Speed Kings (27 page)

THE FINAL

T
hursday, February 4, dawned bright and cool. Most woke early; some never went to sleep. Workmen had been up all night making the final preparations for the opening ceremony, fixing flags and sprigs of evergreen up around the bleachers and the grandstands at the stadium. They had flooded the skating track, and the ice had set hard, with neither a scratch nor a blemish. It caught in the sun and shone steel blue.

On the far side of Mirror Lake, in his room at the Lake Placid Club, Billy Fiske lay awake in his bed. He had a lot on his mind. Gus Kirby, the man from the United States Olympic Committee, had asked him to carry the US flag in the parade at the opening ceremony. Billy didn't much care for ceremonies but of course he had agreed, not least because he wanted to spite Godfrey Dewey, who thought the honor should go to a local man. Billy's team uniform was laid out on a chair on the other side of the room. Red socks, blue woolen trousers, and a sweater of the same hue, but with a red polo-neck. Then a white Hudson Bay blanket jacket with red buttons, and a white cap. Billy looked good in it. He had a breakfast of coffee and eggs. Or “cofi” and “egs” as the menu insisted on calling them.

The stadium was full by 9:30 a.m. The tickets for the opening ceremony were the most expensive of the Games: five dollars for a seat in the grandstands, three dollars for the bleachers, and two dollars for anyone who wanted to stand. By five to the hour, Governor Roosevelt had taken his spot on the stage. The
band welcomed him with “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” As with all Roosevelt's public appearances, it was intricately orchestrated to ensure that as few people as possible saw the extent of his disability. He wore his leg braces beneath his trousers, and when he walked into the stadium, he came with his cane in one hand and his other clasped tight to the arm of his press secretary. The photographers had been told they weren't allowed to take pictures while he was making his way to the stands, so they were waiting for him in the stadium, along with the newsreel cameramen and radio and print journalists. At 10 a.m., he was in his place, and the athletes started to file in through the gates.

First came the Austrians in red and white, then the Belgians in blue ski suits, and then the Canadians in red and white, “red maple leaves standing out strikingly against their white coats.” Czechoslovakia was next, followed by Finland, France, and Germany, all in red. In the middle of the pack was Werner Zahn, his arm in a bright white sling. They had asked him to carry the flag, but he had only just got out of his hospital bed and wasn't strong enough. Then came the four female figure skaters from Great Britain, all in long fur coats: Joan Dix, Megan Taylor, Mollie Phillips, and Cecilia Colledge, only eleven and the youngest athlete at the Games. Phillips walked at the front, the first woman in Olympic history to carry her country's flag at an opening ceremony. Next in the parade were the Italians, the Japanese, and the Norwegians in royal blue, except for the figure skater Sonja Henie, already famous from her feats at St. Moritz: she was wearing a bright burnt-orange coat. The Poles, in maroon, and the Swedes and Swiss, both in blue and yellow, followed them, and then, at last, Billy Fiske appeared at the head of the American team, a column ninety-six strong. They marched with a precision that betrayed the fact that many of them had once served in the military.

Billy led the team round, then paused in front of Roosevelt's box, to dip the flag in his honor. He stayed in that spot as Godfrey Dewey rose to give a speech in that odd, squeaky voice of his.

“Four years ago,” he began, “Lake Placid was studying the II Olympic Winter Games at St. Moritz. Three years ago Lake Placid was organizing the necessary co-operation of state and county with town and village and with the whole Adirondack region to secure the award of the III Olympic Winter Games. Since the award of the Games to Lake Placid by the International Olympic Committee in April 1929, this indispensable co-operation has been splendidly manifested in the face of the most difficult conditions, both national and international, in the whole history of the modern Olympic Games. Today Lake Placid in the
Adirondacks in New York state stands ready as a worthy host to the most distinguisht winter sportsmen of the whole world.”

Billy stood there, on ceremony, holding the US flag, staring up at Dewey. The speech irritated him. Everything about the man irritated him. It seemed to him that Dewey had done every damn thing to stop him from defending his Olympic title. He had stopped him from practicing, banned him from the trials, and warned the bobsled committee over and again that they shouldn't pick him. “America, the country of sportsmen!” Billy wrote in his diary. “What rot.”

