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Helene Delangle sits on the Bugatti 35C race car she broke the world speed record in. |
Dancer, actor and racing driver, Helene Delangle lived life in the fast lane, writes Gerald Isaaman
The Bugatti Queen: In search of a motor racing legend by Miranda Seymour.
Simon and Schuster, £15.99
HER Story is unique. So too her nickname, Hellé Nice, which means ‘she is nice’, and brought her headlines whenever she drove cars – and men – wild with passion.
She was the poor postman’s daughter from Paris who became the fastest woman racing driver in the world, but died destitute and in obscurity, her name not even recorded on her family grave.
For the blonde Helene Delangle, the vivacious and promiscuous girl who started life as a stripper, never survived being falsely accused of being a war-time Nazi agent.
All she left behind were two scrap books of her deeds, sold off at auction, and a trunk stuffed full of papers that an old friend kept safely, in a back street in Nice. Now Helene’s remarkable story has been resurrected and her fame restored by the brilliant biographer Miranda Seymour, who, in her search for the truth in America and France, has herself driven at 120mph the famous racing car, now worth £2 million, of the Bugatti Queen.
“It’s like drinking champagne, absolute joy, pure living for the moment, pure terror, pure delight,” she told me with delight at her home in Belsize Park, Hampstead.
“I did it because of my love of speed and so that I could understand what they said about Helene – that once you’ve driven a Bugatti like that it stays in your blood forever.
Miranda’s own quest is itself a fascinating story, beginning in Hampstead when antique dealer Warner Dailey, an old friend she hadn’t seen for years, visited her in time for her birthday in August 2000, and had one specific tale to tell.
At a car boot sale held near Saint Tropez, he had found a battered album of yellowing sports cuttings all about Helle, to him someone unknown.
He bought it for £70, and subsequently found a second album that had been sold in the Nice flea market, and bought that for £100. Then he tracked down the blue Bugatti 35C racing car pictured in so many of the cuttings, now owned by an American vintage car collector, and reunited the cuttings with the car – for $7,000. “He kept a copy of one of the cuttings, which he showed me,” recalled Miranda. “It was of this wonderful, very sassy girl sitting on the torpedo tail of a Bugatti, laughing her head off and looking absolutely on top of the world. I just fell in love with the picture.”
Miranda headed for Nice, once the home of Ettore Bugatti’s empire. “I found this desperately sad street in the tobacco workers’ district and a boarded up very derelict house with a squatter living in the two attic rooms in what turned out to be Helle’s home, and where she died in 1984.
“A neighbour remembered her wearing this shabby old leopard skin coat with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, a woman so poor that she once saw Helle taking milk from one of the cats’ saucers in the street.”
She discovered too the daughter of Helle’s landlord, who had kept an enormous chest full of her things in the hope that someone would someday come in search of Helle’s story.
“Here was a collection of all her letters and photographs, family papers, details of her lovers, details of her races, details of the yacht she sailed round France in – it was absolutely glorious, the moment biographer’s live for,” Miranda says.
Helle ran away from home at 16, possibly became a hooker in Paris. By the age of 20 she was training as a ballerina, who went on to dance before royalty, then changed steps to appear at the Casino de Paris with the likes of Maurice Chevalier, before breaking a knee while skiing and never dancing again. Another change of career came after Ettore Bugatti chose her to drive his elegant racing car in a bid to sell it to women. On a freezing December day in 1929, driving the Bugatti 35C two-litre machine, she smashed the world speed record, driving at 135mph, for no fewer than 10 laps.
“It was an absolutely extraordinary feat she could handle a car like that when the weight of the steering felt like an iron bar across your shoulders,” says Miranda
A racing career followed in Europe and across America where she competed in more than 75 Grand Prix. Her giddy world collapsed in 1949 when the Monte Carlo Rally was revived for the first time since the war, her one time jealous racing rival, the debonair Louis Chiron, declaring at the rally party that Helle had been a Nazi agent, his word, because of his fame, accepted. She received pitiful damages in a court action when she challenged him, and then disappeared, supported by a charity, to end her life in poverty and disgrace.
Miranda started to dig into the German records in Berlin.
“I got a jolly letter back applauding me for trying to clear her name and the confirmation with absolute certainty from the Germans, who kept meticulous records, that Helle had never been an agent,” she says.
But the drama has a tragic ending. Helle’s sister, Solange, hated her so much she refused to record her name on the family grave.
“I have been to Sainte-Mesme and stood at the grave which has on it the names of her mother, her brother and sister,” says Miranda. “She once said, ‘The thing I like best in the world is adventure.’”
Published: Thursday 5th February 2004
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