Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  “Attempting to grasp Ziegfeld’s genius,” wrote Randolph Carter in his biography of the man, “is somewhat like probing a mist.” Carter felt Ziegfeld had little feeling for music, and no real appreciation of comedy, but was “something of a Midas, who converted gross into gold to fashion a fitting crown for his own superb ego.” It would be hard, Carter went on, “to say whether this alchemy was achieved at greater cost to himself, his associates, or his backers. In any event, Ziegfeld was not an easy man to work with.” This was some understatement. Ziegfeld worked eighteen-hour days. He once sent two of his writers fifty pounds of loose paper covered with his indecipherable observations about their script. After they had finally reworked the draft to make it more in line with what they imagined he wanted, they arrived at the theater to find Ziegfeld had ordered the construction of a set that bore no relation to the scenes he had asked for. So they had to start all over again.

  Ring Lardner was so exasperated by his own experiences of writing for Ziegfeld that he extracted revenge in an acid little short story, A Day with Conrad Green. In Lardner’s version, Ziegfeld was too much of a tightwad to pay the paperboy, too lazy to attend a friend’s funeral, and too self-absorbed to remember his wife’s birthday. One of Ziegfeld’s writers remembered that “we revolved like little moons around his sun, hoping to avoid the heat when we could.” His leading ladies, on the other hand, could afford to give back as good as they got. Marilyn Miller, the twenty-one-year-old star of Sally, had a hot temper and a sharp tongue. In her memoirs, Ziegfeld’s daughter, Patricia, remembered being taken backstage by her father to meet Miller after a performance.

  “Hello,” Miller said, “you lousy son-of-a-bitch.”

  “Now dear,” Ziegfeld replied. “I brought my little daughter backstage especially to meet you. You’ve heard me talk about Patricia, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, to the point of nausea.”

  When Ziegfeld asked what was bothering her, Miller replied, “You know goddamn well what’s bothering me. It’s this piece of crap you call a costume. It weighs a ton, and as far as I’m concerned you can take it and shove it!” At that, Ziegfeld and his daughter hurried back out, closing the door behind them just in time to stop the jar of cold cream Miller had hurled from hitting them.

  Clifford Grey, a modest and mild-mannered man making his first foray on Broadway, was beset on all sides. He was caught between Ziegfeld, Miller, and Jerry Kern, whom he loved and respected but who could, as Wodehouse said, be a right “blighter.” It didn’t help that Ziegfeld was wary about English writers. He’d refused to hire Noël Coward on the grounds that his songs were “too British” and therefore “too sophisticated.” He expected Grey to produce something with plenty of pizzazz, like his work for The Bing Boys. “As the Americans say, I was in ‘fast company,’” Clifford wrote. “However, I found they were more than willing to help a somewhat lame dog, so, in spite of the newness of my surroundings, things went along according to plan.”

  Another understatement. Clifford concocted one of the great song-and-dance sequences in the show. Sally tells the story of a scullery maid who smuggles herself into a party on Long Island by posing as a Russian ballerina. There she launches into the song “Wild Rose,” in which she kicks, twirls, and swirls her way around the stage, flirting with members of the male chorus arrayed around her. Clifford penned the scene’s back-and-forth patter:

  Chorus: You’re nothing tame / You’re like a burning flame / We know your name.

  Sally: But all the same / I’m just a wild rose / Not a prim and mild rose / Tame me if you can / I’m a rose to suit any man.

  At which point Miller would run forward to the front of the stage and wink at the audience. And of course all the men in the audience would think to themselves, “She’s singing to me!”

  Sally was a fantastic success and ran for 570 performances in New York alone.

  Clifford Grey was made. He and Dorothy bought a house on Long Island, took up “tennis and motoring”—the two activities he listed as his “interests” in Who’s Who—and became regulars at the Lamb’s Club in New York. Clifford continued to work furiously and earned credits alongside all the great composers of the age on a string of Broadway hits. There was a show in each of the years 1922 and 1923, a short trip back to Britain in that same year to help launch George Gershwin’s first West End revue, then two more Broadway productions in 1924, and three in 1925.

