England's Favorite Son

The Extraordinary concern and affection the British people show for Stirling Moss cannot be explained by his eminence as a sports figure. (My London housekeeper, who had never seen a motor race, and had never seen Moss excepting on television, asked me to tell him to please shave off his beard, she didn't like it. Then she added, "He is very dear to us.") The British people have known many great sportsmen, and they have usually viewed them with comparative calm and equanimity, but during the decade 1952-1963, let us say, Stirling Moss has been one of the most prominent figures in the United Kingdom. Other formidable accomplishers, sportsmen, athletes, film stars, scientists, politicians have stepped upon the stage, stayed a bit, and slipped away. But still today, and this is written nearly a full year after Goodwood, when Stirling Moss comes down a jet ramp at London Airport, it's news. Why?

I thought I knew, but I asked a more knowledgeable man, a Fleet Street editor who has seen page-one celebrities come and go for 20-odd years.

"It's because he was a knight in armor," the editor said, "rushing out of the castle to do battle in foreign lands, and coming back, sometimes with the prize and sometimes without it; sometimes bloody on his shield (continued on page 78) Favorite Son Favorite Son (continued from page 53) and sometimes not -- and always in a hurry to go back and have another bash at the heathen." Exactly.

It is a cliché to say that people, in the mass, sense sincerity, and sense true purpose, but they do. It can be demonstrated under rigid laboratory conditions that mass judgment is more nearly accurate than individual judgment; if people are asked to estimate the weight of an object by sight and touch, the trend toward the correct answer will rise precisely in proportion to the size of the group. The British people in the mass have known that Stirling Moss has driven to make money, and for personal renown, but they have sensed that he drove to show the flag as well. I think that if he had been born very wealthy, indifferent to the necessity of earning a living, and able to build or buy any car, he would have done the same thing with his life that he has done. I think he has wanted above all to show the world a Briton winning. He has been fervently patriotic, in big as well as in little ways: Alf Francis has told, in his book, Racing Mechanic, how Moss, when he first drove a Maserati, wouldn't even take the car out on the circuit, in its Italian racing red, until two Union Jack transfers had been put on it.

So have other men in racing done this. Dick Seaman did it in the 1930s. Like Moss, he drove for Mercedes-Benz, and he was the first Englishman ever to win the German Grand Prix (he won it in a good year, too, 1938, and put Hitler into a fury). But Seaman's career, unhappily, was short. What of Raymond Mays and Peter Berthon and the whole B.R.M. staff, stoically soaking up a decade and more of hard work and bitter disappointment? And Graham Hill won the championship of the world, and in a British car, something that Moss never did.

It is in no fashion disparaging of the British drivers now dominating the world's Grand Prix circuits -- Graham Hill, Jimmy Clark, John Surtees -- to say that any one of them could be champion of the world three years running and not know the determined affection the British people shower on Moss, who was never champion and never will be. An actor who is a devotee of motor racing said to me, "When a man has that weird and elusive star quality, whatever it is, the thing that makes other men want to stand him a drink, and women want to take him in their arms, whether to mother him or make love to him, then his actual success-failure ratio doesn't matter. Did you notice Orson Welles pointing out the other day that Greta Garbo, the greatest film star of all time, never had a film that made much money? What about the way the Americans have idolized Jack Dempsey for nearly four decades? After all, Gene Tunney beat Dempsey, not once but twice -- but Dempsey will still stop traffic in the same street where Tunney will go unnoticed. Moss never needed to win the championship of the world, strangely enough."

The Dempsey-Tunney parallel is apt. Tunney, "Gentleman Gene," amateur Shakespearean scholar, friend of George Bernard Shaw, came to the ring with calm and measured tread, in the pink of condition, his battle thought out as much as a battle can be, prepared to extend himself if he had to, but carefully, intelligently. Tunney fought as a sensible thinking man ought to fight, won the heavyweight championship of the world, made millions out of it, retired undefeated to a gracious private life.

Dempsey came into the ring just this side of a dead run, black-jowled, jumpy, scowling. Watching him, one felt that if the referee came over and said, "Jack, the other fellow wants to fight with these double-bitted woodsman's axes instead of gloves," Dempsey would have said, "Right. Give me one of 'em and get the hell out of the way!"

Watching Stirling Moss "rush out of the castle," as the Fleet Street man put it, the people have had the same feeling about him. They thought of him as going alone into France and Sweden and Denmark and Portugal and Spain and Germany, Italy, South Africa, Morocco, Monaco, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, Ireland, the Argentine, Cuba, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium and wherever not, for one purpose: to fight. They felt that the reputation of Great Britain was safe with him, before the world. They were certain he'd win more times than he'd lose, and that in any case, win or lose, 99 times in 100 he'd finish on his feet. I suspect that Moss' fantastic comeback after the 1960 accident at Spa excited the pride of Britons as not many things had since the war.

