by Andy Bull
They sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and the two national anthems, and then it was over. As the others shuffled out, Rose stepped in closer to the granite plaque. She saw Billy’s pilot’s wings, mounted on green felt in a small golden frame. And above them, the words
WILLIAM MEADE LINDSLEY FISKE III
AN AMERICAN CITIZEN WHO DIED THAT ENGLAND MIGHT LIVE.
She stayed there a moment, alone in the cool air of the crypt, and then walked out, up the steps, into the sunshine.
—
Rose Fiske spent the rest of the war living in London. In 1945 she married Colonel Sir John Lawson, another extraordinary man: Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery described him as “the best squadron leader in the 8th Army.” They divorced in 1950. She married for a fourth time the very next year, to Ted Bassett. It was a stormy relationship. Bassett wasn’t a popular man with her friends. Mouse Cleaver described him as “a professional gambler,” and it is true that in the end she sold off many of Billy’s assets, in the film company and in Aspen, to cover his gambling debts. The kindest thing Bill Taylor had to say about Bassett was that he was a “horny bastard, always hot for the hand that is nearest.” They, too, eventually divorced. Taylor himself once asked Rose to marry him, only half in jest, but she turned him down, with a laugh, because he didn’t have enough money. “I don’t think,” Taylor said, “that she ever really loved anybody except for Billy.” Rose died just after Christmas in 1972, at the age of fifty-nine. Among the few treasured possessions she passed on to her granddaughter, Lady Charlotte Fraser, were a pair of earrings made out of the gold collar studs of Billy’s RAF uniform. “Billy,” says Lady Fraser, “was always the love of her life.”
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Beulah Fiske moved out to the West Coast to live near her daughter, Peggy. In December 1942 she received, to her great surprise, a letter from the First Lady.
Dear Mrs. Fiske,
When I was going through St. Paul’s they showed me with great pride the plaque which has been put up in memory of your son, the first American citizen who died “that England might live.” Incidentally, I think that the United States might live also. I thought you would like to know with what reverence and admiration they show that plaque not only to American visitors, but to a great many other people. If you have not seen where it is placed, it is right near the pedestal on which stands the statue of George Washington in peace time. This statue, of course, is now put away. My deepest sympathy goes to you, but I must express also my pride in your son,
Very sincerely yours,
Eleanor Roosevelt.
Beulah died in 1949.
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Peggy Fiske eventually divorced Jennison Heaton and remarried. She remained enormously fond, and proud, of her brother right through to the end of her life in 1987. She told her daughters all about how, when they were very little, their uncle Billy drove them in a horse and buggy to a park outside the Fiske family home in Paris, cooked them baked potatoes in a campfire, and scared them silly by telling them ghost stories.
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Jack Heaton died in Paris in 1976, at the age of sixty-eight.
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Eddie Eagan never did get back into the boxing ring, or into a bobsled. He was busy enough at the bar. He spent the rest of the 1930s working as the assistant district attorney for Southern New York. When the United States entered the war, he joined up for a second time, in the Army Air Forces. He became the chief of special service in the Air Transport Command. They even made him a lieutenant colonel. After the war he became the New York State boxing commissioner. It was a hell of a job, too much even for a man like him. The boxing business was lousy with racketeers, cheats, and gangsters. The great sportswriter Red Smith summed it up: “Eddie Eagan is a genuinely sweet guy. He is profoundly honest and profoundly sincere, humble and considerate. The first two qualities are indispensable in a boxing commissioner; probably the other three are a handicap.” Eddie vowed to “clean it up or quit,” and he was as good as his word: he stepped down in 1951. “Eddie brought with him honesty, sincerity, and a passionate love of the sport,” wrote Arthur J. Daley. “But he also brought what amounted to naiveté into a sphere of hard-boiled pragmatism.” In 1956, President Eisenhower asked him to head up the People-to-People Sports Committee, and he spent the rest of his life working to encourage children to take up sport. He ran the sports program at the New York World’s Fair in 1964–65 and served two years as the president of the Boys Athletic League of New York. He and Peggy were happily married right through. They had a house on Long Island Sound, which Eddie named Happy Harbor, one son and one daughter. Eddie died of a heart attack on June 15, 1967, at the age of sixty-nine. More than 250 people turned out for his funeral, among them Jack Dempsey. “He was a good boxer,” Jack said, “and he meant a great deal to the youth of America.” Gene Tunney couldn’t make it because he was in hospital after a fall. Eddie remains the only man in the history of the Olympics to have won gold medals at both the Summer and Winter Games.
