Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  Billy and Rose took a trip down to Baja California together, along with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and his wife. But Billy was just one in a queue of suitors, and after three years in a failed marriage, Rose was in no hurry to commit to any of them. But she liked life in the United States, and decided to stay on, even though she was apart from Warwick. She moved to New York and took a job as a secretary in a travel agency run by a man named Bill Taylor. “She took the calls, made travel arrangements, things like that,” Taylor said. “She never said anything about her being a Countess. She wasn’t that kind of girl. She enjoyed the work. She was happy.” Rose, Taylor said, was “one of my favorites, one of the most delightful girls I ever knew. She was always in high humor, gay and happy. And whenever things got dull, she livened them up.” For those few months in 1937, Rose was, as Taylor put it, “free-lancing” her love life.

  As for Billy, he was beginning to feel, for the first time in his young life, as though he was in a hole. His career “making B-movies,” as Rose called it, had stalled. And while the Aspen project was a sound one, Roch’s survey had made it clear there was a lot of work to be done, and a long wait to be endured, before the resort was earning them any kind of return on their outlay.

  At the age of twenty-five he had decided, at last, to give in and become, as he put it when he was in Tahiti, one of “those poor old fools, who labored their lives away worrying about New York Central dropping two points.” He took up a post at Dillon, Read & Co., which gave him a job as a bond salesman at the New York office. Ted Ryan, Billy’s partner out in Aspen, remembered how much the decision pained his pal. “The one thing Billy had a love for was mountains, and outdoor sport. I think, in fact, he was rather sad when the exigencies of life pulled him back and set him to work with Dillon Read in New York. He loathed Wall Street.” Rose, typically, was altogether more to the point: “He hated it.”

  The one upside to it all was that he got to be near her. Billy wasn’t all that interested in business, and he certainly didn’t care to set the details down. The important thing for him, that year, was that he and Rose grew closer and closer as it slipped by while he, for the first time in his life, was working a nine-to-five job. The earl had filed for divorce, citing Rose’s infidelity with Roger Bailey in 1936. Rose was waiting for the decree nisi to come through. That winter, she and Billy both traveled back to Europe to spend Christmas with their families. They agreed to meet in St. Moritz in the New Year. And it was there, away from New York, on the slopes, that they fell for each other.

  Billy’s sister, Peggy, once asked him exactly what it was that he liked about Rose. He thought for a while, then replied, “She always has the right answers.” And that, for him, was it. Of course she was beautiful, and witty, and great fun. But Billy had known plenty of women who had been all those things. Rose, though, seemed so wise. Billy, who had spent years wandering from one thing to the next, always wondering what to do, had found an anchor. He was happy to stop and settle. As for Rose, she couldn’t but be charmed by him. “He was one of the most popular people I ever met,” she wrote. “To the extent of almost giving me an inferiority complex. No matter what country, with whom, or what, everyone loved him, and admired him.”

  Billy even took her for a ride in his bobsled. That winter of 1937–38 he won a series of startling contests on the Cresta, racing against Fischbacher and an Australian, Freddie McEvoy, nicknamed “Suicide” Freddie because of the obscene risks he took. Freddie was too foolish for the Cresta. As another rider, Owen Francis, said, “The Cresta is no good for youngsters who behave like fearless Fred. You have got to be frightened before you understand the thing at all. You have got to damn well convince yourself that you have to take risks. You have got to be prepared to have a go.” By now, Billy was well acquainted with the risks, and he knew how to master his fear. When Fischbacher broke Billy’s Cresta record, the mark stood for all of an hour before Billy took it back again. His new time, 56.7 seconds, stood for almost twenty years. His fellow riders were so enthralled by his performance that they hoisted him into the air and carried him back to the Palace on their shoulders. The celebrations lasted until dawn.

