Limit, The (19 page)

The drivers called him “Fon,” but his full name was Alfonso Antonio Vicente Eduardo Angel Blas Francisco de Borja Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, Grandee of Spain, 17th Marquis de Portago. His ancestors fought off the Moorish invaders and sailed to the New World in search of El Dorado, the legendary city of gold. One of them, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, was shipwrecked near Tampa Bay, Florida, in 1528 and led a small group of survivors on an eight-year march through wilderness and swamp to a Spanish outpost in Mexico. His father was a loyalist hero in the Spanish Civil War. He died on the polo field.

The twenty-eight-year-old marquis tried to outdo them all by pursuing a series of high-risk sports, which he intended to use as a steppingstone to a political career. At seventeen, Portago won a $500 bet by flying a borrowed plane under a causeway bridge near Palm Beach, Florida. He rode steeplechase and played polo, but gave them up when he gained weight from dining in Paris restaurants. He took only two or three practice runs in Switzerland before buying a $1,000 bobsled, recruiting his cousins from Madrid, and entering the 1956 Winter Olympics at Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy. Veteran bobsledders dismissed him as a dilettante, but he came within 0.17 seconds of winning a bronze medal.

His first taste of car racing was in the 1953 Carrera Panamericana, where he acted as Luigi Chinetti's navigator. “It spins so slowly,” he said after their car slid off the road and crashed. “You have plenty of time to think.” Three years later Portago joined the Grand Prix circuit, where his driving was all acceleration. The front of his car was dented from nudging rivals out of the way at 130 mph. He was too brash and impetuous to observe the subtle etiquette that allowed experienced drivers to maneuver without causing accidents. The press called him “fast and fearless Fon” and “the madcap Marquis.”

He seemed unequipped for the rigors of the sport. Before one of his first races he and his co-driver took apart the gear mechanisms housed in the transmission. When they reassembled it they unaccountably found fifty-four nuts and screws left over. Portago's best friend on the circuit was Harry Schell, one of the most cautious drivers. Schell predicted that Portago would not live to be thirty. Portago answered that he expected to win the World Championship by thirty and move on to politics by
thirty-five. “The trouble with life is that it's too short,” he said. “But I'm certainly not going to spend the rest of my life driving race cars.”

His impatience showed. Portago was known as a driver who tried to overtake in curves where overtaking was impossible, and he pushed cars beyond their capabilities, like a rider who punishes a reluctant horse. He consequently burned out or broke one car after another. But he had suffered only one serious accident: in 1955 he skidded on a patch of oil at Silverstone, England. He was thrown from the car at 90 mph and broke his leg.

Fangio and some of the older drivers tried to coach him. They showed him what line to take into a curve and how to throw the car into a drift turn. But they came away convinced that he was not listening—not really listening, anyway. He was too impatient to learn the nuanced inner game. He was in too much of a hurry to heed the limit.

Like other fashionable figures who found their way onto the sports car circuit, Portago conducted himself with an air of entitlement. He once asked through a mutual acquaintance why Enzo Ferrari had not invited him to join his team. Ferrari responded by mailing two photos of Portago's car in a ditch.

“I am considered quite an expert on the subject of going off the road,” Portago acknowledged in an article for
Sports Illustrated
published in May 1957. He died while that issue was still on the newsstands.

For all his thrill-seeking, Portago never wanted to race in the Mille Miglia. He dreaded it for the same reasons as other drivers—the debilitating length, the erratic amateurs in souped-up Renaults and Fiats, the spectators spilling onto the road, the uncertainly about what lay around each hill, hummock,
and swerve. “Unless you're Italian you can't hope to know the roads,” Portago said, “and as Fangio says, if you have a conscience you can't drive fast anyway. There are too many places where a car can go off the road and kill a dozen people.”

But Portago had no choice. By 1957 Enzo Ferrari had finally hired him, and Ferrari needed Portago to fill out a sports car team left shorthanded by Castellotti's death two months earlier. Ferrari had won all but two Mille Miglia since the war. Enzo Ferrari was determined to win another. Nothing was sweeter than winning before his countrymen.

