Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years Read online

  Other Books by Brock Yates

  Cannonball!: World's Greatest Outlaw Road Race

  The Hot Rod: Resurrection of a Legend

  Outlaw Machine

  Enzo Ferrari

  The Critical Path

  Indianapolis Five Hundred

  Racers and Drivers

  The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry

  Sunday Driver

  Dead in the Water

  The Great Drivers

  O N E FATAL S E A S O N I N RACING'S GLORY YEARS

  BROCK YATES

  To my beloved wife Pamela, for her inspiration and her passion for life.

  HISTORIANS TEND TO DISMISS THE FIFTIES AS A decade of insipid, pastel-colored lassitude. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. described it as a period of "repose" following the cataclysmic decades of the Depression-ridden thirties and the war-ravaged forties. Yet the nation was evidencing a latent restlessness, led in part by veterans returning from World War II and Korea who found the pallid innocence of daily life boring in the extreme. Coffeehouses in the major cities were filling with angry young men soon to be known as "beatniks" while outside, the streets thundered with newly formed motorcycle gangs like the Hells Angels and the dreaded "hot-rodders" and their wild sport of "drag racing." A new generation of musicians were combining country music, western swing, and black rhythm and blues into a new sound called rock and roll. A struggling Kentuckyraised musician named Bill Haley and his new group, the Comets, had recorded "Rock round the Clock" in 1952. It was a modest success until a year later, when it became the theme song for Blackboard Jungle, Hollywood's first attempt to deal with disaffected youth and the newly discovered threat of "juvenile delinquency."

  In 1955 James Dean and Rebel without a Cause shook the establishment along with a mass of young, flat-to-the-floor rock and roll musicians including Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Chuck Berry, and the immortal Elvis Presley.

  Meanwhile, Detroit had discovered new sources of power through revolutionary, large-displacement V-8 engines, which triggered a "horsepower race" and prompted critics like writer John Keats to brand the chrome-encrusted monsters "insolent chariots." At the same time, Europeans were invading the shores with new "sports cars" and a strange, beetle-shaped economy car called the Volkswagen. On the race tracks, high technology was producing cars capable of doing 180 miles an hour with little or no commensurate concern for spectator safety. Death and injury on an unprecedented scale would be the result.

  Four incidents shook the world of automobiles in the pivotal year of 1955. First came the shocking deaths of two of the world's greatest drivers at the peak of their powers-Italian former world champion Alberto Ascari and Indianapolis 500 superstar Bill Vukovich. Then came a gruesome disaster at Le Mans, France, when a Mercedes-Benz race car plunged into the crowded grandstands and killed at least eighty-eight people. Later that year, James Dean drove into immortality in what for a time was the world's most famous automobile crash.

  In attempting to chronicle these incidents and the worlds they emerged from, I have employed what is referred to as "faction," in which a first-person, unidentified narrator is a witness to much of the action in an attempt to more intimately link the reader to the real and events. In so doing, the narrator meets and has an affair with a woman who in actuality is an amalgam of the wealthy, privileged women who followed the sport of automobile racing during that period. Aside from this pair, the rest of the characters in the story are real people. The events are as factual as I could make them, notwithstanding the passage of time and the blurring of memories. In working on this project, I have been particularly grateful to the following individuals who, over the years, have offered first-person accounts of the events portrayed. They include Tom Medley, John Fitch, Rodger Ward, Jim Travers, David E. Davis, Jr., Jesse Alexander, Lee Raskin, Jim Sitz, Dan Rubin, Phil Hill, Denise McCluggage, Donald Davidson, Chris Economaki, L. Spencer Riggs, Phil McCray, and the late Hans Tanner. A special thanks to John Fitch and his autobiography, Adventure on Wheels-A Race Through Life.

  One note regarding poetic license. The character Peter Coltrin in chapters 9 and 10 did not actually arrive in Modena until 1957. However, Coltrin was a classic example of the many American journalists who went to Europe in the 1950s to immerse themselves in the world of high-speed automobiles and who became enamored of life around the Scuderia Ferrari. I have based my portrayal of Coltin's behavior and attitudes on numerous interviews with those who knew him.

