The Intrepid Gentleman
(See Cover) Shed no nostalgic tears for New port. The great "Gilded Age" of the early 1900s -- when O.H.P. Belmont's carriage horses used to sleep on pure white linen sheets, and William Fahnestock festooned the trees on his estate with 14-carat gold artificial fruits--has passed. But Rhode Island's "Queen of Resorts" still has its cachet and its names: the Auchinclosses, the Dukes, the Donahues, the Drexels, Lorillards, Woolworths and Hartfords.
Mrs. Margaret Van Alen Bruguiere, the summer colony's grande dame, still lives in her 50-room "cottage," Wake-hurst, surrounded by a fortune in art and a dozen servants. Bailey's Beach, where the memberships pass from father to son, is still "the most exclusive swimming hole in the U.S." In the Newport Casino, ladies still sip tea under parasols, while their husbands, decked out in white flannels and old school blazers, watch the tennis matches. And at nightfall, there is the Preservation Society Ball, the Tennis Ball, the White Elephant Ball, the Jazz Festival, plus a progression of wedding receptions and black-tie soirees in honor of anything and anyone, provided that he ranks somewhere up there with a U.S. Senator or a European count.
Yet the real lion of Newport society this summer, the most talked-about and sought-after visitor in town, the guest without whose presence no party can truly be called a success, is a normally gregarious fellow named Emil Mosbacher Jr. Unfortunately, Mr. Mosbacher regrets. His appointment book is full. He is dating a lady named Intrepid, and she is a most demanding mistress.
She gets him up at 6:30 every morning, sends him to bed exhausted at 11 every night. She has given him sunburn, windburn and heartburn, great anxiety, occasional despair, and the kind of gut satisfaction that makes it all worthwhile. Sometime within the next two weeks, unless every sailing expert has lost his bearings, the commodore of the New York Yacht Club will come alongside Intrepid and say to "Bus" Mosbacher: "Sir, I have the honor to inform you that Intrepid has been selected to defend the America's Cup against the Australians in a match starting Sept. 12. Congratulations."
The Way to Go. "Ships are but boards," Shakespeare wrote, "sailors but men." He was obviously a landlubber. Never in U.S. history have so many men gone down to the sea (or lake, or river) in ships (or boats)--and whether they sail a 13-ft. Blue Jay or a 70-ft. offshore racer, they are a breed apart. West Coast fanatics get their kicks out of racing dinky, 8-ft. El Toros around treacherous San Francisco Bay, where a 20-knot wind is just air conditioning. Wintertime "frostbite" racing in tiny dinghies (6ft. to 14-ft. cockleshells with sails) is all the rage on the Great Lakes: "I was dunked three times last winter," boasts a gleeful Chicagoan. In last June's gale-tossed Annapolis-to-Newport race, 91 boats started and only 55 finished; 9 were dismasted, and one sank. "I know of men who have died during races at the age of 70," says Champion Star-Class Racer Bill Parks, 45, of Chicago. "It's the way they probably would have wanted to go."
Sailors forget their wives, their mistresses, their children and, of course, their bank accounts for the feel of the wind and the sound of the starting gun. Everybody remembers J. P. Mor gan's haughty retort not to ask the cost of maintaining a yacht. But everybody is doing his best to make a liar out of him. The price of a relatively modest 19-ft. Lightning racer is $3,200 (more than 10,600 sold to date), and that's just the beginning. "A boat," as one Miami sailor puts it, "is a hole in the water, into which you pour your money." Docking fees run anywhere from $2 per day at the Ninnescah Yacht Club near Wichita, Kans., to $10 per day at the crowded slips in Newport. Yearly maintenance on a 23-ft. Star-class racer costs between $500 and $1,000--and the annual tab for a 40-ft. ocean-racing yawl can top five figures.
