Toly's Ghost

Toly’s Ghost

By Burt BS Levy

the fourth novel in THE LAST OPEN ROAD series

Cover Graphics & Art Direction by Art Eastman

Editing & Historical Research by John F. Gardner and Bill Siegfriedt

Unbelievable Backup & Support from Carol Levy and Karen Miller

Additional Editing, Research & Assistance thanks to:

Henry Adamson, Mike Argetsinger, Dick Carlson, Tim Considine, John Fitch, Bill Gehring,

Bill Hallandal, Harry Heuer, Phil Hill, Bruce Kessler, Denise McCluggage, Jim Sitz, Sam Smith,

Bob Storck, Tom White, Janos Wimpffen, Woody Woodhouse, Brock Yates, Bob Ziner and the gang at Age & Treachery Racing

THINK FAST INK L.L.C.

Oak Park, Illinois

www.lastopenroad.com

Copyright 2006 by Burt S. Levy

published by

THINK FAST INK

1010 Lake Street

Oak Park, Illinois, 60301

WWW.LASTOPENROAD.COM

[email protected]

First edition: June, 2006

First E-Book Edition: October, 2014

Other titles by BS Levy:

THE LAST OPEN ROAD  1994

MONTEZUMA’S FERRARI  1999

A POTSIDE COMPANION  2001

THE FABULOUS TRASHWAGON  2002

THE 200mph STEAMROLLER, Book I: RED REIGN  2010

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:

2006900529

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION

IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM

isbn: 0-9642107-6-2

dedicated to

PHIL HILL

Racer, Hero, Gentleman and a True American Champion

THIS BOOK IS A WORK OF FICTION. NAMES, CHARACTERS, PLACES AND INCIDENTS DESCRIBED HEREIN ARE EITHER PRODUCTS OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR USED FICTICIOUSLY. ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL EVENTS OR PERSONS, LIVING OR DEAD, IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL.

RIGHT.

Author’s Note: in the process of writing this book, there were many times I found myself mired in a dilemma regarding the progress of my fictional plot and the actions of my fictional characters versus the true facts of racing history and the lives and accomplishments of the real-life heroes I grew up cheering from the sidelines and reading about in the magazines. I hope those still living and the ghosts and families of those who have passed on—along with you, dear reader—will understand and, when necessary, forgive what I have attempted to do and appreciate the spirit in which it was done.  

Chapter 1: A Change of Scenery

Cal Carrington’s driving career really started taking off after that photo-finish win in California wine impresario Ernesto Julio’s Ferrari at Road America in September of 1955. That was the weekend I finally conned my friend, best customer, part-time father confessor, occasional bigmouth blowhole and all-purpose business partner Big Ed Baumstein into letting Cal drive the Trashwagon. But then Ernesto’s famous European hero driver Jean Behra got socked in someplace in France (some said under a skirt, but I don’t know that for certain) and so he offered Cal the drive at the very last minute. At the big racers’ party at Siebkens the night before the race, in fact. I was pretty well crushed when Cal told me about it, but in the end I could see it was the right thing for him to do. It was exactly the kind of break he needed. Besides, a hungry, driven, self-centered and ambitious guy like Cal was going to take the drive whether it was the right thing to do or not. It’s just the way things had to be.

Everybody agreed that Cal put on one hell of a show the next day—especially considering he’d never so much as sat in Ernesto Julio’s Ferrari before—and the race went back and forth for 200 miles between Cal and his old nemesis Creighton Pendleton the Third in one of Briggs Cunningham’s D-Type Jaguars. It came down to the very last corner of the very last lap, and Cal set him up perfectly and swept past to take the win—by no more than the thickness of that Ferrari’s bright yellow paint-job!—against what most folks figured should have been a faster car. Ernesto Julio was impressed enough to ask Cal if he’d like to do a little more racing for him out on the west coast, and my buddy Cal was ready to leave for California before they even made it to the victory celebration. But then, victory celebrations were never exactly a big deal for a guy like Cal. And neither were pewter mugs, marble-based trophies, mahogany wall plaques or even engraved sterling silver loving cups. Nope, that stuff just never meant very much to Cal Carrington. In fact, nothing much mattered to Cal once the engines shut down except when they’d be firing up again. That’s what it was really all about as far as he was concerned. Oh, sure, he liked to win and prove he was better than the next guy. Who didn’t? And he was cocky enough to think he was about the best damn racing driver who ever pulled on a crash helmet and a pair of split-window goggles. Or at least he’d never seen anybody better. But for Cal, the magic was in the actual doing of it: to be out there devouring asphalt and leaving the real world in your slipstream while you chased the future like you could reach out and grab it with both hands. That’s the way it is with real racers. They just can’t help themselves. Cal wanted his chance behind the wheel of the leanest, fastest, meanest damn racecars on the planet—cars that made you ache to look at them and bubbled the wax in your ears whenever they fired up. Wanted to feel them come alive in his hands like some wild, beautiful, mysterious and dangerous creature he had to tame and make love to at the same time. Moreover he wanted to run those cars—flat-out and wheel-to-wheel—on all the great racetracks against all the other guys who figured they were the best damn drivers in the universe. See if he had what it took to put them in his mirrors and keep them there.

The look in his eye told you he was pretty damn confident that he could.

He told me all about it that soft autumn night we spent out on the front stoop of one of the rough little cabins at the Seneca Lodge: This is the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do, Buddy, he said while we stared up at a low, fat sliver of a harvest moon. But his eyes were focused light years beyond it. This is the only thing I’ve ever been really good at in my whole life, he added dreamily. "I mean really good at. I can feel it. He flashed me one of those helplessly dazzling and dangerous smiles of his. Everything starts when I fire up an engine and pull out on a racetrack. Goes from black-and-white TV to Cinemascope and Technicolor. You know what I mean?"

I guess I do, I shrugged. And maybe I did. Although to tell the truth I was a little bit jealous about it. Okay, maybe even more than a little bit. Even though he was my very best friend and I was proud as hell of what he could do with a racecar. But it ate at me why some guys get to be the Ace Hero/Leading Man/Racing Drivers of life while the rest of us wind up doing all the grunt work and mopping up behind them. So I asked him: What about the rest of the time?

