Limit, The (18 page)

This was true on every team, but Ferrari seemed to put his drivers at particular risk by fostering competitive pressures, a kind of sibling rivalry. He did so by lining up more drivers than cars, then leaving the drivers to fight for a place in the pecking order. To him, an insecure driver was a fast driver.

Newspaper headlines announcing the death of handsome young drivers—and the collateral damage in grandstands—only added to the brand's mystique. The drivers themselves never talked about danger, except obliquely and with darkest humor. For example, the rugged Targa Florio in Sicily contained a curve so perilous that Peter Collins called it the “back to England in a box turn.” When friends said, “See you next week” to Stirling Moss, his standard response was, “Well, I hope so.”

Moss preferred the sport perilous because it set the drivers apart in a nobility of daring. More than skill, it was danger that made them elite. “Without danger there wouldn't be any point to it, really,” Moss said. “It would just be a game that anyone could play. It would be like climbing a mountain with a net ready to catch you if you fell. What's the point to that?”
Though it should be noted that Moss faced the dark uncertainties with a protective parcel of superstitions: he carried a Saint Christopher medal and a horseshoe on board, and he tried to avoid racing on the thirteenth day of the month.

Moss and the other British drivers carried themselves with the studied indifference of RAF pilots half a generation older. They lived by the adage, “swallow your emotions or they will swallow you.” In newspaper and magazine interviews they voiced the same platitudes about peril concentrating one's mind on the here and now. “The very uncertainty sharpens the appetite,” said Colin Chapman, a driver who later founded Lotus, the British race car manufacturer. “The danger makes the value of life all the more appreciable.”

Phil Hill was having dinner with a group of drivers one night when he noticed a restaurant window shaking menacingly in a strong wind. “The racers were the first ones to flee the window before it shattered,” he said. “They are always the first ones to flee an accident on the track. They don't want to die. They just want the possibility of death. It is their way of reaffirming their life. Without racing they don't feel they are really alive. Of course this is not rational.”

They went through mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they were impervious. Otherwise they would be unable to compete. When a driver died his friends explained his accident as the result of faulty judgment or freakish mishap. The victim
got his
, as the drivers said, by missing a gearshift or hitting a patch of oil at an awkward moment. The survivors were blithely confident it would never happen to them. Death would visit the next man.

Hill, the sober-minded technocrat, knew that was not
necessarily true. Too many possibilities lay beyond their control. He was acutely aware that racing was a form of Russian roulette, and it showed in his perpetually grim-faced demeanor. Hill had mostly outgrown his ulcers, but he still slept poorly before races, if at all. A thousand dark possibilities crowded his mind as he tossed and turned in hotels all over the world. He paced the pits, smoking and wiping and rewiping his goggles and biting his lower lip as he worked out mechanical problems in the back of his mind. Tetchy and highly strung, he glared at anyone who disturbed the unsmiling rhythm of his pre-race jitters. “I've been described as anxious in four or five languages,” he said.

Denise McCluggage described Hill as a “Hamlet with goggles and gloves.” She once told him that he was better suited to working as the second oboist for the Cincinnati Symphony.

“Exactly,” Hill answered. “But I can't play the oboe.”

Drivers were not supposed to reveal their anguish. It spoiled their image as the 1950s equivalent of Spitfire pilots. Hill broke the taboo by expressing his anxiety without restraint. “A racer should have, as they say in German, his nerves close to his skin,” von Trips said. “Phil has that quality, but he can't seem to control his nerves as well as he should. He seems so tense, so concentrated.”

Hill openly voiced his safety concerns to the press, which sometimes antagonized his Ferrari handlers. “Pheel, you 'ave spoke too much,” race manager Romolo Tavoni would tell him while menacingly gripping a button on Hill's polo shirt. To the British drivers, in particular, Hill's fretting seemed unmanly and out of keeping with the stoic code. Mike Hawthorn ridiculed Hill's hand-wringing, calling him “Auntie.” But when it came time to drive home from dinner or drinks, Hawthorn wanted Hill behind the wheel.

