The Life and Death of a Spanish Grandee

Portago in retrospect, twelve months later

A year ago, on the 12th of May, a Ferrari automobile running in Italy's Mille Miglia race crashed in the village of Guidizzolo near Brescia. The car had been making something over 150 miles an hour and it killed nine of the spectators lining the long straight road. It killed the co-driver, Edmund Nelson, and it killed the driver, a Spaniard named Alfonso Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, Carvajal y Are, 13th Conde de la Mejorada, 12th Marquis de Portago. He was 28.

In the days after Portago's death, a standard picture of him was quickly established on the front pages of the world's newspapers: an immensely wealthy aristocrat, charter member of the international set, an indefatigable pursuer of beautiful women, and a man obsessed with the wish for an early and violent death. Portago would have laughed, I am sure, reading his obituaries. Two months before he died he had laughed when I had repeated a columnist's remark about his "death wish."

"It's so ridiculous," he said. "I'm sure I love life more than the average man does. I want to get something out of every minute. I want to live to be a very old man. I'm enchanted with life. But no matter how long I live, I still won't have time for all the things I want to do, I won't hear all the music I want to hear, I won't be able to read all the books I want to read, I won't have all the women I want to have, I won't be able to do a twentieth of the things I want to do. I want to live to be a hundred and five, and I mean to."

But Eddie Nelson, who had been Portago's friend for years, and who was to die with him, had a different belief. "I know Fon says he'll live forever," Nelson remarked, "but I say he won't live to be 30."

Nelson didn't say that because he believed Portago had a "death wish." He knew better than that. He felt that simple percentage would kill Portago: he didn't believe that anyone could go on exposing himself to hazard as Portago did and survive. Because he tried so hard to wring every drop of juice out of every moment of his life, Portago was always in a hurry, and he had no patience with time-consuming caution. Normally it takes 10 years to become a top-ranking Grand Prix racing driver -- 10 years, that is, for those few who can do it at all. Portago never drove a racing automobile until 1954, but by 1957 he was ranked officially among the world's first 10 drivers. He believed that he would be champion of the world by 1960. I for one would not have bet against it. He had been, briefly, an airplane pilot -- he apparently believed that the primary function of aircraft was to fly under bridges -- a jai-alai and polo player. He was a superb horseman and, typically, he was interested only in jump-races. He was the world's number-one amateur steeplechaser in 1951 and 1952. When he was invited to go down the St. Moritz bobsled run he said he'd be glad to -- if he could steer. Told that he'd have to learn the run first in a good many trips as a passenger he said he'd rather skip all that and learn it straight off. He steered the first time he went down -- and he took 15 seconds off the time of the then Swiss champion. Later he was captain of the Spanish bobsled team in the Olympics, and he set one-man skeleton-sled records on the Cresta run, too. He was a tremendous swimmer, handy and willing in a street fight, with a very short jolting punch. He was not a big man, not heavily muscled, but he had unusual strength, great endurance, abnormally sharp eyesight, an almost incredible quickness of reaction. He could catch knives thrown at him, pulling them out of the air by their handles.

Because he was so flamboyant, and because he had disdained the confinement of the schoolroom early in his teens, most people thought that Portago's interests were entirely physical. It was not so. "During most of the eight years I was married to Fon," Carol Portago told me, "I think he read a book a day. He read history and biography, and little else. I don't believe I ever saw him reading a novel, a modern novel, although he did like Robert Graves. He thought most novels a terrible waste of time. One day, coming back from a race in Nassau, I read Peyton Place on the plane. Fon muttered about it all the way home. He said it was idiotic to waste time on such books."

Portago did have pronounced views on the well-rounded life. "The most important thing in our existence is a balanced sex life," Portago once said to me. "Everybody knows this is true, but nobody will admit it -- of himself, that is. But if you don't have a happy sex life you don't have anything."

"It's the first thing historians suppress when they write the lives of great men," I said, "and often it was an astonishingly big factor in their lives."

"Of course," Portago said. "Look at Nelson, look at Napoleon."

"Well, look at George Bernard Shaw," I said. "He gave it up altogether, and married on condition that his wife never mention sex to him."

"A freak," Portago said. "A very untypical writer. Look at Maupassant. A prodigy, in more ways than one. Well, as for me, making love is the most important thing I do every day, and I don't care who knows it."