Who cares? "Sailing keeps you alive," says Chicago Psychiatrist Thaddeus Kostrubala, proud owner of a highly therapeutic 32-ft. cruising sloop. "It's a link with nature, with God, with the primeval. It touches your fantasy, your very wellspring. You have to read Conrad to really understand." For those who race, the motivation has a keener edge. "The sport is marvelously complex and terribly competitive," says Bill Parks. "It's a great challenge because there are so many variables: the wind, the weather, water conditions, other boats. You have to tune your boat, get the optimum performance out of it. Even then, it's a roll of the dice." And while the dice are in the air, anyone--for one brief Mittyesque moment--can be Bus Mosbacher, sailing out of Newport for the America's Cup.
Harsh Terms. The America's Cup is the closest thing to a Holy Grail in sport. "On no other sporting prize," wrote the late Everett B. Morris, in his definitive history Sailing for America's Cup, "has so much gold, technical virtuosity, brainpower and brawn been expended." The contest, not the old Victorian silver ewer, is the thing. In the demands it makes on boat and man, it is the ultimate, the very pinnacle in yachting. What started 116 years ago as a gentlemen's lark, has become a proving ground for technocrats, a vast public spectacle, an affair of national pride, purpose and prestige that so far has cost the competitors, winners and losers combined, an estimated $50 million--with no guarantees on the investment except that somebody would win and somebody else would lose.
No such harsh terms faced John C.
Stevens, a founder of the New York Yacht Club, when he sailed his new, 102-ft. pilot schooner America to England in 1851 to do battle with the Royal Yacht Squadron in a race around the Isle of Wight. The original price of the America was to be $30,000, but her builder had to knock her down to $20,000 because she did not prove the fastest boat in the U.S.* Against the
British, though, she was worth every penny. Near the finish line, aboard her royal yacht, Queen Victoria herself waited to present the "100 Guineas Cup" to the winner. "Sail ho!" came the cry from the bridge. "Which boat is it?" demanded the Queen. "The America, Madam." Said Victoria: "Oh, indeed. And which is second?" There was a pause while the signalman's glass swept the horizon. "I regret to report," came the halting reply, "that there is no second." At least not that eyes could see --the British were so far behind.
That set the pattern. Over the next 86 years, the British tried 14 times to win the Cup, the Canadians twice, and all their efforts met with defeat at the hands of Yankee design, tactics or luck. "I willna challenge again. I canna win," sighed Glasgow Tea Baron Sir Thomas Lipton in 1931, when the fifth of his Shamrocks suffered the same inglorious fate as the previous four. Next came T.O.M. Sopwith, famed stunt flyer, hydroplane racer and aircraft builder--and with him the grand era of the J-boat, majestic, 130-ft.-long monsters with 165-ft. masts and clouds of sail, crewed largely by professionals and capable of speeds up to 18 knots on a close-hauled reach. No faster or prettier oceanracers ever existed--or ever will again. In 1937, with Europe in turmoil, Commodore Harold Vanderbilt's Ranger, designed by Naval Architect Olin J. Stephens II, even then a brilliant, but little-known youngster, sank Sopwith's Endeavour II in four straight races, and the America's Cup was bolted into a trophy case in the New York
Yacht Club--there to remain, virtually forgotten, for most of a generation. Within a few years, proud Ranger was destroyed, her 110-ton lead keel melted down, her steel hull sold for scrap.
Finally, in 1958, came a new challenge from Britain. But not in J-boats, which no one could afford to build.
The class now was the International 12-Meter Sloop,* half as big as the J, half as fast, twice as maneuverable--and twice as exciting. The excitement was less the Twelves (after all, the class had been around for 51 years) than the men who turned up to crew them. They were gifted amateurs, many of plebeian ancestry, who earned their spurs in the democratic rough-and-tumble of "one-design" small-boat racing--where the sailor was more important than his boat, and skill, imagination and daring were the stuff of success. To the sport of big-boat racing, they brought new techniques and tactics that were ingenious, efficient, and often downright impolite. From the very start, as four U.S. Twelves squared off to decide which would defend the Cup against Britain's Sceptre, the most dramatic of the audacious new skippers was a blocky, blue-eyed bandit named Bus Mosbacher.