The rest of the time? He mulled it over, looking way past the moon again. I haven’t really thought too much about it. It’s just time in between, isn’t it?

But you can’t spend your whole blessed life in a racing car, I argued, sounding an awful lot like my old man giving me one of his post-Yankees-game, post-six-pack-of-beer backyard lectures.

Cal shot me another unassailable smile. I can sure as hell try! he grinned. And if anybody could get away with an attitude like that, Cal would be your man.

So it didn’t come as any huge shock when Cal threw his helmet and his battered-but-expensive leather overnight bag into the back of Ernesto Julio’s tow rig around dusk Sunday evening at Road America and rode straight back from Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, to southern California with the guys hauling Ernesto’s yellow Ferrari Monza. Just like that. What about the rest of your stuff? I asked him while Ernesto’s guys loaded up the Ferrari.

What stuff?

You know: clothes, bedding, bank book, bible….

Look, I’ll call you. He climbed up into the cab of the truck and smiled down at me. You’ll help me work it out, won’t you, Buddy? he said like there wasn’t even a question about it. And then he waved and he was gone. Just like that. The jerk didn’t even bother to say goodbye….

Anyhow, that’s how my pal Cal Carrington wound up in southern California. He said it was one hell of a cross-country road trip—even in a damn car hauler—while his car owner Ernesto Julio hopped in his twin-engined Aero Commander at the Milwaukee airport and flew back to San Francisco, 400-odd miles to the north, where his brand-new Bentley Continental was waiting for him at the airport. Turns out old Ernesto was living two very different lives out in California. Up around San Francisco, he was a solid citizen known for the rolling, highly productive sprawl of vineyard acreage his family owned in Sonoma County. Acreage that pumped out thousands upon thousands of gallons of cheap, familiar reds and whites that sold in staggering (often literally!) quantities across bars and checkout counters all over the whole blessed country. Not to mention the popular, modestly priced pink and white champagnes sold under the Bon Temps and Fairpeiper labels that had become the Great American Standard for prom-night first feels and New Year’s Day hangovers from coast to coast. Ernesto called them the Chevrolet of sparkling wines after he’d had a good snort of scotch or a brandy or two, and took pains to explain their success: It’s the sugar content and the fizz that makes ‘em go down so easy. High school girls think they’re drinking soda pop! But they’ll whack you good if you’re not careful. And they can be BRUTAL in the morning. Hell, I get a subscription to the Fruit of the Month Club every year from the guys who make Alka Seltzer and a couple nice boxes of cigars from the folks at Bayer Aspirin.

My motoring scribe buddy Hank Lyons told me all about how Ernesto’s grandfather started up in the winery business straight off the boat from Italy. Or at least after a long, painful wagon ride across the entire expanse of the new American frontier in a wagon with springs like iron ingots and no seat cushions of any kind. Two generations later, his son retold that story over and over to little Ernesto while he was growing up and learning the family business. My fadder, he’s a-no siddown again in his a-whole life after dat a-ride. Not-a even inna da outhouse! He’s a-sacrifice plenty to make dis-a place for us, an’ I’m a-no gonna sit-a by while a little stroontz like-a you fucks it up, unnerstan? And then he’d give little Ernesto a good hard crack across the face. Unless he was being really good and paying close attention, in which case he’d give him a not quite so hefty crack across the backside.

This was known as education in many traditional Italian families.

But Ernesto’s father was a sharp, shrewd, hard-working type with calloused hands and a flinty look in his eye who always took care of his family and the wine business his own father started. And also of the sneaky and even scary-looking East Coast and Midwestern business acquaintances who wore big fedora hats, pricey Italian suits and heavy overcoats—sometimes even in the summer—that occasionally clanked when they walked. Those were the guys who bought, transported and distributed a lot of Ernesto’s father’s wine, and made absolutely sure that it was kept behind the counter of little neighborhood Italian restaurants all across the country. And particularly in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Chicago. And a lot of those little streetcorner places (along with other, somewhat harder-to-find places owned by the above-mentioned gentlemen with the clanking overcoats) continued to serve a little of that wine even during prohibition. Or maybe even more than a little. Ernesto’s father managed to quietly keep producing thanks to a loophole in the law that you could drive a damn truck through (or a whole convoy of trucks, and tankers at that!) which said you could still make wine for religious services even during prohibition. So Ernesto Julio’s father made sure to produce enough fermented grape products to keep every blessed church congregation in the country well supplied, from the high Episcopalians through the Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witnesses clear down to the Methodists, Quakers, Calvinists and Baptists who supposedly didn’t drink the stuff anyway. But he made plenty for them, too. And maybe even a little extra for all the Jewish temples, Eastern shrines and down-home, backwoods snake-handlers who might require a wee snort or two to juice up their prayer services. I’m not saying that wine actually got to all those churches, shrines and synagogues, mind you. I’m just saying Ernesto’s father made sure there was plenty to go around.

Ernesto really started taking his place in the business during those difficult prohibition years, and it was obvious right away that he was the kind of natural-born salesman and entrepreneur who could charm the birds out of the trees when he needed to and cut somebody off at the knees when he needed that, too. Ernesto had a rare and decisive flair for wheeling and dealing, and while his father made wine for the guys with big fedoras and clanking overcoats, Ernesto concentrated on filling out the line with imported hard liquor he smuggled up from Mexico, down from Canada or slipped in through the docks at San Francisco. And while most of the other vineyard owners wrung their hands and wailed woe is me during prohibition, Ernesto saw an open wound of financial opportunity. With his father’s help (and even more from his clanking overcoat buddies in the distribution business), Ernesto started buying up distressed vineyards all over Sonoma County. By the time prohibition ended in 1933, Ernesto and his family owned an incredible expanse of acreage—a sixth of the whole county, some said—and they were geared up and ready to produce and ship the instant the 18th Amendment was repealed.