In her memoir, Linda Christian described a premonition she had while vacationing with Portago in Spain before the Mille Miglia. His car was number 531, which adds up to nine—a numeral that she believed foretold tragedy. “If you go into this race,” she told him, “you'll be brought back here and put in the grave with your father.” Portago had his own presentiments. “My early death,” he wrote to Dorian Leigh, “may well come next Sunday.”

In the week leading up to the race, while the mechanics prepped the cars, Ferrari gathered Portago, von Trips, and the rest in a hotel in Manerbio, a town just south of the starting point in Brescia. For Ferrari, it was a chance to play on their insecurities and pit them against one another. Over a series of meals he goaded Portago, saying he expected Portago's 355S to finish behind his teammate Olivier Gendebien, even though Gendebien would drive a less powerful 250 GT. Portago formed an implacable resolve to beat Gendebien, no matter what. He would prove Ferrari wrong.

Portago and von Trips spent most of the last day together talking about how racing heightened their sense of life and
fulfilled an inborn need for physical tests. Their philosophy, hashed out over cigarettes and coffee, held that fighting ennobled the spirit and helped strengthen a new generation of leaders to tackle the dangers of the nuclear era. Racing, they agreed, was “beautiful and necessary.”

“We philosophized until we were over the moon,” von Trips said. “In discussing these things I found confirmation of what I always felt but was never able to clearly express.”

No doubt their chivalric ancestors would have endorsed their brand of bravery, but it was unfashionable in the Europe of the 1950s where wariness and conciliation were the order of the day. Progressive Europeans tended to reject physical courage as backward, even barbaric. It was considered a vestige of a discredited old order that had led to two world wars. In the Cold War culture of long-range ballistics and biological warheads, daring was a liability. Risk was in disrepute.

That night a group that included Portago, von Trips, Collins, Louise King, and a handful of others pushed two restaurant tables together for a group dinner in Brescia. It was noted that they totaled thirteen, an unlucky number.

“Life has to be lived to the full,” Portago said that night. “It is better to be wholly alive for thirty years than half-dead for sixty.”

Shortly before midnight the first cars took off in one-minute intervals from the Viale Venezia. At 5:30 a.m. Portago and Edmund Nelson heard their names announced over the public address system. They rolled down the floodlit starting ramp, past a flag-draped grandstand, and into the night. Spectators stood behind hay bales and wooden barricades on both sides of the street, leaning in to touch the car as it passed. They
skittered down cobblestone streets and jounced over tram rails while peering through a thin ground fog for red taillights ahead.

By the time they reached Verona the sky was brightening, and the mists hanging over the fields began to burn off. In the half-light they could see broken-down cars smoldering by the roadside. They blazed east at 150 mph through the flat countryside of Vicenza and Padova, then south over the bridges of Rimini to Pesaro. Now they could see white sand beaches and the sparkle of the Adriatic to the left as they wove through Ancona and Pescara. Portago was in fourth place and moving up fast. He was running less than two minutes behind the leader as he turned inland and thrashed his car back and forth through the switchbacks leading up and over the Apennine Mountains.

Linda Christian was waiting in Rome when Portago pulled in at late morning for refueling and to have his card stamped by race officials certifying his position. Dirt and sweat streaked his face beneath his goggles. She passed him a note:
Te quiero mucho
. I love you very much. She obliged the paparazzi by leaning in for a kiss. “I had to lean to touch him,” she later wrote, “and I had a strange sensation with that kiss; it was cold. And it caused me to look for the first time at Edmund Nelson seated beside him. He seemed to be like a mummy, gray, ashen, as if mesmerized. He had the eyes of someone who had suffered an enormous shock.”

“I'll see you tomorrow night in Milan,” Portago said. They planned to meet von Trips for dinner. They would drink to the next win, in Monte Carlo, he promised. Champagne for Christian, milk for Portago.

He then roared off and Christian headed for the airport to catch her flight to Milan. She asked the driver to stop at the Church of Santa Francesca Romana, where she and Tyrone Power had married eight years earlier. Beneath the altar was a crypt containing the body of Santa Francesca, the patron saint of drivers. She lit a candle. “As I prayed, a sharp pain seared through me, almost more than I could bear,” she wrote. “Then it subsided into a dull, throbbing ache that was to stay with me for days.”