  The most intriguing of the lot was Ups-a-Daisy. It was only “a mild frivol,” as the New York Times put it, with, in the words of the Sun, “trite lines, undistinguished scenery, [and] costumes which fail to quite hit the mark.” At first glance, the most notable thing about it now is that it included a walk-on appearance by Bob Hope, one of the very first roles of his career. The plot, however, involves a married man who pretends to be climbing the Alps when he is, in fact, living the high life in Paris. He dupes his wife by sending home letters about his exploits in Switzerland, which he has copied, verbatim, out of an obscure book by a real mountaineer. She is so impressed by her husband’s descriptions of his derring-do that she has the letters published. He returns home to find himself a renowned climber and an acclaimed author. The original author, outraged, turns up at the impostor’s house and promptly falls in love with his sister-in-law. It all ends with the two men setting off to climb in the Alps together, so one can save his reputation and the other can win the woman.

  Grey wrote the story in the summer of 1928, and it made its Broadway debut on October 8 that year, just eight months after the Winter Olympics in St. Moritz. This, then, is surely a story inspired by the author’s own adventures, a take on what Ross Moore calls “the secret life of this quiet, retiring, and serious-looking man, so supposedly sedentary and shy behind his horn-rimmed glasses.”

  Clifford Grey must have known Jay O’Brien from around and about Long Island and Broadway. The two men certainly moved in the same circles. Both knew Flo Ziegfeld and his friends. In his short story about Ziegfeld, A Day with Conrad Green, Ring Lardner includes a character who is an “internationally famous polo player” who refuses to let his “pretty and stage-struck wife” pursue a career in Ziegfeld’s Follies. It could well have been O’Brien and Mae Murray that Lardner was describing. In the early twenties, O’Brien ran with Herbert Swope, a member of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table. There’s a record of his having gone for dinner at Swope’s house along with Groucho and Harpo Marx and William Randolph Hearst. That was when Swope lived across the road from both Lardner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Great Neck, Long Island—which also happened to be where Clifford Grey was staying while he was working on Sally. He knew the Marx brothers, too, having once turned down their act on the grounds that it was too risqué for the stage.

  In 1928, Clifford took a trip to Switzerland to visit his stepdaughter at her finishing school in Lausanne. From Lausanne it was but a short hop to St. Moritz, where he went in search of sport and society. His friend O’Brien must have introduced him to Fiske, who needed men to ride in his sled at the Olympics. So, as Ross Moore puts it, “with considerable skill, Grey invented an American persona, Tippi [sic] Gray,” and it was under that name that he signed up to compete.

  The secret stayed hidden for fifty years. Grey died of an asthma attack while he was staying in Ipswich in September 1941. His condition had been aggravated by smoke inhaled during a German bombing raid on the city a fortnight earlier. Obituaries appeared in newspapers across Britain and the United States. Many of them, taken from a template put out on the news wires, described him as “one of the best-known lyric writers of the last three decades.” They all mentioned his beginnings in Birmingham, his hits with Nat Ayer, and his work with Grossmith in the West End and with Ziegfeld on Broadway. Not one made any reference to his Olympic career.

  He was buried in the Old Cemetery in Ipswich, beneath a simple gravestone that read, “In happy memory of Clifford Grey.” In 2005, Clifford’s four g
randchildren and about thirty others who knew the story as Tim Clark had told it gathered at the Old Cemetery in Ipswich to lay a new marble tablet at the foot of the original headstone:

  HE “SPREAD A LITTLE HAPPINESS”

  CLIFFORD GREY

  LYRICIST

  “IF YOU WERE THE ONLY GIRL IN THE WORLD”

  “LET THE GREAT BIG WORLD KEEP TURNING”

  “GOT A DATE WITH AN ANGEL”

  OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALIST

  4-MAN BOBSLED IN 1928 & 1932 (USA)

  BORN BIRMINGHAM JAN 5TH 1887

  DIED IPSWICH SEPT 25TH 1941

  WHILST ON DUTY WITH “ENSA”

  REDEDICATION BY FAMILY AND FRIENDS 2005

  It felt like a fitting tribute. Seventy-seven years after he rode with Billy Fiske in the 1928 Olympics, sixty-four years after he died, and twenty-five years after Tim Clark uncovered his secret, Clifford Grey had finally earned the recognition he deserved.