Reading over the last few hundred words, a friend said to me, "I think Stirling is more Tunney than Dempsey -- thinking, a planner, always in condition, always ready."

I said no. "Dempsey was usually in condition, too. But even if he wasn't, he was ready. He'd go, condition or no condition. He kept nothing back, and that's why his name is magic. You could beat Dempsey, but you couldn't make a loser out of him, and you can't make a loser out of Moss. Tunney had Dempsey flat on the deck, but half the people who saw the fight refused to believe it."

Stirling Moss' personality is complicated, and he is competent at guarding it. The man is not simple; the way to the center of him makes Hampton Court Maze look as open and straight as the Mall. I don't claim to have been there, in the years I've known him, but I do know that under the urbanity, under the good humor and politesse, under the flat, bland, masked face that I have watched as he walked silently away from dry petrol tanks, flat batteries and flawed gearboxes ("Few people can hide their real feelings the way he can," Alf Francis said), he carries the one thing that distinguishes all the great competitors from the also-rans, the spear carriers: the thing the fight people call killer instinct. Moss wouldn't rather be dead than a loser, he doesn't want to the to win -- but he'll take the chance. A man who is a spear carrier at heart can be a famous competitor, husbanding himself, watching his chances, thinking of the future, of his career as a rounded whole, and he can go a long, long way. But the real competitor can only try that line, halfheartedly and briefly, before the thing that has made him takes over; before, as drivers say, the power comes in, and his foot goes down. ("One's a race driver, or one's not.") It is not a matter of another few thousand pounds, or another silver cup, the laurel wreath, a kiss from a pretty girl, more starting money next time, a better contract from the tire company next year, none of that nonsense, none of that mere careerist bilge. It is nothing that can be shared with a living soul; indeed many of the bitter-end competitors, the killers, hold it so secret they'll deny they have it. It is a private thing, the dark, driving urge man has known since he came creeping out of the cave, the wish for identity, the grinding need to lift one's face out of the sea of the faces of the mob, to mark oneself and what one stands for, because that is worthwhile, that is immortality, and the price to be paid for it is only a transient thing. Some prime ministers and presidents have known this, but not all. Some stonemasons have known it, but not all, and some race drivers, but not all.

Juan Manuel Fangio had so much power, so much skill, so much intelligence, so much of everything that some people, hearing him speak, in a tired, whispery monotone, watching him drive, smooth as oil on glass, wholly undramatic nearly all of the time, would say, "Old Chueco is so good, he doesn't need to care, he doesn't have to fight," forgetting the years when he drove homecrafted Ford and Chevrolet specials in the ferocious trans-Andean road races of South America, some of them 6000 miles! Then, in 1956 at Monaco, Moss started to run away from him, and Fangio went berserk. Amazed crowds saw the most skillful car conserver since Caracciola spin his Ferrari, knocking (continued on page 119)Favorite Son (continued from page 78) two other cars out of the race, and then bounce it off a curb, buckling a wheel. He left that one and took Peter Collins' car, but still couldn't catch Moss, though he broke the course record trying. At the Nürburgring in 1957, challenged by Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins, he rounded on them like a baited bear, and in the process of giving both of them a thorough beating, broke the lap record 10 times.

Fangio was Moss' model, his teacher in the more esoteric, advanced techniques of driving, but he had nothing to teach him in sang-froid, in covering over, with civility and urbanity, the bone-deep will to win. ("We are all friends," Moss said one day, speaking of the other drivers, "but once the race starts, no one expects to hear anyone say, After you, m'lord." I was reminded of Wilbur Shaw, a charming gentleman, who might give another driver the shirt off his back before a race and buy him a drink afterward, but during it would run the man into a concrete wall at 140 mph, if he wouldn't move over.)

"At Bari, in 1950," Stirling told me, "soon after I'd joined H.W.M., I managed to lead from Fangio for a bit, and Farina. They were both in Alfas, I had a Formula II H.W.M. Fangio was third, Farina was just behind me, and I think he was annoyed; after all I was a new boy and he was a very important figure. In any case, he came alongside me going into a corner and just stayed there; he shut the gate on me, as the Americans say. He gave me the alternative of slowing down or going into a wall. But I slowed right down, I got round his tail, and then, because what he'd done had put him on the wrong line, I went through just ahead of him. I looked back and Fangio, just behind us, was laughing his head off."