In 1927, Ernesto Julio married the daughter of one of the other vineyard owners he was trying to buy out—a nice, solid, old-school Italian girl with plenty of respect and traditional breeding—and they moved into a luxurious, Spanish-style manor house he’d built for them where his grandfather’s shack once stood next to the very first rows of grape vines on that very first piece of vineyard property. They lived quietly, privately and respectably (except for Ernesto’s taste for fast, flashy sportscars) and had four children together, two boys and two girls. All around the San Francisco area, Ernesto Julio was known as an upright citizen, devoted husband and doting father. Which he was. Or at least when he was home, anyway. But Ernesto had to travel a lot to look after the wine business—especially after his father passed away a few months after the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor—and that’s where the other side of his face started to show.

Because, in the respected old Italian tradition, Ernesto Julio had built an entire, semi-secret side life for himself down in southern California, and the wine business in Sonoma County became only one part of a large and growing list of Ernesto Julio deals, holdings, interests and enterprises. It all started with a piece of a well-known luxury hotel in San Francisco, which was famous for elegant society weddings and legendary, no-limit poker games that went on occasionally in the penthouse. But Ernesto rarely attended such things personally. At least not in San Francisco. He didn’t much fit in with or care for San Francisco society. Not even the SCMA sportycar clubbies, who were mostly toney, old-money types like the ones we’d become familiar with back east.

Besides, it was too close to home.

Four hundred miles down the California coast in Los Angeles was where Ernesto Julio started keeping the other half of his life. That’s where he had the luxury apartment he moved Cal into up in the Hollywood hills plus a not-so-silent partnership in a highline foreign car dealership in Santa Monica called Moto Italia that sold Fiats, Alfa Romeos and Lancias and repaired and/or race-prepped just about anything with four wheels and two seats. The shop in Santa Monica also served as Ernesto Julio’s racing headquarters and, more importantly, as a plausible tax-dodge cover for his incurable sportycar habit.

Ernesto also dabbled a bit here and there in the movie business in Hollywood, which was always on the lookout for rich wheeler/dealer types with unusually deep pockets to back movie projects in return for little side benefits like dates with eager, aspiring young actresses fresh in from Omaha or Texas or Brooklyn or Poughkeepsie and hungry for a taste of the limelight. Not to mention regular invites to the infamous, weekend-long house parties at sprawling Beverly Hills mansions, Malibu beach houses or posh hideaways up in the Hollywood hills where famous names and instantly recognized faces mingled with producers, directors, casting agents, deal makers, power brokers and hot-and-cold-running starlets. Parties where anything not only could happen, but was more or less expected to….

When Cal Carrington first arrived in L.A., Ernesto Julio kind of temporarily set him up in the fancy apartment he had up in the hills overlooking Los Angeles. He could stay there as long as he wanted (or at least as long as he stayed in Ernesto Julio’s good graces, which seemed deceptively easy at the time) as long as he understood that he might have to vacate the place at a moment’s notice so Ernesto could send the smiling old Mexican woman who took care of the cleaning and housekeeping over to tidy things up for whatever sort of evening or weekend activities Ernesto had in mind. That didn’t happen very often, but when it did, Cal was pretty much on his own until the all-clear sounded, usually around 11am or so on the following Monday morning.

Even so, it was one hell of a nice place to stay (rent free, no less!) and there was even a part-time job in it for Cal—if he wanted it, anyway—at Ernesto’s Italian car dealership down near the ocean in Santa Monica. Cal’s duties there amounted to mostly shuttling cars around from one place to another (and that could just as easily mean across town to a trim shop in Culver City or hustling some hot new sportscar clear across the country from New York to Los Angeles), hanging around with the race mechanics and chatting up the customers. Which didn’t figure to be too difficult given Cal’s natural-born line of bullshit. But Cal never really worked out as a car salesman because he didn’t have the necessary tolerance for kissing ass and suffering fools gladly, both of which are prime considerations in the retail automobile business—no matter if you’re selling Fiats, Frazer Nashes, Model T Fords or the latest Ferraris. And Cal simply hated hanging around the showroom waiting for some rich drool to walk in through the front door and want something. Plus Cal didn’t really have to work. He was past 21 by then—just—and getting a little money he never much talked about every month from some kind of trust fund. Or maybe that should be lack of trust fund. He’d joke about it, though. I’m a Remittance Man, he told me later at Sebring through that sly cobra smile of his.

I had to admit I didn’t know what one was.

Oh, they’re very big in wealthy families. Especially on the east coast. And it’s practically an institution over in England.

I gave him a blank look.

A Remittance Man is a disagreeable or disreputable sort of chap who gets a check from his family every month—sometimes a very sizeable check—in return for simply staying the hell out of the family’s hair, out of the family’s business, as far away as possible. And, most especially, out of the newspapers. He shot me a wink. Especially the tabloids.

As a result, Cal was very punctual about rolling through the front door of the dealership by 11:30 or 11:45 every single weekday morning. Or at least on the mornings he showed up, anyway. But working at the dealership was hardly what Ernesto Julio had in mind when he brought Cal out to L.A., and whatever else you could say about my buddy Cal Carrington, he was devastatingly quick in a racing car. As he started proving to Ernesto Julio and everybody else as soon as he got to California. Cal’s first race came barely two weeks after he arrived on the west coast, an SCMA club event out at the Salinas airport, which was about 100 miles southeast of San Francisco and a solid 300-plus north of LA.