  There was just one problem. Clifford Grey never competed for the United States, and he never went to the Olympics.

  —

  The story of Clifford Grey, of how this rotund, asthmatic English composer came to be mistaken for an American Olympian, takes some untangling. The knots of the problem have been drawn tight over time, and now the idea that he led a double life as an Olympic athlete is fixed fast, because it has been repeated over and again in a range of reference books and newspaper articles.

  There had always been those who were skeptical about the story. David Wallechinsky, the president of the International Society of Olympic Historians, was one. At first he accepted it to be true, but over time he began to have his doubts, largely because the records held by the US Olympic Committee listed Clifford Gray as having been born in Chicago in 1892. James Ross Moore was quite convinced that this was just part of Grey’s deception, his ingenious invention of an “American persona.” He appended his entry on Grey in the Dictionary of National Biography with a footnote insisting that the “the US Olympic Committee’s records on Grey are inaccurate.”

  John Cross from Bowdoin College, in Maine, also had his doubts. He was researching the life of the third man in Fiske’s sled from 1928, Geoff Mason, a Bowdoin alumnus. According to Mason’s recollections, Gray was a “businessman” and an alumnus of Cornell. “The story of the British songwriter-turned-Olympic gold medalist appeals to the Walter Mitty in all of us,” Cross wrote. “It persists, despite the absence of a scrap of evidence to support it.”

  Which isn’t quite right. There was the physical resemblance in the photos, so strong that it swayed Grey’s own daughter; the references in the reports from the 1932 Games to Gray’s being a “song-writer” and a “tune-smith”; and the hazy recollections of Grey’s adopted daughter, who recalled that he “adored bobsledding.” There are some circumstantial details too: the plot of Ups-a-Daisy, about a man with a double life and his adventures in the Alps, and the fact that he had already changed his name and created a new identity once before, when he dropped Percival Davis and became Clifford Grey.

  But nothing definitive. What bound it all together into a story that stuck for so long was the fact that so many people wanted it to be true. June Grey wanted to believe it was her father in that photo because she regretted how little she knew about his life. June’s niece, Vicki Barcus, wanted her grandfather to have led a secret life as an Olympian because it appealed to her romantic streak. Tim Clark wanted a good story for Yankee magazine, and was sure he had found one—the very same urge that led so many journalists to follow up on his work. James Ross Moore seems to have been driven by a biographer’s desire to uncover every last detail about his subject; but he got so close to the story that he lost sight of whether those same details were true or not. So Clark’s original, understandable, error spread. It is still being perpetuated today because no one has found a single piece of incontrovertible evidence that proves that it is wrong. Until now.

  On page 11 of an old edition of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, spread across six columns, sandwiched between an advert for a Bendix washing machine and a Hanes suede-knit shirt, is a profile of Clifford “Tippy” Gray, champion bobsledder. The headline reads, “Bobsled Champ Writes Music for His Living.” The date printed on the top of the paper is March 9, 1948. Seven years after the English composer Clifford Grey died in Ipswich, Clifford “Tippy” Gray, with an “a,” was still alive and well. In fact, at the time he was on holiday in Venice, visiting his brother, having just come back from the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz. Gray told the interviewer he was forty-seven, which was a lie, by a good few years. He said, too, that he was in “peak condition”—a claim that we can chalk up to his sense of humor, since he wasn’t ever what you might call a fit man, even in his younger days. He was still sledding though, and planned to “help coach” the United States teams at the world championship the following year.

