1962 - A pretty, pink-cheeked English nurse pushed him into the room; he was riding a high-backed, old fashioned looking wheelchair, a small man, heavily muscled, laughing, slit eyed. It was his 46th day in the hospital, and for 38 of those days he had been unconscious, or semi-conscious, or in amnesia, but he was tan and he looked strong.
The left side of his face was raddled with rough, red scars all around the eye, as if someone had been at him with a broken beer bottle. " That was a funny story, boy, in your last letter," he said, "that story about the clam-digger ... what's this, what's this?" An enchanting gamine thing in faded levis, red-brown hair and dark glasses was handing him an envelope, her photograph. "I like that!" he said. "Put it over there, stand it up. you've met, you two, this is Judy Carne?".
We had met. He stared at her, smiling, as if he could pull himself out of the wheelchair with eyes. He grabbed her wrist. "Did you see The Daily Sketch yesterday?" He turned to me. "Did you see that, boy? We were sitting in the garden, this bloke poked a telephoto lens over the wall, the bastard was 20 yards away, Judy was brushing a bread crumb off my chin when he shot it, an admirer the capition said ..." "I like that," Miss Carne said. "Admirer!" "Are you suing?" he said. "I can't," she said. "I'm going to Hollywood tomorrow."
He smiled again. He looked much as he had when I saw him four days before he went off the course at 120 miles an hour and slammed into a wall at Goodwood: the 40 odd stitches had been taken out of his face; the left cheekbone, stuffed full of support from inside, didn't betray that it had been shattered, and his nose didn't really look as if it had ever been broken, much less broken eigth times. His bare left foot lay immobile on the wheelchair rest. His leg was bandaged, but the plaster cast was on the window-sill, sliced in two. There were marks on the pink top of his head. He looked beat up but whole. What he could move; his head, his right arm, his left arm less, and he talked. He picked up a cellophane bag of red roses someone had left on the bed.
"They're from Germany," he said. He read the name. "I don't know who that is," he said. The door opened behind him. "Viper?" he said. He looked around the back of the wheelchair. "Viper, you went off with my fountain pen. "Valerie Pirie, his secretary, a pretty, calm girl. She gave him his pen. He made a note on the card and dropped it on a neat pile of cards and letters. "So-and-so and so-and-so are outside, "she said. "I told them not to come, but... and the man from Grundig is coming at 4:30, about the tape recorder. "Tape recorders are important to Moss. He has done five books on tape recorders.
An orderly brought in another bunch of red roses. As he left, a tall blonde came in, and behind her, another, taller. Kiss Kiss. Judy Carne was lying on her belly on the bed, her chin in her hand, staring at him. "I'll tell you, boy," he was saying, "nothing that has happened to me since I came here, except when they broke my nose again, hurt like that clot's shaving me. I had seven days growth of beard. He swore he knew how. I can't think where he'd learned, it was like pulling it out... "
Another nurse, with tea, bread and butter, jam, clotted cream. He talked. Valerie said, "Drink your tea, Stirling". He drank it and she gave him another cup. He made each of the blondes eat a piece of bread and butter and jam. Neither wanted to, they were dieting, but they couldn't think of answers for the persuasions that poured out of him.
He talked very well, but he didn't stop. He said to me, "You know, I'm not supposed to put any weight on this left leg, under penalty of death or flogging or something, but I'll tell you, the other night I went from there, to there, the washbasin, and back; actually, coming back I passed out. I didn't go unconscious, I get dizzy now and then. I just fell down, but it was so funny, the reason I had to do it ..."
For some time after the accident his speech, when he spoke in delirium, was thick and slurred because of the brain injury, and there was some reason to doubt he would ever speak clearly again. Worse, a close friend had said, "I have the impression that he cannot form an idea of his own, but can only respond to ideas that are fed to him". Now he spoke the crisp quick English he had always used, and ideas came as fast as he could handle them. And he went on and on. It wasn't that he talked incessantly, or compulsively, although he did come close to it. He would stop to listen. He had always been in my opinion a good listener, polite, attentive, absorbed and retentive. But he would listen now only exactly as long as someone spoke and had something to speak about. Then he would begin instantly to talk again. There were no pauses. I think he was happy to find himself able to talk again, and in any case excitation is common in recovery from severe trauma. But it was also plain that he wanted no silences in that room.
