Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (32 page)

Buddy Holly and the Crickets played four hard-driving sets that
lasted until well after midnight. Exhausted, their tidy blue blazers
soaked with sweat, the foursome gave up in the face of deafening
cheers and demands for more. It was over, and the crowd drifted back
to drinking and talking.

"That was fabulous. Holly is an unbelievable talent. They're
already talking about him doing a movie," said Diana, brushing back
her hair, which had become frazzled with enthusiasm. She grabbed
my arm. "Let's get out of here," she said.

"My place or yours?" I asked.

"Oh god, give it up," she laughed. "That line went out with Gable
and Lombard. Just follow me."

We left the party, still at full din, and raced back south on Laurel
Canyon and into a night that I will remember forever.

I GOT UP LATER THAN USUAL. JUANITA, THE MEXICAN
maid, offered me a cup of coffee while Diana slept. She admitted to
being an illegal, having crossed the border from Tijuana two years
earlier and hoping to seek citizenship once her English improved.
Aside from Diana, myself, and Juanita, the house was deserted.
Diana's parents were on vacation in Italy, which had opened the door
for my late-night arrival and a magical interlude with their daughter.
She was beyond my wildest dreams.

Seated beside the pool, with only the distant murmur of traffic on
busy Wilshire Boulevard to the south breaking the morning solitude,
I reflected on my good fortune. A struggling writer hooks up with a
Hollywood beauty for a night of insane passion. Then she eased onto
the patio, wearing only a terry cloth bathrobe and a wide smile.

"You were up early," she mused.

"You had me up all night," I said.

"So I noticed. How could I forget? You were wonderful," she said,
smiling.

"You weren't so bad yourself."

"Thanks. I guess you bring out the best in a girl."

"When you're a house guest, you have to do your best to please the
hostess," I said.

"Hump the hostess. I've heard about that," she laughed.

The conversation was going nowhere. Diana took a long sip of coffee and looked away. "So what now?" she asked.

"Back to work, I guess. Up to my garret and writing. What
about you?"

"I'm leaving today for New York. Gwen Verdon is opening in the
musical Damn Yankees. Lots of parties. It'll be the big hit of the
Broadway season."

"So maybe I'll see you when you get back."

"Sure. That'll be fun."

And so it ended. At least for the moment. Diana Logan was on the
move. Her life was an endless roundelay of parties, premieres, intercontinental travel, and elbow-rubbing with the rich and famous. Later
in the day, following a long and amusing lunch at Musso and Franks,
she dropped me back at Nick Ray's house, where I retrieved my MG.
From there it was a descent, socially, psychologically, and financially,
from Beverly Hills into the mundane world of Studio City, where reality greeted me like a stray dog.

As September arrived, humid and hot, the Yankees and the
Brooklyn Dodgers were headed for the World Series. The Dodgers,
who would soon shock the baseball world by defecting to Los
Angeles, had already rattled the establishment to its very foundations
in 1947 by hiring the first black player, the brilliant Jackie Robinson.
A supremely talented athlete, Robinson was destined to lead the
Dodgers to their first World Series victory later that October, beating the hated crosstown Yankees four games to three and thereby shaking
what was believed by many to be a curse against the beloved "Bums."

Sadly, the savagery in racing would not let up. A major sports car
race was run in early September on the Irish Dundrod circuit, a 7.4-
mile patchwork of narrow public roads closed off for competition.
Many of the same machines that had raced at Le Mans were entered;
the lethal Mercedes-Benz SLRs for Moss and Fangio, Hawthorn's
winning D-type Jaguar, Castellotti in his Ferrari, and other topranked European professionals. Also in the field was the usual collection of gentlemen amateurs, semi-professionals, and struggling
nobodies in manifestly slower cars.

News of the race was carried in two paragraphs in the Los Angeles
Herald Examiner under the headline, "Three Die in Irish Car Race."

A cluster of slower cars often ridiculed as "back-markers" were
heading down a straightaway toward a narrow cleft slicing through
peat banks and a blind drop-off called "Deer's Leap." Two of the
machines, driven by veterans Ken Wharton and Jim Mayer, had tried
to squeeze past a Mercedes-Benz gullwing coupe being driven lazily
by a French aristocrat and rank amateur, the Vicomte de Barry. As
they poured over the brow and into the trough, Mayer's Cooper was
squeezed by de Barry's Mercedes up an earthen bank. In a wink,
Mayer slammed into a concrete post on the roadside and his car disintegrated in a ball of fire. Two more cars, driven by the experienced
Peter Jopp and a rising British star, Bill Smith, sailed into the melee.
Somehow Jopp skated through the inferno, but poor Smith slammed
into the Mayer wreckage and was killed instantly. Later in the race,
which was dominated by Mercedes-Benz with Moss and John Fitch
teaming for the victory, another British amateur, Richard
Mainwaring, died in a single-car rollover.