  That winter, Billy and Rose fell in with a group of Englishmen, all skiers and all old friends of his pal Paddy Green. There was Neil “Mouse” Cleaver, his old friend from the playboy days—he and Billy had once taken a golfing tour across France, during which they’d stayed only in brothels; Willie Rhodes-Moorhouse, absurdly rich, even by their standards, whose father had won the first Victoria Cross ever awarded for gallantry in the air back in World War One; Roger Bushell, a barrister, flamboyant, dashing and acutely intelligent, fluent in four languages and able to swear in many more; Billy Clyde; and Max Aitken, the eldest son of Lord Beaverbrook, the first baron of Fleet Street, who held a string of records flying transport planes owned by his father. They all knew “Rosie,” as they called her, from London. “She was very down-to-earth,” said Clyde. “A woman who knew what was what, forthright and worldly.”

  Rose thought that Billy was especially drawn toward the Englishmen because he was still sore with the way he’d been treated in 1932 and 1936 by the United States Olympic Committee. “He did not like America very much,” she wrote. “He had a brush with his compatriots in the 1932 Olympics and found them not only unsporting but underhand and cheats.” He found the English to be easy company. They were all in their twenties, and had a lot in common. “Like him,” wrote Rose’s friend Patsy Ward, “they all loved any form of sport in which speed was a ruling factor.” Rhodes-Moorhouse was a superb downhill skier; so was Bushell. Billy Clyde was perhaps the best of the bunch, a regular on the British ski team. But their first love was flying. Rhodes-Moorhouse had his pilot’s license by the time he was seventeen, and all four of them were members of the RAF’s 601 Auxiliary Reserve, based at Northolt, just outside London.

  In those days, 601 was a social club as much as a flying squadron. It had been founded in 1925 by Lord Edward Grosvenor, youngest son of the Duke of Westminster. They were known as the Millionaires’ Mob. Grosvenor, so the story goes, drew his first recruits exclusively from the membership of White’s, the oldest and most prestigious of the many gentlemen’s clubs in St. James’s. According to 601’s official history, written by Tom Moulson, “Recruitment under Grosvenor involved a trial by alcohol to see if candidates could still behave like gentlemen when drunk. They were apparently required to consume a large port, and gin and tonics would follow back at the club.” And while the squadron’s membership criteria may have loosened a little over the following decade, it still adhered to Grosvenor’s ideal that the pilots should be “of sufficient presence not to be overawed by him and of sufficient means not to be excluded from his favorite pastimes, eating, drinking and White’s.” They were the only squadron in the RAF that divided its flights into light and dark blue, according to whether the pilots had gone to Oxford or Cambridge.

  When it came to flying, Billy was just a novice. He’d had a few lessons with Paddy Green when they were living in LA, but no more than that. But he would sit up with them all the same, talking, as Ward wrote, “of airplanes and aerial warfare.” He was so taken with it all that he decided to sign up for more flying lessons as soon as he could.

  As fun as it all was, the atmosphere in St. Moritz wasn’t as carefree as it had once been. Nazism cast shadows, even in the neutral territory of the Engadine. Billy’s friends and rivals, his fellow members of the Suicide Club of ’32, were already being pulled in opposing directions. There were rumors that the Swiss rider René Fonjallaz was now working as an agent for the Gestapo. Georg Gyssling, one of the scratch German crew from 1932, had spent the past six years working as the Nazi’s foreign consul in Los Angeles, lobbying the Hollywood studios to keep anti-Nazi sentiments out of their movies. And then there was Werner Zahn, still on the scene, and as arrogant as ever. Zahn’s manufacturing company, the same firm that had built his sled Fram III, was now making helmets for th
e military. Hubert Martineau, still at the SMBC, remembered how Zahn had told him, in 1939, “Hubert, I want you to promise me one thing. When you leave here, pack up all your goods and chattels and take them to America. We made a mistake in the first war, but we shan’t repeat it this time. So promise to do what I tell you.” Martineau didn’t take his advice.

