Ironically, the same day in Maine that I found the novel based on James Dean, featured here last week, I also happened to come across an old issue of Saga magazine from December 1957 with Alfonso de Portago on the cover. Nicknamed “the madcap Marquis,” this flamboyant Spanish playboy had lived large, and died, like Dean, in a devastating car crash.

There are striking similarities between the two, although “Fon,” as he was called, led a far more glamorous life.

Born in London on this day October 11, in 1928, Fon was the offspring of a celebrated bon vivant, Antonio Cabeza de Vaca, a gambler and polo player, and a dazzling Irish nurse named Olga Leighton. De Vaca, scion of a distinguished Spanish noble family, was pals with the Spanish King, who became Fon’s namesake and godfather. The De Vacas had ancient roots in Spain and were early explorers in the Americas. According to Jack Newcombe’s Saga article, Fon’s ancestors included a Spanish hero of the 13th century, Martin Alahaja, who routed the Moors and Francisco de Vera, who conquered Grand Canary Island in 1483. The most famous ancestor was Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, who in 1527, joined an expedition sailing from Spain to colonize Florida and eastern Mexico. “Shipwrecks, disease and desertion cut the original party of 600 down to a handful,” Newcombe writes. “For six years, he wandered half-naked among the Indians of the Southwest, a trader in cones, conches and skins. He was always in danger of being hacked to pieces by Indians.”

Because of his miraculous medicinal skills, however, de Vaca (pictured above), survived and became something of a religious cult figure, a hero in Mexico, lauded by all. He later became governor of Rio de la Plata in South America. Fon’s father inherited this adventurous streak. He once won two million francs at a table in Monte Carlo. A first class sailor and crack polo player, he hired Jack Johnson to teach him boxing.  He also produced five movies in which he acted as the star.

Fon’s mother, Olga Leighton, above, was the widow of her former employer, Frank Jay Mackey, a rich American who was the founder of the Household Finance Corp. Mackey, who was 40 years her senior and ill, shot himself to death. Other sources say she was British, not Irish. The de Vacas lived the high life in Europe until Antonio died in 1941 from a heart attack. Fon was barely a teen. His mother placed him at Lawrenceville prep school outside Princeton, but Fon hated it and left after a month. His mother found him a tutor, and moved him into the Plaza where she was living. (Alfonso, age seven, below.)

There he befriended a rough-and-tumble elevator operator, Edmund Nelson, who became his constant companion until the bitter end. Fon said he drove his first sportscar at the age of 7. But after his father’s death he became even more reckless. Newcombe describes him as a teenage dandy, a prissy snob, who smoked cigarettes from a gold holder. But he also rebelled against his noble upbringing, refusing to bathe and to observe social niceties. One society wag said that if he hadn’t been a nobleman, Fon would have been a truck driver.

“A nobleman in spirit,” Newcombe writes, “Fon made no effort to dress or cultivate the part. His customary appearance was one of studied dishevelment. He let his hair grow to unruly lengths. He chain-smoked cigarettes, dangling them like a blade of grass between his teeth. He was handsome in a dark, masculine way, but he often dressed like a garage mechanic. At Sebring or Monaco or Nassau, he was seen hiking quickly along the pit area, wearing rubber-soled shoes, wrinkled slacks and an alligator sports shirt with the alligator neatly removed. His father, once described as the best dressed man in Europe, was the very model of a modish Marquis. Fon was satisfied to behave like one.”

From day one de Portago was a daredevil, addicted to hazards, horses and hot rods. He yearned to be an aviator, so he took flying lessons in Lynchburg, Virginia. But his flirtation with having wings did not last long. In Palm Beach, a hotel chef bet Fon $500 that he could not fly under a causeway bridge. The span was only 20 feet above water. Portago won the bet, but landed in jail. Later, in 1946, he was flying in France when his plane suddenly malfunctioned. He managed to fly into a field, landing, he said, “on a cow.”

Portago was always testing the limits of speed. As a horseman, Newcombe writes, “he twice rode in the Irish Grand National, the most famous and hazardous of steeplechases, and was thrown from his mount each time. He was an excellent swimmer… He became an Olympic bobsledder with only a few weeks practice. He slithered down the Cresta Run at St. Moritz, setting a record for that suicidal sled course. In auto-racing, he survived a series of 100-mile-an-hour spins and crackups to develop into one of the ten best professional drivers in the world.”

At 20, he slowed down long enough to marry Carroll McDaniel, above, a disarmingly beautiful American, seven years older than him, from a small South Carolina town. Fon first saw her in New York at El Morocco and was enchanted. The first time they met, they barely spoke a word to each other. She was with a group who didn’t care for him. But he remembered her. The next day he made certain to get her alone. Always impulsive, he asked her to marry him two hours later. She did so in 1949. They had two children, Alfonso and Andrea. Alfonso inherited his father’s way with the ladies. One of his wives was Barbara de Portago, a prominent New York socialite who grew up in Versailles. Her father-in-law was its curator.

Andrea (above, with Scavullo) who inherited her mother’s fine features, became a model and an actress, and traveled in chic circles, including the Warhol crowd. I remember when I worked with Jay Presson Allen, who had written a Broadway play designed for Angela Lansbury, entitled A Little Family Business, Andrea Portago (she did not like to use the “de”) came into the office to audition for one of the parts. Reeking glamour and sophistication, she was also surprisingly down-to-earth and charming. You can always tell a person’s breeding by how they treat the staff, and she was as gracious as she was lovely. People magazine profiled her in 1977, when she was promoting a new perfume by Nina Ricci. After affairs with Garry Trudeau and Bob Neuwirth, she wed Mick Flick in 1978. She later retired from acting.