Ernesto told Cal he wanted him to drive up in the brand-new, gleaming silver Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing he’d just gotten in a five-car swap with another dealer in Los Angeles. 300SLs were still a really hot item in the fall of 1955, and were the production version of the war-machine Mercedes race cars we’d seen out-run, out-plan and outlast the Ferraris down at La Carrera in November of 1952. Mercedes went on to pretty much dominate the international motorsports scene throughout the middle ’50s—or at least wherever they chose to run, anyway, and they picked their spots with cunning precision—but the terrible wreck Hank and I witnessed at Le Mans in June of ’55 really soured the taste of all that success. That was when Pierre Levegh’s magnesium-bodied 300SLR launched into the air off the back of an unsuspecting Austin-Healey, hit a concrete support stanchion at 150-plus and went into the crowd along the pit straight like an exploding meteor, killing Levegh and 80-some innocent spectators. By that time there were already rumors floating around that Mercedes-Benz was going to withdraw from racing at the end of the ’55 season anyway. I mean, what did they have left to prove? They’d generally mopped the floor with Ferrari, Aston Martin, Jaguar, Porsche and Maserati to win the World Manufacturers’ Championship for sports cars in 1955, and the old Argentine master Juan Manuel Fangio had come through to win back-to-back World Grand Prix Driving Championships for them in Mercedes’ Formula One cars in ’54 and ’55 to add to the one he’d already won for himself at Alfa Romeo in 1951. You have to understand that Mercedes didn’t always have the fastest or most powerful cars—for sure they didn’t down at La Carrera—but they had the whole blessed rest of the package you needed to win: design, engineering, relentless development, top-notch materials, quality manufacturing, incredible organization, thoughtful strategy, unbelievable team discipline…oh, and driving talent. Mercedes was always on the lookout for the very best drivers they could find. So they not only hired Juan Manuel Fangio (who most people agreed was the best damn racing driver on the planet at the time) but also blew off one of their own solid German guys to add Stirling Moss to the team for the ’55 season once it became clear that he was The Next Big Thing. Having a keen eye for driving talent (not to mention the money to sign it up!) is a real key ingredient for any successful racing team. And Mercedes was always a lot different from Ferrari when it came to hiring drivers. Old man Ferrari always figured he had the best, fastest and strongest cars—and he was right more often than not—and so he figured it was a damn privilege to get to drive one of his cars. So a lot of his drivers wound up paying him to drive instead of the other way ’round. Or at least they did in the beginning, anyway. North American Ferrari importer and part-time talent spotter Carlo Sebastian put it all in perspective for me one day at his shop in Manhattan: I don’t care how good they are, if they have money, they pay….

To tell the truth, old man Ferrari was as terminally addicted to motorsports as any star-struck racing driver. Hell, he started out as a driver. And then became a team manager for Alfa Romeo during their glory years between the wars before striking out on his own. So he needed to win once he had his own company and was building cars under his own name. Needed it like a bride needs a groom or a junkie needs a fix. It was as simple as that. No question Enzo Ferrari’s ego was one of the eight great wonders of the industrial age, and it had to be fluffed and preened and petted and cared for with kid gloves the same as any other glorious Italian prima donna. Mercedes was different in that the purpose of their racing was always to prove (and improve the image of!) their bread-and-butter road cars, while a lot of folks—Hank included—thought Ferrari only built road cars to generate enough money to feed his racing habit. But I guess that’s the difference between Germans and Italians in a nutshell, isn’t it? Heart versus head. Mad Passion versus Master Plan. All I know is that no Mercedes ever gave me a hot flash like a blood-red Ferrari and no Ferrari ever awed me with its cool mechanical excellence like a Mercedes SLR.

But that’s why there’s chocolate and vanilla, right?

Anyhow, Mercedes’ new 300SL production version of the 300SLR was still rare, expensive and hard to come by in late 1955. Particularly the all-alloy competition versions with the knock-off disc wheels. Carson and Big Ed and me saw one on the stand at the New York International Auto Show in April of 1953, and no question it impressed the living crap out of us. It was the first production car ever with fuel injection, and they had to use those strange, up-and-out gullwing doors on account of Mercedes’ three-dimensional tubular space frame chassis was easily a foot deep and so the rocker panels had to come halfway up the sides of the car. There was just no other way to do it. But you could see it was really well built and beautifully finished in that cold, meticulous, machined-from-solid-metal German way. Even if 300SL Gullwings were hard as heck to get in and out of. Women in skirts wouldn’t even attempt it. Or at least not in broad daylight, anyway. And word got around pretty quick that 300SLs could be a real steam bath inside on a hot summer day. Which is why you occasionally saw them parading around a July or August racing paddock with the gullwing doors wide open over the roof in the ready for takeoff position. But even so, they were the cars to have if you really wanted the latest hot new thing and so naturally Ernesto Julio just had to have one. And he found a way to do it, too.

But the car wound up at his shop down in Santa Monica after that five-car dealer trade, and Ernesto wanted it up in Sonoma County where he could play with it for a while. And having my pal Cal drive it up to the races in Salinas seemed like a good way to do it and get the car broken in at the same time. Like a lot of guys (Big Ed included), Ernesto always believed that you made a car quicker by breaking it in hard and fast—no matter what the manuals, salesmen or service managers told you—and what better way than by having a hotshoe like Cal smoke it up the coast road from L.A. to Monterey followed by a short blast east on Highway 68 to Salinas? It was hardly the fastest route, but it was the right one to take if you really wanted to wring out a new sportscar.

Or that’s what Hank Lyons told me, anyway. And he ought to know, since he wound up going along for the ride. Turns out Hank lived somewhere south of L.A. with his mother and stepfather when he wasn’t out hop-scotching around the country—or even across the ocean—from one racetrack to another as a motoring scribe. He’d dropped by the dealership in Santa Monica to take a closer look at Ernesto Julio’s new toy as soon as he heard it was there. The sales manager at the official, franchised-from-God Mercedes dealership in L.A. kind of frowned on certified non-prospects like Hank crawling all over his cars. And test drives were out of the question. But Ernesto liked Hank and enjoyed the stuff he wrote—especially when he wrote about Ernesto and his cars—and so he pretty much gave Hank carte blanche to nose around his Italian sportycar store in Santa Monica as much as he wanted.

That’s where Hank ran into Cal, and naturally the two of them got to talking about the race coming up in Salinas and next thing you know it was just past dawn on Friday morning, September 30th, 1955, with Cal’s battered leather overnight bag and Hank’s canvas duffel full of socks, underwear and fresh steno notepads crammed behind the seats of Ernesto Julio’s new 300SL as they took off up the coast route towards Salinas. "That was one hell of a drive! Hank told me later. I was scared shitless all the way from San Simeon to Carmel. Honest to God I was. He shook his head and sighed. But I was lovin’ it, too, he admitted. You ever been on that road?"

