One Summer: America, 1927 (11 page)

Curiously, it was the present that people weren’t so certain about. The First World War had left in its wake a world that nearly everyone thought shallow, corrupt, and depraved—even those who were enjoying it for those very reasons. Prohibition was in its eighth year and was a spectacular failure. It had turned ordinary citizens into criminals and created a world of gangsters and rattling tommy guns. New York had more saloons in 1927 than it had had before Prohibition, and drinking remained so transparently prevalent that the mayor of Berlin on a visit reportedly asked Mayor Jimmy Walker when Prohibition was to begin. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Corporation reported in 1927 that more
people were dying of alcohol-related causes now than at any time before Prohibition was introduced.

Moral decline was evident everywhere, even on the dance floor. The tango, shimmy, and Charleston, with their insistent beats and flapping of limbs, had a hint of sexual frenzy that many an anxious elder found alarming. Worse was a popular dance called the black bottom, which involved hopping forward and backward and slapping the rump—an act of scandalous abandon focused on a body part that many would rather didn’t exist at all. Even the hesitation waltz was deemed to contain some element of sultriness that made it tantamount to musical foreplay. Worst of all by far was jazz, which was widely held to be a springboard for drug taking and promiscuity. “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” asked an article in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
. You bet it did, was the answer. An editorial in the
New York American
called jazz “a pathological, nerve-irritating, sex-exciting music.” Many were dismayed to realize that America now had the highest divorce rate in the world after the Soviet Union. (To cash in on this, Nevada in 1927 slashed the residency requirement for divorce in the state to three months, and in so doing became home of the quickie divorce.)

Concern was greatest for young women, who seemed everywhere to have abandoned themselves to sordid habits. They smoked, drank, rouged their shining faces, bobbed their hair (which is to say cut it short and even all the way around), and clad themselves in silken dresses of breathtaking skimpiness. The amount of fabric in the average dress, it was calculated, fell from almost twenty yards before the war to a wispy seven after. The generic term of the day for women of lively and liberal disposition was
flapper
—a word that originated in England in the late nineteenth century and originally signified a prostitute. (It was an offshoot of that other avian term for females, still in use in England today:
bird
.)

The movies deftly caught, and often actively inflamed, the spirit of abandon that characterized the times. One movie, according to its poster, offered its slavering audiences “beautiful jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn, all ending in one terrific smashing climax that makes you gasp.” Another had “neckers,
petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-mad daughters, sensation craving mothers.” It didn’t take a great deal of imagination to discern a direct-line connection between the wanton behavior of the modern woman and the murderous instincts of a Ruth Snyder. It was often noted in newspaper accounts that the wicked Mrs. Snyder before her downfall had been a great one for going to hot movies.

In desperation, lawmakers tried to legislate probity. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a local law made it an offense for dancing partners to gaze into each other’s eyes. In Utah, the state legislature considered sending women to prison—not fining them, but imprisoning them—if their skirts showed more than three inches of leg above the ankle. In Seattle, a group called the Clean Books League even tried to get banned the travel books of the adventurer Richard Halliburton on the grounds that they “excited to wanderlust.” Regulations of a moral nature were introduced all over the nation—and nearly everywhere were, like Prohibition itself, ignored. Among people of a conservative temperament, it was a time of despair.

So when the
Spirit of St. Louis
landed on Long Island and from it stepped a young man who seemed to represent everything that was modest and virtuous and good, a very large part of the nation stirred hopefully and took notice.

Up to this point Lindbergh had seemed “a far-away and vague rival,” as Clarence Chamberlin recalled later. Most people outside aviation had not even heard of him. But he now rapidly became the public favorite. As a
New York Times
reporter observed just twenty-four hours after his arrival: “Lindbergh has won the hearts of New Yorkers by his bashful smile, his indomitable pluck and his impetuous flight here from the Pacific.” Large crowds came to the airfields to see the person the papers were calling (to his extreme irritation) “Lucky Lindy.” On the Sunday after his arrival, thirty thousand people—as many as would go to a Yankees game—turned up at Curtiss Field just in the hope of catching sight of the young aviator as he talked with his mechanics and worked on his plane. So many climbed onto the roof of a small paint shop next to the
Spirit of St. Louis
hangar that the building collapsed under their weight. Luckily, no one was inside at the time and none of those who fell were seriously injured.