  In 1938, Zahn issued a challenge to the British members of the SMBC on behalf of the Luftwaffe. “We received a devious suggestion that we should, or rather ‘must,’ persuade the British team to compete against them in uniform,” wrote Martineau. “The boys in gray-blue were convinced of their own invincibility in every sphere at that time, and considered a few pictures of them beating the RAF on the ground would make excellent propaganda at home and in neutral countries.” Switzerland, however, had strict rules forbidding anyone from wearing foreign uniforms, “so their little scheme was punctured from the start.”

  In March that year came the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria. By then, Billy and Rose had quit St. Moritz. Dillon Read had posted him to London for the year, and she stayed over too. The decree nisi on her divorce had come through. The earl kept custody of their boy, David, but she was officially single again. Billy, Rose wrote, “was never happier” than he was in London that summer. “And nor was I.” The two of them had “quiet dinners together,” and days out in the country around the upper reaches of the Thames in Oxfordshire, where he had once gone to school. Patsy Ward noted, “They attended all the gala parties together.” And they met each other’s families. Rose’s mother took to Billy from the first. “One always felt with him a perfect sense of security and trust,” she wrote. “Bill was everything in the world to Rose, and their life was so happy.”

  Good as his word, Billy started taking flying lessons at an airfield outside London. “I remember the big day when he was finally allowed to take me up in a two-seater,” Rose wrote. She thought they were going for a flip around the airfield, but Billy had grander plans. He decided they should pop across the Channel and spend the weekend at Le Touquet. But things didn’t go as planned. The plane sprang a leak, and oil splattered all across the windshield. “So visibility was non-existent,” Rose wrote, “and so was the navigation.” Twenty minutes passed. Then forty. Then sixty. And they were still circling around the Channel. “I must have bogged it,” Billy shouted back over the engine. “We may have to come down in the sea, but don’t worry, we’re sure to float all right so just get ready to climb out on the wing.” Rose was just trying to decide what to do with her handbag when she heard Billy whoop with joy. Land, at last. They were actually at Deauville, 150 miles to the south of the spot they’d been heading for. No matter. They spent a happy weekend there anyway.

  “Wonderful,” Rose said, “how foolhardy one was at that age!”

  The decree absolute for Rose’s divorce was announced on August 24. A fortnight later, she and Billy were married at the register office in Maidenhead, Berkshire. The ceremony was quiet and simple. No pomp, no cameras or press, no guests even. And when it was done, Billy went right back to work at the bank.

  They took a short honeymoon, a week in France. Then, at the end of the month, the newlyweds prepared to sail to New York. Dillon, Read & Co. had decided that it needed Billy back in the United States. He had one last thing to do in England before he left: he put in an application to join the RAF as a volunteer. They turned him down, because they weren’t accepting foreign citizens into the ranks. Roger, Willie, Max, and the rest of the 601 crew had a laugh about it at his expense. Ever since St. Moritz, Billy had been telling them he wanted to join up, even though he was a Yank. “If and when it breaks, I want to be in it with you—from the start,” Billy said, over and again. “It had just become an ongoing joke between the lot of us,” remembered Billy Clyde. “None of us took him seriously.”

  Billy Fiske in uniform, London, 1940.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE WAR BEGINS

  Billy Fiske’s Journal, Page One.

  October 29, 1939

  This is not meant to be a diary, less a book. It’s simply an attempt to record in chronological order, if possible, some of the experiences and events brought about in my life as a result of Mr. Hitler’s indiscretions. They are probably not very different from the things that are happening to hundreds of thousands of other individuals. There’s really only one reason other than my own amusement why they may be worth recording, and that is the fact that I believe I can lay claim to being the first US citizen to join the RAF in England after the outbreak of hostilities. I don’t say this with any particular pride, except that insofar as my conscience is clear, but only it probably has some bearing on the course of my career . . .

  Now that I’ve started I might as well go right back and begin at the beginning, which was in the city of New York on the day of August 30, 1939, the Wednesday before war was declared. And a hectic day it was, too . . .

