Speed Kings (9 page)

The
Standard Examiner
's readers didn't have long to wait for an answer. Dolly had tried to leave Julius four times, and on each occasion he had persuaded her to stay. In June 1924 she sailed for Paris, ostensibly to visit her mother. Paris just happened to be the divorce mill of Europe. Jay headed out after her on the very next ship. The two of them were alone together for two weeks before Julius finally caught up with them. He tracked them to an apartment on the Rue Spontini in the 16th arrondissement. He did not stop there long. After a short conversation, he realized that he had lost Dolly. The divorce was rushed through the French courts. Julius's legal counsel insisted that the decision was prompted only by the couple's “incompatibility,” that they had, in fact, already been separated for the best part of a year. In a sense that was true, but only because she had been having an affair with Jay, which the counsel strenuously denied. “No scandalous allegations were discussed,” he said. “Any statement that any third person was the cause of these proceedings is untrue.” He also scotched the widespread reports that Julius was going to give Dolly a five-million-dollar fortune as a final settlement. No one believed that either. Instead, Julius Fleischmann was made out to be a man who had martyred himself for love, a man so magnanimous he'd refused to stand in the way of her happiness. His generosity to her, it was said,
had ultimately extended to granting her the divorce she wanted, and on the grounds that he had abandoned her.

The Fleischmann scandal was one of the single biggest news stories in the United States that summer. It spread from Boston to Dallas to Miami, Chicago to San Diego to Seattle. The bare bones were laid out underneath bold headlines on the front pages, and the details picked over in long, lurid features inside. Jay was the “prince of poloists, the most graceful of Manhattan's masculine dancers, wielding his allurement over throbbing feminine hearts.” He was “a Greek god on a prancing steed,” the “Adonis of the polo field.”

Julius Fleischmann returned to New York, alone, on the RMS
Berengaria
. He retreated to the Lindens. On July 12, he faced the press, who had been hounding him ever since his return. He met with a pack of hacks as he came off the tennis court. As they fired questions at him, he listened in silence, idly brushed a little dust from his trousers, then started to speak. “The idea seems to be that I am a hero. I have no desire to be such a hero. Just because my wife is divorcing from me in Paris and I'm not contesting it, someone is trying to picture me as the injured person. That isn't fair—to the woman. Whatever my wife may do, she is my friend, and she is the loveliest woman I have met.” The divorce, he insisted, had come about simply because “a man and a woman may be devoted to one another and not be able to live together as man and wife, you know.” The story that he was going to give her five million dollars was, he said, “absolute bosh,” though “of course she has never lacked for anything, and she never will.”

Was it true, someone asked, that he knew Jay O'Brien, that Jay had been a guest here at the Lindens?

Julius smiled wistfully and leaned down to stroke the Sealyham terrier that was nagging at his feet. “Yes, it is true that he has been my guest here. He is a good player, and has played polo on my field. But it is foolish to suggest he is my friend.”

Who introduced Mrs. Fleischmann to Jay O'Brien? Was it yourself?

“Now, now, I am rather tired of hearing about Mr. O'Brien. Suppose we just forget about him.” And with that, he walked off, turning back only to urge the journalists to “have a glass of lemonade and a look around the stables.”

Just over a fortnight later, on July 29, Dolly and Jay announced their engagement. They traveled around France, to Deauville, Biarritz, and Monte Carlo, “in a style that seemed to show no reduction from her old one-million-dollar-a-year style.” They were married in Paris on October 20, in a small ceremony at a hall in the 16th arrondissement. Again, the only guests were the two witnesses, but
this time there were no reports that Jay had to use a gun to get his bride down the aisle.

As for Julius, he spent the rest of the summer with Edward, the Prince of Wales, who was first in line to the British throne and who had come over with the British polo team to play the United States for the International Cup. Fleischmann put them all up at the Lindens. No one mentioned that the mistress of the house was missing—because, as one paper put it, “a sportsman never would.” So it seemed at last, as summer eased into autumn, that life was starting to settle down. But there was still one final twist to come.

On February 5, 1925, Julius was in Miami, where he had just ordered the construction of a new winter house on the beachfront. He and his old friend Carl Fisher were supposed to play polo that afternoon at the Nautilus club, but Julius was unsure about whether he was up to it. Fisher talked him round over a long lunch. After fifteen minutes of the game, Julius was flagging. He took a break to catch his wind, then returned to the field with his teammates. He was laughing. He had just asked them all to join him for dinner on board his yacht that evening. Moments later Julius pulled up and dismounted. He sat on the grass while play went on around him. A friend came over. Julius asked him for a glass of water. Then he lay down flat on his back, put his hand over his chest, and died.