First Race, First Win. Bus (a contraction of "Buster," the nickname given him by a hospital nurse at birth) has been sailing--in dead earnest--ever since his daddy dropped him into a dinghy at five. Starting from scratch as a messenger boy in a Wall Street brokerage house, Emil Sr. had already climbed so far as an investor that he could buy "Brook Hills," a 43-acre estate in White Plains, N.Y. George Gershwin was a frequent visitor, wrote most of Porgy and Bess in a guest cottage tucked away on a corner of the grounds. The Mosbachers wintered comfortably in Palm Beach; summers were given oyer to sailing on Long Island Sound, first in the family shell boat, and then, when Bus was nine, in his own boat: a Star. That August, with coaching from his father's professional helmsman, he entered his first race--and won. "There was," grins Bus, "only one other boat in the race."
By the time he was 13 and a third-former at the Choate School in Wallingford, Conn., Bus was a familiar, fiercely competitive figure in Star-class races on the Sound. He won the Midget championship in 1935 and 1936, moved up to the Juniors in 1937 and took that national title two years later. "It was obvious from the start," says his father, now 70, "that Bus had what it takes to be a great sailor." When he was only 16, Cornelius ("Corny") Shields asked him to sail on his Interna tional Dinghy team--a high honor, indeed, coming from the famous "Grey Fox" of U.S. yachting (TIME cover, July 27, 1953). But Emil Sr. felt Bus still had lots to learn. "The thing that made me mad was his extreme conserva tism--especially with money. I remember once he was racing in the Midget Star class during Manhasset Race Week. I went down to the dock to check out the boat and noticed that his sheets were frayed. He had never even mentioned it to me; hell, I would have been glad to replace them. I got so mad I slashed the sails. That was the last of Manhasset Week for him."
Whenever Bus was racing, supper at the Mosbacher household was a pretty lively affair. "Why did it take two minutes to get the spinnaker up?" Papa would demand. "Why did you tack when you did?" Recalls Bus: "He was most sparing with his compliments. If I pulled a really bad blunder, I would arrange to have dinner with a friend. On one or two occasions I stayed the weekend." One of Emil Sr.'s concerns was sportsmanship. "He thought it was terrible to file protests," says Bus, "and he always warned me not to get involved in gamesmanship, which was especially prevalent in the '30s."
That accounts for Bus's discomfiture the day when he was 15 and a lass named Ethel crewed for him in a nip-and-tuck race. "The finish was so close I couldn't tell who had won," Bus remembers. "The other fellow called over to the committee boat to find out the results, but I couldn't hear what they told him. So I yelled 'Nice race!' And when he answered Thank you,' I assumed he had won. Next thing I knew, Ethel was standing up, shaking her fist at the committee boat and screaming 'Ya blind bum, ya!' at the top of her lungs." They were some lungs even then. Ethel's last name was Merman. Says Bus: "I sailed away from there just as fast as I could." As it turned out, he was the winner.
No Regrets. Mosbacher graduated cum laude from Choate, went on to Dartmouth, where he majored in economics, settled for C's, became known as a deft hand with a bridge deck and dice, and led the varsity sailing club to two straight national intercollegiate championships. Commissioned an ensign in the Navy in 1943, he applied for the Small Craft Training Center in Miami. The Navy, in its infinite wisdom, sent him to radar school instead, but Bus finally wrangled a transfer to the carrier Liscome Bay--a transfer that fell through when doctors found he had a hernia. He has no regrets: Liscome Bay was later torpedoed off the Gilbert Islands, and went down with most of her crew.
For Bus, the first postwar years were mostly business, buckling down to help his father manage the family millions (real estate, oil, natural gas), sailing only occasionally and then just for fun. When he finally did return to competition in 1949, Bus did it with a broadside: he skippered a 33-ft. International One-Design sloop to victory in the Amorita Cup in Bermuda, then sailed a 6-meter to victory in the British-American Cup at the Isle of Wight. As the song goes, it was a very good year: at a Manhattan cocktail party that September, he met Patricia Ryan, a pretty, dark-haired public relations assistant. "Neither of us ever had another date with anyone else--as far as I know," says Bus. Pat was no sailor, but she set out to learn: 14 months later, she and Bus were married.