Dewey prosed on some more, all in praise of his own efforts, before, eventually, he ceded the podium to Roosevelt, who rose uneasily to his feet, cleared his throat, and then welcomed the athletes on behalf of the United States. It was a short speech—shorter, for sure, than Dewey's introduction had been. “It is an evidence of the age of our modern civilization that the Olympics date back nearly 2,800 years,” Roosevelt said, “and although in those early days they did not have the Winter Games, we in these later days, through the Winter Games, are trying to carry out the ideals of sport that were instituted in the Olympiads. Throughout the history of these Games, athletes have come to participate in them, seeking no recognition other than the honor received in simple medals. But that medal has come to typify the very best athlete in all nations in honor as well as in health.” He paused, then came to his point. “I wish in these later days that the Olympic ideals of 2,800 years ago could have been carried out in one further part. In those days it was the custom every four years, no matter what war was in progress, to cease all obligations of armies during the period of the Games. Can those early Olympic ideals be revived throughout the world so we can contribute in larger measure?” Admirable as his words were, they stirred some controversy. The Olympic rostrum wasn't supposed to be a place for political statements. The
New York Times
ran his speech in full, under the headline “Roosevelt Invokes an Olympic Peace.”

“And so,” Roosevelt finished, “we are glad to welcome to this nation, our sister nations, as guests of the American people and of the State of New York, and I proclaim open the III Olympic Winter Games.”

A bugle blew, a cannon fired, and a great white Olympic flag with its five rings was pulled to the top of the tallest flagpole, where it immediately snapped straight out in the stiff breeze blowing down from the mountains. The Games were open.

Within half an hour, the first event was under way: the 500-meter speed skating sprint on the ice rink. A canny piece of scheduling, this, since the
favorite was a local boy, Jack Shea, whose family ran the grocery market on Main Street. Shea had learned to skate on Mirror Lake, “only a little time after he had learned to walk,” as the local paper put it. He won in 43.4 seconds, just a lick shy of the world record. Billy stayed at the rink to watch the second event, too, since it involved Irv Jaffee, his old friend from St. Moritz. This time round, to Jaffee's relief, the speed skating was being done in the American style, with all the riders starting in a bunch and racing each other rather than the clock. The Europeans were as unhappy about the unfamiliar rules as the Americans had been four years earlier. Just as he had back then, Jaffee won the race with a late sprint, starting from fifth place on the final bend and finishing in first. This time, no one took his gold medal away from him.

With two gold medals won on the very first day, the American team—athletes and journalists—had plenty to celebrate. Question was, where to do it? The Lake Placid Club was as arid as the desert. But Jay O'Brien knew the way to the nearest oasis. On Saranac Avenue, a short way out of town, stood the Hotel Belmont, a grand old three-story building. Until now it had only ever been open in the summer. But the owner, John Schatz, had just had it done up for the Olympics. The chief new feature was the speakeasy he'd built in the basement.

Westbrook Pegler christened it the “Cellar Athletic Club” since, from that first night on, it was where you'd find most of the athletes. Except for Billy. He was in no mood for drinking. Hubert Stevens remembered that “Billy was a very quiet man. He didn't party much. After practice was over each day he would just go back to his room at the Lake Placid Club.” But what Stevens didn't know was just why Billy was keeping to himself. He was tired of the press, who, he said, were making his life “a perfect hell” with all their “ballyhoo” over the bobsledding. He was sick of Dewey, his hypocrisy and pedantry. And he was wary of Hank Homburger and the other local drivers. He had heard about the five thousand dollars that the local riders had suggested they bet on Billy's head, wagering that he wouldn't finish in the top three. They looked on him and Jay as just a couple of expatriate playboys. And on top of all that, he was serious about winning the gold. That, he figured, would be the way to show the locals, and to stick it to Dewey. So yes, early to bed. There would be time to drink and dance when it was all over. Till then, he had more important business to attend to. As he put it in his diary, “He who laughs last . . .”