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Clifford “Tippy” Gray spent the war living in Hollywood, working, as he put it, as a “self-employed writer.” In the early 1950s he was living as a “permanent houseguest” of Edward Hillman Jr., a playboy who had inherited his money from his father’s department store business. The two of them moved to Acapulco together in 1952, taking along another friend from the old days, the movie star Norman Kerry. Clifford never remarried. He settled back in Daytona Beach, Florida, where he became well known in local high-society circles for his immaculately accurate impressions of Winston Churchill. In his seventies he began to suffer from Parkinson’s disease. He spent the final two years of his life in a care home in San Diego. He died in April 1968. Almost inevitably, the brief obituary notices he was given in the local papers confused him with his namesake, announcing that “Clifford Gray, the composer of If You Were the Only Girl (in the World), has passed away at the age of 76.”
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The other Clifford Grey is still known in some quarters as a man who led an extraordinary double life as an English composer and an American Olympian, not least, of course, in the Old Cemetery in Ipswich, where his gravestone still marks him out as a two-time Olympic champion.
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After Jay died, Dolly O’Brien spent two years in mourning. “A part of Dolly died with him,” her friend Suzy Knickerbocker explained. Still, Dolly had a queue of suitors waiting. The most serious of them was Clark Gable, who was still in mourning himself, for his wife Carole Lombard. They had a long affair, and Dolly then dumped him for a Bulgarian count, Jose Dorelis, who was “suave, sophisticated, and always wore a monocle, even when playing golf.” After a year’s marriage, she divorced Dorelis on grounds of cruelty, explaining to the press, “It is a result of an accumulation of little things. Separately, they were so unimportant that I can’t recall particulars. I think the underlying cause of our difficulties was that he seemed to resent, subconsciously perhaps, the fact that I knew so many people.” After that, she decided not to marry again, declaring, “Four times is enough!” She died on January 10, 1965. “She may have been a siren,” wrote Knickerbocker, “but she was nice to everyone, and she was never pompous or stuffy because she was never insecure.”
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Irene Fenwick remained married to Lionel Barrymore until her death from complications related to anorexia nervosa on Christmas Eve 1936. Mae Murray stayed married to the film director Bob Leonard for seven years. A year after their divorce, she got married again, this time to a dubious Georgian prince, David Mdivani, who also became her manager. She made the mistake of listening to him when he told her to quit her contract with MGM. Louis B. Mayer made sure she never worked in movies again. Her career stalled, and Mdivani burned through her earnings. They had a particularly ugly divorce. Still, she said, “once a star is always a star.” She took a job as a dancer at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe nightclub. In 1964 she was fou
nd, confused and destitute, wandering the streets of St. Louis. She told the police that she had forgotten the name of her hotel, and she refused to accept money for a ticket back to her hometown of LA because she insisted that she was trying to get to New York. After a spell in a Salvation Army home, she was eventually taken into the Motion Picture House in Woodland Hills, a retirement home for Hollywood professionals. She died there on March 23, 1965.
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The first “Wolf of Wall Street,” Clarence Dillon, died in 1979. He was ninety-six. By then he was, in the words of his company’s official history, “almost completely forgotten outside of the firm,” although he remained involved in its running right up to the very end of his life. Whenever new partners or vice presidents joined the firm, they would be summoned for a dinner at his estate so they could meet him for the first—and in most cases, only—time. His son, Douglas Dillon, served as the US ambassador to France under President Eisenhower and as the secretary of the Treasury under President Kennedy. After his father’s death, Douglas Dillon agreed to sell the controlling interest in the firm to the Bechtel Group.
