Limit, The (3 page)

In fact, his future was altogether unclear. His friends Richie Ginther and George Hearst were drafted in advance of the Korean War, but the military rejected Hill because of his sinus condition. So he worked for a while on the opposite end of the war, as a nose-gun assembler at the Douglas Aircraft plant in Santa Monica. His father wanted him to attend Union College,
but Hill defied him by enrolling at the University of Southern California where he halfheartedly studied business administration, a subject Helen urged because she expected him to someday handle her estate.

He joined Kappa Sigma fraternity, attended sorority parties, played folk songs on a guitar, and cruised fraternity row in Helen's Pierce-Arrow. He did everything expected of a pledge, but his heart was not in it. Try as he might, he could not summon his father's gusto for hobnobbing and backslapping. Even after moving into the frat house he would slip away a few nights a week to stay in the bedroom he kept at Helen's house. He had long since abandoned his parents' home.

Hill called his college career “a bust.” He was a lackluster student and an indifferent frat brother, but he could not come up with an alternative. In the late 1940s California was bursting with opportunities, but he was adrift. “From the time I was a little boy, people would ask me: ‘What do you want to be, Phil?' I couldn't tell them,” he said. It didn't help that his brother Jerry was the classic California boy—blond, self-assured, athletic, and popular with girls.

Hill listened hard for a calling, but heard only pistons. Car mechanics was the one subject that stirred him, but grease monkey did not seem a plausible occupation. Mechanics were dropouts. It was considered a job of last resort.

Nonetheless, Hill jumped when a job presented itself. In June 1947, after Hill's second year of college, Hearst referred him to a mechanic named Rudy Sumpter who needed help in the pit crew of a midget car owned by Marvin Edwards, a manufacturer of automotive springs. Hill abruptly left school and
began working for Sumpter. “My parents were apprehensive,” he said, “but they didn't seem to get through to me.”

From the college quadrangle to the midget pits: It's hard to imagine a more radical change of scene. The midgets were stumpy little scaled-down cars built strictly for racing and usually sponsored by garages and gas stations. They were high-powered but relatively light, no more than 850 pounds, which made them entertainingly dangerous. Hill had a close-up view as the cars skidded around dirt tracks in a movable scrum, thumping off each other and smacking the fence—all the while kicking dirt into the grandstands and belching cumulus clouds of blue smoke. The drivers sat upright, exposed to flying clumps of hard sod. They pulled into the pits with fractures, burns, busted noses, and cracked teeth.

Midget racing played to beery blue-collar crowds. It was a cross between demolition derby and NASCAR—an ugly distant cousin of the European road racing Hill revered. During the warm-up laps at Gilmore Stadium in West Hollywood, an 18,000-seat arena built specifically for midget racing, a designated bad guy named Dominic “Pee Wee” Distarce (“Mussolini's gift to midget racing”) gave fans the finger. A jolly chorus of boos rained down. Vendors hawked beer and peanuts. The air was filled with exhaust plumes and a cinderous odor.

A rousing former pilot named Gib Lilly drove the Edwards midget. He raced twice a week, at the Rose Bowl on Tuesdays and the Orange Show Speedway on Thursdays, consistently finishing near the top. In the grimy midget demimonde, he was a hero. Hill was a junior mechanic, known as a “stooge,” but he learned how to keep a car in winning form. He worked
in the pits, a half-covered concrete command post stinking of Castrol oil and stocked with spare tires and tools laid out like an operating theater. When Lilly pulled in, Hill went to work—refueling, repairing, banging off worn tires and wrestling on fresh ones. “I was just a mechanic's helper, but I had an identity,” he said. “I had a real label which I could hang onto at last.”

Not long after Hill began working for Sumpter, Hearst asked him to pick up his new car. Hill drove down Wilshire Boulevard to the dealership and saw Hearst's MG-TC, a small, boxy British two-seat roadster, parked at the curb. The MG was a favorite of GIs stationed in England, and it touched off a sports car fad when they began bringing them home at the end of the war. The MG was flashy and fast—effortlessly reaching 70 mph on empty roads. It looked like a car Cary Grant might drive.

