• August 04, 1975
• Vol. 4
• No. 5

Mark & Eden Donohue Are Two for the Road—but It's the Deadly Grand Prix

When a mutual friend asked socialite-model Eden White to look up Mark Donohue, the U.S.'s most versatile race driver, he was in traction in Atlanta's Piedmont Hospital. He had just totaled both his first marriage (his wife got custody of their two kids) and presumably his last car. Testing out his Porsche, he had gone airborne, cartwheeled twice at 160 mph and miraculously survived. But Mark got out of the hospital—if with a permanent limp—and he came back, with another Porsche, to win the 1973 Can-Am championships. Having proved his point, Donohue announced his retirement from racing, declaring that, at 36, "I'm past my peak."

To the contrary, thought Eden, who at 29 was seven years younger and no fan of the dicey life of a driver's lady, and they eventually started talking marriage instead of motors. But after chafing for a year in the $100,000-plus presidency of his sponsor, Penske Racing, Donohue decided that, as he once put it, watching others pilot his cars "is like seeing another man in bed with your wife." (Besides, he has earned as much as $250,000 a year driving.) All of which meant that Eden would be caught after all in a ménage à trois with Lady Luck. So, when offered a chance to drive Penske's first Formula One (the Thoroughbred of racing cars), Mark left retirement and a hurried honeymoon with Eden in Jamaica to take on this year's Grand Prix championship—16 road races on four continents that are driving's most deadly challenge. (It was the high-powered but flimsy Formula One racers, bulging with fuel tanks but lacking the automatic fire extinguishers of the heavier Indy cars, that killed Wolfgang von Trips and Peter Revson.)

Mark is seemingly nonchalant about his perilous profession. But how does Eden feel? "In the beginning I used to worry about getting involved with Mark," she admits. "But after awhile I decided that if you want something badly enough in life you just have to take the chance and grab it. I stopped thinking that anything could happen to him. And now if somebody told me that Mark had been hurt, I wouldn't believe it until I had actually seen him myself in the hospital."

On the eve of a race, she prepares a light matador's meal for her man—just in case he must undergo emergency surgery. To distract her fears during Mark's races, Eden tensely times his laps with a stopwatch. At the Monaco Grand Prix in May, Eden was clocking Mark on the rain-slickened serpentine course (a shift of gears is required every five seconds) when his car failed to reappear on schedule. She stood frozen, waiting until the word came that he had skidded into a guardrail but was unharmed. Though outwardly calm, she retreated into the privacy of a bathroom where she then broke into tears.

Says their friend and racing great Stirling Moss, "Motor racing is a very masculine, slay-the-dragon sort of thing that attracts a kind of girl who thrives on the excitement of danger." But, as Mark explains, "Eden's too gentle for racing. She doesn't even like to hear the sound of tires squealing."

Judged by their rearing alone, Mark and Eden should be tooling around the suburbs in station wagons instead of in the grease-under-the-fingernails world of the auto track. Eden, the debutante daughter of an Atlanta business executive, spent a year in Paris and graduated from a classy college, Virginia's Hollins. She studied interior design in New York, came home to work for an ad agency ("It was the only way to break off a bad romance") and finally shucked it all for the sweet life—summers modeling in Atlanta to pay for winters skiing in Vail.

Mark, son of a partner in a Wall Street law firm, is one of the few college grads, much less Ivy Leaguers, to drive at Indianapolis. He grew up in chic Summit, N.J., prepped at nearby Pingry School and graduated from Brown with a degree in mechanical engineering. In Mark's junior year, his dad gratified the passion of any child of the '50s by helping him buy a blood-red Chevrolet Corvette. Mark souped it up for American Graffiti-style drag races and won the first competition he entered, a hill climb in New Hampshire.

Mark continued amateur sports-car racing after college until he met ex-racer-turned-tycoon Roger Penske. With Penske's financial backing, Mark quit his job and copped practically every motor race in America. His average speed of 162.962 mph won the 1972 Indy 500 and set a Brickyard record that still stands. Donohue's boyish charm gave him the nickname of "Captain Nice," even though he was intensely competitive on the track, and driving the fastest road racer ever created, a turbocharged, 240-mph "supercar" that eventually was outlawed in races. (Donohue now drives it only in exhibitions such as this month's crack at setting a new world speed record on an oval track in Alabama.)

This season, however, at 38, Donohue is the oldest driver on the Grand Prix circuit and so far has been just a frustrated, over-aged rookie. After 12 races he has yet to finish better than fifth. He cracked up in a 120-mph practice lap for the Belgian Grand Prix and lasted only four laps before smacking his $100,000 Penske-Ford into a barrier in Barcelona. In his latest race, the British Grand Prix, he was caught in a multi-car smashup during a thunderstorm, but walked away unhurt.

The Donohues' escape valve from their daily way of life and death is a furnished flat they've rented for the racing season in the English seaside resort of Bournemouth near the Penske racing shop. Understandably, they haven't had children but may someday, Eden says, "when it feels right." She routinely ducks off to London, where she and Annie Ralston, Stirling Moss's bird, run an antiques stall on Portobello Road. Mark, who rarely completely unwinds from the pressure of competition—there is a race every other weekend—stays close to his cars, working out the mechanical flaws that have left his comeback dreams in the dust to date. "Believe me," he says, "this is only fun when you win." For his restless wife, it may not be fun until it's all over. "If I ever knew that I would be doing the same thing in three years that I am doing today," says Eden, "I would hate it."