Pat did have a little competition from Susan. She was an International-class sloop that Bus sailed in 1950--thereby launching one of the most phenomenal winning streaks in U.S. yachting history. The International skippers whom Bus took on that summer were the elite of U.S. racing: Arthur Knapp, regarded as the best sailor to windward in the business; Bill Luders, a topnotch helmsman and naval architect; and Shields--the very man who had introduced the International to the U.S. 14 years before.-Bus beat them all--that year, the next, the next, the next, the next, the next, the next, and the next. Since the Internationals are one-design boats, each presumably like all the others, the most distinctive thing about Susan was her skipper, as Mosbacher proved in 1957, when--after clinching his eighth straight championship--he took on Bermuda's best in a two-out-of-three match series for the Prince of Wales Trophy. Rules of the match specified that neither crew could sail its own boat. Given their pick of U.S. boats, they unhesitatingly chose Susan, hoping to annoy Bus. He merely shrugged, closed his eyes, pointed--and sailed whatever boat it was (he does not even remember) to two straight victories.
Find the Heel. By Bus Mosbacher's standards, that match was a mild, gentlemanly affair. Not that Bus isn't a gentleman--which he most certainly is, on land at least. He is an attentive hus band, a deeply affectionate father (he usually greets his three boys, who range in age from eleven to 15 with a kiss on the cheek), a loyal friend, a delightful conversationalist. He is the kind of fellow who might take a milkshake instead of a martini, never smokes a cigarette, and always squeezes the toothpaste from the bottom. The worst anybody can say about him is that maybe he isn't quite sloppy enough. Even his smile is nice, a big, shiny perpetual grin. But on a boat, with an opponent to devastate, the smile has a saber-toothed quality about it. "In match racing," says Mosbacher, "the idea is to find your opponent's Achilles' heel--and sink your teeth into it."
Bus's uncanny knack for finding that heel was quickly discovered during the 1958 America's Cup revival, when his superb International-class record won him the helmsman's job on John Matthews' twelve-meter Vim in the U.S. elimination trials. Some job. The other three boats in the trials--Columbia, Easterner, Weatherly--were spanking new; Vim was a 19-year-old ark, clearly slower than any of her competitors. Incredibly, if a crewman had not set the wrong spinnaker on the last leg of the last race of the final trials, it might very well have been Vim instead of Briggs Cunningham's Columbia that wiped up Britain's hopeless Sceptre to retain the Cup. Mosbacher could not make Vim fast, but with his immense power of concentration and fanatic attention to detail, he certainly made her feisty. He harassed opponents into errors with his ingenious, "tailing starts": laying Vim's bow practically on top of their transoms so that they could neither tack nor jibe until Vim broke off for the line. If harassment didn't work, he reverted to brute force with a crew that he had honed to perfection. "We initiated some great tacking duels," Bus recalls. "In one race we took 36 tacks on the first windward leg and 20 on the second. That was before the days of linked coffee-grinder winches, and the wind was blowing 19 knots. Our boys were spitting up blood from exhaustion." More important, their opponents were collapsing. Down to that last race against Columbia it went. Up went the wrong spinnaker--and Columbia became the defender by a margin of twelve sec.
Bus took the defeat in characteristic style--hard and silently. Not since he was a youngster and laced into a neophyte crewman for calling a line a "rope" has anyone seen Bus Mosbacher lose his temper aboard a boat. He rarely even talks above a loud whisper, prefers to give his orders in sign language. But his sense of humor in competition tends to the dry side. "This is no democracy," Bus announced when he was skippering Weatherly in the 1962 Cup trials. "However, I do like to hear any well-thought-out, reasonable suggestion. Once." Vig Romagna, Weatherly's foredeck boss (and currently second-in-command of Intrepid), recalls the day that somebody in his crew dropped a spinnaker over the side. "I rushed aft to get it hauled aboard," he says. "I was feeling terrible. As I passed Bus, he smiled and said: 'Don't jump!' "
Men, Not Machines. For Mosbacher, the 1962 America's Cup defense was 1958 all over again--only with a far more satisfying ending. Tank tests later proved beyond a doubt that Australia's Gretel was faster than the four-year-old Weatherly. But boats are sailed by men, not laboratory machines. Gretel did manage to win one race in the four-out-of-seven series--with the help of a spinnaker snafu on Weatherly and a freak wave that sent the Aussie boat surfing ahead at a crucial moment. But what Bus did to Gretel's skipper, Jock Sturrock, in the four races that won Weatherly the Cup should not have happened to a kangaroo.
