and fell in love with Dorothy Gould. He was twenty-five; she was a little younger, at twenty-two. She already had a child, the daughter who would grow up to be Babs. Clifford adopted her when he married Dorothy in London in 1912. Together, they popped up in shows all over the country, from Bath to Brighton to Bristol. Finally, in 1915, when he was twenty-eight, Clifford’s first full revue, Why Certainly, opened in Morpeth.

  The next year, Clifford got his big break from the West End producer George Grossmith Jr. He was commissioned to write lyrics to accompany songs by the American ragtime composer Nat Ayer for a new revue, The Bing Boys Are Here. It was a smash and then some. It ran for 378 days at the Alhambra on Leicester Square and played to full houses from the first night to the last. Even Queen Mary went to see it, at a special matinee performance in July. Grossmith and his partners eventually replaced it with a series of sequels, The Other Bing Boys, The Bing Girls Are There, and The Bing Boys on Broadway, wringing every last penny they could from the public’s affection for their original show. The most popular song of the series was Clifford’s collaboration with Ayer, “If You Were the Only Girl (in the World),” a sweet and sentimental tune popular with pining lovers pulled apart by the war. Clifford wrote the lyrics for it during a Zeppelin raid, finishing them off by candlelight after the electricity went off. He played down his contribution, said he “was lucky to have been handed a melody like this,” but his lyrics became so peculiarly evocative of their era that it has been a staple of soundtracks for period pieces ever since, popping up most recently in Gosford Park and Downton Abbey.

  Clifford Grey was now one of the hottest young writers in the West End. He teamed up with Ivor Novello, “very young and humming with energy.” The two of them holed up in Novello’s flat in Aldwych, huddled around his piano, and rattled out songs for the shows Who’s Hooper? and Arlette. After that, Clifford worked with P. G. Wodehouse on Kissing Time. Wodehouse and Grey would come to be good friends, but at first, it has to be said, “Plum” had a low opinion of Clifford’s writing, thinking him “a plodder who changed others’
work slightly and claimed credit.”

  Truth was, Wodehouse’s sniffiness owed a little to their professional rivalry. In 1920, the great impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, the man, and mind, behind the famous Follies of Broadway, was looking for a vehicle for his new star, Marilyn Miller. He bought the rights for a new musical by the great American composer Jerome Kern, for which Wodehouse had written the lyrics. But when Ziegfeld renamed the musical Sally and insisted on including a couple of songs that Wodehouse hadn’t written, Wodehouse returned to England in high dudgeon. When he read in Variety that Ziegfeld and Kern had hired Clifford to rewrite his work, he wrote to “everybody in New York” demanding his original lyrics back. At which point . . . well, it’s best to let the master storyteller take over. He described the “laughable imbroglio” in a personal letter: “I got a furious cable from Jerry. The sort of cable the Kaiser might send to an underling—saying my letter withdrawing the lyrics was ‘extremely offensive’ and ending ‘You have offended me for the last time!’ At which point the manly spirit of the Wodehouses (descended from the sister of Anne Boleyn) bubbled in my veins.”

  While Wodehouse squabbled with Kern, Clifford seized his opportunity. “My wife and I decided it was time we discovered America,” he wrote. “I had been in rather indifferent health throughout the previous winter and the idea of a holiday seemed good.” Which is one way of putting it. The move may also have had something to do with rumors that Grey had an affair with a London showgirl that same year. Either way, he and Dorothy moved to New York in a hurry, lured by the prospect of working on Broadway with Ziegfeld. Not that life there was any less stressful. “Ziegfeld has a great name among American showmen,” Clifford wrote. “In any town in the United States the name of Ziegfeld on a playbill would pack a theater. Other management might have to advertise the names of the stars. Not Ziegfeld.”