In this Spanish name, the first or paternalsurname is Cabeza de Vacaand the second or maternal family name is Leighton.
Alfonso Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, 11th Marquess of Portago, GE (11 October 1928 – 12 May 1957),[1] best known as Alfonso de Portago, was a Spanish aristocrat, racing and bobsleigh driver, jockey and pilot.
At age 17, Portago began displaying his flamboyant lifestyle by winning a $500 bet after flying a borrowed plane under London Tower Bridge.[4] He twice rode the Grand National as "gentleman rider" and formed the first Spanish bobsleigh team with his cousins, finishing 4th in the 1956 Winter Olympics, shaving the bronze medal by 0.14 seconds.[5]
His promising career was cut short in May 1957 after his renowned Ferrari 335 S crashed near the village of Guidizzolo when a tyre burst while driving along a dead straight road at 150mph (240km/h) in the 1957 running of the Mille Miglia, killing Portago, his navigator, and nine spectators.[6] The young age of the marquess who was 28 at the time of his death combined with his status as a sex symbol[7] caused a shock amongst many, having several tributes and landmarks named after him, most notably the "Portago curve" at Jarama racetrack.[8]
The Marquess of Portago was seen by many as a true playboy of his time;[9][10][11] "a tall, handsome and wealthy Spanish aristocrat who captured everybody's imagination".[12]Gregor Grant famously said of him: "a man like Portago appears only once in a generation, and it would probably be more accurate to say only once in a lifetime. The fellow does everything fabulously well. Never mind the driving, the steeplechasing, the bobsledding, the athletic side of things, never mind being fluent in 4 languages. (...) He could be the best bridge player in the world if he cared to try, he could certainly be a great soldier, and I suspect he could be a fine writer".[13]
Portago was dark-haired and had freckles and blue eyes.[19] He was 1.83 m (6 ft) tall and weighed 77kg (170 Ibs).[16] He famously won a bet at the age of 17 when he flew his plane beneath London Tower Bridge. He participated twice in the Grand National Steeplechase at Aintree as a gentleman jockey, although he found keeping his weight down to be a struggle.[16]
Race car driver
Portago began racing sports cars in 1953 after his meeting with the Ferrari importer in the USA, Luigi Chinetti, who asked him to be his co-driver in the Carrera Panamericana.[14] He later raced alone in a personal Ferrari Sport model at the 1954 1000 km Buenos Aires.[14] Portago won six major races, including the Tour de France automobile race, the Grand Prix of Oporto, and the Nassau Governor's Cup (twice). In Nassau, during the winter of 1956, Portago trailed the car ahead of him by centimeters while travelling at 240km/h. Portago used his skill to avert careening into a crowd after the driver ahead of him touched his brakes and both cars went into a 180m skid. Among sports car enthusiasts, Portago was known as a two-car man, because of the many burned-out brakes, clutches, transmissions, and wrecked cars for which he was responsible. He often needed several cars to finish a race.[16]
He participated in 5 World Championship Formula One Grands Prix, debuting on 1 July 1956. His best result was a second place at the 1956 British Grand Prix (a shared drive with Peter Collins), and scored a total of four championship points. In 1953 he raced with Chinetti in the Carrera Panamericana. During the 1955 British Grand Prix at Silverstone, Portago was thrown from his Ferrari while racing at 140km/h after losing control on a patch of oil. He was hospitalized with a broken leg.[16]
He also was a bobsleigh runner, recruiting several cousins in order to form Spain's first bobsleigh team for the 1956 Winter Olympic Games in Cortina d'Ampezzo.[20] He had had only two or three practice runs in Switzerland before buying a pair of sleds. With Portago steering, the two-man bob finished fourth to the surprise of the traditional teams, missing out on a medal by 0.16 seconds.[20] He was introduced to bobsledding by an American from Beloit, Wisconsin, Edmund Nelson, whom he later teamed up with in order to win the Tour de France automobile race.
He and his co-driver Edmund Nelson were killed on 12 May 1957[21] in a crash during that year's Mille Miglia, in a straight road section between Cerlongo and Guidizzolo, in the communal territory of Cavriana[14] about 70km from Brescia, the start and finish point of the event race.[6] The wreck also claimed the lives of nine spectators, among them five children.[14] Portago was apprehensive about competing in the Mille Miglia, a race he considered too dangerous to be run, as he was concerned about the almost complete impossibility of knowing every corner (even with a navigator) and every possible road condition over 1,000mi (1,600km) of open public roads with very limited information on what to expect in the race.[22] A tire blew on Portago's third-place[21][23]Ferrari 335 S causing it to spin into the crowd lining the highway. He was travelling at 240km/h (150mph). The 335 hurtled over a canal on the left side of the road, then veered back across the canal, causing the deaths of nine onlookers in total.[6] Two of the dead children were hit by a concrete highway milestone that was ripped from the ground by Portago's car and thrown into the crowd. The bodies of Portago and Nelson were badly disfigured beneath the Ferrari, Nelson's body was in two sections.[15] A photograph dubbed "The Kiss of Death" shows actress Linda Christian kissing Portago at a stop just before his fatal crash.
As T.C. Browne wrote, "The inevitable happened when Alfonso [...] de Portago stopped alongside the course, ran to the fence, kissed Linda Christian, ran back to his Ferrari and drove on to his destiny, killing himself, his co-driver, 10 spectators, and the Mille Miglia".[24]
Once Portago commented, "I won't die in an accident. I'll die of old age or be executed in some gross miscarriage of justice". Nelson countered this assertion, saying Portago would not live to be 30. According to Nelson, "every time Portago comes in from a race the front of his car is wrinkled where he has been nudging people out of the way at 130 mph (210 km/h)".[16]
In 1949, when he was only twenty, Portago married American former model Carroll McDaniel (by whom he had two children). McDaniel was several years older than Portago and they barely knew each other. She subsequently married the philanthropist Milton Petrie. One of Portago's daughters is photographer Andrea Portago, who was on the June 1977 cover of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. His son, Anthony (1954–1990), was a stockbroker who married in 1973 (and divorced in 1978) Sorbonne-educated society fundraiser and costume and set designer Barbara, daughter of German nobleman Henrik von Schlubach, partner in Schlubach Exporting and Importing Company in Hamburg. His ex-wife Florence Van der Kemp (née Harris), was president of the Versailles-Claude Monet Foundation in New York and daughter of the late Rear Admiral Frederic R. Harris, of Washington and New York. Her stepfather, Gérald van der Kemp, was a curator who restored the Palace of Versailles.[25][26][27] Barbara de Portago subsequently married, in 1984, actor and playwright Jason Harrison Grant;[28] after their divorce she married in 1991 (divorced 1994) investment banker William James Tapert.[29][30][31]
Supposedly, Carroll McDaniel and Alfonso de Portago were in the process of getting a divorce so he could legitimize his invalid Mexican marriage to fashion modelDorian Leigh (who had already aborted their first baby in 1954 and then gave birth to their son Kim on 27 September 1955). Leigh was eleven years his senior.[32] However, Portago was also dating actress Linda Christian, actor Tyrone Power's ex-wife.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Alfonso_de_Portago, and is written by contributors.
Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.