The Dundrod circuit, such as it was, would never again stage a motor
race and would serve as a classic example of how a network of public
roads could no longer accommodate a field of modern, high-speed racing cars. Automobiles running 170 miles an hour on country lanes
lined with every conceivable roadside hazard simply could not be tolerated in the modern world. By the end of the decade, most major
automobile racing would be run exclusively on dedicated circuits
designed specifically for the sport.

But amid the increasing death and carnage on the world's racetracks, carmakers in Detroit and in the European industry continued
to build faster road cars. Not only were Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz,
Jaguar, Corvette, and Porsche creating two-seaters that would exceed
150 mph on the open road, but even fusty old Pontiac, the longmaligned "maiden aunt's" car from General Motors, was experiencing
a shot of engineering hormones. The last of the major domestic
brands to resist the shift to high-powered V-8 engines, Pontiac finally
relented with the introduction of the 200 hp "Strato-Streak V-8"

The Division's revival and its sale of 553,000 vehicles helped the
industry reach record-shattering sales of 9,188,571 vehicles for the
year. Total revenues exceeded $11 billion, with nine-hundred thousand
workers across the nation receiving paychecks from the automakers.

By that time, one in six American businesses was connected to the
auto industry. The powerful V-8s, with their advanced automatic
transmission, were added to flashy models offering a plethora of power
options. Svelte four-door hardtops with their wraparound windshields,
outrageous frostings of chrome, and lurid three-tone paint work, triggered what economists described as an "explosion" of business.

But universally ignored by the moguls in Detroit was a strange, eggshaped, wheezy-powered economy car from Germany. Designed prior
to World War II as a "people's car" for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, the
Volkswagen Beetle sold 25,000 units in the United States in 1955-a
paltry number when compared to the domestic industry's output. But
the Beetle was the triggering mechanism for an invasion of imported
automobiles that would, in twenty years, completely alter American
automobile commerce. In 1955, a total of 57,115 imported cars were sold in the United States. Four years later, that number would escalate
to 668,070 units and the floodgates would open in the heretofore
provincial and isolated Detroit automobile industry.

For the short term, however, flashy, over-the-top, mega-powered,
multi-colored "insolent chariots" would dominate the highways of
wildly optimistic America. Pontiac's headquarters staff, in its namesake Michigan city, was abuzz with the expected elevation of fortytwo year-old Semon "Bunky" Knudsen to the general managership of
the division. The son of General Motors powerhouse William "Big
Bill" Knudsen, "Bunky" was a certified car enthusiast who would
soon introduce the Pontiac Bonneville "Wide Tracks" with 300-plus
Tri-Power engines.

Meanwhile, Bill France's NASCAR circuit was becoming a major
battleground for the Detroit manufacturers. Pontiac joined the wars
with factory-sponsored teams competing against similar operations
from Ford, Chrysler, Oldsmobile, and Buick. The slogan "Win on
Sunday, sell on Monday" was becoming gospel in the sales offices of
the car companies. Hudson, which had dominated NASCAR in the
first years of the decade, was now aligned with Nash and headed for
bankruptcy in 1957. Its demise fortified the contention that racing
victories in fact could not substitute for saleable vehicles. No matter.
Enthusiasm for high-performance cars of all sizes, shapes, and prices
was the basic sales philosophy in the middle 1950's despite the endless news of catastrophic racing crashes here and abroad.

Diana Logan and the world of automobile racing drifted out of my
consciousness until late September, when she returned from New York
and we met for dinner and drinks at the Coach & Horses. She reported
that Warner Brothers was preparing a James Dean promotional tour
for the opening of Rebel without a Cause in October and that shooting
of Giant had wrapped in Texas. Because her parents were now back
home, a repeat of the beautiful night following the Rebel preview was
not possible, although we agreed to meet the following morning at Von Neumann's Competition Motors. Dean and Rolf Wutherich would be
preparing the Porsche 550 Spyder that "Jimmy," as she called him,
planned to enter at the Cal Club races scheduled for the Salinas road
course on the last weekend of the month.

We arrived late in the morning. Because of the buzz surrounding
both Dean and his new car, a security guard kept the small crowd of
enthusiasts at the curb. Thanks to Diana's friendship with Dean, we
were admitted into the shadowy confines of the race shop, where the
sharp odors of lubricants, solvents, and high-octane fuel permeated
the stark space. In the middle of the room sat a stubby silver two-seat
roadster bereft of top, windshield-wipers, roll-up windows, bumpers,
or other normal automotive amenities.