  I hope that in a small way, he and the other vivid characters on the following pages will help to bring alive one of the most tumultuous and riveting periods in automotive history.

  Brock Yates

  Wyoming, New York

  I MET HIM IN A TUSSLE FOR THE BATHROOM. HE was built like a middleweight. Forearms like bowling pins. His face was spread with a toothy smile, but his eyes, ink-black beneath a heavy brow, showed little amusement. It was obvious that his good nature would remain only so long as I gave him first shot at the shower.

  We were on the third floor of a rooming house three blocks from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on the second day of May in 1953. I was sharing a room with my old high school pal Tom Medley, a photographer and sometime cartoonist for Hot Rod Magazine, a Los Angeles-based monthly that had been started seven years earlier by a struggling Hollywood press agent named Bob Petersen. I had come east with Medley, having just been mustered out of the army and still bearing shrapnel scars picked up on the Yalu River. He had an assign ment for the month at the place they called the "Brickyard." Unemployed as I was, I tagged along as his gopher, taking notes, running errands, and sharing what we considered to be the hefty room rate of twelve bucks a week.

  "Who's that tough guy who just beat me out of the bathroom?" I asked Medley, who was sorting out Speed Graphic camera equipment on his single bed.

  "Must be Vuke," he said.

  "Nuke? Bill Vukovich?"

  "That's him. Stays here every year with his wife."

  "The guy they call the `Mad Russian'? The guy who almost won the 500 last year? What the hell is he doing in a rooming house?" I asked. "I figured guys like him would stay downtown at a fancy hotel like the Claypool or the Riley."

  "Let me tell you something," said Medley, laying down his camera. "Everybody thinks that guys who race at Indy are rolling in dough. Forget it."

  "Come on," I protested. "This is big-time stuff."

  "Maybe for the car owners. They're mostly rich guys in it for the sport. They get 60 percent of the purse. The driver gets 40. And if the car breaks, he gets zilch."

  "I figured a guy like Vukovich would have money of his own."

  "He's a car mechanic by trade. Got a little shop in Fresno. Wife. She's here somewhere. Stays out of sight. Two kids. No insurance. If he's hurt, he lays there until he gets better."

  "It doesn't seem worth the risk."

  "It isn't to a normal human being. These guys aren't normal."

  "So the `Mad Russian' is really mad."

  "Hell, he isn't even Russian. Some press guy stuck him with that. Real name is Vucerovich. Czechoslovakian. Either way, don't mess with him."

  I didn't mess with Bill Vukovich, although during that month our little races to the only bathroom became a small joke. He always won, partly because he was quicker afoot than I, but mostly because it seemed important to him. Second was not a place where Bill Vukovich wanted to be.

  I first heard about Vukovich at an Indianapolis going-away party the racing fraternity traditionally held in late April at the Club La Rouge on V
entura Boulevard in West Los Angeles. It was a large, dark room lined with blue-upholstered vinyl booths and draped with red velvet curtains. The place was owned by a New Yorker named Shapiro whose idea of French decor no doubt came from second-rate Parisian brothels.

  A swing band tooted away in a corner while the local Indianapolis crowd-mechanics, accessory manufacturers, rail birds, hangers-on, girlfriends, wives, and a few drivers-drank and bragged about their chances at Indy. Johnny Parsons, a chiseled movie-star type who had won the Indy 500 in 1950, was there, as was last year's winner, the young, strapping Troy Ruttman. He had to be six feet three and was still wearing a sling after breaking his arm in a freak accident in a Midwestern sprint car race.

  Ruttman had won at Indianapolis driving for J. C. Agajanian, a big-time LA garbageman who strutted around the room in his omnipresent cowboy hat topping an immense Armenian hook nose. "Too bad Bill Vukovich isn't here," he said to Medley, placing a beringed paw on Tom's sloping shoulder. "I'd bet him a thousand bucks that we'll beat him again." Agajanian was choosing to forget that Vukovich had Ruttman doomed to a distant second until Vukovich's steering failed eight laps from the finish.

  "Jesus. Everybody in the place thinks they're going to win back there," I said to Medley as a waiter planted two more Seven Crown and 7-Ups-"Seven and Sevens" were all the rage-in front of us.