I remembered something he had said that last time I'd seen him, in a long dark afternoon of talk in the little apartment in Earl's Court Road: "When I go to bed tonight, I hope to be tired, very tired, because I don't want to think. I don't want to think".
Valerie Pirie had said to me, when he was still in coma, "Do you know, last night he was speaking in French and Italian, as well as English, of course - but his accent in french and Italian was very pure, much better than it's ever been when he was conscious. Why's that, do you think?"
"Disinhibition. What did he say?" "He was talking about girls, a lot of the time. Once he said, "E molto difficile per un corridore, molto difficile." (Life is very hard for a race driver, very hard).
A hard life ? Stirling Moss is one of the best-know men in the world, and beyond any doubt the best-know sports figure. Only Queen Elizabeth, by actual line count, gets more mention in the British press than Stirling Moss. Six weeks after his last accident the Sunday Times of London considered his appearance in the garden of the hospital worth a four column picture and a long story - on page one. His appearance on a street corner in Rome or Nairobi or Brisbane would block traffic within minutes. He makes $ 150,000 or so a year. His present injuries aside, he is as healthy as a bull, iron-hard, capable of fantastic endurance. His mail averages 10.000 pieces a year (400 - 500 a day when he's in the hospital) and he answers every letter, and promptly. Most men like him. Women find him irresistible, nine times in ten. He has picked a girl out of the crowd standing in a corner at a race circuit, waved to her every time around, made a date for that evening in pantomime, and won the race, too. He sometimes dates three girls in a day. The ultimate mark is on him; his women know that he has other women and they don't care.
His Lotus hopelessly behind because of gearbox trouble, Moss nevertheless took off in flat-out pursuit of Goodwood's lap record.
Most importantly, he has work to do that he likes doing, and he is better in his work than any other man alive, better in the common judgment of his peers. He is, if the last accident has not destroyed him, the greatest race driver living.
For years he has been universally considered the fastest driver alive and that he has never won the championship of the world is one of the major curiosities of sports. He has been three times third in the world rankings, four times second. The championship is decided on the basis of placement in, usually, about 10 major races throughout the world. The 1958 champion, Mike Hawthorn of England, won only one of these races, while Moss won four. But Moss has beaten every man who has held the world championship for the past 10 years. Those very few of whom it can be said that they do one thing, whatever it is, better than anyone else has ever done it are marked forever, and in his profession Moss is an immortal. And he is 32, well off if not rich, healthy, popular, talented to the point of genius, a citizen of the world.
E molto difficile per un corridore, molto difficile ?
Yes. Very difficult. The essence of the difficulty is that race-driving on the highest level, in a fastest, most competitive company, Grand Prix driving, is the most dangerous sport in the world. In some recent years the mortality rate has been 25 percent per years; one of every four drivers starting the season could expect to be dead at the end of it. The list of drivers killed in the decade 1951/1961, counting major figures only, totals 56 names.
Tazio Nuvolari, for decades called the greatest master of race driving who ever lived, could not find the courage to leave the game that had broken every major bone in his body and had seven times caused doctors formally to announce his impending death; he drove with blood running down his chin because the exhaust fumes made him hemorrhage; he drove when he was so weak he had to be lifted, inert, from the car at the end of a race; he drove until he could not drive; he died in bed, hating it.
Juan Manuel Fangio, five times champion of the world, retired and left the game in 1958 because he was slowing and because he was lonely and depressed, so many of his friends had been killed.
Men like Nuvolari and Fangio, or the matador de toros Juan Belmonte, retiring with the marks of 72 bull gorings on a thin, frail body, share a common mold: skill, obsession, courage, sensitivity. Courage doesn't count most. Skill is basic, and sensitivity, and always the obsession. When the obsession is great enough, the man will find courage to sustain it, somehow. The American race driver Frank Lochart, killed at Daytona in 1928, nearly always vomited before he got into the automobile, but he got into it.
