50 Years Ago This Week: The Story Behind the America’s Cup

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.

The way Director Roger Vadim, 39, planned it for his movie Barbarella, giant fans would blow 2,000 wrens into a cage occupied by Wife Jane Fonda, 29, exciting them so much that they would peck off her clothes. For four days the fans whirred, birds swooped, Jane emoted—but nothing happened. In desperation, Vadim jammed birdseed inside her costume and fired guns in the air, which bothered the birds not at all but drove Jane off to a hospital with a fever and acute nausea. After three days of rest Jane returned to work, finally finished the scene with the aid of even larger fans and a flock of peckish lovebirds. It would all come out onscreen, said Roger, as a “whimsical, lyrical outlook toward sex in the year 40000.”