Julius was fifty-three. His heart attack, it was said, had been brought on by “the excitement and strenuousness of the match.” His death was the lead story in the
New York Times
and almost every other paper in the United States the next day. Inside, the
Times
ran a long article on the mood in Cincinnati, “a city in mourning.” Exhaustive reports related his philanthropic deeds, his political accomplishments, his achievements in business, and his glories in sport. And then, as soon as his funeral was over, the papers began to address the question that everyone was asking: What was going to happen to his sixty-million-dollar fortune?

The will was opened and read on February 12, and this, too, was front-page news. It was just a little more than seven months after Dolly and Julius had agreed to their divorce, and a little less than four since she had married Jay. A short time, to be sure, but more than enough for Julius to have had it completely rewritten. In it, he explained that he had intended to bequeath the near entirety of his fortune to her, but since she had left him, most of the money would instead be split between his two children. Almost everyone got a cut: the captain of his yacht, his valet, his chauffeur, his stable hands. His factory employees got twenty thousand shares in his company, valued at $82 each, to split between them, and
there was $200,000 for whichever Cincinnati charities his executors thought fit for it. Dolly got nothing. The date alongside his signature was August 29, 1924—nearly two months after their divorce.

Jay wasn't the romantic hero anymore. He was the man who had cost his wife something between a $35 million and a $50 million fortune, depending on who you listened to. Either way, it would have made her one of the richest women in the world. “Thirty-five million dollars!” exclaimed the
Seattle Daily Times
. “Divide that by the 200 pounds Mr. O'Brien weighs and you get the rate at which it now turns out the former Mrs. Fleischmann paid for him—$175,000 a pound. If she really thinks she got a bargain, she can truthfully say he is worth his weight in gold.” If only “she had resisted his impassioned beseeching a few months more,” she could have “had Jay O'Brien and the great fortune Mr. Fleischmann planned for her to have.”

“If only they had waited another six months!” agreed the
Pittsburgh Post
. “The interest on this sum at 6% is $8,000 per day,” it noted. “Every time Mrs. O'Brien gazes at her husband at the breakfast table, it must be apparent to her that within the next 24 hours he must deliver $8,000 worth of tenderness, gallantry, wit, sympathy, attention, amusement, or satisfaction of some sort, or she has made a bad bargain. Can he possibly be worth it?”

The answer, it seemed, was yes, he could. Jay and Dolly stayed out on the French Riviera, far away from the brouhaha. When one particularly persistent reporter finally found them, in Nice, Dolly simply told him, “I have heard all about it and I don't propose to do a thing. I am happy. And that is all that matters.”

Jay may not have been guilty of the crimes Mae Murray accused him of, but there was no doubt he was a rogue, a fast-living, freewheeling rake with a violent temper. But he had finally met his match. As his friend Park Benjamin said in 1926, “You never can tell about re-marriages. The beautiful Dolly and her dashing swain were, last I heard, living abroad in permanent and luxurious peace. They seem to have made a go of matrimony after all. It was a love match, pure and simple.” Dolly, said her friend Suzy Knickerbocker, “was very happy to be the ultimate female. Her beauty, her chic, her wit, her charm, her radiant sex appeal, her marvelous sense of humor, and, most importantly, her kindness to others.”

Jay had always been, as Julius said, “on the fringes of society.” Now he was down in the gossip columns as “a perpetual host” on the south coast of France, fast friends with the Prince of Wales—a situation that, one reporter wrote,
“must cause the Queen of England to stay awake many a night worrying about her son.” In those days Prince Edward was, his assistant private secretary wrote, engaged in “an unbridled pursuit of wine and women, and of whatever selfish whim occupied him.” That same secretary thought he was “going rapidly to the devil” and “would soon become no fit wearer of the British Crown.” His friendship with Jay and Dolly—the three of them were often seen out playing golf together—did nothing to assuage these worries. What tainted the prince in British papers, though, only burnished Jay and Dolly in US ones. Now that they were friends with royalty, their only appearances in the American papers were in the reports of what the fashionable set was wearing in Europe. Here was Dolly “on the beach at Lido, Venice, garbed in an up to the minute beach costume,” or at “a social function for the Florida Club in Paris wearing a cornflower blue lace gown.”

