Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  He had spent the entire shoot encased in a suffocatingly hot papier-mâché shell, topped off with a large head with little false eyes. He wasn’t feeling great about the place his career was in. And Billy, well, as his friend Patsy Ward wrote, “In those roving years, wherever he went and among whomever he moved his gaiety, warm-heartedness, and quick intelligence won him instant popularity; his natural ability to excel in whatever form of sport he tried his hand at, his complete lack of arrogance, and his unfailing sense of humor brought him not only admiration but love among many different classes of people in many different lands.” His pal Neil Cleaver was a little more to the point: “Billy, was short, 5ft 8in,” said Cleaver, “but the women found him wildly attractive.”

  Cherrill always denied that there had been anything between the two of them. “After a day’s shooting in the heat and the dust, we returned to the ranch exhausted,” she told her biographer. “I had a long bath and then my supper and retired early for the next day’s shooting. Billy and his co-producer would sit and talk about the next day’s shooting. Those few times I was involved in after-dinner talk, Billy would tell the most amusing stories.” That was her story, and she stuck with it. Even if she changed the details a little over the years. “Virginia remembers both the unpleasantness of the film-making and the intensity of Cary’s jealousy,” wrote a biographer of Grant’s. “She had to work day after day on a sugar plantation, covered with red dust blown by a savage wind. At night, she would return to the boarding house to be scrubbed by a housemaid in an effort to remove the dust from her hair, pores, and nails. Fiske, accompanied by his co-producer, would disappear to a local brothel; the director went to her room; and Virginia was left completely alone.”

  Grant didn’t buy it. “He hated the fact that he couldn’t keep an eye on her during the many weeks of shooting. He would telephone her in Kauai, or try to check up on her with the switchboard at her Japanese boarding house, a difficult task in those days of comparatively primitive telephone services. He was maddened by an unfounded belief that she was having an affair.” Grant got to be so paranoid about it all that even after shooting was over and Cherrill had moved to the Beverly Hills Hotel, he bribed the switchboard operators there to eavesdrop on any calls between Billy and her.

  Cherrill’s recollections of life on set, all “red dust blown by a savage wind,” didn’t exactly tally with everyone else’s. But then, she was the star. The two things everyone remembered about the production were how much fun it was and how little work they got done. Progress was slow because so many of the crew were injured, cut, bruised, and sprained playing a game Billy had invented. There was a spot where the sugar cutters worked, a plateau high above the plain. From up there, they delivered the cane down to the lowlands by bundling it up and tossing it into two small streams, separated by a foot or so, which ran side by side down to the bottom of the hill. Billy thought it would be a sport to stand, one foot on each bundle, and water-ski down the slope. “It was dangerous and difficult,” wrote Patsy Ward, “and he excelled at it.”

  It turned out they had a lot more fun making the movie than anyone did watching it. White Heat, as it was now called, had its premiere in New York on June 14, 1934. The reviews were awful. “White Heat is a humorless account of the amorous difficulties of a young sugar planter,” began the New York Times. It got worse. The themes, the paper conceded, were “by no means trivial,” but the film cheapened them by “resorting to rotten and predictable clichés.” Worse, its critic found the grand finale of the fire in the cane fields to be a “completely foolish episode.” Whispers were that Billy had spent $400,000 on it and made only $125,000 back. Certainly all plans for their next film, Moro, set in the Philippines, were quietly shelved. As for Weber, she never worked again.

  Ah, well. Billy’s career as a producer was a bust, but he was still having a high time in Hollywood. And as Peggy said, he never cared too much about money. He had a house on Lookout Mountain Avenue, off Laurel Canyon. He lived there with an old pal from his Cambridge days, Paddy Green. The two of them used to run around town with David Niven, who lived just around the corner. Niven was still working bit parts then, looking for his big break. Billy and Paddy even took flying lessons together out at Burbank. They’d been inspired to sign up after going to see The China Clipper, the latest Warner Bros. picture—starring, in a supporting role, a new player by the name of Humphrey Bogart. It was all about a man’s obsession with building a flying boat capable of crossing the Pacific. And Billy could still dream of those fighters he saw over the US fleet on his way to Tahiti.