So Billy holed up at the Lake Placid Club in the evenings. He wasn't alone. He spent a lot of time talking with a new friend, Jimmy Walker, the mayor of New York. Walker was a friend of Jay's from way back in their Broadway days,
when they had both run with “Ace” Rothstein. They were both from old Irish-American stock. And Walker had a reputation as a playboy. The press called him “Beau James” and teased him for swanning around town in a top hat and swallowtail coat. Walker had been a songwriter once, but these days he was, as
New York
magazine put it much later, “the public servant who favored short workdays and long afternoons at Yankee Stadium, who was loath to miss a big prizefight or a Broadway premiere, who left his wife and Greenwich Village apartment for a chorus girl and a suite at the Ritz-Carlton.”

Walker had his own private booth in the secret cellar at the 21 Club, the most famous of the New York speakeasies. The 21 had a “disappearing” bar, which, at the flick of a switch, would tip all the liquor into a chute that ran down into sewers, just in case the prohibition agents came calling. Walker was once stuck in the cellar there for five hours while a raid went on up above. He grew so sick of the inconvenience that he got on a telephone, called the city police, and had them ticket and tow away all the federal vehicles. As popular as acts like that made him with a certain section of the electorate, he was also, at that particular time, fighting for his political career. He had been on the make ever since he first came to office, in 1926. In the early years no one minded. He was a popular mayor, not least because he legalized boxing and allowed theaters to open on Sundays. It was only after the crash that his career collapsed. He was denounced by the archbishop of New York, who suggested that the Depression was divine retribution for Walker's immoral mayoralty. He also became ensnared in the Hofstadter Committee investigations into corruption in the New York police department and court circuit. Long story short, when one of the chief witnesses, Vivian Gordon, was murdered, her body dumped in a park, public pressure grew so great that Roosevelt decided Walker would have to answer to Samuel Seabury, the Hofstadter Committee's presiding judge.

Billy took to Jimmy right away. “What I like about him is the fact that he is a fighting Irishman,” Billy wrote. “A more charming, amusing, or really nice man it would be hard to find.” He admitted, however, that his family was “disgusted” at their close acquaintance. In the evenings, when everyone else was out at the Cellar Athletic Club, Billy and Jimmy would be back at the Lake Placid Club. They listened to Seabury's speeches on the radio and heard the judge call out Walker for his corruption and rail against Tammany Hall. “Jimmy kept up a running commentary,” Billy wrote. “And with the facts he made Seabury look the biggest fool in the world. ‘Let him make a few more speeches like that and he'll condemn himself,' said Jimmy.” Walker told Billy that he planned to run
as vice president on the Democratic ticket in 1933, “depending on his health, and his adversaries.” As it turned out, Walker would be drummed out of office within six months.

Billy lost himself talking politics with his new friend to take his mind off that mile and a half of mountainside on the edge of town. Because the more he thought about the run, the more it scared him. He had made the mistake of reading one of Pegler's articles. The bobsledders, Pegler wrote, “are that rare kind who know nothing about fear. They cannot understand it any better than a cat understands loyalty.” But of course Billy knew fear. They all did. Even Jay was starting to crack. Practice on the bob track had continued in the days following the opening ceremony, and there had been another crash on Saturday. The Belgian four-man sled tipped over on Whiteface after the front right runner had caught on the rim of the curve. The driver, Max Houben, had managed to wrench the sled back into the bowl of the corner, where it capsized. Now he and the brake, Louis van Hege, were with the others in the hospital. Jay had said then that “the course is too fast to be safe.” They had called off practice for the day. Anyone, Billy thought, who says he doesn't feel fear is either a fool or a liar.

The first bobsledding competition was scheduled for the first Sunday of the Games. But that morning a blizzard hit. Snow fell for twelve hours straight. In those conditions, the only athletes able to compete were the ice hockey players, who now had a roof over their heads, and the dog-sled racers, who went out whatever the weather. The Suicide Club took the day off. Or rather all but four of them did. Billy gathered his team together at the club and took them out to the mountain. He had realized that Dewey was right about one thing. The style they were using at Lake Placid, where all four riders were sitting up, was a lot different than the one they had used at St. Moritz, where the riders were lying down. With the crews sitting up, the sled had a higher center of gravity. A single mistake, one man leaning the wrong way at the wrong time, wouldn't just slow the sled but could also throw the whole thing over. The crew had to be trained, to be of any use.