In the 1940s European sports cars were so rare that American owners honked and waved to one another. Hill had seen MGs in magazines, but this was his first intimate look at its round tachometer mounted on a curvy walnut-veneer dashboard, red leather upholstery, swoopy fenders, carpets, and wire wheels. “I could see so much classic beauty in that car,” he said.

After inspecting the MG, Hill sold his Ford, borrowed money from his aunt and assorted friends, and bought his own MG for a little more than $2,000 from International Motors, a dealership next to Grauman's Chinese Theater on Sunset Boulevard. It was his first taste of European engineering, a revelation of handling and lively pickup. By comparison “the typical American car of the day was a wallowing pig. The sports car had—how should I put it?—an air of truth about it.”

Hill was working at the midget tracks two nights a week, but he now added a day job as a mechanic and salesman at International Motors, which sold MGs, Jaguars, and Mercedes to business leaders and movie stars. Their customers included Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, and Gary Cooper. He shared the showroom with Bernard Cahier, the son of a French general and a member of the Resistance who had enrolled at UCLA and married a sorority girl. Cahier's gravelly French accent gave him a big advantage, particularly selling the two MG models, TCs and TDs, that were popular with American women. “You wanna Tissy or a Tiddy?” was his standard opening line.

Compared to the flamboyant Cahier, Hill was an unexceptional salesman, in part because of his unhinged enthusiasm for esoteric mechanical matters. “I'd stop to talk at length about cars and certain drivers and about the advantage of one kind of suspension over another with almost every customer who came in the place,” he said.

His jittery, overkeen manner might have vexed the management if Hill had not soon distinguished himself as a driver. In January 1948 he drove his MG in his first real competition, a rally at Palos Verdes, where he finished just behind his boss, an established amateur driver named Louis Van Dyke.

In 1949 a mix of foreign cars—MGs, BMWs, Morris Minors, Simcas, Fiats, and Austins—began racing on a half-mile paved oval called the Carrell Speedway in Gardena. Hill cleaned up. “Attendance was heavy for a while,” he said. “People came out for the comical aspect, to see those funny little wire-wheeled cars being stuffed into the fences. I avoided the fences and on a good night I could earn $400 to $500.”

California sports car culture was evolving fast and Hill
moved with it. He traded his MG for a newer model with rounder lines and a stiffer, sturdier suspension (the same model that James Dean bought a few years later after earning a part in
East of Eden).
He hopped it up with tricks learned in the dirty midget pits: he installed a supercharger and modified the powerplant, lowered the compression ratio and used larger inlet valves. He knew that worn tires got better traction with more air pressure, and he figured out how to adjust the leaf springs to keep pressure on the inside rear wheel. He finished it off with a red-and-black paint job with white stripes along the doors.

“Certain guys had the touch, and Phil was one of them,” said John Lamm, a friend of Hill's and a columnist for
Road & Track.
“He knew how to get that something extra out of an engine. It's an instinct.”

When there was no official race Hill and his friends organized their own illicit rallies. As the sun set over the Pacific, half a dozen would meet at Saugus, twenty miles north of the San Fernando Valley, and take off down dark canyon roads at one-minute intervals. They considered it safer at night because headlights alerted them to oncoming cars. They called their fifty-mile loop the Cento Miglia in imitation of the Mille Miglia, a thousand-mile road race in Italy. Afterwards they bragged and joked and drank beer at a roadhouse restaurant.

With the MG's windshield folded flat, the breeze whipped over the long hood, ruffling Hill's dark hair and tearing his eyes. He felt as if he shared a nervous system with the car. He knew its moods and how to spur it on by dancing lightly on clutch and brake.

Hill still considered himself a misfit, an incorrigible car wonk, but he was unknowingly in tune with a restless undercurrent.
Like many Americans coming of age between the atomic bomb and the Beatles, he turned to acceleration as an antidote to restive estrangement. “I mean, man, whither goest thou?” Jack Kerouac would write in
On the Road
a few years later. “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” Like the Kerouac hero Dean Moriarty, Hill was alive to the road without much thought of where it might lead.