“Love,” Knickerbocker wrote, “was the most important thing in the world to Dolly. And she and Jay, beautiful creatures, were dazzling and brilliant and golden. And very much in love and very happy.” They were “soon the toasts of Paris and London and the darlings of the south of France.” And, of course, of St. Moritz, which was, after all, where everyone who was anyone on the Riviera went to play in the winter.

Billy's new crew in their Satan kit, St. Moritz, 1928.

A CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS

B
illy Fiske arrived in St. Moritz for the first time in January 1927. He was still a boy, only fifteen, but his puppyish face had filled out a little, making him more handsome, and his slim, wiry body was hidden beneath the thick white polo-necks and cricket sweaters he wore to keep out the cold. His solo trip to South America had toughened him up, which was apparent in his gait. He walked with his shoulders back and his head up. But he was still too young to make much of an impression on the social scene in the grand ballrooms and great dining halls of the Palace and the Kulm. He left that to his parents and his sister, Peggy.

At that age Billy didn't drink or smoke. His father had offered both his children a thousand dollars each if they would refrain from either vice until they were twenty-one. Peggy decided she'd rather look “sophisticated and grown-up” than rich, so she took up both, but Billy collected the money. All that really meant, though, was that he did a good job of hiding his vices from his family. Peggy said that Billy could be “just as happy on orange juice at parties” when everyone else was drinking champagne. And he never smoked. But while he didn't depend on drink or drugs for a good time, he certainly wasn't averse to a binge, especially when he had something to celebrate. He just liked to measure them out against spells of clean living. He was reckless with other pleasures: he always loved to gamble, and he would, in time, become an insatiable womanizer. But all that was a few years away. At this stage of his life, speed was the thing.

St. Moritz provided him with plenty of opportunities to slake that thirst, even at the age of fifteen. Billy took his first trip down the St. Moritz bob run in January 1927, driving a little two-seater known as a boblet. The course started up by the Kulm. It ran into “the Snake,” a chicane that buffeted the sled from side to side—“a horrible piece of architecture,” as one of the riders called it. From there it went on into Sunny Corner, a twelve-foot-high bank. This was where the spectators gathered. There was a telephone station here, and the times for the sled were shouted out through a megaphone as it shot past. Tom Webster, a journalist who rode the course once for a feature article, reckoned, “If nobody goes over the top here then the spectators rush to the railway company and ask for their money back.” They had come, after all, to see a crash. Then came Horseshoe. “All (except the spectators) shut their eyes here. At Horseshoe, a good driver needed to turn late, to gain height as easily and effortlessly as is possible. You need to be brave enough to let the sled run right up to the lip before pulling it back down out of the bend.” From there, the sled went into Devil's Dyke. “I don't remember going through that,” Webster wrote. “Think we leaped it.” Then it was on into the straight, under the railway bridge. “This,” Webster continued, “is supposed to last five seconds but not one member of the crew would be surprised if he found himself in a different climate” by the time it was over. Officially, Webster noted, the course was just under a mile. “But I thought it was never going to finish.”

Billy was a natural. On January 11 he completed a boblet run in 1:47.5, the single fastest time of the season. He loved the sport so much that when Martineau purchased five new bobsleds for the club from a manufacturer in Davos, Billy persuaded his father to buy one for him. He was lucky: “In the gay old days,” Martineau wrote, “few people could afford to buy their own bobs.” Back then the bobs all had their own names. In fact, they would be listed first in the results; the steerer's name came second, out of courtesy, so it seemed as though it was the bob that won the race. “Every bob thereby acquired a character of its own,” Martineau wrote. “They became personalized. And when it changed hands, one had the impression of a race-horse being bought-and-sold.” Billy called his “Satan.” His good friend Jennison Heaton bought another and named it “Hell.” The names led one Englishman, often beaten by both of them, to wonder how “any one was expected to beat such a diabolical combination as that.”