• • •

On his father's side Portago was born to one of Spain's ancient titles. His mother, a Briton, had been married before and she brought to Portago's father, the 11 th Marquis, an enormous American fortune. The last king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, was Portago's godfather and namesake. As a baby, and as a child, he was close to beautiful. In his teens, he looked petulant, and in maturity he was simply tough. Sometimes he looked like a hired killer, sometimes he looked like what he was -- a Spanish grandee to the bone. One of his friends said, "Every time I look at Fon I see him in a long black cape, a sword sticking out of it, a floppy black hat on his head, riding like a fiend across some castle drawbridge." Portago himself said that had he been born in another century he would have been a Crusader, a free-booter, a knight errant. I'm sure he often thought of that, and probably with longing. A determined lust for adventure, plus an inclination toward government, runs through the Portago line, and Spanish history is studded with the name. In the 16th Century one of Portago's forebears, Cabeza de Vaca, was shipwrecked on the Florida coast. He walked to Mexico City, recruiting an army as he went. Another conquered the Canary Islands, another was a leader in the fight to drive the Moors out of Spain. Portago's grandfather was governor of Madrid, his father was Spain's best golfer, poloist, yachtsman; he was a fabulous gambler said to have once won $2 million at Monte Carlo, a soldier and a movie actor. He died of a heart attack on the polo field, playing against his doctor's orders.

Portago's childhood was in the standard pattern of the wealthy European nobility: a melange of governesses, tutors, Biarritz, lessons in the graces -- dancing, horsemanship and so on. In the inevitable early pictures -- six-year-olds at a birthday party, ranks of red-faced nannies in the rear -- he is easy to pick out, and not only because he is usually close to the camera. There is a calm arrogance about the child, and he seems to be just on the point of moving. Portago kept a careful record of his life almost to the end of it. He collected pictures, he was a paper-saver, he recorded almost literally everything he did. He kept six huge leather-bound scrapbooks, so big that three of them make a load too heavy to carry comfortably. They are full of photographs and newspaper clippings, obviously cut with ruler and razor blade and pasted in dead straight and level. He told me that he didn't believe even his wife knew how detailed these scrapbooks were. Why had he gone to such trouble? Ego? Certainly. That, plus the wish to be sure that his children would be able to form a firm portrait of him. And I think he thought of the record of his life as something quite apart from himself. He was proud of his lineage, and he did not want the life of the 12th Marquis de Portago to be less well-recorded than the other 11 had been. And, as he said, he looked forward to a long life. And a full one.

I asked him if he intended to go on driving until he was as old as the present champion of the world, Juan Manuel Fangio, now in his middle forties. I knew that he would say no.

"Never," he said. "Certainly not. In any case I'll stop when I'm 35, and if I'm champion of the world, sooner."

"And then?"

"I'm ambitious for myself," he said. "I wouldn't be racing automobiles if I didn't think I could get something out of it, and not only the championship. I haven't told this to a great many people, but -- well, you see, Spain has had no national hero for many years. That's what the championship of the world means to me."

Portago never attempted bullfighting, the sport in which the Spaniards have. been accustomed to find their heroes. Few Spanish aristocrats ever do. "I have (continued on page 69)Spanish grandee(continued from page 28) thought about it, of course," he said. "I like to watch bullfights. I suppose that's natural since I'm Spanish, but I've never thought of trying it because I couldn't start early enough. To be any kind of torero, you must begin almost as a child, you must live with bulls, learn how they think. Racing cars don't think. When I give up racing I'm going to Spain and go into politics."

"You seem hardly the type," I said.

"Maybe the word is wrong," he said.

"Maybe I should have said 'government' instead of 'politics.' In any case, if you want to know what I mean, I mean that I think I could reasonably hope to be foreign minister of Spain."

Later, from Paris, he sent me a photograph of himself and Fangio and the Pretender to the Spanish throne. On it he had written, "With Fangio and Don Juan, the future king of Spain."

When he found automobile racing, Portago knew that he had come to his real metier and he abandoned all other sports.

Portago had driven midget track racing cars in Paris, but it was not until 1953 that he found out what automobile racing was really like.

"I met Luigi Chinetti, the New York Ferrari representative, at the Paris auto show in 1953, and he asked me to be his co-driver in the Mexican Road Race -- the Carrera Panamericana. All he wanted me for, of course, was ballast. I didn't drive a foot, not even from the garage to the starting line. I just sat there, white with fear, holding on to anything I thought looked sturdy enough. I knew that Chinetti was a very good driver, a specialist in long-distance races who was known to be conservative and careful, but the first time you're in a racing car you can't tell if the driver is conservative or a wild man, and I didn't see how Chinetti could get away with half what he was doing. We broke down the second day of the race, but I had decided by then that this was what I wanted to do more than anything else. I used to think that flying was exciting, and for a long time riding seemed very rewarding. I rode, mostly steeplechases, twice a week at least for two years. But those things can't be compared with driving. It's a different world. So I bought a three-liter Ferrari."