The two main airfields of Long Island, Roosevelt and its more diminutive neighbor Curtiss, didn’t offer much in the way of romance. They stood in a dreary, semi-industrialized landscape of warehouses and low factories interspersed with truck farms and characterless housing developments. The airfields themselves were strictly utilitarian. Their hangars and service buildings were rough and unpainted. The parking areas were potholed and overspread with brown puddles. After weeks of rain, the paths around the buildings were a shiny slick of mud.

Roosevelt was much the better of the two airfields, thanks to money spent by Rodman Wanamaker on rolling and grading the runway since René Fonck’s terrible crash there eight months earlier.
^*
It was the only runway in New York long enough for an Atlantic flight, which could have been a problem since it was now leased exclusively to Wanamaker for Byrd’s use, but Byrd insisted that the other competitors be allowed to use it, too. To his immense credit, Byrd did everything he could to help his rivals. He freely shared his private weather reports, for instance. He was also one of the first to call on Lindbergh at his hangar at Curtiss Field and to wish him good luck. Then again, Byrd was by such a wide margin the front-runner and Lindbergh so obviously outclassed that Byrd could afford to be generous.

Despite the attention Lindbergh now received, most of the other aviators and crews didn’t rate his chances high. Bernt Balchen, one of the members of the Byrd team, recalled in his memoirs that Lindbergh was generally assumed to be out of his class. The president of the American Society for the Promotion of Aviation stated frankly that he didn’t think Lindbergh, or indeed any of the pilots, stood a chance.

Compared with Byrd’s operation, Lindbergh’s was indeed arrestingly
low-key. Byrd had a team of forty people—mechanics, telegraph operators, even kitchen staff to run a private mess hall. Lindbergh had no help at all lined up in New York. His backers in St. Louis sent out a young man named George Stumpf, who had no relevant experience, in the vague hope that he might run errands or otherwise make himself useful. The Wright Corporation provided two mechanics to assist him with preparations (it did this for all the teams using its engines, in its own interests) and also sent a PR man named Richard Blythe to help manage the press, but the company considered Lindbergh such a dark horse that it made the two of them share a room in the Garden City Hotel. Apart from this, Lindbergh was entirely on his own. Byrd’s preparations were conservatively estimated to have cost $500,000.
^†
Lindbergh’s total expenses—plane, fuel, food, lodging, everything—came to just $13,500.

Though Byrd was too well bred to betray his thoughts, he must have been appalled by what he saw when he called on Lindbergh. He was clearly just a boy. He had no relevant experience. His plane had no radio and a single engine—Byrd insisted on having three—and had been built by a company no one had ever heard of. Lindbergh planned to carry no lifeboat and almost no backup supplies. Above all, he proposed to go alone, which meant flying a difficult and unstable plane for a day and a half through storm and cloud and darkness while intricately balancing the flow of fuel through five tanks governed by fourteen valves, and navigating his way across a void without landmarks. When he needed to check his position or log a note, he would have to spread his work out on his lap and hold the stick between his knees; if it was nighttime he would have to grip a small flashlight between his teeth. Taken together, these were jobs that would test a crew of three. Anyone who knew flying knew that this was more than any one person could do. It was madness.

Several newspapermen tried to talk Lindbergh out of his suicidal ambition, but to no avail.

“He won’t listen to reason,” one complained to Balchen. “He’s just a stubborn squarehead.”

The atmosphere at the airfields, Lindbergh recalled years later in his autobiography
The Spirit of St. Louis
, was decidedly tense. It was just over two weeks since Davis and Wooster had crashed fatally in Virginia and less than one week since Nungesser and Coli had gone missing. Myron Herrick, the American ambassador in Paris, had publicly announced that it would not be a good idea for any American airmen to fly to France for the time being. Now everyone was pinned down by bad weather anyway. It was all very frustrating.