You would scarcely recognize Satan as a sled today. It looked a little like a camp bed with a steering wheel where the pillow ought to be. It was a long, flat
frame spanned by a series of metal bars with two long rails on either side and metal runners underneath. There was a brake at the back, though it was considered a sin to use it during the run, since its metal teeth cut up the ice. And at the front, flat down, parallel to the ground, was the little wheel. Back then they were still bobbing in the ventre à terre style: the pilot got on first and lay along the sled, his feet pointing toward the brake; the second rider lay between the pilot's legs, his chest overlapping with the pilot's back; the third was flat on top of the second, a little farther back; and so on, right back to the brake. Only the steerer saw the course; the crew behind him buried their faces in the backs of the person in front and weren't supposed to glance left or right for even a fraction of a second during the run. They were, in effect, a deadweight, remaining motionless until the steerer called out “Left!” or “Right!”—when they would all lean over to that side. The only exception was the brake, who was allowed to get up on his knees before the corners and bob back and forth to help the sled build up speed. Leaning meant that the sled took the corner without any loss of speed, and made it easier to steer. And good bobbing, that back-and-forth motion, made a real difference to the speed of the sled. Ventre à terre was pretty much foolproof in that while a bad or rookie crew wouldn't help the sled speed along, they couldn't cause it to crash so long as they made sure to just stay still. This meant that the onus was entirely on the steerer and, to a much lesser extent, the brakeman.

That first year, the logbook of the St. Moritz Bobsleigh Club singled out two qualities in Billy's driving: “W. Fiske,” as they called him then, was an “intrepid” and “hard-working” steerer. And here we get the first two clues about what made him such a great driver.

Every bob course in the world is different. Each has its own personality. There aren't really any hard-and-fast rules about, for instance, how to handle a corner, because each corner on each track is different from every other one. Some demand that you take the sled in low, some that you take it in high, some that you hold the line around the bend, some that you snap out of it before you've finished the corner. At the elite level—the level Billy was working at—the driver can control the position of the sled to within a margin of around three inches. And those three inches matter. Because every bob course has a perfect line. Steve Holcomb, the 2010 Olympic gold medalist in the four-man bob and the greatest pilot in the United States today, explains: “You could draw a line on the track. Follow it, and that would be the absolute fastest way down. And if you hit it the entire way, with a good push, you would destroy the track record. The catch is that you are never on that line; you are always changing. You can go into the first
corner, the second, the third, maybe even six, seven, and still be on that perfect line. But to hit it the entire way down? That happens once, twice, in your entire career. I can think of runs where I was like, ‘Man, that was it.' But, always, you can go back over it in your mind and be like, ‘Ah, I missed these little points.' That perfect line is what everybody strives for.”

The more familiar a pilot is with the course, the better he knows that line. So when Billy is described as “hard-working,” what that means is that he spent a lot of time learning the ins, outs, and twists of the course, calculating, to the nearest inch, where the sled needed to be at any one particular moment on the track. For an amateur, he practiced a lot. And that work ethic and quest for precision would come to characterize his racing. Billy's friends recalled that later in his life, when he was racing a skeleton sled on the Cresta Run, he had a little party trick that proved how well he knew the course. He would stand, blindfolded, in the bar at the Palace Hotel, with a stopwatch. He would call “Start!” and click the watch, then count off the corners one by one, describing his run down the course yard by yard. And when he called “Finish!” and stopped the watch, the times for his imaginary runs would invariably be within a few tenths of his real ones.

Hard work wasn't the half of it. The second quality Billy had is captured in that word “intrepid.” Remember, a company of men who rode bobsleds for kicks singled him out for being particularly brave. They had all done the run themselves—all had their own scrapes and crashes. They were all brave. But the best were braver still. As Steve Holcomb explains: “There are a number of drivers who are great drivers, they are passionate, they love the sport, they know what they are doing. But they don't want to take that risk. They don't want to push it. I raced with a guy who was a phenomenal driver, but he was more worried about going over the edge than he was about winning. He would rather get down safely and successfully than actually push the speed of the sled. And you really have to push the speed. Because you know that somebody else out there—the guys you are racing against—has the guts to push it hard. So to be the best, you don't just need the skill to drive the sled; you need to be prepared to take the risks. And that's tough.” When Holcomb talks about “pushing it,” what he means is having the patience to wait, to let the sled run right up to the top of the bank before you steer it back; to let it veer right over on to its side, to the very point when it could be about to tip over, before you pull it around. All part of that never-ending quest to find the perfect line.