In Hill's view, the chivalric tradition of bravery and bloody sacrifice that von Trips espoused was obsolete. It was, in Hill's opinion, better suited to von Trips' ancestors than to Ferrari drivers of the 1950s. Hill believed himself to be a more accurate reflection of what he called “the age of anxiety.” In the Cold War era of spy satellites and H-bombs, speed had acquired an intimation of dread. In keeping with the paranoid mood of the day, Hill was both obsessed with and unsettled by the quest for speed.

“I had been to many races and many funerals,” Hill said, “and a battle was mounting within me. There was an inner drive to race, to excel; but there was also a tremendous drive to stay alive and in one piece. . . Some drivers never seem to entertain that conflict. I think Wolfgang von Trips was one of them. He was tremendously turned on by everything about racing, the driving, the adoration. His inner image of himself seemed to be as a racing hero.”

When the beat reporters gathered over wine, they often talked about Hill as if his psyche were a riddle to be solved. How could a man so doom-conscious get in the car and drive unflinchingly through heat and rain? Behind the wheel Hill's apprehension mysteriously vanished and he turned into a racing robot coldly calculating time, distance, and engine performance. He had learned by now to use his nervous adrenaline to quicken his reflexes and heighten his sense of movement and maneuvering—a faculty known today as situational awareness. “I have no lack of confidence,” Hill said, “when I have the wheel in my hands.”

As long as Hill was in the car he was in control and blissfully free of the awkward social interactions of everyday life. “All doubts, all anxieties, all memories of past painful struggles fade away before the magic of this occasional purity,” he wrote in
Sports Illustrated
, referring to morning practice laps on an empty track, “and I am at one with the car.” It was as if there were two Phil Hills—one a neurotic hand-wringer, the other a hard-minded hero—each strangely disconnected from the other.

If Hill was happiest behind the wheel, von Trips was the opposite. He looked forward to the moment when the struggle ended and he could step from the car with a wan smile of relief. Like a mountaineer descending from the peaks, he was glad to have faced down the danger. “Happiness lies in mastery,” he said. “It's not the thrill of speed that makes us happy, but the fact that we go through 120 or 180 kilometers an hour and return home.”

Both men found it hard to face the danger, but they found it harder to quit. Racing was all-consuming, and therefore addictive. “Once the game has become life,” Ken Purdy wrote in 1962, “and life has become a vestibule, unimagined courage is required to renounce the game—because renunciation is suicide.”

Peril had its compensations. Drivers generally had their run of the well-tanned camp followers who sat pretty in the pits in capri pants and floppy hats. Before he met Louise King, Peter Collins' personal car was a Ford Zephyr with a bumper sticker on its rear fender that read, “I like girls!” That might qualify as one of history's great understatements. Collins was a dashing figure, and before settling down with King he used his charm to full advantage. For example, while Stirling Moss gave a speech from the winner's podium at the 1955 Targa Florio in Sicily, Collins disappeared under the stands with Miss Targa Florio.

Like Collins, Stirling Moss was as famous for womanizing as racing. “I got more column inches by taking out crumpet than winning races,” he later said. Moss met his first wife after spotting her in the crowd at Le Mans. He waved and signaled
for her to meet him in the pits. He got engaged to his second wife, Katie Molson, a Canadian beer heiress, shortly after Collins married Louise King. At an engagement party at the Savoy Hotel in London, Moss told guests, “Of course, I realize this is a foolish time to get engaged because Peter Collins has just got married and has released such a flood of crumpet onto the market, and now I can't do anything about it.”

When Mike Hawthorn's car broke down at the Monte Carlo Grand Prix he spotted a blonde watching from a hotel window. He asked her for a glass of water. When she went to fetch it he climbed in the window.

With women, as with most things, Hill was the cranky voice of dissent. He all but vowed celibacy, saying those who live close to the limit should not live close to women. “A wife would worry too much about my driving,” he told the
Times
of London. “I'll drive and worry alone.”

He had grown up in a marital war zone, and he did not want relationship problems clouding his mind. Besides, he found it easier to drive if he knew that he could die with a clear conscience. “Look at them,” he once told a friend, nodding toward a handful of wives holding stopwatches and binoculars in the pits. “Don't they know that their husbands are going to die?”

Hill sometimes found it hard to keep his distance, given the pack of determined women that followed the drivers from city to city. A woman with designs on him once shrewdly arranged to attend a pre-race party in Monte Carlo with neither money nor a means of returning to her hotel. She knew that Hill had brought a car, and she coyly asked if he could help her. “Sure,” he said, and he reached into his pocket. “Here's 50 francs for a taxi.”