  "They think that way because they have to. If they didn't, they'd be in another line of work."

  Chet Miller strolled in with his wife, Gertrude. A few scattered claps and whoops. He was a small man, slightly hunched and nearly bald. But he could drive. He had been in sixteen 500-mile races at Indianapolis since 1928 and had logged over 5,000 miles at the big track-but had never won. Third place was his best. This year was his biggest shot. He was driving a Novi, the fiercest, fastest, meanest race car in the world: 500 steaming horsepower that could make or break a man. The best had tried and failed. Ralph Hepburn had paid with his life. The Novi brooked no mistakes, yet had carried Miller to a track record just short of 140 miles an hour.

  "If anybody's going to break 140, it'll be Miller," said Medley.

  "A little guy. Looks like my tailor. That is, if I could afford a tailor."

  "He's been doing this since the Depression. Fifty years old. Still hasn't made enough to retire. He runs a little upholstery shop for fancy cars over in Burbank. Business with the Hollywood types," said Medley. "But he can drive the shit out of those big Novis. Some say they're jinxed. Too much horsepower. Too radical. Faster than hell, but as evil.

  "These guys are nutty about jinxes. Green cars. Peanuts. Black cats, woman in the pits. The number thirteen. All taboo. You'd be surprised what guys carry in their cars for good luck: St. Christopher medals, baby shoes, rabbit's feet, coins. Weird stuff. But I guess you've gotta be a little weird to even get in one of those things."

  "What about that guy Vukovich?" I asked. "Sounds like he had it wrapped up until his steering broke."

  "He'll be tough. Good car. Vuke calls it a roadster because he sits down low, deep inside the cockpit. Frank Kurtis built the thing up in Glendale. Another one of those Eastern European types. Croatia or somewhere like that. The car owner is Howard Keck. Superior Oil. Big money. Got two of the best wrenches in the business. Jim Travers. They call him Crabby. Got an attitude. His buddy is Frank Coon. Smart asses. Call 'em the Rich Kids.

  "When Vuke first showed up at the Speedway two years ago, he had a shitbox car-an old stove entered by an Italian contractor from back in Ohio. A lot of other guys wouldn't get near it. A hoodoo car they called it. One that'd bite back and kill you. But when Vuke saw the thing for the first time he walked up to it and said, `I can drive that pig.'

  "He doesn't know the word fear. When he was a champion in the midgets, he'd run over the Russian army to win. Had some of his wildest battles with his own brother, Eli. No quarter. Eats nails and spits rust."

  But during the first few days at the boarding house, run by a family named Manifold-which was such a weird coincidence that Tom and I wondered if they'd changed their name just for the racing crowd- Vuke and I somehow got along. He was generally distant and indifferent to anybody in the press, but us being hot-rodders from California and army veterans, he treated Tom and I with easy good humor.

  Most mornings, the three of us walked the few blocks to busy Sixteenth Street and crossed into the immense Speedway. For most of its history, it had been paved with bricks- hence it's nickname (the Brickyard). But in the 1930s its owner, Eddie Rickenbacker, paved part of it with macadam.

  The place was scary. The long front straight, still brick, was bordered by yawning grandstands on the outside along Georgetown Road and on the inside by the pits and a ramshackle five-story pagodalike timing tower built before World War I. The straight was 4,000 feet long, to be exact, with the back straight the same length, connected by four corners, each a quarter mile of a mile long, with two so-called short chutes at either end. Some of the faster cars, like Miller's Novi, would knock on 180 miles an hour before they swooped into the curves. One mistake, and three-foot-thick cement walls lining the track awaited, whitewashed to cover the deadly scars that pocked their surfaces.

  It was on this ominous rectangle, which had consumed the lives of thirty-one men since opening in 1909, that guys like Miller and Vukovich were planning to average 140 miles an hour.

