The Bugatti Queen: In Search of a Motor-racing Legend (Hardcover)

This amazing woman who gained fame as an exotic model and dancer was to move
into the very male dominated world of motor sport in the 1920's. Although
her successful careers had bought her great wealth she had acquired a love
for extravagance. After a serious accident in 1936 her career came to an
end. The tragic side of the story is that in 1984 she died penniless and
alone.

I have no reservations in recommending this book to anyone, whether
interested in cars or not. This is probably one of the most enjoyed book on
our shelves of motor sport related books.

It chronicles her intensely adventurous, glamorous and glittering career driving Bugattis, Alfas and other assorted exotic machinery in the south of France, Italy, Brazil and the United States. This with the added frisson of knowing that the girl in question was a drop-dead gorgeous dancer, nightclub stripper and wildly promiscuous.

After gathering all the glittering prizes, her life descends inexorably with the hubris and inevitability of Greek tragedy into desperate poverty,loneliness and ill-health, cruelly neglected and disinherited by her provincial and slightly retarded provincial French family, abandoned and robbed by her lover. Her downfall was precipitated by a vicious betrayl at a glamorous party when she was publicly accused by the famous and 'cultivated' driver Louis Chiron of collaboration with the Gestapo during the occcupation. She ultimately lives in the care of a benevolent French charity until her death in utter obscurity. Her plain, dull sister Solange vindictively omits her name from the family gravestone, so tormented was she by a primitive and gnawing envy of her joyful and champagne-filled life. Pure Balzac transported to our century.

But the book is far more than that. It is a brilliant evocation of the almost unbelievably reckless nature of 1930s racing. It describes the violent deaths from tremendous accidents that often resulted on the banked courses and unregulated tracks that were so popular in those days. Helle herself crashed in Brazil killing and injuring many spectators - something that haunted her for the rest of her life. It paints a wonderfully eloquent picture of the aristocratic temperament of those times, courting hazards with ease and negligence; a portrait of those rash, wealthy sons who diced with their lives among the other esoteric pleasures of the Bugatti racing circle. Miranda Seymour's economical style portrays these tragic, even spectacular deaths like so many stabs to the heart. Shocking and desperately moving accounts. The arbitrary nature of torture and execution in Nazi occupied France is similarly treated with fierce economy.

I have only driven a Bugatti T35 once in my life and that around Hamptead Garden Suburb! Yet it was the greatest driving experience I have ever had - the car absolutely alive with the nervous and fractious energy of an Arab stallion. The sound of the engine courses through one like electricity. Seymour captures this pace and excitement in her book as it breathlessly bowls along like a Bugatti itself.

I am also an author with a passion for vintage machinery and the fabulous style of the politically incorrect 1930s - such creatures as Helle Nice we shall never see again. Oh that I had had the luck to come across this wonderful story. Please God, someone make a movie of it! Do read this fantastic biography. Like the author, I too have fallen in love with the ghost of Helle Nice.