  In those days, Billy was dating Alice Faye, a platinum blonde with a singing voice so sweet that Rudy Vallee signed her up as the vocalist on his hit radio show after hearing her perform at a party. (Vallee’s wife thought there was a little more to it than that, and named Faye as a co-respondent when she sued for divorce in 1934.) Faye was tougher than she looked in her china doll makeup. She had grown up in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen and quit school when she was thirteen to try to join the Follies. She had a hard edge, which appealed to Billy. And to Darryl F. Zanuck too: he gave her the lead in the 1934 film George White’s Scandals, then cast her opposite Spencer Tracy in Now I’ll Tell. She soon shot to the top of the bill, and dropped Billy on her way up.

  While Billy was pining after Faye, he fell in with another hell-raiser, the actor William Boyd, a man who drank a lot, and gambled more. In 1935, Boyd was offered a six-picture deal for a series of Westerns based on hit pulp stories about Hopalong Cassidy. Boyd persuaded Billy that the series would be a good investment. Billy agreed, and became the vice president of Western Pictures Corp. Boyd retooled the character, took the hard-drinking hell-raiser described in the books and turned him into a teetotaler who didn’t smoke or swear. “He was part philosopher, part doctor, part minister,” reckoned Boyd. “He was everything.” Everything that Boyd was not. So that was one of the few deals Billy struck in Hollywood that worked out well. Though by the time the Hopalong films got really big—by 1938 Boyd was one of the best-paid actors in Hollywood—Billy’s involvement was already over. He only ever made piecemeal change from the early films in the series. So he continued to look for the next big thing, an investment that would give him a better return on his money than Hollywood had done.

  —

  Early in 1936, he found it. The way T. J. Flynn tells it, it all started at a cocktail party in Pasadena. T.J. was from Aspen, Colorado. In the thirties, Aspen was a one-horse town, and the horse was dead. The mining boom was long since over, and the population had slumped from a peak of twelve thousand to just seven hundred in the space of three decades. With a background like that, T.J. didn’t have much to say about polo, which seemed to be all anyone at the party wanted to chat about. Apart from this one guy, off on his own, evidently equally bored with the small talk.

  “Are you more interested in any sport than polo?” Billy asked.

  “Yes,” T.J. replied, “I like horseback riding in the mountains.”

  Billy lit up. “What mountains?”

  “The High Rockies,” T.J. told him. “Back where I grew up.”

  “Do they have skiing out there?”

  “They do.”

  And from then on, Flynn said, “Billy became more and more interested, and plied me with more and more questions about the mountains.”

  Well, T. J. Flynn always did like a good story. Another of Billy’s friends, Ted Ryan, remembered it a little differently. T.J. was out in Los Angeles trying to find someone to invest in a silver mine back in Colorado. “And he kept trying to sell it to Billy. And Billy was just not at all impressed.” But he insisted on sending over some photos of the mine’s location, high in the Rockies. Billy saw then “the terrain, the heights, the altitude.” He had no idea such country existed in America. Billy called T.J. back, told him that maybe he wanted to invest in Aspen after all. T.J. was delighted, said, “I told you so.” And Billy replied,
“But it’s not the mine I’m interested in, T.J. It’s the mountains.”

  Later that summer, Billy, Paddy Green, and a third friend, Robert Rowan, a renowned real estate developer, took a trip out to Aspen. Billy’s brother-in-law, Jennison Heaton, flew them out there in his little four-seater monoplane. Flynn met them, just as soon as he could find them, in his truck. He took them up past the Midnight mine to Richmond Hill, where they got out to walk. Billy and Paddy were so excited to be there that they broke into a sprint for the final five hundred yards of the climb to the peak, racing against each other like a couple of kids. Rowan and Flynn followed them up in their own sweet time, found them both wheezing at the top, doubled over, a couple of husks. When they’d got their wind back, they stood up and saw the summer snows on the fields of Mount Hayden, the Swiss meadows running down to the junction of the two creeks, Castle and Conundrum.

  “This,” Billy said, “is the place.”

  His dream, so very similar to the one Godfrey Dewey had once held for Lake Placid, was to turn the sleepy little town of Aspen into America’s leading winter sports resort. Perhaps, for Billy, the fact that they would be competing with Dewey’s resort was part of the appeal. Certainly Billy threw himself into the work. “Without Bill Fiske, the whole skiing area would probably be as hopeless today as it was in 1936,” said Ted Ryan in a 1965 interview. “Bill came through without question.” He coughed up the first lump sum of money. His contacts were even more valuable. “Billy,” Ryan said, “knew just about everybody.” He persuaded Robert Benchley, once a key member of the now defunct Algonquin Round Table, to write them a promotional pamphlet. Harold Ross, Benchley’s editor at the New Yorker, was actually from Aspen, though, according to Ryan, Ross never cared to admit it if he could help it. He was amazed when he saw the brochure. “However did you get into this, Benchley?” Ross asked. The answer was, of course, that Billy had charmed him into it.