Of course Billy wasn't the only talented pilot in town. There were the
Heaton brothers, for a start, especially the younger pair, his good friends Jack and Jennison. The three of them would run around town together, along with Billy's sister, Peggy. She and Jennison were falling in love. Then there were the British, the best of them Martineau's young son Henry, and Cecil Pim, a captain in the Scots Guards. The Belgian Ernest Casimir-Lambert, whom everyone called “Henri,” was so brave they thought him a fool. “He was always a source of tremendous danger to the other riders,” remembered Martineau. He recalled the day when Lambert arrived, “late as usual,” for a competition on the Cresta Run sled track. The organizer, Frank Curzon, was so angry that as Lambert set off on his run, he shouted out, “You ought to go down on your knees!” Lambert didn't realize it was a figure of speech and set off crouching on his sled. “Frank was in a terrible state,” Martineau wrote. “He was calling out, ‘He's going to kill himself! He's going to kill himself!'” And then there was the “hot-blooded Argentine” Arturo Gramajo, the man who had unmasked Mademoiselle Krasnowski at that SMBC prize ceremony. “[He was] one of a number of Argentinians who frequented Paris and St. Moritz during those years,” said Martineau. “They were all good sportsmen, as well as having the necessary cash; consequently they were popular wherever they went.”

The blue riband race of the season, the one they all wanted to win, was the Bobsleigh Derby Cup. The prize was a silver cup that had been presented to the club by John Jacob Astor back in 1899—a gift from one of the richest men in the world, thirteen years before he went down with the
Titanic
. It went to whoever could put together the four fastest runs over two days of competition. Few gave Billy, the new boy, much of a chance. But he was confident. He had five yellow polo-neck sweaters made up for his team, each with “Satan” stitched across the front. His father had faith too. The club used to run what they called a “Calcutta auction,” with bidders competing to buy the rights to the racers in a sweepstake. Billy's father paid 550 francs to get his son's ticket for the derby.

And he collected on it. Billy didn't just win the Derby Cup; he took another prize, too, the Olavegoya Cup, for the single fastest run over the course of the two days. And two days later he won more silverware, the St. Leger Trophy. So in his very first few weeks as a bobsledder, the fifteen-year-old Billy Fiske won three trophies, one of them the single most prestigious pot on offer in St. Moritz.

Billy's victories barely made the papers in either Britain or the United States, which seems surprising: you'd think that even by the more reserved standards of the day, a fifteen-year-old winning the biggest bobsled race of the season in St. Moritz might have merited more than a passing mention. But Billy
didn't make much of a fuss about his age. In fact, few of his fellow racers knew just how young he was. And besides, by then St. Moritz was only one of a series of Swiss bobsled tracks, and while the races there may have been more prestigious than some of the others simply by dint of their history, the papers now took reports from the rival runs at Davos and Interlaken. The SMBC was particularly worried about the development of a run in nearby Celerina, “which, as far as one can see, will sound the death knell of the SMBC.” Martineau considered it “an ominous black cloud in the sky which, if it bursts, will mean the flooding and disappearance of the SMBC run.” The St. Moritz run was aging, and seemed a little slow and decrepit in comparison with some of these newer courses at rival resorts, which were thought to provide better sport. St. Moritz needed a major event, a race that would fix the world's focus on the town, give the SMBC the opportunity to reestablish its course as the premier bob run in Switzerland and its sledders the opportunity to prove themselves the best in the world.

“And then,” noted the club log at the end of 1927, “floating out of the sky, came the Winter Olympics.”

—

I
f it seems odd that the club and its community could be caught short by an event the size of the Winter Olympics, understand that in the 1920s it was a far smaller and less significant competition than the one we know today. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the International Olympic Committee, was never keen on the idea of the Winter Olympics. Figure skating had been included in the summer Olympic program in 1908, and again in 1920, when it was joined by ice hockey, but de Coubertin was skeptical about whether winter sports were worth including. “Modern industry has managed to create artificial ice,” he wrote in 1909, “but it is hardly reasonable to expect that the time will come when a perfected form of chemistry will be able to place durable, long-lasting snow on hillsides. Thus skating is the only one of the three great winter sports that might be included within the Olympic enclosure if necessary. It would be better to adopt a solution in which these special sports are grouped together in winter, under the title ‘Northern Games.'” Which is what had happened: the Nordic Games for winter sports were founded in 1901. Though nominally international, the Nordic Games were always hosted in Stockholm, with the exception of a single edition in Oslo, and were contested largely by Scandinavian athletes. The upshot was that Norway, Sweden, and Finland, three of the leading winter sports nations, were, like de Coubertin, never keen
on the idea of a Winter Olympics, since they felt it would be trespassing on their turf.