I told him I hadn’t.

Well, that first section heading north out of L.A. takes forever, but after Morro Bay it’s 100-plus miles of climbing, diving switchbacks—coiling and uncoiling all the time—with ragged rock faces on one side and sheer dropoffs all the way down to the ocean on the other. I swear, you never saw an ocean that big or blue or endless. The scenery is just flat unbelievable. It’s the most beautiful and breathtaking stretch of sportscar road you ever saw in your life. He thought it over for a second and added: Scariest, too….

Cal was driving?

Hank nodded.

In a brand-new 300SL?

Hank nodded again, his eyes bulging a little from the memory.

That must’ve been one heck of a ride.

Hank offered up a weak grin. I think I maybe made the whole hundred miles on one breath. Or at least that’s what it felt like, anyway. He shook his head again. "Boy, can that guy ever drive!"

You’re telling me.

Once he gets a feel for a car and gets his rhythm with it, it’s like watching a damn symphony conductor.

I know exactly what you mean.

And that 300SL isn’t exactly the easiest thing to sling around. It’s big and kind of heavy, and the rear end can get mighty squirrelly if you’re not careful with it.

It’s the low-pivot swing axle, I explained, kind of showing off what I knew.

Well, whatever it is, it can scare the living crap out of you. Especially if you’re riding in the suicide seat.

You have any religious experiences?

Hank thought it over. Let’s call them ‘stirring encounters with the laws of physics’ and let it go at that. I’m generally not the religious type.

Rides like that will give you religion.

I suppose. Or at least they’ll teach you how to pray….

Amen to that, I agreed.

But I gotta admit, Cal had that car figured out pretty damn quick. At least after he got us into one hell of a tank-slapper and almost put us over a cliff.

I don’t think that would’ve made Ernesto Julio very happy—drop-kicking his brand-new 300SL into the ocean!

No doubt about it. But Cal wasn’t worried. He said we never would’ve survived the crash anyway.

That’s my Cal….

Chapter 2: The Hollywood Connection

Naturally Cal was really revved up about driving Ernesto Julio’s Ferrari in that race at the Salinas airport the first weekend of October. He’d only arrived in California a few weeks before—direct from Road America, in fact—and the season was generally over and done with back in the East and Midwest. But not out in California, where they race pretty much all year ’round. And even though it was just a garden-variety SCMA club event, that race weekend at Salinas turned out to be famous for a lot of reasons. And none of them very good. Oh, it started out well enough. Cal and Hank arrived late Friday afternoon in brilliant, warm, sunshiny California weather and Cal was thrilled with the whole new flock of keen, eager racers and rows of bright, shiny sportscars that he’d never seen before. The layout at Salinas was different from the wide-open, broad-shouldered airport tracks Cal had driven on before on account of it used a lot of the perimeter and access roads around the runways instead of just the runways themselves. Which made for a fairly interesting 2.8-mile circuit with two long straightaways and eleven turns, even if it was flat as an ironing board and didn’t have any of the character or scenery or elevation changes—or greenery or element of risk, for that matter—of the true road courses Cal cut his teeth on back east. And the whole California scene was different, too. To begin with, the cars were generally neater and cleaner and prettied up much nicer than what we were used to back east. Flash and style always counted for a lot out in California. Why, the bodywork and paint on a lot of the cars—even some of the homebuilts and backyard specials—was done to near-show-car standards. Hank said that was on account of the hotrod and custom car influence out in California, and no question it was a far, far cry from what Cal had gotten used to with me and Big Ed and the Trashwagon.

Fact is, a lot of guys were building their own cars out on the west coast (or having them built for them, anyway) and what grabbed Cal’s eye right away were a pair of tough-looking Kurtis 500 sportscars out of Frank Kurtis’s well-known Kurtis-Kraft shop in Glendale, just outside of Los Angeles. Kurtis had been building highly successful Indianapolis racers, sprinters and midgets for years—his low-slung roadsters with the engines offset so the driveshaft ran alongside the driver were pretty much dominating the Indianapolis 500—and underneath the cycle fenders and sheet metal, his sportscars were nothing but Kurtis Indy roadsters widened enough to fit a passenger seat and covered up with some two-seater aluminum bodywork. Frank Kurtis had been building topnotch oval-track racecars for quite a while, and he was also responsible for the somewhat odd-looking and oversized four-seater sports car with the Buck Rogers body styling that Earl Madman Muntz bought the rights to and turned into the Muntz Jet—like the one Big Ed owned for a while. Meanwhile, somebody gave Frank Kurtis an Allard to try (according to chatter in the Salinas paddock, he spun it around backwards in short order!) and it dawned on him almost immediately that he might be able to do a bit better. Not to mention picking up a little extra folding money selling cars to the bucks-up sportycar trade by turning his successful, strong and well-proven Indy roadster design into a two-seater sportscar. They were genuinely brutal-looking machines—all broad shoulders and a big, toothy, bar-bouncer snarl on the front end—and built solid as a set of railroad tracks. At first, Frank Kurtis offered them up in kit form as the 500KK, but he didn’t get many takers. So he started selling complete cars—called the 500S—and you could order them with any big, honking engine you wanted slipped between the frame rails. One of the cars at Salinas had a hot-rodded Caddy V-8 and the other one had a big old chuffing monster of a Buick engine under its quivering hood louvers, and Cal said they both came out of the corners like they were shot out of a damn cannon. In the right hands, a Kurtis 500 could take on the latest and fastest Ferraris and Jaguars and stand a pretty fair chance of beating them. Or at least they could on a nice, wide, flat airport circuit with tight corners leading onto long straightaways like Salinas, where brute acceleration really counted for more than aerodynamically slippery top speed or outright handling finesse. Oh, maybe their Indy-style solid axle front and rear suspensions didn’t much like the road crowns, iffy pavement, elevation changes and sudden switchbacks of a real road course, but they were sure hell for fast on the airport tracks.