Did Bus ever use his famous "tailing start?" No. Did he deliberately engage Gretel in tacking duels? Not on your life: pound for pound, Gretel's crewmen were Goliaths compared with Weatherly's, and besides, her winches were nearly twice as effective. There were lots of other ways. In one race, Sturrock was coming up fast on a reach, and seemed certain to overtake the slower Weatherly. So Mosbacher started changing spinnakers; there was no reason for it, but Sturrock assumed there was, promptly followed suit--and the resulting loss of momentum preserved Weatherly's lead and cost Gretel the race. In another duel, Bus noticed that whenever Jock actually meant to tack, he grabbed the wheel at the bottom; when he was merely faking, he grasped it at the side. Bus naturally ignored the false tacks, and with that tactical advantage had no trouble at all beating the Aussie by an incredible 8 min. 40 sec.
When it was all over, Mosbacher announced his retirement from America's Cup racing. "I've had it," he declared. "Never again." He did manage to stay out of the 1964 defense when Bob Bavier in Constellation scuttled Britain's Sovereign in four straight races; he was still determined to stay ashore when the Australians challenged again this year. Changing his mind was not easy.
His family and friends were all against another campaign. "I told him not to," says Emil Sr.--and so did most of his friends, who argued that he had nothing to gain, everything to lose. Why risk the chance of going down in yachting annals as the man who finally lost the Cup for the U.S.? But the pressures were strong. For one thing, in 1961 he had become the second member of Jewish ancestry (although he is an Episcopal convert) ever elected to the New York Yacht Club.
For another, explains his father, "Bus is extremely patriotic. He's no flag waver, but keeping the Cup here is very important to him." Finally, the Intrepid syndicate, managed by Philadelphia Banker William Strawbridge, offered him a chance to collaborate from the start with Architect Olin Stephens on the design of the yacht. Bus agreed, and eight models, 35 modifications, 18 months of tank tests and $750,000 later, Intrepid slid down the ways at City Island, N.Y., last April--the shortest (at 64 ft.), homeliest, most radical and most expensive 12-meter yacht ever built.
Keep It Low. Much has been made of Intrepid's second rudder, which is actually a "trim tab," similar to an aileron on an airplane and is designed to increase her speed to windward besides making her more maneuverable. A second innovation is her skeg, or "kicker," an extension of the keel that is supposed to cut down wave turbulence and make her faster yet. But all that is underwater. What shows above the wa ter line is pretty radical too: a broken-nosed bow, a titanium-tipped mast, a $22,000 sail inventory that includes a 2,200-sq.-ft. nylon spinnaker that weighs barely 15.8 Ibs.--plus the most of Bus Mosbacher, but only bits of anybody else.
The working area of Intrepid is Bus's baby. To lower the center of gravity and assure himself a clear view for ward, the two linked Graydom-Powell coffee-grinder winches (cost: $20,000 each) that control the trim of the jib and spinnaker are located below decks --along with at least the bottom half of every crewman except the skipper. Afraid that the eager Aussies might try to duplicate his design, Mosbacher was furious when Architect Stephens allowed a magazine writer to photograph and measure Intrepid last spring. "The hull is Olin's," Bus fumed, "but the deck and interior are mine." Says George O'Day, an Olympic champion in 5.5 meters and an Intrepid crew member: "You have to understand that this is more than just a race to Bus. Vim and Weatherly weren't his, but he's been with this boat from the start. Intrepid is Bus's own personality."