  The little lodge they built on their new land was designed by a friend of his from Pasadena, G. B. Kaufman, who had designed the grand old Jockey Club at the Santa Anita racetrack. And it was decorated by his pal Jimmy Bodrero, the man who wrote White Heat. Bodrero had given up screenwriting and turned, instead, to drawing and painting. He was a lot better at it too: he was working as one of the chief artists over at the new Walt Disney studio at Burbank. The lodge was only a little place, but Billy wanted it to make a big impression, since the idea was that they would be bringing potential investors out to stay there for a week. There was a pump house, a ski room, a barn, and a hayloft that housed a team of horses and a sleigh. There were two bunkrooms, which, the adverts promised, housed “beds fitted with box spring mattresses, down pillows, patch quilts” and built on—a Billy Fiske touch, this—“frames constructed from Philippine mahogany.”

  Aside from swish bed frames, what they needed were a couple of real winter sports experts, men who could chart the weather, mark the trails, and map the mountains, men who really understood the work that would need to be done to turn the empty slopes into a first-class skiing resort. They couldn’t think of anyone in their circle in the United States with the necessary experience or qualifications. But Billy knew just where to look. The same place he’d first come up with this wild idea of building a ski resort—St. Moritz. Billy recruited Swiss mountaineer Andre Roch and the Italian Gunther Langes, the man who had laid out the fastest downhill ski piste in Europe, at Marmolada. Billy was so committed to the Aspen plan that he paid Roch’s and Langes’ wages, $125 a month, out of his own money. They got to work the following winter, once the log cabin had been built.

  Roch had mixed news. The land at Aspen Mountain, around the old Little Annie Mine, was good and could provide, he said, some of the best skiing in the United States. But there was another spot, at Ashcroft, six miles up Castle Creek, that could well be the finest ski site in the whole world. They were, Roch reckoned, building in the wrong place. They were going to need more time and more money. So Billy hadn’t found his path yet—but wherever he was heading next, he wouldn’t be representing his country in any more winter sports. Since he had won the gold medal in ’32, so many new doors had opened for him, but that one had been firmly shut.

  —

  Tryouts for the 1936 Winter Olympics had been held at Lake Placid back in February of 1935. Billy had had no desire to go back to Godfrey Dewey’s little patch, and besides, he’d never been too interested in racing for tin-pot titles anyway. Hank Homburger had retired, and in Billy’s absence, the trials had been won by a new crew led by, of all people, an undertaker from the Bronx named John Donna Fox; second place had gone to Hubert Stevens, and third to Frank Tyler, who was a policeman from Lake Placid. Dewey, in a way, had achieved his aim of making bobsledding a popular activity, insomuch as the track at Mount Van Hoevenberg was open to all, so there were now plenty of blue-collar crews, men who raced for weekend kicks when their work was done. You didn’t need to be rich to be a bobsledder anymore. But Billy was still a two-time Olympic champion. The USOC knew what he could do. If they wanted him, they could just go ahead and pick him.

  And they did. Jay O’Brien was still in charge of selection at the time. He’d named a fifteen-man squad that included fourteen who had raced in the trials at Lake Placid, plus Billy. But Jay had been stood down soon after, since he was too busy socializing in Palm Springs to make it over to Germany for the 1936 Games. He’d been replaced as head of the bobsled committee by Jack Garren, a Lake Placid local, and the only contact Garren had with Billy was a letter forwarded from Avery Brundage, the president of the USOC. In it, Fiske explained that he was planning to make his own way to Europe that winter, sailing from California for Germany via the Pacific. He’d signed off with “See you there.” And that was the last they’d heard.

  On the day before the US Olympic team sailed from New York, Clifford Gray turned up at the Olympic Committee’s bustling office on the twenty-seventh floor of the Woolworth Building. The committee had been trying to contact him for weeks now, to check on his availability, and they hadn’t heard anything back. Now he had turned up out of the blue, and with a proposition. He had made his mind up the night before. He was willing to pay his own way to the Games, just so long as the USOC would add him to the official bobsled squad list.