  To begin at the beginning, we actually need to move back another couple of days. In the early morning of Monday, August 28, Billy blinked, rolled over on his side, and flicked on the light by his bedside. He took a quick look at the clock. Two a.m.? Who the hell was calling at that hour? Whoever it was, the phone had been ringing for so long that they must be drunk, or desperate. He resigned himself, at last, to the fact that he was going to have to get up and answer it.

  “Hello?”

  “Billy? It’s Roger, Roger Bushell. Sorry if I woke you. Listen, is Little Bill there? It’s urgent.”

  Little Bill was their nickname for Billy Clyde, who was, at that precise moment, sound asleep in the guest bedroom. Billy could hear him snoring from out in the hall. That man, he thought, could sleep through anything. “One minute, Roger,” he said. And then he crept into Clyde’s room and gave him a gleeful poke in the ribs.

  Clyde’s eyes shot open.

  “Phone for you. It’s Roger.”

  Billy slunk back into his bed. But he didn’t go back to sleep. Instead he lay up, listening in to the muted conversation going on in the hall.

  “I see,” he heard Clyde say. “I see. Yes. All right. I’ll come. Tell them I’ll be back on the next boat.”

  He heard Clyde put the receiver down. There was a pause. And then a knock at the door.

  “Billy?” Clyde said. “Roger says things are cranking up. He says they’re going to mobilize the squadron. If I get back now, they’ll save a spot for me. Otherwise I’ll be back in the pilots’ pool.” If that happened, then it was likely Clyde would end up being assigned to another squadron, rather than 601, where all his friends were. “I suppose I had better call the girls and let them know.”

  “No, Bill,” Billy replied. “It’s late, best wait till the morning.” Besides, he had some thinking to do.

  When Billy came into the kitchen in the morning, Clyde was already up. The New York Times was on the table in front of him. Billy could read the headlines from where he stood in the doorway: “Hitler Tells Paris He Must Get Berlin and Corridor”; “Berlin Thinks Door Is Left Open to Peaceful Solution”; “British Answer Today to Insist on Rights of Poland.” Over breakfast, Billy broke his news: he had decided to come back to England with Clyde, to join the RAF. By then, Little Bill knew better than to try to talk his friend out of it. He was too busy to spare the time, anyway. He needed to get a ticket on the next boat from New York to England. That was the Aquitania, which was due to sail in a little over forty-eight hours—little enough time to pack and wrap up his business at the firm.

  Over the past eight months or so, the two of them had become close friends. Clyde was working for Johnson & Johnson in Princeton. Billy, of course, was with Dillon, Read & Co., at its offices down on Nassau Street in Manhattan. Just as they were both called Bill, their wives were both Rose. The four of them had hired a house on Rhode Island for the summer, by the harbor at Watch Hill. The two women would stay there together during the week while their husbands went to work; the
men would come up to join them on weekends. On the occasions when Clyde’s work brought him into New York, he’d stay with Billy at the little flat he kept downtown, which was where he was that night. It had taken Bushell, who was over in London, some time to track Clyde down.

  They’d had a lot of fun, the four of them. Billy had introduced them to his old pals Eddie, Tippy, and Jay, who came up from his mansion in Palm Springs—which he’d christened “the Garden of Eden”—just to meet Rose. They’d all gone to see the new singer Carmen Miranda perform at the Waldorf-Astoria. But hanging in the background, always, was the threat of war. And while everyone else discussed it as though it were a distant thing, for Clyde the conversations were always overshadowed by the knowledge that he might have to return to England to take up his place with his squadron.

  Once Billy had spoken to Rose, the next thing he did was call his lawyer out in LA. There were a lot of loose ends to tie up, like the investments he was in the middle of, with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, and the Aspen business, and the film company, which, though he hardly ever had anything to do with it these days, was now producing newsreels and educational shorts. Bad news. The lawyer just didn’t see how Billy could leave New York now. It would take three months, at least, to get his affairs in order. “Billy,” Clyde said, “was so downhearted about it.” But Clyde didn’t have time to dwell on his friend’s feelings. He had to get over to Princeton to clear out his desk.