There were some nifty smallbore machines, too. Like expatriate Brit Ken Miles’s slick, tiny and indecently quick little MG special that everybody called The Flying Shingle for obvious reasons. He beat all the Porsches with it more often than not. To the point that California Porsche distributor John von Neumann eventually asked Ken to race Porsches for him—as much to get him out of that damn MG special as anything else! And he kept right on winning, because Ken Miles was one hell of a sharp, talented and mechanically savvy racing driver. He was a tough, skinny, wiry sort of guy with a sly grin, a side-of-the-mouth British accent and a face like the business end of a tomahawk, and Hank said that gorgeous little Flying Shingle MG special was so tiny and petite that the shadow of Ken’s nose extended halfway down the hood whenever he drove it.

Then there was Pete Lovely’s ingenious (if somewhat strange-looking) miniscule Porsche-powered Cooper chassis that he and everybody else called the Pooper with tongues so far in cheek that they almost came out their ears. But it went fast as stink. Hell, nobody was building cars like that back east. And they flew! But what really impressed Cal was the lack of all that blue-blooded, Old Money stuffiness he’d grown accustomed to at places like Bridgehampton and Mount Equinox back east. Everybody seemed so tanned and relaxed and happy on the west coast racing scene. But Hank said that could be a little deceptive. Everything was on the surface out in California. Everything was appearances. And looking like you were on top of the world (and just naturally enjoying the living hell out of it!) was maybe even more important than actually being there. But a lot of that was on account of the strong connection between the L.A. racing scene and the movie business in Hollywood, where the line between fantasy and reality was blurry at best. Not to mention that when Big Money arrived in the movie business—if it arrived at all—it came in a sudden, gushing avalanche of exceedingly large-denomination bills that just begged to be spent on something extravagant, excessive, exotic, flamboyant and, if possible, just a wee bit naughty and dangerous.

Sportycar racing was a perfect fit….

Turns out there was always a lot of crossover between the movie business and the California racing scene. Like Hank told me Clark Gable—yes, that Clark Gable—had served as Honorary Race Chairman at the races out at Hansen Dam in the middle of June. Can you imagine? But I guess that was to be expected. After all, racing and the movie business were both about money and flash and style and risk and unreasonably high expectations, and the only real difference was that you could pretty much tell where the hell you were and how things were going and whether you were winning or losing in racing, while that kind of certainty was always up for grabs (or at the very least open to interpretation) where the movie business was concerned. So the Hollywood types not only liked racing because of the color and speed and danger and atmosphere and excitement, but also because it was a lot more finite and made a lot more sense than making movies. Like Hank always said, starring roles and Oscar picks were essentially whim-and-fashion gut shots—style points, you know?—but in racing, all you needed was a stopwatch to know who really had the goods.

Of course Cal didn’t know many of the west coast racers. And they didn’t know him, either. Except that he’d shown up in Ernesto Julio’s brand-new (but now rather dusty) 300SL and that he’d been entered to drive Ernesto’s latest Ferrari in the bigbore modified feature on Sunday. And that was more than enough to make him the subject of a lot of whispering, finger-pointing and shrugging of shoulders. Hank introduced him around as best he could, and Cal was typically, cockily confident that they’d all sure as hell know who he was by the end of the weekend. That in spite of the fact that our old La Carrera friend and hero Phil Hill—who was pretty much regarded as the top California road racer at the time—was entered to drive John von Neumann’s Ferrari Monza in the very same race. Phil was also supposed to run von Neumann’s quick little Porsche 550 Spyder in the smallbore race, and you’d have to say he was penciled in as the favorite in both groups.

John von Neumann had become quite a key fixture in southern California sportycar circles by then. He was originally from Vienna—just like that Max Hoffmann guy who imported Porsches and just about anything else he could get his hands on back in New York—where von Neumann’s father was some kind of bigshot society doctor with an impressive international reputation and some very famous names on his patient list. But he decided he had to get his family the hell out of Europe before the war came, and so they pulled up stakes (and bank accounts) and moved to New York City. Not long after that, his father died and John eventually wound up messing around with cars out in California. It’d be easy to simply pass him off as a silver-spoon type who’d always had money in his pocket, but John von Neumann was also a shrewd thinker, hard worker, tireless organizer and had learned a lot of tough lessons about trust and self-reliance. Anyhow, he’d always been nuts about fast, interesting cars, and he and a couple of his car-crazy California buddies (along with their wives and/or girlfriends) started doing these loosely organized, highly illegal point-to-point highway speed runs to test and show off their latest toys. Most often at night, when the canyon, desert and shoreline roads were empty and the cops were generally parked on a stool in a diner somewhere or home having dinner. Those runs would inevitably wind up at some restaurant with good food and a well-stocked bar where everybody could brag and lie and swap excuses, and out of those nighttime speed runs grew an organization called the California Sports Car Club—or Cal Club, as it became known—which turned into kind of a more relaxed, less stuffy, ain’t-that-neat/run-what’cha-brung southern California alternative to the local SCMA regions. And particularly the San Francisco region, which tended to be more like the blue-blooded, blue-nosed, let-me-see-your-family-pedigree stuffed shirts who had far too much influence on the sportycar scene back east. Cal Club welcomed hot rodders, customizers, Bonneville speed-record freaks and roundy-round types as well as European sportycar enthusiasts—hey, if it made noise and went fast, it had their attention—and quickly turned into a thorn in the side of the local SCMA regions. Especially after Cal Club started putting on their own races. Even though the two clubs were sanctioning and promoting the same kind of races—and often for the same exact cars and participants!—there was an ongoing political border war between the two. Which is another way of saying that the Charlie Priddle types in both clubs were at each other’s throats often as not. As for the real racers, they couldn’t have cared less! It just meant more events and more race weekends and more places to run!