Hill began dating a receptionist from International Motors. After work they drove his MG to Hollywood or San Bernardino for the twilight midget races. She sat in the stands eating hot dogs and talking with friends while he repaired midgets down in the pits. “I loved those days,” Hill later recalled. “I don't really know why except that it was such a simple life. I was totally devoted to it and totally interested in it.”

The midget team was now racing seven nights a week. When a driver broke his leg, Sumpter asked Hill to replace him in a field of forty cars. He spun badly on the first lap of a qualifying race, then settled down as he got the hang of sliding around the dirt oval. The trick was to ride in what drivers called the groove, a line that cuts low on turns and wide on straightaways. He qualified for the finals “even though they told me I looked like a cow walking across an icy pond.”

Hill drove well enough to earn a regular spot, though the assignment soured when he performed poorly in a stretch of races, finishing in the back of the pack at Gilmore Stadium and smacking the fence at San Bernardino. Hill blamed his washout on poor mechanics. Sumpter disagreed. Hill quit.

Midget racing was a uniquely American sport taken up by tough young men from blue-collar neighborhoods. The fastest advanced up the ranks to the Indianapolis 500, the pinnacle of
American driving. Hill might have followed that path, but he found oval racing a deadening merry-go-round. California had not yet built an extensive network of roads. Its racing was consequently modeled on horse tracks. Cars skidded counterclockwise around the same quarter mile lap after lap, their wheels perpetually swung leftward. European races, by contrast, were run on a car's natural surroundings—long loops of closed-off public roads with a rich variety of rises and dips, twists and hairpins. As sports cars grew in popularity, the divide deepened. Hill's friends from the midget ranks dismissed European sports car drivers as effete “tea baggers.” The tea baggers, in turn, mocked the midget drivers as “circle burners.”

Hill was more connoisseur than combatant. He far preferred the continental aesthetics of speed—the contours of a tapered car body, a finely calibrated engine working its way up the gears like musical scales, a coupe braking at just the right moment as it swung through a curve shaded by overhanging trees.

From his greasy perch in the repair shop of International Motors, he could imagine no happier future than tuning and repairing European cars. With that ambition in mind, he persuaded Van Dyke to send him abroad to study mechanics with the great British carmakers. In the late fall of 1949 he traveled by freighter from Boston to Southampton, England, and then by train to Leamington Spa, a short drive from the Jaguar plant. Hill was met at the train station by a man with the implausible name of Lofty England, who as team manager would lead Jaguar to five victories at Le Mans.

Hill spent a cold winter in a series of boardinghouses while he performed monthlong apprenticeships at Jaguar, SU Carburetors, Rolls-Royce, and MG. It was a harsh change from Santa
Monica. In 1949 England was still scraping by on rations. Hill ate mutton and drank lukewarm beer with a coarse-talking crew of Cockney mechanics. “He found himself in this stunningly shabby and war-battered country where seagulls were coughing into the fog and people went about their business looking pale and broken,” said Doug Nye, author of more than fifty books on motor racing. “It was as different from California as a place could be.”

While training at Rolls-Royce, Hill stayed in a drafty Kew hostelry where guests deposited sixpence into an electric radiator for twenty minutes of heat. On his first night he noticed that one of the two heating coils was disconnected, so he screwed it back on. The next night he found that the landlady had disconnected it again. “Every day was this ritual of reattaching it before bed,” he said, “and detaching it in the morning so [the landlady] wouldn't start augmenting my room rent.”

His intimate encounters with sports car history made up for the rude accommodations. The monthlong training sessions were like a master class, and they allowed him to bask in greatness. He was photographed behind the wheel of “Old Number One,” the first MG ever produced, and he met Goldie Gardner, an elaborately mustachioed old driver who held twenty-two international speed records. In May, toward the end of his stay, Hill rented a room on a farm in Billingshurst, south of London. Spring had come to West Sussex, and the countryside glowed emerald green. The fields carried the rich scent of springtime. That month may have been the only time that Hill enjoyed a peace of the spirit. “During that final month down there, before I headed home, I swore that I would never let myself get tense or nervous again,” he said. “The area had an
Old World calm that settled into your bones. I'd roam the hills, walking the country, which was really beautiful at that time of year—and nothing seemed important enough to worry over.”