  It’s curious enough that two men alive at the same time could have such similar names and also look so alike. They both had balding heads, thick jowls, and stocky bodies. But the twist that really threw Tim Clark, the first and foremost coincidence in the chain, was that there was so much overlap between their two careers. “The sportsman has another facet to his career which is hard to believe upon meeting him,” reads the profile in the Herald-Tribune. “Tippy looks like a line coach or any number of things other than his real vocation—which is music.” Gray, like Grey, was a composer, though considerably less successful at it. At the time of the interview, he was working for the Music Corporation of America, writing background music for the movies. This, too, caused some confusion, since Grey spent three years in Hollywood himself, working as a screenwriter. Both were songwriters, both moved in and around Broadway, and both worked in Hollywood. They knew the same people, frequented the same haunts and hangouts. Odd thing is, they seldom seem to have been in the same place at the same time. While the Englishman was working the concert party circuit in England, the American was making movies in Hollywood. When the Englishman came to work in New York, the American moved to England, and then went on to Paris. When the American moved back to the United States, the Englishman was already home in England. No surprise, then, that the two grew to be confused with each other.

  It seems to have been a common enough mistake in their own lifetimes. Over time, Gray came to be forgotten altogether: much of his life and many of the things he did were attributed to his near namesake. Even Gray’s friends thought he was a mysterious man. His good pal Odd McIntyre, the famous gossip journalist, once called him a “human question mark.” (McIntyre worked, for a time, as Flo Ziegfeld’s publicist—another curious link between the two Cliffords.) McIntyre took great pleasure in including little snippets about Gray’s life in his famous column “New York Day by Day,” which was syndicated in five hundred papers across the United States. In the 1920s, McIntyre was reckoned to be the most widely read and well-paid journalist at work anywhere in the world. He fed his readers tales of the city, “the drifters, chorus girls, gunmen,” and, of course, the celebrities. He was who you read if you wanted to know how Amelia Earhart was wearing her hair, what Babe Ruth had been eating for dessert, who Ernest Hemingway had been squabbling with in a bar downtown. McIntyre’s columns are the nearest thing we have to a record of Gray’s comings and goings. But even he found his friend to be “as homeless as smoke and always adrift.”

  Let’s start with what we know for sure. Clifford Gray was born in Chicago in 1892, the son of an English father and an American mother. He is supposed to have attended Cornell, where he was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity—at least that was how his teammate Geoff Mason remembered him; Cornell has no record of Gray ever having attended. By 1910 he was in New York, writing subtitles for silent movies made by Jesse Lasky’s Feature Play Company. From there he made the leap into starring on-screen himself. He had a series of roles in short films and made his debut in a full feature in 1915. The film was calle
d Beulah, “a slapdash drama,” as one critic called it, which was unsurprising given the rate at which Hollywood rattled out its silent movies. Gray was in nine productions in 1916 alone. In 1917 he landed his first leading role, in The Inspirations of Harry Larrabee, “a breezy detective story” about a playwright caught up in a murder mystery. He followed that with Alien Blood, in which he shared the top of the bill. The best of the bunch of films Gray made was Coney Island Princess, in which he starred with Irene Fenwick (who, of course, went on to marry Jay O’Brien) and Owen Moore.

  Moore remained a friend of Gray’s for the rest of his life. Damon Runyon remembered hanging out with the two of them at a party in New York in 1933. Gray was passing through the city, having just returned from Paris. He had traveled back on the liner Europa, accompanying home the body of his fellow actor Jack Pickford. Gray, Pickford, and Moore all came up in Hollywood at the same time, a tight little circle of friends together through the 1910s. Moore had been married to Pickford’s more celebrated sister, Mary, though they had long since separated. Gray didn’t enjoy anything like the success of his two friends, though Moore tried to help him along, getting him work on a couple of bigger productions made by Myron Selznick’s new studio. Moore and Pickford both earned their stars on the Hollywood walk of fame; Gray never came close to that. But in the long run he was luckier than either of his two friends, or perhaps just blessed with a stronger constitution. Moore was a lifelong alcoholic; Pickford was a notorious playboy who died at the age of thirty-six from neuritis brought on, rumors had it, by syphilis. They were the original Hollywood hell-raisers, as debauched and dissolute as any of the many who have followed in their footsteps.