Besides being seriously infected with the sports car disease, John von Neumann was also a pretty clever and far-sighted businessman, and he got into the sportycar business in a very big way out in Los Angeles. It all started with a place called Competition Motors in North Hollywood, where he started selling MGs and Hillmans and such to the local enthusiast crowd. And also to the fashion-conscious Los Angeles Boulevard Cruiser types who didn’t know a double-clutch from a double scotch-on-the-rocks, but thought those precious little European sportscars were terribly chic anyway. Like Hank always said, there was never a better market for anything bold, loud, flashy and different than California. And that went double for anything that could attract attention in Los Angeles!

Later on von Neumann added Porsche—buying them one at a time from Max Hoffman in New York and driving them across the whole blessed country to North Hollywood—and those cars really caught on in California and made John von Neumann one whale of a lot of money. Then he worked himself a deal to become the Volkswagen distributor for the entire state just when Volkswagen was starting to catch on. Like I said, smart. But it was more than dumb luck and being in the right place at the right time. According to Hank, von Neumann always ran a tight ship and did things the right way, and moreover made damn sure that the sports cars he sold were out there being raced where the buying public could see them. And winning, too….

But even though he was selling and racing Porsches, von Neumann’s real love was always Ferraris. He generally had a couple of old Enzo’s latest and fastest street and racing models in his stable along with the MGs and Porsches and such. Like a lot of guys who get bitten by the bug, at first he just drove them himself (and so did his wife Eleanor and her daughter Josie in the Ladies’ Races) but John von Neumann was realistic enough to see that there were faster guys out there. And some of them—like Ken Miles—were even working for him as mechanics. I’m proud to say that a large percentage of great racing drivers—and virtually all great racing drivers born without that lucky silver spoon in their chops—started out as grease-monkey wrench-spinners. Taking cars apart and putting them back together and dealing with whatever broke gives you a pretty keen feel for how cars work and what they’ll put up with.

Anyhow, pretty soon von Neumann was offering drives to some of the most promising young west coast hotshoes—like Phil Hill and Ken Miles and Richie Ginther—in order to give his cars the best chance of winning. Which also helped their careers along no small amount. But John von Neumann was hardly the only rich sportycar enthusiast/car-owner/race entrant type out in California. Ernesto Julio and John Edgar and Tony Parravano always had hot cars—lots of them!—and Tony in particular was a hands-on kind of guy out of the concrete and construction businesses who loved exotic hardware and enjoyed the heck out of spinning wrenches and twisting screwdrivers on his Ferraris and Maseratis himself. Hank said he could be a hell of a nice guy (so long as his cars were running at the front of the pack, anyway) although it was quietly whispered that nosing around in Tony’s business affairs wasn’t the healthiest sort of thing you could do. But he and von Neumann and John Edgar and Ernesto Julio all loved the fast cars and the excitement and drama and color and sportsmanship and camaraderie of the race weekends. Not to mention the thrill, power and control of being a hotshot racing team impresario. There was huge satisfaction in seeing their cars come home first—especially if they were beating the other bigtime west coast racing team impresarios in the process! Why, it was almost as good as being in the driver’s seat! In fact, sometimes (with the aid of a few stiff drinks) they couldn’t tell the two apart. Plus there were always lots of parties and pretty girls and wild, famous or unusual characters on the scene, and that made race weekends a hell of a lot more entertaining and interesting than everyday life. In fact, the social scene was the main attraction for an awful lot of the west coast racers and hangers-on. There were beer busts and barbeques in the paddock, motel pool parties where everybody eventually wound up in the drink—whether they had bathing suits on or not!—and boozy, sunburned commando-raid invasions of entire small-town cocktail lounges, corner bars, supper clubs and sit-down restaurants. Racing in California always came with a whoop-it-up party atmosphere that moved through the paddock like a 90-proof tide as soon as the last engine fell silent and continued till damn near dawn for some of the heartier participants.

The cars those bigshot car owners bought to race against each other were always the very latest and fastest—Jaguars and Ferraris and Maseratis and such—and they’d hire the best of the available hotshoes to drive them. Like tough ex-oval track racer Jim McAfee and lightning-fast failed Texas chicken rancher Carroll Shelby and that rich Masten Gregory kid (who by then was known as The Kansas City Flash and getting some of his rides without even having to pay for them) and quick local boys Phil Hill and Richie Ginther and Bob Drake and Billy Krause and even Indy 500 stars like Troy Ruttman, whose names were already household words. Although some of the roundy-round drivers seemed a little out of their element at first in the sportycar world. It wasn’t that they didn’t know how to drive—hell, they were great racing drivers!—but, like Sammy Speed once told me, ovals and road courses are as different as country music and a string symphony, and it takes time to get used to either one if you’re coming at it from the opposite direction.

Meanwhile, those rich car owners planned and schemed and watched and evaluated and maneuvered against each other from trackside, trying to find that elusive extra edge. Hank said the competition between those guys was every bit as fierce as what their drivers were trying to do to each other out on the racetrack—maybe even moreso—and there was always a secret, behind-the-scenes side battle going as to who could get the inside line on the latest, hottest new car or who could spot fresh driving talent and bring it to the finish line first. Which is precisely how Phil Hill wound up entered in John von Neumann’s Ferrari and Porsche 550 out at Salinas. But as soon as Phil arrived, he had to turn around and head back home after word came through that his brother-in-law Dan Parkinson—who was also a well-known, well-liked and highly successful and respected California racer and car builder—had inexplicably committed suicide. It was one of those strange, hard-to-fathom deals that makes everybody look in a mirror and wonder. Especially out in a perfect, Garden-of-Eden spot like southern California. Why would anybody who seemed to enjoy life so much ever want to do such a thing? Especially a racer, since racers can get a lot of stuff out of their systems that ordinary people have to keep bottled up inside where it gnaws at them. But you never know how it is for other people, do you? They usually only show you the shiny side.

But with Phil Hill on his way back to L.A., Cal figured to have an even better shot at winning his race at Salinas. And don’t think for a moment he didn’t appreciate the implications. That’s something you have to understand about genuine racecar drivers: the really good ones are predatory, cold-blooded realists. And opportunists to a fault. But they have to be. Any advantage, any break, any turn of fate that can help you out is a plus. No matter how dark or ugly or unfortunate it may be for somebody else. Even if it’s your friend. Sure, you may feel lousy about it. But you take it, just the same. And that’s something that sets the real racers apart from all the duffers, journeymen, playboys and wannabes who fill up the majority of the starting spots on race weekends. It’s tight, serious stuff up there at the sharp end of the grid. And the better you are and the higher you go, the tighter and more serious it becomes.

