The Right Places (31 page)

With all due respect to Mr. Shields, who was born in 1895, he may have been being just a bit nostalgic. And he does, after all, qualify his comment by saying that America's Cup yachtsmen have “generally” been gentlemen. But there are other observers of today's yachting scene who feel that being a great yachtsman takes just about what it take to be a great ambassador—lots and lots of money. As one Old Guard sailor puts it, “The America's Cup used to be a clubby thing, but look at it now. Everybody's into it—even Jews.” In other words, a bit of the flashy glitter of Fort Lauderdale has come to the stately shores of old Newport.

Individualists, meanwhile, have certainly not been in short supply. In Florida, after mouthwash heir Gerald B. Lambert had joined the list of unsuccessful aspirants for the honor of defending the Cup, he announced in a sour-grapes way that his new Palm Beach house would not face out to sea but would instead, face inland across Lake Worth.
His wife, on the other hand, was of the exactly opposite frame of mind. As those familiar with the area know, the sandbar which composes Palm Beach is divided by U.S. Highway A-1A, and it is technically not possible for a house to overlook both the ocean and the lake. The architect's solution was to build the house underground, under the highway, and today Mrs. Lambert never, never ventures from her side to look at the lake, and Mr. Lambert will not cross over to view the Atlantic. The room in the center of the house, over which the roadbed passes, is known as the music room.

Mad Captain Ahab would have understood the nuances of the America's Cup at a glance, and probably would have pursued the Cup with as much zeal as he pursued the whale. From the beginning, the America's Cup competition has been fraught with not only intrigue and derring-do but with non-sequiturs, inconsistencies, illogic, and sheer expensive—
very
expensive—zaniness. As one yachtsman puts it, “The thrill of the America's Cup competition is exactly like standing for hours in an icy shower, tearing up thousand-dollar bills, and watching them wash down the drain.” Though considered the ultimate “gentleman's sport,” the Cup race over its history has taken place in the atmosphere of a frontier free-for-all—a very well-dressed frontier free-for-all, to be sure.

“If the America's Cup is so famous,” as the late Gracie Allen might have asked, “how come no one's ever heard of it?” She would have had a point. The America's Cup was in the beginning a kind of club, a clique, an “in” thing to which both money and connections were required to gain entrée. It all began in 1851 when Queen Victoria, casting about for something for her young husband, Prince Albert, to do, suggested that Britain organize the first World's Fair. A yachting race was proposed as part of the fair, and it was suggested to Albert that an American yacht be invited to England to take part in the competition. There is every indication that the smug British assumed without hesitation that any American boat entered in such a race would have to lose. After all, the American boat would have to sail across the Atlantic Ocean—a debilitating trip in those days—just to enter the competition. But the invitation caught the fancy of John Cox Stevens of New York, founder and commodore of the then fledgling New York Yacht Club, and he accepted the British challenge.
Stevens quickly put together a syndicate and set about to build “a schooner yacht that would be the fastest afloat.” George Steers, a leading marine architect, was commissioned to design the boat, and on May 3, 1851, the vessel was christened
America
, and set sail for England from New York's East River.

By July, the schooner had made it to within sight of England, and she was met by the British cutter
Laverock
, which immediately tried to lure
America
into a test of speed. The skipper and crew of the U.S. yacht were reluctant, but game—and won this initial race hands down. After this somewhat humiliating experience, the British committee withdrew to its drafting rooms to consider its strategy; there was even some rather unsporting talk of calling off the match altogether. But at last, on August 22, an open regatta was scheduled around the Isle of Wight, with a trophy valued at one hundred guineas as the prize.