The roughest thing Moss remembers doing on a circuit? "At Roskilde one time there was a chap in a Ferrari, a Swede, who would not let me past. I took it for two or three laps, even people in the crowd were shaking their fists at him. Finally, just before a slow corner, I laid the front of my car into his tail and spun him off the road into the bushes. He wasn't hurt."

Stirling once told me that when he had lost a race, he could put it out of his mind and sleep like a baby, but that the night after he'd won was likely to be sleepless. This is the competitor's typical reaction. For the ordinary man, the situation would be exactly reversed. Losing, he would be full of fury and frustration, no more able to sleep than to fly by flapping his arms. I have seen men in this case stay wide awake under a dose of Seconal that would stun a Shetland pony. But, winning, they feel fulfilled, content and they sleep in peace. The real competitor looks at losing, loathing it, shoves it savagely out of his mind and goes to sleep. He must, or he'll unhinge himself. It is winning that keeps him awake, because it means so much to him; it is fulfillment, and raison d'être, and though he conceals it under however much urbanity and ritual sportsmanship, it shakes him through and through; it stirs him to his soul.

Someone said recently, with an air of discovery, that the British people are at their best in war, and have always been, that they like fighting, that they like bucking the odds, and that however savagely and bitterly they fight, they are sustained by observance of the proprieties, by maintenance at all cost of an air of calm, civilized good temper.

The two things do not always go together. I think the people quietly admire the hard fighter, and they admire the man who shows grace under pressure, even if it is only mild pressure. But they reserve their hearts for the man who their instincts tell them is a killer, a bitter-ender, and a man capable of winning all he wants in the world, or losing everything he owns, in such fashion that one can't tell, watching him, which has happened. This, they feel, is British behavior.

Stirling Moss is British.

• • •

One did not watch Stirling Moss drive for long without noticing that he almost invariably waved as he passed another car. This wave was pleasant to see, a kind of salute, given with the hand held vertically, graceful without excessive movement, imperious as well as polite.

I was standing at the bottom of the pit straight at Sebring one hot morning, a place where one can almost look into the cars. A photographer was with me. Stirling, coming out of the U-turn faster than most, as was his wont, ate up a Porsche as he went by us, giving the man his patented wave.

"Have you ever noticed," the photographer said, "that Moss always thanks another driver for letting him pass?"

I laughed. "Yes," I said, "I've noticed that. Of course in this case he was thanking the man for nothing, wasn't he, because the only way C-- could have prevented Mossie's passing would have been to shoot him."

"Oh, I don't know," the photographer said. "He didn't have to move over."

"The rules say he did," I said. "They'd have hit him with a blue flag halfway down the straight, if he hadn't. Anyway, it's wide here, Moss would have run around him."

"I still think it's a pleasant gesture," my friend said. "It shows the camaraderie that exists among really big-league drivers, and I like to see him do it."

"Camaraderie, my foot," I said. "If that pig he's driving holds together all day, you'll get to see him wave to everybody out there, and I daresay you'll like it better than they will, too."

"Why?"

"Because he's mostly thanking them for nothing, and that's not all he's doing."

"You fascinate me," my friend said. "Tell me, what else is he doing?"

"He's waving goodbye to them," I said.

No stronger competitive instinct than Moss' has ever appeared in sports, I am convinced, and I have outraged a lot of people by saying so. That motoring enthusiasts can be annoyed by the picture of Stirling Moss as a brutal competitor is illustrative of the fantastic discipline the man has imposed on himself, and of the skill with which he has originated and erected his public character.

"Watching Stirling Moss before a race, the absolute picture of calm," a man said to me about five years ago, "is to understand real sportsmanship. For him, the game is everything, from is everything, and winning or losing is of not the slightest importance."

I won't quote my reply. It was both rude and profane.

That Stirling Moss was usually calm before a race is true. This is rare. Juan Belmonte used to say, "If we had to sign the contracts an hour before the corrida there would be no one in the ring when the bulls came out." I had a conversation with a well-known driver just before a race, and when I took it up again that night I discovered that he not only didn't recall what we'd talked about, he couldn't remember our speaking at all! Nothing of that sort ever happened to Moss. I remember almost bumping into him just off a starting grid one day, before I knew him well, and I smiled and kept on, having learned from the experience I mentioned above that it was best not to talk to drivers just before the off. But Moss had something he wanted to tell me, he took my arm and walked along with me for three or four minutes. Then he said, "Excuse me, Ken, I must find m'hat," and went off for his helmet. Five minutes later, he was motoring.