But Cal Carrington didn’t really know all that stuff yet. All he knew was that he was happy as hell to be out there getting ready for his very first race in California, and that one of the guys he was worried about—I mean really worried about!—he didn’t have to worry about anymore. You’d think racing drivers would spend a lot of time mulling over mixed feelings and feeling conflicted about that sort of thing. But believe me, they don’t. Personally, I think the best of them are immune….

Ernesto Julio wasn’t scheduled to show up until later that evening and his Ferrari was still on its way up from Santa Monica (but most definitely not by way of the coast road!) and so there wasn’t much for Cal and Hank to do but hang around the paddock, chat up the locals and check out the cars. Dusty as it was, Ernesto’s 300SL was attracting quite a bit of attention—300SLs were still new and rare and unquestionably a little bit sinister—and Hank felt compelled to take a clean t-shirt out of his duffel and wipe the car down. Cal couldn’t have cared less. In fact, he took his shirt off, stretched himself out on the hood with his aviator sunglasses on and went to work on his tan. At least he put his shirt down first (although Hank said it was more to keep the road dust off of him than to keep the finish from getting scratched).

At any rate, it wasn’t long at all before another 300SL cruised into the paddock—a dark blue one with the rare knockoff disc wheels—and pulled to a halt right next to them. The big gullwing doors swung open and out stepped two young kids who looked like they were barely out of high school. The driver was a handsome, smooth-cheeked teenager with Ray-Ban sunglasses and a perfectly sculptured sweep of California blonde hair across his forehead. He glanced at Cal laid out on the hood of Ernesto Julio’s 300SL and then ran his eyes up and down the car. How long you had yours? he asked.

About eight hours, Cal told him without looking up. But it’s not really mine. I’m just breaking it in for a friend.

You breaking in the hood or the whole car? the other kid asked. He wasn’t as trim or blond or handsome as the one who was driving, but he had a wiseass smile and a shitload of mischief dancing in his eyes. Cal aimed those aviator sunglasses at him but didn’t say a word.

You drove it up from L.A.? the first kid asked.

Cal nodded.

You take the coast road or 99 and 101?

We took the coast road, Hank broke in. He scared the living shit out of me.

A tight-lipped grin slowly spread across the blonde kid’s face. I wanted to take the coast road, too. But we were running late and I figured we didn’t have the time. Besides, I wanted to see what she’d do on a long, flat stretch.

The second kid rolled his eyes.

Whad’ja find out?

It won’t do 150. The salesman told me it would, but it wouldn’t.

Maybe after it’s broken in? Hank offered.

Maybe. But I could only get around 140 and change out of it. At least on the speedo, anyway.

That’s still pretty respectable, Hank allowed.

Yeah, but it’s still not 150. The blonde kid’s lip curled under. "If the salesman tells you it’ll do 150, it oughta do 150."

He obviously had a lot to learn about car salesmen.

The kid looked the two cars over again. So, you gonna race that one?

I don’t think so, Cal told him. We just brought it up for a friend, like I said. Ernesto Julio. You know who he is?

The kid shrugged. I think I’ve heard of him.

Cal here’s gonna race his Ferrari this weekend, Hank explained grandly.

The blonde kid looked thoroughly unimpressed. Well, I’m racing this one, he said, nodding towards his 300SL, and my friend Bruce here is gonna get some laps in, too. We were kind of hoping to have somebody to race against. There was a mild hint of a challenge in his voice, and Cal and Hank instantly shot glances at each other. It had occurred to both of them that the kid didn’t really look old enough to be racing. Hell, he didn’t look old enough to be shaving. The SCMA rules said you had to be at least 21 to get a racing license.

You been in many races? Hank asked him.

This’ll be my second. I raced at Santa Barbara over Labor Day weekend.

First time?

The kid nodded.

You do any good?

The kid looked down at the gill slits on the flanks of his 300SL. It was my first try, he said without looking up. I’ll get better.

You’d better, the other kid wisecracked. The first kid shot him a glare you could see right through the Ray-Bans.

Y’know, Cal told them in a friendly, Dutch Uncle kind of way (but putting the old psych job in at the same time), 300SLs aren’t exactly the easiest cars in the world to drive. Especially for a beginner. Oh, they may be the best damn sports car in the world out on the open highway—smooth and solid as a ball bearing—and you can cruise all day long at seven- or eight-tenths, no sweat. But try pushing one to nine- or ten-tenths and they can get a little hairy. It’s that low-pivot swing axle. The handling’s kinda freakish out there at the limit. And they’re sorta heavy, too….

Mine’s got the all-alloy bodywork, the kid broke in. I had a regular one, but the salesman said I really needed one of the lightweight ones if I was gonna race it. Bruce and I had to go all the way up to this warehouse in San Francisco to find it.

The other kid nodded. The guy told us to look through all the cars until we found a silver one with the knockoff disc wheels.

But this car’s blue, Hank observed.

The two of them looked back and forth at each other. He had it repainted, the wiseass one explained.

I was maybe trying to fool some people into thinking it was the same car, the blonde kid said sheepishly.

Right, the other one laughed. "You didn’t want your mother to know you bought two 300SLs."

She doesn’t care, the blonde kid said like he almost wished she did. He looked the car over with a hint of uncertainty in his eyes. It’s supposed to be the only lightweight on the coast. Or at least that’s what the salesman told us, anyway.

And we already know what a piece-of-shit liar he is, don’t we? Cal laughed.

The kid frowned, but then a big, genuine smile blossomed across his face. Yeah, I guess we do, he agreed, and stuck out his hand. Reventlow, he said. Lance Reventlow. And this is my buddy Bruce Kessler. We went to school together in Arizona.

Handshakes all around.

Lance, huh? Cal repeated with an