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Godfrey Dewey never did become the president of the Lake Placid Club Foundation, though he never stopped fighting other board members for the position. And the 1932 Winter Olympics didn’t do much for the club. It floundered, and passed into receivership by the end of the decade. During the war, it was bought by the US Army, which turned it into a rest and recreation center for soldiers. Over the next three decades the club sold off most of its land, but stuck fast by its exclusionary practices, even in the face of an investigation by the state Commission Against Discrimination in 1958. Membership dwindled. Finally, in 1976, the clubhouse was made open, all year-round, to all members of the public, regardless of creed or class. It was a little too late to help: in 1977 it was converted to serve as a regular hotel. Dewey died in October of that year, at the age of ninety. Three years later, in 1980, Lake Placid became one of the few towns to be awarded the Olympics for a second time, a feat all the more astonishing when you consider just how small a community it is. The club finally closed in 2002.
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Irving Jaffee was elected to the United States’ skating hall of fame in 1940 and to the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1979. He died two years later. Werner Zahn spent the Second World War running his manufacturing firm, which produced the leather liners for military helmets. In 1944 a photograph of Zahn, in full military fig standing next to Adolf Hitler, appeared in the American newspapers, prompting a gleeful retelling of his Olympic exploits in the pages of the Lake Placid News. “With typical German arrogance, the Berliners rejected Billy Fiske’s offer to take them down the course to show them one bad turn. Zahn thereupon took his team down the run and at the curve which the Americans had indicated, the Heinies were hurtling through the air.” Zahn died in 1971, apparently after crashing his Bugatti sports car. He was eighty-one at the time. Hank Homburger died in Sacramento in 1950. The bob run he helped build on Mount Van Hoevenberg remained one of the fastest and most dangerous courses in the world even after they closed the first half mile: Max Houben died at Shady in 1949, and Sergio Zardini at Zig-Zag in 1966. A new run was built in time for the 1980 Winter Olympics. Reto Capadrutt died in 1939, after crashing his bob on the track at St. Moritz. After the war, René Fonjallaz was imprisoned for two years by the Swiss government after he was found guilty of collaborating with the Nazis. Hans Kilian became a hotelier. Christian Fischbacher became the Honorary Life President of the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club. “Suicide Freddie” McEvoy was credited with, among other things, “launching the fashion for flowered shirts for men” when he sold his own, right off his back, to an Argentine millionaire for two thousand dollars. He became a great friend of Errol Flynn and gave evidence on his behalf when he was accused of statutory rape. He drowned off the coast of Morocco when his 104-ton schooner was wrecked on the rocks near Cape Cantrin during a storm. According to reports, McEvoy actually made it to the shore but went back into the water to rescue his wife.
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Billy’s friend from Cambridge, Henry Longhurst, became a golf writer for the Times and spent the Second World War serving as an anti-aircraft gunner. He didn’t see much of Billy after university, but he thought of him every now and then. “A little incident at a Birmingham gun site will always stick in my memory,” he wrote. “Twice a week, two kindly ladies used to appear in a YMCA van and hoot encouragingly at the foot of our tower—whereupon the monkeys would down tools and rush down for their bag of nuts. They sold us chocolate and cakes and razor blades and tea and lent out books, and were a cheerful and highly acceptable link with the outside world. One day, as I sipped my tea at the counter, I noticed the crossed Union Jack and Stars and Stripes on the side of the van. Underneath were the words ‘Fiske memorial.’ Billy Fiske! My mind raced back over the years to the time when we used to travel almost daily the 21 miles from Cambridge to Mildenhall in his monstrous supercharged green Bentley, and to the days when his father had helped send a team of us to play golf in the United States . . . Now he lies buried in a Sussex churchyard, and a plaque in St. Paul’s commemorates our gratitude. I wondered what crisp comment this forthright little man would have come out with if he could have seen me drinking tea from the van that kept his memory alive.”
