Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  Jim Bickford, a member of that Olympic team in 1936, remembered it all a little differently. “Billy was a quiet, calm type of fellow, liked by all the sportsmen. I never saw him be demanding or disruptive.” Bickford couldn’t imagine that Billy would ever say anything like the quotes attributed to him by the USOC. “There were,” Bickford recalled, “a lot of politics that I didn’t go along with, even though I was from Lake Placid and had grown up there. Things were all screwed up.” As Bickford remembered it, Brundage and the USOC told Billy that he could be a reserve, but wouldn’t be allowed to drive because he hadn’t competed in the trials. “But Billy didn’t want any part of that, he wanted to compete.” For Billy, no doubt, all this was an unwelcome reminder of the nonsense he’d had to put up with before the Lake Placid Games. He decided he was happy enough without it. With Billy out, Eddie and Clifford also stepped down. Tippy stayed on in St. Moritz; Eddie never even left New York. The US team went ahead and competed without them. Neither of its two four-man teams managed to win a medal.

  There was, and still is, another theory about why Billy decided not to compete in 1936. It was put about by Billy’s old pal Irv Jaffee, who insisted, “Billy just didn’t want to go to Germany. Way back in 1932 after the Lake Placid Games, Billy was talking to me about his hatred for Adolf Hitler. Almost every day he would tell me how important it was that he won at Lake Placid because it would be his last Olympics. He didn’t want to compete in front of Hitler. When the USOC insisted that he enter the trials, Billy had a graceful way of saying “nothing doing.” This is certainly possible. Jaffee is the only one of Billy’s friends and family members who went on record with the story, though Virginia Cherrill recalled that “Billy often spoke about Hitler coming to power, and how there would be another European war” when the two of them were working on White Heat together. According to Peggy, her brother’s antipathy toward Nazi Germany came about a little later in his life, in 1938, when the two of them went to watch England play soccer against Germany in Berlin. The match is infamous now, for the Nazi salute made by the English team before the kickoff, under orders from their ambassador, as a token of respect. Peggy remembered how “amazed and distressed” Billy had been by the “aggressive militarism of the young children, their uniforms, their marching, and their grim faces.”

  Jaffee, proudly Jewish, certainly decided early on that he wouldn’t attend the Games. He was one of thousands who believed that the US should boycott the Nazi Olympics. The movement was led by Jeremiah Mahoney, former New York supreme justice and head of the Amateur Athletic Union. He had serious support, from the likes of New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia and the governors of both New York and Massachusetts. Newspapers and magazines, too, lined up behind him. Mahoney, an enlightened man, argued, “There is no room for discrimination on grounds of race, color, or creed in the Olympics.” On his watch, the AAU had voted, back in 1933, to attend the 1936 Games only if Germany pledged that there would be no discrimination against Jewish athletes.

  Avery Brundage, to his eternal discredit, had satisfied himself that there would be no anti-Semitic prejudice at the Olympics when he made a six-day tour of Germany in August 1934. He was chaperoned by two members of the Nazi Party for the duration of his stay. The Olympics, Brundage said, “must be kept free from outside interference or entanglements, racial, religious, or political.” He even suggested that the Jewish lobby was trying to hijack the Olympic movement. “Certain Jews must understand that that they cannot use these Games as a weapon in their boycott against the Nazis.” His line of argument seemed absurd and offensive at the time. Decades later, it appears downright disgusting. But the USOC stuck to it. Charles Hitchcock Sherrill, a US member of the IOC, even argued that a boycott would be harmful to the Jewish cause, since “we are almost certain to have a wave of anti-Semitism among those who never before gave it a thought and who may consider that 5,000,000 Jews in this country are using 120,000,000 Americans to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.” Sherrill, incredibly, accused the Jews of “over-playing their cards” and declared their attitude was, in fact, the start “of the whole trouble in Germany.”

  Despite Brundage’s best efforts to suggest otherwise, the boycott lobby included men and women from all walks. The Commonweal, the weekly Catholic newspaper, had come out in support of it. So had the Christian Century, a leading Protestant publication; the Nation, the flagship magazine of the left; and the New York Amsterdam News, the oldest African-American weekly in the United States. Assorted church groups, labor unions, and student bodies signed up to the campaign. But Brundage stood his ground, even after the Nuremberg Laws were passed, which the Nazis used to strip citizenship from Jews and “Gypsies, Negroes, or their bastard offspring” and to prohibit sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. Still, though, the German government maintained the pretense that their Olympic team would be open to all. They even made a great song-and-dance about the fact that they had, at Sherrill’s behest, already selected two Jewish athletes. Though, to be eligible, athletes needed to be members of registered sports clubs, and most of those clubs had rules that barred Jews from entry; at the same time, the Jews’ own clubs had been disbanded on the grounds that they were all Zionist fronts. Brundage won the argument, regardless, and Mahoney resigned.

  Was Billy Fiske among the ranks of the boycotters? Sadly, we can’t simply take Jaffee at his word, though his explanation of Billy’s behavior fits better than the one provided by the USOC, which insisted that he pulled out in a fit of pique. At the same time, while Billy was certainly firm friends with Jaffee, he was no great philo-Semite. In his travel journal, which he wrote when he was twenty, he unthinkingly used the Jewish race as the butt of some unsavory jokes—which was a young man’s foolishness. What he did have, indisputably, was that keen sense of “courage and justice” that his father had installed in him as a child.

  But then, Fiske Sr. had a complicated relationship with the Nazis himself. He was still living in Paris, and still working as the head of Dillon, Read & Co.’s European operation. The bank had parlayed the early returns on their German transactions in the 1920s into further investments in the country. Dillon Read was now doing more business in Germany than any other bank on Wall Street. That had, after all, been Clarence Dillon’s plan from the outset. In 1926 they underwrote the creation of the United Steelworks, which soon became Germany’s single-largest industrial corporation. They invested elsewhere, too, so much so that Dillon Read employee Ferdinand Eberstadt was able to boast of the firm’s work in Germany, “We have the iron, steel, and coal industry, in the electrical industry we have Siemens, and in the banking industry we have Disconto and Deutsche Bank.” After Hitler came to power, Dillon Read retained its investments in Siemens and in United Steelworks. Dillon loaned more than seventy million dollars to United Steelworks, and by 1938 that same firm was producing 95 percent of all German explosives.

  Clarence Dillon, and Billy’s father, worked especially closely with steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, who was not only a member of the Nazi Party but also provided it with a million reichsmarks in personal donations, as well as loans from his family bank. Thyssen welcomed the Nazi suppression of the Communist Party and of the trade unions. He acceded, too, to the demand that he fire all Jewish employees from his factories. There was no doubt that Clarence Dillon, famously well informed about every little detail of his operations, knew all this, and knew, too, that the steel being produced in those same factories was being used to build munitions. Dillon was a Polish Jew himself, remember, who had changed his name from Lapowski. Despite that, he thought the investment worth the return. As for Thyssen, he realized the errors he had made too late. He quit the Nazi Party early in 1939, after being shocked into action by Kristallnacht, the horrific night in November 1938 when Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues in Germany and Austria were attacked, leaving the streets littered with broken glass. “My conscience is clean,” he told Hitler in a letter. “My sole mistake is to have
believed in you, our leader, Adolf Hitler, and in the movement initiated by you—to have believed with the enthusiasm of a passionate lover of my native Germany.”

  After the war, Dillon, Read & Co. escaped punishment, but not censure. James Stewart Martin, chief of the Decartelization Branch set up after the war to investigate German industry, called out Dillon Read for the firm’s role in it all. “Their loans for reconstruction,” he wrote, referring back to the Dawes Plan, “became a vehicle for arrangements that did more to promote World War II than to establish peace after World War I.” Dillon Read itself was “intimately related to the growth of Nazi industry,” since Germany’s military production “was from capacity built” by the bank’s loans.

  —

  In St. Moritz in January 1936, it seemed Billy was a world away from such issues. One of the lines attributed to him, in the New York Times, was that “he wasn’t interested in bobsledding just now.” There was a measure of truth in that, at least. Billy had turned his attention, instead, to the other great sport of St. Moritz: the Cresta Run, a headfirst sled ride down one of the most famous stretches of ice on earth. Three-quarters of a mile, a drop of 514 feet, and a gradient, at its steepest point, of one in three.

  The Cresta had grown up right alongside the St. Moritz bob run. Billy had first tried it as a boy back in 1928, when he had won the Novices Cup, run from the starting point at Junction, midway down the course. He turned to it in earnest in the winter of 1935, when he won three more trophies. In 1936, though, fueled by the anger he felt after his arguments with the USOC, he attacked the Cresta in a way that had never been seen before, and has seldom been seen since. He won five trophies in the space of just eleven days, including the most glorious of all, the Grand National. On January 30 he broke the record for the quickest time in the run’s history, 56.9 seconds. The feat was all the sweeter because the old mark, of 58 seconds flat, had been set seven years earlier by his old friend Jack Heaton. No one had ever seen riding like it. “As a Cresta stylist,” wrote historian Michael Seth-Smith, “he was a joy to watch, taking the banks at the highest speed in perfect curves without the trace of a skid, without risking a fall.” One of Billy’s great rivals on the run in those days was the Swiss Christian Fischbacher. “Once Billy mastered the technique of riding his toboggan,” Fischbacher said, “he became the unbeatable challenge for all his competitors. He seemed to enjoy a total sense of balance and body co-ordination, besides being an excellent all-round sportsman.” Even today, Seth-Smith wrote, “it is impossible to discuss the Cresta without him.”

  Riding the Cresta, Billy worked alone. It was just him, the sled, the ice, and the clock. A solitary business. It suited him. For a driver that fast, a crew was almost a burden, even one as skilled as the team of Eddie, Tippy, and Jay. Each error they made slowed him down, forced him to check the sled to compensate. Racing alone on the Cresta, traveling face-first, inches above the ice, Billy achieved a kind of perfection. Astonishingly, he never once fell off—which meant he was ineligible for the Shuttlecock Club: the only qualification for membership was that you had to have crashed, just once, at the infamous low, raking left-hand bank. In the end they had to make Billy an honorary member. Even today, the best riders reckon on crashing at least once for every twelve times they make the Cresta Run. There are ten corners, and the best riders cover them in less than a minute. In Billy’s mind, the race seemed to last so much longer than that. His mind had grown so attuned to speed that life seemed almost to slow down as he traveled the run. He had all the time he needed, and more, to steer his sled along that “perfect line” down the mountain. “Billy,” one of his rivals once asked him, “how the hell do you manage to beat us all so easily?” Billy thought for a second. “I’ll tell you what I think it is,” he replied. “You all seem to be in such a hell of a hurry getting through the banks. I seem to have more leisure and more time than you.”

  By night, he was the same old Billy. It is said that after one nightlong tear, he even rode the run at dawn in his tuxedo. Sounds unlikely, until you learn that there was money at stake.

  That winter, Billy was hung up on Paulette Poniatowski. Or, to give her her full name, Doña Paulette Amor, Princess Poniatowski. “One of Billy’s rather more serious girlfriends,” said his friend Neil Cleaver. The trouble was, the princess, who was Mexican, was married to a Polish prince, with whom she had three little children. Billy was so smitten that he insisted Cleaver drive him the 280 miles down and across the Italian border to Sestrieres to visit her. “I didn’t want to,” Cleaver said, “because we—the English—had put sanctions on Mussolini over the war in Abyssinia, and we were pretty unpopular in Italy just then. But as usual Billy talked me into it.”