When Portago began to drive in earnest, early in 1954, no one took him seriously. He was almost universally considered to be just another rich, dilettante. He and Harry Schell. an American living in Paris who is now ranked number six in the world listings, took the three-liter Ferrari to the Argentine for the 1000-kilometer sports car race. Said Portago: "Harry was so frightened that I would break the car he wouldn't teach me how to change gear, so when after 70 laps [the race was 101] he was tired and it was my turn to drive, I did three laps, during which I lost so much time that we dropped from second to fifth place, before I saw Harry out in the middle of the track frantically waving a flag to make me come into the pits so he could drive again. We eventually finished second overall and first in our class. I didn't learn to change gears properly until the chief mechanic of Maserati took me out one day and spent an afternoon teaching me." Portago had driven all his life, of course, since childhood in fact, but changing gears on a passenger car bears little relation to shifting on a 175-mile-an-hour competition car, when a miss on a shift from fourth to third, for example, can wreck engine or transmission or both and perhaps kill the driver as well.

Schell and Portago ran the three-liter in the 12-Hour Race at Sebring, Florida, in 1954. The rear axle broke after two hours. He sold the Ferrari and bought a two-liter Maserati, the gear-shifting lesson thrown in, and ran it in the 1954 Le Mans 24-Hour Race with Alessandro Tomaso co-driving. They led the class until five in the morning, when the engine blew up. He won the Grand Prix of Metz with the Maserati -- "but there were no good drivers in it" -- and ran with Louis Chiron in the 12 Hours of Rheims, Chiron blowing up the engine with 20 minutes to go while leading the class. He ran an Osca in the G.P. of Germany, and rolled it. "God protects the good, so I wasn't hurt," he said.

In 1954 Portago broke down while leading the first lap of the Mexican Road Race, a murderous affair run the length of the peninsula. He won three races in Nassau that year. He broke an automobile occasionally, and he was often off the road, but he was never hurt until the 1955 Silverstone race, in England, when he missed a gear-shift and came out of the resulting crash with a double compound break in his left leg.

The crash had no effect on Portago's driving; he continued to run a little faster on the circuit and to leave it less frequently. At Caracas in Venezuela in 1955 he climbed up on Juan Manuel Fangio until he was only nine seconds behind him, and he finished second. He was a member of the Ferrari team in 1956, an incredibly short time after he had begun to race. The precise equivalent of his rise in this country would be for a man to be a first-string pitcher for the Yankees two years after he had begun to play baseball. He won the Grand Prix of Portugal in 1956, a wild go-round in which the lap record was broken 17 times; he won the Tour of France, the Coupes du Salon, the Grand Prix of Rome and was leading Fangio and the great British driver, Stirling Moss, at Caracas when a broken gas-line put him out of the race. After Caracas that year I asked Moss how he ranked Portago.

"He's certainly among the 10 best in the world," Moss said, "and as far as I'm concerned, he's the one to watch out for."

Running in the Grand Prix of Cuba in 1957 he was leading Fangio by well over a minute when a gas-line broke again, and afterward, when they gave Fangio the huge silver cup emblematic of victory, he said, "Portago should have it."

He ran at Sebring in '57, driving alone nearly all of the 12 hours and finishing seventh; he ran at Montlhery in France, breaking the track record for gran turismo cars, and then went to Italy for the Mille Miglia. It was a race he did not like. Few professional drivers do like it: a thousand miles over ordinary two-lane roads, across two mountain ranges, beginning at Brescia, down the Adriatic coast, across the boot of Italy and back to Brescia through Florence. The Mille Miglia is probably the world's most dangerous automobile race. The weather is usually wet, there are hundreds of cars running, from tiny two-cylinder runabouts to Grand Prix racing cars barely disguised as sports models and capable of 185 miles an hour. "No matter how much you practice," Portago said to me, "you can't possibly come to know 1000 miles of Italian roads as well as the Italian drivers, and, as Fangio says, if you have a conscience you can't drive really fast anyway. There are hundreds of corners in the Mille Miglia where one little slip by a driver will kill 50 people. You can't keep the spectators from crowding into the road -- you couldn't do it with an army. It's a terrible thing, the Mille Miglia."