From the outset, Fon’s marriage to Carroll was tempestuous and difficult. His mother was said not to approve of her, perhaps as Charlotte Hays writes in The Fortune Hunters, she saw too much of herself in the ambitious young American. Carroll befriended the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who remained lifelong pals, and entertained on a lavish scale. Fon, meanwhile, had become more and more impulsive. She was not fond of his rowdy friends, nor his constant traveling, and Fon’s Latin eye tended to rove. He also threw himself into racing. He started out with a Ferrari, then a Maserati, then an Osca, which flipped over at the Grand Prix in 1954. He went back to a Ferrari and gained their sponsorship. In 1956, he won the Grand Prix of Portugal and the Tour de France.

At the time of his final race in 1957, he and Carroll were separated, but not legally divorced. He had carried on a very public romance with Dorian Leigh, below, the Revlon “Fire and Ice” model who was the sister of Suzy Parker. Truman Capote is said to have modeled Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s in part on her. The two were wed in Mexico, although the marriage was not formally recognized. That affair resulted in a son named Kim de Portago, who would later turn to drugs and commit suicide by jumping out a window at the age of 21.

Prior to the prestigious Mille Miglia race in Italy, Fon was courting sultry Mexican-born actress Linda Christian, the ex-wife of Tyrone Power. Lusciously beautiful, she is perhaps best known for her 1948 role in Tarzan and the Mermaids, Johnny Weissmuller’s last turn as the ape man. She also appeared in Up In Arms (1944) with Danny Kaye and Dinah Shore. Some might remember her as the first Bond girl, appearing in an early TV-version of Casino Royale.

On that fateful day, during the 1000-mile race, she flew to Italy and ran out at the pit stop in Florence to embrace him. Photographers caught their kiss (below) just moments before his crash.

Throughout that hair-raising race, Fon seemed to be thumbing his nose at death. Ferrari mechanics had noticed that one of his tires was grating against the body of the car, causing severe abrasion. He paid it no mind. He was hellbent on winning the race.

Finally, rounding a curve outside Mantua, one of his back tires exploded (he was driving 150 mph) and the rear axle broke. His Ferrari flew off the road, taking out a large milestone marker, snapping a telephone pole in two, flipping from one side of the road to the other, killing his companion Edmund Nelson and ten spectators, including numerous children. Portago’s body was found in two sections. It was one of the most horrible wrecks in the history of motor car racing. He was only 30 miles away from the finish line.

Portago’s fatal crack-up was front-page news all over the world in May, 1957, just a few weeks after I was born. I remember people talking about it often when I was a child. His tale was part of the zeitgeist. It remains embedded in my psyche.

I was not the only one obsessed with his tragic tale. There have been countless articles about him in magazines and newspapers. A newsreel about the crash was released in 1957 called Speed Week. Recently a French cable channel presented a detailed documentary with interviews with family members. Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, Heaven Has No Favorites, about passion and thrills in the world of auto-racing, is said to be partly based on Portago’s life, although the situations are quite different. It was later made into the film, Bobby Deerfield, starring Al Pacino and Marthe Keller.

A novel, The Fast One, by Robert Daley, was written in 1978. Loosely based on Portago’s short, daredevil life, it captured the spirit of the auto-racing circuit. From the dustjacket:

“The intertwining of sex and death has long been a preoccupation of literature. Robert Daley’s hair-raising novel about the Grand Prix auto circuit roars from Palermo to Le Mans. As Jack Blakemore, the reigning world champion and Alex Cavelli, an aristocratic and exultantly fearless challenger, fight for the checkered flag and the love of a rich and beautiful but inexperienced American girl, the thrills and perils of danger at high speed mix with the intense exhilaration of the erotic.”

The book was not warmly received. Critics carped that it was overwrought and badly written, with sentences like this one, about Alex Cavelli (the de Portago-inspired character): “He can bend anything to his will, this car, race, season: this girl, this day, life itself.” Kirkus Review asked, “Who would have thought that a super-ordinary Grand Prix car-and-sexarama would present a seminar in pretentiously clumsy writing?” Their critique ended on this cruel note: “For readers with a special interest in speed and gears, the painstaking descriptions of the actual tactics and sensations of racing may sometimes rise above the murky similes. But even the fiercest four-wheel fans will put on the brakes when they run up against ‘Her heart lands on the table like a crowbar.’”

What happened to the people touched by Alfonso de Portago’s brief but tumultuous life? Dorian Leigh, below, continued to shine as one of the premier super models, marrying five times. She opened a restaurant outside Fontainebleau, Chez Dorian. Then became a born-again Christian. She wrote her memoirs The Girl Who Had Everything in 1980. She dedicated it to her son Kim, although as she said, he would never read it.

Linda Christian, below, was married briefly to Edmund Purdom, the handsome British actor. Her two children with Power are actors Taryn and Romina Power. She wrote her own autobiography, Linda, in 1962.

And what of Carroll de Portago? Well, as it turned out, her divorce papers with Fon had not yet been filed, so she became his widow. She went through the funeral with the kind of dignity Jackie Kennedy displayed a few years later. But there was an awkward moment when Linda Christian, in a black veil, arrived just as she was leaving. Despite de Portago’s noble name, there was little or no money for her to live on and to raise her two children. She moved around the world. Andrea recalled how she felt like Eloise, constantly inhabiting one hotel after the next.

Carroll, above, eventually moved to Hong Kong where she married a Welsh doctor, John Carey-Hughes. That marriage did not last, and she returned to New York. Carroll went on to a much-rumored affair with Charles Englehard, then married a businessman, Richard Chadwick Pistell, who later had legal problems and lost his money. In the end, Carroll wed Milton Petrie, king of ready-to-wear, and settled into her role as philanthropist, collector, and socialite. She has a knack for survival, unlike Alfonso de Portago, the madcap Marquis, who flirted with death once too often.