Miranda Seymour: The Bugatti Queen

Let's get rid of the semantics. The Bugatti Queen is sub-titled In Search of a Motor-Racing Legend. Is Helene Delangle, the pioneering French woman driver, a legend? Probably not in the English-speaking world. Nowhere in my research of her chosen sport and of notable women sporting identities does she rate a mention. One suspects the "legend" bit was at the insistence of the publishers. No matter.

By any standards, Delangle was still some gal — certainly fascinating enough to convince the established English writer Miranda Seymour that she was worthy of a biography, and a spectacularly good one it has turned out to be, too. Roll on the movie, I say, or at least put Delangle on the History Channel.

She was born in 1900, the daughter of a rural postmaster. She moved to Paris in her late teens, and in between climbing Mt Blanc and posing for Lucky Strike cigarette advertisements, she danced nude in music hall revues until she hurt her knee in a skiing accident.

She then took to driving fast cars, Bugattis in particular, and called herself Helle Nice. She raced against the blokes in Grands Prix and Monte Carlo rallies and sped to all sorts of women's world records.

In 1930 she gave hell-raising exhibition drives in America, hurtling round banked tracks. With her Jean Harlow hair and her ability to work a crowd, she was loved by Americans.

Her career virtually came to an end six years later when she crashed, through no fault of her own, in the Sao Paulo Grand Prix. Six spectators were killed in the accident and 34 injured. Helle Nice was in a coma for three days.

Enough of the motor-racing. This was never intended as a book for petrolheads. As the author is at pains to point out, Delangle had more lovers — among them a Spanish Count, a Romanian Prince and Baron Philippe de Rothschild — than Grands Prix; she was accused of being a Gestapo collaborator; and was embezzled out of her savings by a long-time admirer.

Delangle died in obscurity in 1984. She was alone and had been living on charity. Her obituary in Le Figaro amounted to just four lines.

Seymour has done Delangle and us a great favour. Indeed, the real heroine here might be Seymour herself. How she stumbled across her subject, quite by chance, and then diligently went to work on it, is a shining example to all biographers.

* Harper Collins, $29.95


* Hedley Mortlock is an Auckland reviewer.