A crowd was waiting at the foot of the passenger stair when Christian stepped from the plane in Milan. Flashbulbs crackled. A reporter from a Milan newspaper climbed the steps to speak with her. “Miss Christian,” he said. “Have you heard yet?”

He led her into a small private room inside the airport and told her. They got in his car and drove through a hard rain to the crash site. A policeman described how they had found half of Portago's body on the left side of the road, the other half pinned under the car on the right. The crushed hulk of the car still sat in the ditch surrounded by shreds of clothing and shoes.

Hours earlier, at the final checkpoint in Bologna, mechanics had warned Portago that a broken shock absorber was causing the front left tire to rub against the bodywork. He waved them off. He was in fourth place with Gendebien muscling up from behind. If he paused for a tire change Gendebien would pass him, as Ferrari had predicted.

After driving for thirteen and a half hours Portago set off on the final run to Brescia, a stretch through the Po Valley sometimes called the Death Road. This, wrote the French journalist Olivier Merlin, was “where the fastest cars in the Mille Miglia, scenting their stables after 900 miles journeying, rose to speeds of over 160 mph.”

With thirty miles to go, Portago flew down a flat, narrow road toward the stone village of Guidizzolo. The villagers had stood all afternoon near a farmhouse on the outskirts of town listening for the sound of approaching cars. They cheered as he came into view. Children watched from their fathers' shoulders or from between their legs. “Ferrari, Ferrari,” they shouted.

On the edge of town Portago swerved, probably because the abrading tire blew. The rear of his car fishtailed to the left, toppling a stone kilometer marker and snapping a telegraph pole. The impact drove the hood backward, slicing Portago in two. The car then spun fifteen feet into the air and severed the overhead wires. It caromed into a crowd on the right side of the road, coming to a rest in a drainage ditch half filled with water. Nine spectators died, including five children.

Von Trips was in the lead, miles ahead and unaware of his friend's crash. He had raced into the lead with an average speed of 119 mph over the first two hours. After 250 miles he gradually fell back as his blood sugar crashed. He was so feeble that he could barely push in the clutch and work the brake pedal, which in those days required some manhandling. He retrieved a sandwich stashed in the cockpit and recovered.

It was a familiar pattern. “At first I drive well, but then suddenly I can't do it anymore and I fall back,” he said. “I'm then simply worn down, and must very quickly have something to eat. Somehow the energy goes through me too quickly. When racing I always have a decent sandwich with me, because food is my biggest problem.”

The final stretch through the Po Valley was a duel between von Trips and his teammate Piero Taruffi, a prematurely white-haired Italian known as the Silver Fox. At age fifty-one, Taruffi
had entered his country's most prestigious race twelve times without winning. He had come out of semiretirement for one last try. He almost dropped out at the midway point when his transmission failed, making it difficult to switch out of fifth gear. “I had intended to give up because the car didn't seem very safe to me, in its crippled condition,” Taruffi said. “But I had promised my wife that I would give up racing if I won a Mille Miglia. So I took a chance.”

Taruffi and von Trips came into Brescia side by side. The spectators congregated on both sides of the road screamed when the two Ferraris barreled into town. With the finish line in view, Taruffi pointed to his rear axle, signaling to von Trips that he had a transmission problem. Then, Hermann Harster wrote, “he put his hand on the steering wheel for a moment, as if in prayer.” In response von Trips pulled back to let Taruffi win. It was an act of sportsmanship and respect for a grizzled teammate. Finishing second behind Taruffi, von Trips told reporters, was the same as winning.

For Taruffi, it was a win of the sweetest satisfaction. He stood on the podium in black coveralls and silver helmet smiling and waving half a dollar bill. Before the race Bernard Cahier had ripped the bill in two, saying they would reunite the halves in Brescia to buy a celebratory glass of champagne.

Ferrari took first, second, and third, but its sweep was overshadowed by recriminations. Two days after the race, the bishop of Mantua stood in Guidizzolo's small parish church imparting absolution at a funeral for the nine bystanders killed in the Portago accident. A row of hearses stretched down the street, some waiting to carry the miniature coffins of the children struck down by the spinning car. For once Ferrari had shown up.
He sat in the front row flanked by women in black and enveloped in incense. As always, his countenance was impenetrable behind his dark sunglasses.