Judging by Intrepid's performance so far in the elimination trials, the Aussies are in for a bit of heavy weather. Their Twelve, Dame Pattie, has some novel features of her own, including a mainsail that is rumored to weigh only 71 oz. per sq. yd.--one-half ounce less than Intrepid's lightest main. She is longer (by more than a foot) and definitely prettier than Intrepid, and her keel is nearly three tons lighter. In the Australian elimination trials off Sydney last May, she showed impressive speed and maneuverability under the hand of Mosbacher's old antagonist, Jock Sturrock, leaving Gretel wallowing in her wake like a sea turtle.
But Sydney is not Newport, and after watching Dame Pattie in U.S. waters against her trial horse, Nefertiti, most experts do not rate her quite as fast as Intrepid. Three weeks ago, Skipper Sturrock had the bad luck to run her aground in Newport Harbor, necessitating repairs to her keel and the underside of her hull. Intrepid has had a ration of trouble too: one of her two 1,000-lb. aluminum-titanium masts keeps collapsing at awkward moments. When it toppled for the second time on the New York Yacht Club cruise two weeks ago, it catapulted one crewman overboard and another headfirst down a hatch, narrowly missed crunching Bus Mosbacher's skull.
Even so, the only actual race Intrepid has lost all summer came on Long Island Sound in June, when her navigator gave Mosbacher a bum steer --laying a course to the wrong buoy. The boat that won that race was Ameri can Eagle, skippered by George Hinman, a former commodore of the New York Yacht Club. So Eagle's record against Intrepid is comparatively spectacular: one victory, four defeats. Intrepid is 4-0 against Constellation, the 1964 Cup winner. And she has been equally impressive against the West Coast entry, Pat Dougan's remodeled (at a cost of $125,000) Columbia, the boat that was supposed to give her a run, reach and beat for her money. Columbia did not show up for the trials until the action shifted from Long Island Sound to the regular 24.3-mile triangular America's Cup course off Brenton Reef, seven miles south-southeast of Newport. The first time Columbia tackled Intrepid, she lost by 3 min. 46 sec. Second time round, Mosbacher increased Intrepid's victory margin to 4 min. 38 sec. Score to date: 2-0.
As the final eliminations get under way this week, Bus Mosbacher is tak ing no chances on his crew's losing its fighting edge. Breakfast is served at 7:30 in East Bourne Lodge, the mansion on Rhode Island Avenue, which the Intrepid syndicate has leased for the summer as a dormitory for Bus and his boys. A cheery "good morning" greets early risers who come to the table fresh from their two-mile run, and something else is in store for the slugabeds who forgot how hard it is to sneak up a gravel driveway at 3 a.m. without waking someone important. The only way to get two cocktails at East Bourne Lodge is to be first in line: Happy Hour lasts only half an hour, and even the ice is rationed. Not that Intrepid's owners are trying to pinch pennies: last week in their haste to get her mast repaired and a new rudder installed, they were paying Newport shipwrights $12.25 an hour to work straight through the night.
There was no such frenzied activity in the Aussie camp. As a matter of fact, there was positive gloom--after flu knocked out half the crew and two of the healthy ones got into a brawl in a Thames Street rock 'n' roll joint. Figuring that a change of scenery might do wonders for their morale, Skipper Sturrock herded up all his ambulatory Aussies and dragged them off to Montreal to see Expo. The news from home at least was good. All of Australia is pulling for an upset and praying for one--including a tribe of aborigines on Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, who have promised to sing a "wind corroboree" for good luck every day that Dame Pattie races.
The Aussies have another hope too. Could be that Bus Mosbacher will get seasick--which, at times, he does.
* By contrast, the full-scale replica of America that sailed into New York harbor last week en route to the Cup trials at Newport cost the F. & M. Schaefer Brewing Co. $500,000 to construct. Architects for the new America: Sparkman & Stephens, the same firm that designed Intrepid. * The Twelves get their name from a complicated rating formula that takes into consideration length, girth, sail area and freeboard, and after much mathematical hocus-pocus equals 39.37 ft., or twelve meters. * And who now has his own class named after him, the 30-ft. Shields boat, first brought out in 1963 and currently a hot favorite at $8,000 among sailors, with 147 sold so far.
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