To make matters worse for him, the illness of another driver on the team forced Portago to take a car he loathed and mistrusted, the 3.8 Ferrari. As a rule he was indifferent to the cars he drove, had no affection for them, could barely tell one from the other, but the 3.8 he considered to be somehow malevolent. He told a reporter that he was intent only on finishing, that he was, in effect, going to take it easy. But when he slid down the starting ramp at Brescia, with Nelson hunched enigmatically beside him, he forgot all that, his bitterly competitive instinct took over and he began to go. He was fourth overall at the first check-point. Peter Collins, lying third, broke a half-shaft, and when Portago was given this information, he knew that he could finish third without any trouble at all. It wasn't enough. He knew too that he might finish second, that he might even win. He ran the car at the absolute limit of road adhesion. At the Ferrari depot in Florence, he refused two new tires, grudging the 45 seconds it would have taken to put them on. He had run nearly the whole 1000 miles, he was within 20 minutes or so of Brescia and the end of the race when a tire blew out, or a half-shaft broke, on the straight at Guidizzolo and the car lifted its wheels off the road and left him helpless as it flew through a telephone pole, went into and out of one ditch and came to rest finally in another.

Portago's widow, Carol McDaniel Portago, left their New York apartment with the children, Antonio, four, and Andrea, seven, and went to Italy to take her husband's body to Spain. The world's newspapers duly ran the funeral pictures and that was that.

Portago married Carol McDaniel, a South Carolina girl, in 1949. He had been living in New York for some time. He met her at a party, told her two hours later that he intended to marry her. They spent most of their eight years of married life in France. A beautiful and enchanting woman, Carol Portago brought to her husband a social stability that was new to him. She became an intimate of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and she could move with grace in any circle. "Carol, in a sense, tamed Fon," one of their friends has said. "To the degree that anyone could, she brought him into the 20th Century. I think he regretted not having been born in the 1600s, lots of us thought that, and I believe that Carol helped him fit into his own time."

Portago was volatile, violent, headstrong, almost desperate in his determination to take every sensation out of every minute of his life. Carol Portago is tranquil, firm-minded, strong-willed in her own right, and their life together produced some heady moments. If Portago felt that a man had impugned his honor, the debate was apt to be short and terminated by a right cross to the jaw, and among the people to whom he publicly demonstrated this side of his nature was a columnist who has not even yet forgiven him. Portago's airy indifference to the maxim "Never, but never hit a reporter" ensured that his attentions to women other than his wife, and they were many, would have maximum coverage in the public prints. And at least one of the women concerned demonstrated a semi-professional ability in publicity on her own right. Just before Portago's death, columnists were frequently predicting that he and his wife would be divorced.

"Like so much else that was printed about Fon," Carol Portago told me, "that has no connection with reality. Fon's attitude toward divorce was very Catholic: to him divorce was anathema, it was impossible, unthinkable.

"Another thing: there was very little that was sneaky about Fon. He moved quite beyond commonplace deception. I knew him, I think, better than anyone else, and there was very little indeed in his life that I did not know about. We could talk about anything, and we did. I can assure you that some of the explanations, excuses, that he gave me at one time or another when we talked about something that he had done were strange and wonderful, often hilarious, even, but you could not laugh at him because he was absolutely sincere. All one can say about it, really, is that he was unable to resist a beautiful woman, any more than he was able to resist any other kind of challenge. He could not be changed. It was a facet of his nature, and not by any means the most important, either. Most of his attachments were completely casual. One was not, but even that had ended before his death.

"After all, the essence of Fon's whole personality was his maleness. He was totally a man, and he was almost ferocious in his determination to live by his own rules."

What was he, really? He was the absolutely free spirit.

"If I die tomorrow," he told me the day before the 1957 Sebring, "still I have had 28 wonderful years."

I cited to him the Spanish proverb "In this life, take what you want -- but pay for it."

"Of course," he said. "Of course, that's exactly it. You must pay. You pay ... you try to put it off, but you pay. But I think, for my part at least, I think the game is worth the candle."

When Portago died, I wrote for the magazine Sports Cars Illustrated an appreciation of him. Nothing that I have learned about him in the months since inclines me to change it:

He was not an artist, he left nothing of beauty behind him and nothing of use to the world. He moved no mountains, wrote no books, bridged no rivers. He saved no lives, indeed he took innocents with him to death. He could be cruel. If he wished to indulge himself he would do it, though the act hurt and humiliated others who had done him no harm nor in any way earned his malice. Yet it would be a flinty heart that did not mourn his death. At the very least he was an adornment in the world, an excitement, a pillar of fire in the night, producing no useful heat or light perhaps, but a glory to see nonetheless. At most he was an inspiration, for, with the mere instruments of his life set aside -- the steeplechasing, the motor-racing, wealth, women, world-roaming -- he proved again what cannot be too often proven: if anything at all is meant for us here, we are meant to live life, there is no folly like the folly of the hermit who cowers in his cave, and a dead lion is a greater thing than a live mouse.