Adding to Lindbergh’s personal strain was a growing uneasiness with the press. Reporters persisted in asking him personal questions that had nothing to do with flying—did he have a sweetheart? did he like dancing?—which he found embarrassing and intrusive, and photographers couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t let them take pictures of him relaxing or horsing around with the other fliers or mechanics. They were just trying to make him look normal, after all. At one point, two of them burst into his room at the Garden City Hotel, hoping to catch him shaving or reading or doing
some
thing that would suggest a kind of likable boyish normality.

On May 14, Charles’s mother arrived from Detroit to wish him a safe journey. Reluctantly they posed for pictures, standing stiffly side by side like two people who had only just been introduced. Mrs. Lindbergh declined all pleas to kiss or embrace her son, explaining that they came from “an undemonstrative Nordic race,” which in her case was wholly untrue. Instead, she patted her son lightly on the back and said, “Good luck, Charles,” then added as an ominous afterthought: “And goodbye.” The
Evening Graphic
, undeterred by their shyness, created a touching composograph for its readers in which Charles’s and his mother’s heads were pasted onto the bodies of more demonstrative models—though no art director could do anything about the strange, flat absence of emotion in mother’s and son’s eyes.

All three American competitors—Lindbergh in the
Spirit of St. Louis
, Byrd with the
America
, Chamberlin and Acosta in Bellanca’s
Columbia
—were reported as ready to go, so it was widely assumed that they would leave together the moment the weather cleared and that the Atlantic crossing would now be an exciting three-way race. In fact, unbeknownst to Lindbergh and the rest of the world, things were not going well in the other two camps. Byrd seemed strangely reluctant to commit to the Paris flight. He endlessly tested and retested every system of the plane, to the mystification of his crew and the hair-rending exasperation of Tony Fokker, the plane’s volatile designer. “It seemed to me that every possible excuse for delay was seized on,” Fokker recalled in his autobiography four years later. “I began to wonder whether Byrd really wanted to make the transatlantic flight.” To everyone’s surprise, Byrd set the plane’s formal dedication—with droning speeches and the plane draped in bunting—for Saturday, May 21, which meant that he couldn’t go before the weekend even if the weather allowed.

In the
Columbia
camp, matters were even more unhappy, and all because of the odd and truculent nature of Charles A. Levine. The son of a scrap merchant, Levine had made his own fortune after the Great War by buying and selling surplus shell casings, which could be recycled for their brass. After developing an interest in aviation, he became known, all but inevitably, as the Flying Junkman. By 1927 he claimed to be worth $5 million, though many who had seen his modest frame home in the Belle Harbor section of Rockaway, at the less genteel end of Long Island real estate, suspected that was an exaggeration.

Levine was bald, pugnacious, stockily built, and about five feet six. He dressed like a gangster in heavily pinstriped double-breasted suits and broad-brimmed hats. He had the quick mind and alert, roving gaze of a man always on the lookout for an opportunity. His smile was a grimace. He had recently celebrated his thirtieth birthday.

Levine’s two greatest personality faults were a pathological inability to be square with anyone—he seemed sometimes to be lying simply for the sake of it—and an equal difficulty in distinguishing legal activities from illegal ones. He had a fatal tendency to alienate and often cheat his
business associates. In consequence he constantly ended up in court. It was legal problems that would prove his undoing now.

Levine’s immediate problem was that he couldn’t stand his chief pilot, Clarence Chamberlin. This was a rather odd sentiment since Chamberlin was a decent, amiable fellow and a first-rate flier. He just lacked sparkle. The liveliest thing about him was his dress sense. He favored snappy bow ties and intensely patterned argyle socks paired with capacious knickerbockers, but in all other respects he was almost painfully retiring.

Levine was endlessly exasperated by Chamberlin’s lack of dynamism, and openly maneuvered to replace him as chief pilot. “He wanted to eliminate me because I was not a ‘movie type’ and would not film well after the big adventure,” Chamberlin recalled cheerfully in his autobiography.