"I don't mind anyone's talking to me before a start," he has said to me. "I don't care in the least. If I'm sitting in the car, a boy can ask me for an autograph. I'm happy to talk about anything, a play I saw the night before, a girl; up to the moment I start the engine, I couldn't care less. I've done my practice, I reckon to know the course, I reckon the car to be ready, I can't make a plan, I can't foresee what's to happen when 15 of us pile into the first corner, so why should I bother thinking about it? Time enough for that when we get there. I was giving a chap a radio interview one day, in the States, Sitting on the starting grid; we were chatting away, and suddenly I realized the race was going to start in 60 seconds. I had almost forgot about it!"

It would be interesting to be able to look into Moss' head as he switches off his urbane, gay, smiling self, to switch on Moss the competitor and the engine at the same time. (I know a veteran airline captain who does the same thing, in a slightly different fashion. Sitting in the front end of a transatlantic jet, waiting, perhaps, for a delayed load of passengers, he's amusing, witty, relaxed; he and his crew are just old friends killing time together. With him the change-over comes when he draws on a pair of pigskin gloves, without which, I think, he couldn't fly. When the gloves go on, the temperature in the cockpit drops about 10 degrees, and thereafter anyone who speaks to him had best have a "captain" or a "sir" on the end of the sentence, as well as a good reason for speaking at all.)

The reason the competitive attitude so intrigues us is that it's a distillate of life. And the occasional appearance of a really strong competitive instinct in one of the four elementary games -- fighting, mountain climbing, the corrida and motor racing -- is more compelling, naturally, than its appearance in, say, swimming or pole vaulting or one of the stick-and-ball games. Knowing how the great mountaineer Albert Frederick Mummery of Dover went up the Chamonix Aiguilles or how Edward Whymper did the Matterhorn or how Stirling Moss ran the Mille Miglia, we know something of how life may be lived, and perhaps should be lived, and we have seen this thing in minutes instead of years.

This is not to denigrate the great spirits who appear in the lesser games. The American baseball player Harold "Pete" Reiser, held by many to have been the most competitive player of modern times, was carried off the field incapacitated or unconscious 11 times in 14 years of play, five times because, running to get under a high ball, he had refused to take his eyes off it, lest he lose it in the sun or the field lights, and went full tilt into the concrete wall that borders the perimeters of most major-league baseball parks.

It is a peculiarity of the real competitor that he is indifferent to being hurt. The intellectual, the spiritual aspect of elemental competition against other men has become so weighty that it transcends consideration of the corporeal; he no longer cares about being hurt except that injury keeps him out of the game. (Left to himself, he will invariably go back before he's fit.) A peculiarity of the real competitor who has a major talent -- the two things do not necessarily go together -- is that he likes to handicap himself, to make the game harder. Thus Mummery would not use pitons; he thought them base, a thing for cheaters, although many mountaineers will hardly go up a flight of stairs without a sackful of pitons and a hammer to drive them. Moss' addiction to nonfactory cars is illustrative.

The real competitor, if he lives long enough, comes inevitably to the realization that the ultimate victory is the victory over self: when the years of self-discipline and self-denial are past, the years of study and training and practice to exhaustion are over, the man understands, suddenly or slowly as the case may be, that the being able to win is what matters; that the formal victory itself, the laurel wreath is then only a statistic, a thing of no consequence, and he no longer even wants it.

The real competitor sees no limitations. He wants to beat the whole world. If he's a simple man, like John L. Sullivan, the legendary heavyweight fighter, he'll say so. Sullivan used to announce from the ring, "In a fair fight, I will whip any man born of woman. Yours truly, John L. Sullivan." He handicapped himself with brandy. In the course of a long fight, Sullivan would empty a bottle of cognac. He was much admired. In 1887 a crowd, trying to get near him, broke up the carriage in which he was riding down the Haymarket.

A complex personality behaves with more civility, although he may wish to beat every other man in the world, and at everything. (Wilbur Shaw was so bothered by the fact that other men could drive railway engines, whilst he could not, that he badgered a railroad into teaching him.)

Dominating one of the most competitive endeavors man knows, for more than a decade, entering more races than anyone else had ever done, and winning more of them, was not enough for Stirling Moss. He started so many ancillary activities that they would occupy most people through an eight-hour day. He is no threat to J. Paul Getty as a businessman, but if one enterprise fails he is always ready to start another. He has the obsessive concern with details that so often marks the man who can't find enough to do. I am almost surprised that Stirling doesn't type his own letters. (Come to think of it, I have a number of letters from him that he did type -- at least some amateur did them!)