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Among the 601 pilots, Max Aitken, Archie Hope, Little Bill Clyde, Paddy Green, and Mouse Cleaver all survived the war. Cleaver regained some use of his eyes, after countless operations. Willie Rhodes-Moorhouse was shot down and killed during the Battle of Britain. Roger Bushell was executed by the Gestapo after orchestrating “the great escape” from the Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp. He inspired the character of Big X, played by Richard Attenborough in the film about the escape. Dr. Courtney Willey was awarded the Military Cross for his conduct at Tangmere on the day of the raid, August 16, 1940. The two nursing orderlies George Jones and Cyril Faulkner were both awarded the Military Medal for retrieving Billy from his burning plane.
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Billy Fiske received five posthumous decorations. The most notable of these was the oak leaf emblem he was awarded after he was mentioned in dispatches by Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding on September 29, 1940, for “gallant and distinguished services.” The Ashcroft Mountain resort project at Aspen was abandoned during the war, because, as T. J. Flynn explained, “frankly, after Billy was killed we had little heart for putting steel into ski lifts.” But there is, to this day, a Fiske cross-country ski trail in Ashcroft, renowned as one of the hardest in the area. As Lord Brabazon of Tara predicted it would, the memory of Billy Fiske lives on in the mountains. The best bobsledders in the United States still compete for the beautiful Billy Fiske Memorial Trophy, which is awarded each year to the winners of the four-man national championship. And in St. Moritz, a Billy Fiske Trophy is still awarded every year to the rider who records the fastest time in the Grand National on the Cresta Run.
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On September 23, 2002, the few surviving members of 601 Squadron gathered together at Boxgrove Priory with a group of friends, servicemen and servicewomen, and well-wishers, for a ceremony of thanksgiving for the life of Billy Fiske and to dedicate a new memorial headstone. The old, original stone is now kept in the memorial garden at RAF Tangmere. In 2008, sixty-eight years after Billy’s death, the 601 Squadron Old Comrades Association paid for the construction and installation of a new stained-glass window at Boxgrove. It was designed and made by the artist Mel Howse. It shows Billy’s Hurricane, with the Stars and Stripes trailing from one wing. When the sun catches it, the soft stone of this old English church is bathed in brilliant shades of red, white, and blue.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Speed Kings is, to borrow a phrase, a nonfiction novel. The characters are real, and the events are true. There are, of course, certain limitations on how accurate you can be when you’re telling a tale that took place so long ago and a
ll the protagonists are dead. Still, it is as faithful and precise as I was able to make it. The weather, for instance, is taken from contemporary newspaper reports. Conversations, where quoted, are taken from primary sources. I’ve used a certain degree of license when relating the motivations and moods of the main characters, although in several instances I was fortunate enough to have access to private diaries and letters, which gave me a good steer as to how they were feeling.
I have made extensive use of previously unpublished material from a large archive of Billy Fiske’s letters, diaries, photographs, and personal journals. These were drawn from four collections, the first of them owned by the family of Peggy Fiske: Charles, Setsuko, and Emi Zabalaga; the second of them belonging to Billy’s cousin, Newell Fiske Wagoner; the third to Skip Grieser; and the fourth to Richard Perkins. I was lucky enough to have access to two unpublished biographies of Billy: An American Original, by Richard Perkins, and Billy Fiske, by Skip Grieser. Plenty of the additional material is drawn from the extensive interviews with members of the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club, 601 Squadron, and other friends of Billy’s conducted by Perkins and Grieser. This book stands on their shoulders. I have also used previously unpublished material from the archives of Lake Placid Olympic Museum.
I’ve made extensive use, too, of innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, which are, in the main, cited in the text as and when they occur. Finally, I have drawn material and information from the following books: