The life of Enzo Ferrari
As well as being a natural PR man, Enzo was also a born salesman. “If you like this car, we’ll make it. If you don’t, we won’t,” he would tell a prospective customer. If they happened to be female, the patter would be even more flamboyant. When it came to women, Enzo was a positive gourmand.
One of his closest associates, Luigi Chinetti – who in 1949 won the first of Ferrari’s nine victories in the Le Mans 24 Hours endurance race – would also be the man who turned Enzo on to the potential of the North American market. Ferrari opened a dealership on West 55th Street in Manhattan, New York, in April 1954 and before long Hollywood’s finest were in thrall to the Italian newcomer. James Coburn, Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, Miles Davis and many more soon succumbed to its powerful allure.
Racing is a great mania to which one must sacrifice everything without hesitation
In Europe, meanwhile, the brand quickly embodied the new Riviera chic: film director Roberto Rossellini commissioned a one-off for his wife, Ingrid Bergman, and Roger Vadim wooed any number of starlets in his 250 California Spider, including Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda circa Barbarella. With old royalty buying his cars and the new playboy elite (typified by Gianni Agnelli, Gunter Sachs and racing driver Porfirio Rubirosa) all committed fans, Enzo was very happy to indulge them.
Racing, however, was what really mattered. “[It] is a great mania to which one must sacrifice everything, without reticence, without hesitation,” he said. It was also the source of what he himself referred to as his “terrible joys” (also the title of his memoir). During his imperial phase, many of his drivers were killed, Peter Collins, Eugenio Castellotti, Count Wolfgang von Trips, Luigi Musso and Lorenzo Bandini among them. During the 1957 Mille Miglia road race, the Marquis Alfonso de Portago, who was also a bobsleigh champion, lost control of his Ferrari 335S when a tyre blew, killing himself, his co-driver and nine spectators. The Vatican’s official newspaper, Osservatore Romana, denounced Ferrari as a latter-day Saturn, happy to sacrifice his sons in the service of competitive victory. He also faced charges of manslaughter. Rumours that he favoured one driver over another, or that he was apt to set his engineers and lieutenants against each other to keep everyone on their toes, were rife. His spokesman, Franco Gozzi, loved to cultivate the mystique.
He was absolutely focused on success – but in the end, he was Italian and he had a heart
Enzo had married young, to Laura Garello, but they were estranged following one of the other defining moments of his emotionally turbocharged life: the death in 1956 of his beloved son Dino from muscular dystrophy, aged just 24. “When a man tells a woman he loves her,” he observed, “he only means that he desires her. The only total love in this world is that of a father for his son.” Enzo had maintained another family, with his mistress, Lina Lardi, and their son, Piero, who was born in 1945. Only after Laura’s death in 1978 was Piero allowed to take his father’s name. He owns ten per cent of the company and is still heavily involved. When Ferrari was publicly quoted in 2015, Piero became a billionaire.