From the beginning, it had been clear to Skipper Browne of
America
that, because of her considerable weight, her best speeds could only be attained in heavy winds. Alas, on the morning of the twenty-second the winds were discouragingly light and, sailing against fourteen of England's finest yachts,
America
was the last to cross the starting line. Throughout the early part of the course,
America
lagged behind. An experimental “flying jib” was tried, but without success. Finally, Skipper Browne decided on a desperate course. As sailors know, often when there are no winds one or two miles out to sea, there will be brisk ones farther in, close to land. Browne decided to take
America
in, along the island coastline, into uncharted waters full of dangerous rocks and shoals. When the British yachts saw what
America
was up to, “they wondered that the Americans had lost their minds.” But Browne—his crew making desperate soundings as they went—found the winds he wanted, and
America
took the race, finishing a full eight minutes ahead of her nearest competitor. This has been called the most glorious moment in the history of yachting.

The United States crew sailed homeward with its hundred-guinea trophy—an odd-shaped, goosenecked ewer of silver with an improbable handle—which became, then, literally the
America
's Cup, since
America
had won it. Someone pointed out that the cup-pitcher was somewhat useless, since it contained no bottom, but the absence of a
proper bottom was put to good use when the cup was securely bolted into its display case at the New York Yacht Club on West Forty-fourth Street, where it stands to this day. In the years between, neither Britain nor any other nation has been able to wrest the Cup from its American defenders. The English, Scots, Canadians, Irish and Australians have all tried in vain to win it. In 1970, there was a French challenger.

To be sure, in the early years of the America's Cup race, the odds that the United States would retain the Cup were rather heavily weighted in our favor. Races were originally held in Lower New York Harbor, where a general familiarity with the winds, tides, and pattern of commercial harbor traffic were something of an asset to a skipper; foreign yachtsmen were slower to grasp such mechanical intricacies. Also, visiting skippers used to complain that the enthusiastic spectator fleet that turned out to watch the challenge managed, perhaps accidentally, to get in the way of the challenging craft. Hard feelings, never far from the surface from the beginning, were expressed on all sides. In 1870, the British schooner
Cambria
, owned by James Ashbury, whose father had invented the railway carriage, came to New York to try to gain back the Cup and was met by no fewer than twenty-three defending yachts. Needless to say, against this armada,
Cambria
's chances were small. Ashbury returned huffily to England and, a year later, came back with another challenger yacht,
Livonia
. This time, there were only four American defenders to meet him, but otherwise the race was hardly orthodox.
Livonia
lost her first two races to the American yacht
Columbia
, but won the third. The Americans then substituted
Sappho
for
Columbia
, and when
Sappho
won the next two races the Americans declared the match was over—our side having won four races out of seven. This was too much for Ashbury, who hurled insults and threatened lawsuits and, eventually, stalked home to England to devote himself to ground transportation. The fuss Ashbury kicked up, though, resulted in the rule that no challenger may be forced to race against more than one defending yacht.

In 1876, the Royal Canadian Yacht Club became the first non-British challenger for the Cup with
Countess of Dufferin
, from the Great Lakes. Needless to say,
Countess
was a freshwater yacht, and in the unwritten hierarchy of yachting snobbism there has always been the strong feeling that anyone who sails on fresh water is guilty of
doing something that is
infra dig
and is therefore probably not a gentleman. Consternation in the ranks of the New York Yacht Club! In any case, the American schooner
Madeleine
easily defeated
Countess of Dufferin
. Five years later, another freshwater boat—after an embarrassing trip down the old Erie Canal—suffered a similar defeat, and more rules were adopted. Among them was the rule that the challenging yacht must be constructed within the country it represents; a challenger, in other words, must be transported bodily from the country of challenge in order to compete, which makes it somewhat more costly to challenge than to defend the America's Cup. Also, it was ruled that any challenge, to be valid, had to come from an organized yacht club of a foreign country “having for its annual regatta an ocean water course on the sea or an arm of the sea.” This handily eliminated further challenges from upstart lakes.