Once a man has gone over, the terror of his nights will be, not mortal death, which he will have seen many times, and which, like a soldier, he believes is most likely to come to the man next to him, and the risk of which is in any case the price of the ticket to the game, but real death - final deprivation of the right to go up on the wire again. Then, like Moss, he'll do anything to get back. In the hospital, Moss would accept any pain, any kind of treatment, anything at all that he could believe would shorten, if only by a very little, his path back to the race car, never mind the fact that it took a crew of mechanics 30 minutes with hack saws and metal shears to cut the last one apart enough to make it let go of him.
When he was finally lifted free his face was slashed in a dozen places, his left arm was broken, his left leg was broken at knee and ankle, he had cracked ribs, torn muscles, a broken cheekbone and a broken nose - and his brain had been so massively bruised that the left side of his body was paralyzed.
"Recovery from the brain damage is likely to be a slow process", specialists said, "and there is a possibility that full recovery of function in the arm and leg will not take place." His vision was disturbed. Moss laughed at the doctors and in the night, and whenever he could, pushed the broken leg against the footboard of his bed to exercise it.
His vision, before the Goodwood accident, was startlingly abnormal. Denis Jenkinson, one of the most reliable of observers, tells of an occasion when Moss identified a driver by name at a distance at which Jenkinson, who has normal corrected vision, could barely tell the color of the man's car. Moss' visual accommodation is fantastic: He can change focus from, say, one mile to 30 inches to one mile again virtually instantaneously.
Moss broke the record, then inexplicably ran off the circuit. Cut out of the mangled Lotus, he spent two months in a hospital.Until Easter Sunday and Goodwood, it was usually held that no one had seen Stirling Moss make a major error of judgment. Off the road enough to bash a fender on a hay bale, yes, or run up on the curb, that short of thing, yes, but serious, no. No one knows what happened at Goodwood.
Thousands saw the accident, but no one knows what caused it, least of all Moss, who has the amnesia typical of his injury. Driving a Lotus, he was in fourth place in the ninth lap when the gearbox stuck in fourth gear. He came in, and the mechanics took five minutes to fix the gearbox.
Almost any stop at all will ruin a driver's chances in today's a Grand Prix racing, and when Moss went out again, he was three laps, or 7.2 miles, behind Graham Hill, leading. He had absolutely no chance to win, but typically (One's a race driver or one's not) he began to driv at the absolute limit. Last year, at the Zandvoort circuit in Holland in a similar situation, with no chance to win, he broke the lap record seven times in succession. He broke the course record at Goodwood, too, and made up an entire lap, 2.4 miles.
He came up behind Graham Hill at around 120 miles an hours, out of a fast bend called St. Mary's. It is not a stretch in which drivers ordinarily attempt passing. He shifted from fifth to fourth gear at the proper place, but at this point Graham Hill, looking into his mirror, was astounded to see that Moss car was not slowing, but was coming on; observers on the ground saw him pull abreast of Hill's car and then go almost straight on 60 yards or so into an earthen bank. He did slow the car down to something around 60-80 miles an hour before he hit, but he did not spin it, which would have been logical.
The possible explanations were various:
1- He had finally made a major error in judgment and was trying to overtake Hill at a point in the circuit where it couldn't be done. There is always a first time. The great Italian driver Achille Varzi never had a real accident until the one that killed him at berne in 1948.
2- When he lifted his foot off the accelerator after shifting from fifth to fourth, the throttle stayed down. This had happened to him in the same car the week before, but as he would be expected to do, he had managed.
3- The engine had suddenly cut out. When this happens, the car can go instantly out of control.
Laurence Pomeroy, a world authority on the racing car, was near. He considers that the behavior of the car was typical of a throttle jammed wide open, and that Moss had one second, or one second and a half at the most, in which to assay the situation, decide what to do, and do it.