  It just so happened that at that precise moment, Clifford was caught up in an especially lurid scandal and had been in the papers far more than he cared for. He’d had a fling with an actress—at least, that was what she called herself—the previous November. Her name was Ruby Lockhart. He’d made some rash promises to her in the heat of the moment, and when he hadn’t come through, she’d threatened to sue him. Her lawyers were demanding ten thousand dollars on her behalf. They called it a “heart balm.” It seemed like a good time to go to Europe.

  Garren was delighted. The bobsledders they’d selected, off the back of the trials at Lake Placid, were a raw lot. “And by the way,” Tippy told them as he was on his way out, “Eddie says he’ll be happy to come too, on the same terms, of course, so you should expect a call from him sometime soon.”

  Gray was right. Half an hour later, the phone rang. It was Eddie Eagan. He told Garren that he, too, would be traveling to the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the German Alps, so they should add him to the squad list as well.

  Now that Eagan and Gray had turned up, Garren made plans to put the three of them in a sled together and to fill out the final seat with another squad member. Then they could race against Fox and Stevens to see who got to compete in the Olympics proper.

  It turned out that the track at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the site of the ’36 Games, wasn’t ready for use. If the bobsledders wanted to get any practice in before the Olympics, they would need to up sticks and move the 120 miles west across the Alps to St. Moritz. But, without Jay’s money behind them, they couldn’t even afford the train fare. The manager of the team had to send a telegram back to the USOC office in New York pleading fo
r extra funds. He promised that the team “would travel third class and sleep in a barn” to keep costs down. The USOC agreed, so they all set off for Switzerland. And, well, guess who was waiting for them at the other end? “The mystery concerning Billy Fiske has been solved,” reported the Times on January 18. “It was thought he was in California. Yesterday it was learned that Fiske was already in St. Moritz, ready for training, and would meet his American teammates there.”

  For Billy, St. Moritz had always felt like home. It had been almost a decade since he’d first seen the town, and the more things had changed in the years since, the more they seemed to stay just as they were. If anything had changed, it was him. He was older, of course, twenty-four now, and had seen more of the world than most of his age. But it was those two Olympic medals that marked him out, as well as the manner in which he handled all the success he’d had. “He was a gentleman,” remembered Paul Dupree, another American bobber of that era, “what a fine man. He took all his glory in his stride. And he was very well respected by the Europeans, who were a tight little circle. He certainly had the respect of his fellow man, which was unique among bobsledders. They looked up to Billy as though he was an idol.” Some of the officials, on the other hand, couldn’t stand him. Especially Brundage, who ran the USOC much as the Dewey family had the Lake Placid Club. Brundage was irked by the offhand way in which Billy had skipped the trials and then refused to respond to his selection for the 1936 Games, and his attitude trickled down to the men on the ground, team managers Fred Rubien and Dr. Joel Henry Hildebrand. As soon as they arrived in St. Moritz, a row broke out.

  Billy’s position hadn’t changed. If the USOC wanted him in the team, they should go ahead and pick him, but he had three conditions. The first two were that he wanted to drive the United States’ No. 1 sled, and without being made to win his place in a trial. The third was that he wanted final say on the makeup of his team, as he’d had at Lake Placid, so he could be sure he would be riding with Eddie and Clifford. The officials quibbled. They insisted that Billy would have to win a series of qualifying races to get the No. 1 spot, and said that they couldn’t promise him the right to pick his own team, since the other eight men in the squad deserved their shot—despite the fact that Billy had won the last two Olympic competitions and was the only pilot there who had ever driven on the snow-covered European tracks. So they cut him. They were mindful, just as Dewey had been, of “the impracticability of eliminating without trial the men who are identified in the public mind” with brilliant victories, so they made sure to make it look as though Billy was to blame. The Associated Press reported that Billy had “notified the officials that he would compete if appointed captain with full authority and if he could drive both the four and two-man teams. His offer was not accepted.” Even the New York Times quoted Billy, secondhand, as saying, “I have two gold medals and several other championships. I’ve everything to gain and nothing to lose by staying out. So if I drive I’ll be the driver of the No. 1 sled. I won’t compete in the elimination trials. I’ll also choose my own team. The rest of you will be at liberty to compete for bobsled No. 2. Take it or leave it.”