The low point in the history of the America's Cup matches occurred in 1895. The autocratic Earl of Dunraven brought his
Valkyrie III
to New York to challenge the American
Defender. Defender
won the first race; and in the second,
Valkyrie III
fouled her and was disqualified. Just before the third race was to start,
Valkyrie III
withdrew from the contest, complaining of prejudicial interference from the members of the spectator fleet. Dunraven also accused the American boat of having added illegal ballast—to give it a longer waterline, which makes a sailboat go faster. Dunraven was attacked as a quitter, a poor sport, and no gentleman, and he returned to England licking his wounds. In an investigation that followed, the American
Defender
was found guilty of no wrongdoing, and, for his insult, the Earl of Dunraven was advised that his honorary membership in the New York Yacht Club had been canceled. The race went to the Americans, but nowhere was the shine of sportsmanship of purest ray serene.

For years, contenders for the America's Cup were required to conform to no particular size or design formula, and the competing yachts varied greatly. Elaborate handicaps had to be devised in order to keep contestants on a more or less equal basis. Then, in 1920, a Universal Rating Rule was adopted in order to make America's Cup yachts uniform. It was the first real attempt to bring into some sort of order the chaotic rules and rituals of the event. Today, the America's Cup is restricted to yachts of the 12-meter class—which sounds simple
enough, but actually means that the competing craft must conform to a complicated arithmetical formula. In the formula, L is the corrected length at approximately 7 inches above the waterline: D is the “girth difference,” or the remainder between a “chain measurement” from deck to deck under the keel at the widest point, and a “skin measurement,” which follows all the cross-sectional contours at the same point; SA stands for the mainsail plus 85 per cent of the fore triangle. Thus the emerging formula is:

Since the early days in Lower New York Bay, the America's Cup races have moved to Sandy Hook, to Sea Bright, New Jersey, and out to sea to the Ambrose Lightship, but in 1920 Newport, queen of the ocean resorts, was selected as the regular site of the match, and a standard course of 24.3 nautical miles was laid out.

Between 1920 and the 1970 challenge, there were only seven runnings of the America's Cup race. “After all,” as one yachtsman says, “we've never wanted to turn it into an annual thing like the Kentucky Derby.” True enough, and it is also important to remember that a yacht race, despite the size of the spectator fleet it attracts, is not really a spectator sport. It is not a sport designed for an audience. “Watching a yacht race is kind of like watching the grass grow,” one man says. There are all those sails, almost motionless on the horizon. Even with the strongest glasses, it is hard to determine which sail belongs to whom. The sails shift backward and forward against the afternoon light, and the “spectators” spend their time waving and calling hello to their friends, catching up on a summer's worth of gossip, and making sure there is plenty of ice and vodka. With a bit of doggerel called “A Tragic Day at the Races,” the Denniston L. Slaters of New York used to remind themselves of the terrible consequences during a regatta when “our trusty tub ran out of gin”:

The spinnaker she would not spin
.

How could she? We were out of gin …

Yacht racing has been a social sport. But it has been, most of all, an expensive one. In 1851,
America
cost around thirty-five thousand
dollars to build, sail, and win her hundred-guinea cup. In those days, this was a considerable sum of money. The America's Cup—and the little club and the mystique surrounding it—remained the bailiwick of only the world's richest and most privileged men, the George Schuylers, the Sir Thomas Liptons, the Earls of Dunraven, the Oliver Iselins, the Harold S. Vanderbilts. It was a far cry from J. Pierpont Morgan's celebrated comment about the cost of yachts: “If you have to ask, you can't afford one.” It was a case instead of “If you can afford one, you know who you are, along with the ten other men in the world who can afford one too.” The America's Cup race tried to keep itself a relic of Victorian England, a living museum piece, a last vestige and appurtenance of what the gentlemanly sporting life was like among the nineteenth-century aristocracy. There were even those who, from that point of view alone, argued that the event should be government-subsidized. But today, syndicates the size of million-dollar corporations are required to create an America's Cup contender—and, of the huge sums of money laid out for an America's Cup yacht, none of it is legitimately tax-deductible. Nor is it really possible for a syndicate to be a gentleman.