  The weather stayed steamy for the first week of practice. Not much was going on, other than a few cars sporadically taking practice laps and some rookies being given so-called driver's tests, which mainly meant keeping their cars off the walls. The whole issue of safety was a bit of a joke. The rules were what you might call rudimentary. "Crash helmets" were required, but they were flimsy leather lids developed for motorcycle racing in the 1930s. It was recommended that "fireproof" clothing be worn. This involved soaking a shirt or a pair of coveralls in a boric-acid-and-borax solution to inhibit firethe one component of the business that scared guys. Yet most of them, including the hot ones like Miller and Vukovich, drove in normal street clothes-usually a T-shirt during the hot months.

  T-shirts were a major fashion item among drivers. Most displayed a Mobil flying red horse and a "Mobil Oil" logo on the front, courtesy of Mike Petrovich's Mobil station out on Sixteenth. Another favorite was the T-shirt handed out at Mate's White Front Saloon, a racer's hangout across from the Speedway.

  As a final precaution, the Speedway rules stipulated that all dentures and false teeth be removed, lest they be swallowed in a crash.

  There was no mention of seat belts, which were optional. Most drivers wore them-surplus webbed types from World War II aircraftalthough it was known that most European drivers still refused to belt themselves in, figuring it was better to be thrown clear in case of a crash.

  Nobody had even considered using a seat belt until 1941, when a Cherokee Indian driver named Joie Chitwood found that his car bounced so violently on the brick surface of the Speedway that he couldn't keep his foot on the throttle. As a remedy, he tied himself into the cockpit with a rope. This caused major concern among the officials, who openly worried that the young driver would "wear the car" in the event of a rollover. Some star drivers, like the great Rex Mays, were ardently against such a device.

  Then came a 100-mile dirt track race at the Del Mar, California, horse track in late 1949. Mays was tossed from his spinning car and run over by a competitor. His death throes were featured in a shocking two-page spread in Life magazine. A year earlier, the national champion, Ted Horn, had died a similar death after spilling out of his car at the DuQuoin, Illinois, dirt track.

  Slowly, the reality that staying inside a crashing car was safer than being pitched out of it like a rag doll began to make sense. Yet nearly a decade would pass before seat belts became mandatory in racing cars.

  Practice went well for the first nine days, with only minor spins and some dented aluminum. Everybody was getting serious in preparation for the first big weekend of qualifying when Cliff Griffith, a twenty-seven-y
ear-old Hoosier, took out one of the new Kurtis-Kraft roadsters for some hot laps. He'd been running over 137 mph in his black number 24, sponsored by Bardahl, an engine performance additive.

  Tom and I were hanging around the little Associated Press hut in the garage area. The AP guys sat there, smoking cheap El Productos and playing gin rummy when a light bulb went on. The light bulb was connected to the network of caution lights around the track, and when it flashed, it usually meant a crash.

  Because the AP was really only there to record wrecks, when the lightbulb flashed, the reporters and photographers would drop their cards, grab their notebooks and Speed Graphics, and run like a bunch of firemen to the scene of the accident.

  "Griffith's into the wall in the first turn," somebody yelled. The mad rush. Tom had a little CZ single-cylinder motorcycle, and we piled on and skittered across the vast, manicured lawn of the infield to the scene.

  The sweet smell of fresh-mown grass and dandelions mingled with the smoky odor of fire issuing from Griffith's car.

  The ambulance and safety crews were there. Somebody was spraying carbon dioxide on the Bardahl Kurtis-Kraft, which was sitting, its front wheels splayed in odd directions, in the middle of the track. Fuel dripped out of its innards like the spoor from a wounded animal. Covered with white C02 powder, it looked more like a beached whale than a race car.

  Griffith was already in the ambulance-called "the crash wagon" by the racing guys-and about to be hauled off to Methodist Hospital. "He hit a ton," said a tall man with navy tattoos on his forearms holding a pair of stopwatches. He was one of the many crewmen stationed inside the first turn to clock speeds through the corner, which were clear indications of how quickly various drivers were negotiating the entire track. "He lost it. Got it sideways and couldn't get it back. Then it caught on fire. Cliff got out, but he looked like hell."

  He should have. Somehow Griffith, an ex-soldier like virtually every driver in the place, had managed to climb clear of the flaming car, despite having broken his pelvis. His Mobil Oil T-shirt was burned away in the fire.