  The fling didn’t last long. At the end of the season, Billy traveled back to California. Soon after that he met T. J. Flynn and turned his attention to the Aspen project. By the summer, Paulette was another distant memory. Not because he was so engrossed with plans for the skiing resort. But because Billy had met someone else, someone new.

  —

  The papers called her the Countess of Warwick. To everyone who knew her, she was Rose. Billy had never met anyone with a name so apt, not even his old flame Doña Amor. She was startlingly beautiful. She was a brunette, and wore her hair short and pinned up in curls around her neck. Her face was broad, with sharp cheekbones and long slim eyebrows, which curved over her round brown eyes, alive with energy. Her lips seemed to be set with the hint of a wry smile, which suggested, somehow, that she was always laughing at a joke she hadn’t shared with anyone else. She was a couple of years younger than Billy, born in 1913.

  Rose’s father had been a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards. She never knew him: he died fighting at Aisne on the Western Front in September 1914. Her mother, Lady Rosabelle Brand, raised Rose alone, an only child, at a house in Beddingham in Sussex, an hour or so south of London, and not far from the coast. It was a traditional-enough upbringing. Rose was even presented at court as a debutante in 1931, when the press pronounced her “one of the most popular and most beautiful of the younger members of society.” But she wasn’t a traditional girl. She loved to smoke, through a dapper little cigarette holder, and liked to drink, and, as she grew older, could swear like a sailor when the mood took her. She was, in the language of her day, “a modern woman.” But she made an old-fashioned match. In 1933, when she was still nineteen, she got engaged to Charles Greville, the Earl of Warwick. He was the most eligible bachelor about town, a handsome man who had ascended to one of the most prestigious peerages in the country when he was nineteen. He and Rose seemed a perfect fit. They were married in July 1933, in the East Sussex village of Glynde, in a church decorated for the day with masses of roses, yellow and white and pink and scarlet. Several hundred villagers, all dressed in their finest Sunday outfits, were there to cheer them along. They even had policemen to hold the crowds back.

  It would be easy to say the marriage was an unhappy one. But life is seldom so simple. They had happy moments, certainly, and a child together, a boy, David, in 1934. But they certainly never settled into life together, for all that the papers tried to portray them as a pair of joyful childhood sweethearts. There were rumors, even in the year of their wedding, that the earl was also in love with an American actress, Sally Blane. Hollywood was certainly where he wanted to be. In the summer of 1936 he signed a five-year deal with MGM, for $300 a year, plus a paid-for valet and secretary. Irving Thalberg, the boy wonder in charge of production at the studio, was convinced they could launch him as a film star, playing, as he told the press, “romantic roles—dark complexioned, he-mannish, of a strictly English type.” Warwick and Rose came over to Hollywood together, but by then it was already an open secret that their marriage had fallen apart. She was dating a man named Roger Bailey, and he, as the print scuttlebutts delighted in telling their readers, had been seen out and about with Greta Garbo. Who was, of course, also on the books at MGM.

 
It was David Niven who first introduced Rose to Billy. Niven was living with Errol Flynn at that time, in a bachelor pad on North Linden Drive, which Flynn’s ex-wife had nicknamed “Cirrhosis-by-the-Sea.” Billy and Paddy had moved to Santa Barbara. They had a nickname for their house too: the “Rat and Weasel mansion.” Niven’s parties were worth coming into town for. They knew Flynn as well. He was an old friend of Eddie’s. In the late twenties. Flynn had entertained lunatic ideas about becoming a heavyweight boxer and had asked Eddie to teach him the ropes. “I cracked him with blows that would drop an ox,” Flynn said. “But he wasn’t an ox.” He abandoned his fledgling career as a fighter soon after. Niven was still playing supporting roles, but he was very much the ringmaster of the “Hollywood Raj,” which was what the yellow press called the British ex-pat scene. It was only natural that he should invite the earl and the countess over to get acquainted. “Rose, I’d like you to meet my old neighbor, Billy . . .”