The real competitor is not easy to live with, when he is on the way up, and when he is at the top, because he is driven to compete with everybody; he wants to do everything better; he wants to dominate everyone around him, his friends, his associates, his employees, his wife. This is the deepest need in his nature, and allowance must be made for it. It has made him what he is; without it we would never have heard of him.

• • •

When he knew how badly he had been hurt at Goodwood, how severely his brain had been damaged, when he found that he couldn't even open a door without giving himself step-by-step instructions -- "I shall take the knob in my right hand, now I shall turn it sharply to the right, now I'll pull it" -- Stirling Moss knew that he simply could not wait until the broken bones had mended and then go back to racing, as he had after the Spa accident in 1960. He knew that if his reaction time and his vision did not return at least to normal, he could not drive a racing car again. Further, he knew that if the doctors were correct in saying that whilst his reaction time might improve rapidly, his vision would probably not be normal for two years or more, then there would be no point in it. He would be terribly out of practice and he would come wholly unprepared to the 1965 cars, having missed the 1962, 1963 and 1964 models. He decided that he must give himself a practical test, that as soon as he felt reasonably well, reasonably strong, he would take a race car to an isolated, completely closed circuit, and there, in privacy, try himself, and, on the basis of what he observed, make the decision, to go on or not, yes or no, then and there. As soon as he had settled on this plan, he announced it. He could set no date.

When he went to Nassau, immediately after being discharged from Atkinson Morley's Hospital, he drove a Mini-Minor, and he found that the island speed limit of 30 miles an hour suited him very well. When he returned to England he drove other cars, more quickly, but his retraining program was interrupted by two long stays in St. Thomas' for surgery. By January 1963, his left eye now offering him correct focus as long as he looked straight ahead, he felt secure at 90-100 miles an hour on the road in his Lotus Elite, and it was impossible, riding with him, to detect slowness or lack of acuity. Everything seemed to be as before. He had the car completely in hand; he could drift it at will, he could do anything he pleased with it. But Moss allowed himself no enthusiasm, repeating what he had often said, that 100 on the road in a Lotus Elite has nothing whatever to do with 160 on a Grand Prix circuit in a Lotus 25.

He flew around the world. He had business commitments in South Africa, New Zealand and Australia and Hong Kong; he wanted to visit Tokyo; he had obligations in Daytona and Nassau. Whilst he was away, he had asked Valerie Pirie to see to renewing his competition license. He was back in England on February 26th, for 10 days before going to the United States to fulfill a contract at Sebring. There was not enough time to engage a circuit and set up a car.

At noon on the First of May, Moss left London for Goodwood, where Ken Gregory and Tony Robinson were waiting for him with a Lotus 27. He drove the 50-odd miles in a Mini-Cooper, two friends with him, and he went flat-out the whole way, constantly remarking the behavior of the car under the various stresses he put on it, obviously seeing the trip as a mild warm-up for what lay ahead of him. It had rained all morning, but the circuit was drying when Moss came to it, drying in some places, deeply puddled in others. The loudspeakers were silent, but there must have been armies there for him; the mild May air must have rung with their shouts and with the howl of engines ripping across the flat land under the pale lemon-colored sun. The first significant British race meeting-after the war had been at Goodwood, in 1948, and Moss had won the 500-cc event, in his first Cooper. He was 19 then. How many times he'd run at Goodwood since, how many nights at the Fleece Inn, he couldn't begin to remember.

He dropped himself into the car. It had occurred to him that, coming out of Fordwater into St. Mary's for the first time, running fast, some vagrant memory, the thin wedge of a clue might come to him, something that would explain the accident. No. It was just a bit of wet road. He felt nothing.

He was alone on the course. The little knot of people who had known of his plan -- Gregory, the mechanics, a private photographer, three friends -- could hear the engine scream across the circuit; they could follow the car by nothing the shift points. Back in sight, he hit a pool of water, lost the car, recovered it quickly -- but not as quickly as he once would have done.

He lapped the circuit for half-an-hour and more, running fast but, at his own rating, at only around eight tenths. At the quickest, he said afterward, he was three seconds over what he would consider competitive time.

He had suspected what he would find, and he found it: "I had to think," he said. "I had to give orders to myself: here I'll brake, here I must change down, and so on ... and the other thing, I used to look at the rev counter without taking my eyes off the road; not only that, I could see the rev counter and the road and a friend waving to me, all at the same time ... I've lost that, that's gone."

He drove back to London. Ken Gregory called the press, the bulletin went on the wires: "I've decided to retire. I will not drive again." It was 15 years, almost to the day, from the date on which Stirling Moss had run his Cooper up Prescott, in the Bugatti Owners Club event which had been his first official competition.