He spent so much time with Denise McCluggage, the gamine
American correspondent, that acquaintances assumed they were involved. But Hill denied it. His abstinence was so conspicuous that it was suspected he might be gay, though that was not the case. Hill was often seen with a pretty French schoolteacher named Michele Albert, though she, like McCluggage, never officially became a girlfriend, at least not publicly. “When I'm away from the track, I forget about racing,” von Trips said. “But Phil, he just hangs around Modena. He has no home over here. He just hangs around hotels all the time. It must make him sick.”

Von Trips was never one to languish in a hotel. He had not entirely outgrown his sickly childhood, but workouts and weightlifting gave him a robust, barrel-chested presence. No racer of the time looked more handsome in a polo shirt and goggles, his cheeks colored by sun and smudged with exhaust. Hearts fluttered. Women gravitated to him, and he returned their flirtations in gentlemanly fashion. “If he saw a girl he liked he really zeroed in on her,” Louise King said. “He was good-looking, glamorous, and of course, he was a count.”

One evening Louise King was having drinks on the aft deck of a yacht docked in Monte Carlo with von Trips and a couple of girls. With barely a parting word von Trips slipped off with a redhead named Zoe. “He always went off to some quiet place with them to make out,” King said. “He always kept them away from us.”

Von Trips had a wealth of affairs, none of them serious. As if to capture everything about his new life—as if to savor it with a survivor's relish—he traveled with a 16mm movie camera. Viewed years later, his homemade movies are a montage of preposterously beautiful women in bathing suits and ski outfits, all of them laughing and turning fond eyes on the cameraman.

He scampered to evade groupies as the Beatles would a few years later. Girls drove uninvited into Burg Hemmersbach's forecourt and asked for him. The boldest knocked on his hotel room door, and they were surprised when he did not invite them in. On at least one occasion a woman claimed an attachment that probably did not exist. Salome Ringling, the granddaughter of circus producer Henry Ringling, worked as a translator with Maserati in the mid-1950s. She was slyly nicknamed “gearbox,” ostensibly for her willingness to hold tools for the mechanics as they worked. Years later, after she had moved home to Wisconsin, she claimed to have been engaged to von Trips, but there is no record of it.

No driver bedded more women than Hill's and von Trips' teammate Alfonso de Portago, a Spanish nobleman with black eyes and a thick head of curls that cascaded over his ears and collar. He kept a spacious apartment on Avenue Foch, one of the finest addresses in Paris, with a Ferrari parked out front. The apartment was practically empty except for stacks of Latin music albums and silver bowls won in bobsledding, polo, and steeplechase. He stayed out all night in bars and nightclubs, chain-smoking and, oddly enough, drinking only milk. Reporters gravitated to him because he could be relied on to speak poetically in a near whisper about the meaning of racing and risk. “Adventure is like religion,” he said, “and in religion you have to have faith.”

In reaction against his silken upbringing, Portago wore dirty shoes, a black leather jacket, and an unbuttoned black Lacoste polo shirt. He had an inexplicable reluctance to bathe and shaved every four or five days. Hill called him “a Spanish James Dean without some of the brooding.”

Portago was rarely seen without his sidekick, Edmund
Nelson, a quiet light-heavyweight boxer and former merchant marine who had worked as an elevator operator at the Plaza Hotel in New York when Portago lived there with his mother. Nelson taught Portago sparring and introduced him to the novels of Jack Kerouac, which might account for his willfully disheveled appearance and roughneck posture.

Not that it dampened his appeal. “That man was so busy with women,” Louise King said, “I don't know how he had any time for racing.”

Portago's wife, an American showgirl named Carroll McDaniel, eventually tired of his public affairs, most notably with model Dorian Leigh, and decamped to an apartment at 1030 Fifth Avenue with their two children. Portago then took up with B-list actress Linda Christian, the ex-wife of actor Tyrone Power. She appeared in the last of Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan movies and a 1954 television adaptation of the Ian Fleming novel
Casino Royale
, which makes her the original Bond girl. She told friends she would marry Portago as soon as he got divorced, but as a Catholic he would never divorce.