One Summer: America, 1927 (14 page)

Lindbergh’s plane slowly gained speed, but seemed “glued to the earth,” as Fokker recalled later. The propeller had been set at an angle to provide maximum fuel efficiency in flight, but that meant a sacrifice in power at liftoff—and that deficiency was worryingly evident as the plane used up more and more runway without showing any sign of rising. Lindbergh in his cockpit had another concern to deal with. His lack of forward visibility, he now realized, made it impossible for him to be certain that he was moving in a completely straight line—something he very much needed to do. The plane had never been this loaded before—indeed, no Wright Whirlwind engine had ever tried to lift this much.

“Five hundred feet from the end, it still hugged the earth,” Fokker wrote in his memoirs. “In front of him was a tractor; telephone wires bordered the field. My heart stood still.” As with Nungesser and Coli at Le Bourget, Lindbergh’s plane rose tentatively and came back to earth with a clumsy bump, then rose and fell again. Finally on the third try it lifted. It was, some spectators reported, as if Lindbergh had willed it into the air. Even Lindbergh viewed it as a kind of miracle—“5,000 pounds balanced on a blast of air,” he wrote in
Spirit of St. Louis
.

The plane rose so ponderously that it seemed to have little chance of clearing the telephone wires straight ahead—wires that Lindbergh could not himself see. He would learn his failure from the sudden
twang
of snagged cables, followed an instant later by a crash no human could survive. Bernt Balchen, watching from halfway along the runway, was certain that Lindbergh could not make it, and he cried out with relief when the plane just cleared the wires. He called it a masterly takeoff. Chamberlin declared: “My heart was in my throat. It seemed impossible. It took guts.” Fokker predicted that Lindbergh would reach Europe but would come nowhere near Paris because of the impossibility of navigating while flying solo. Byrd was especially gracious. “His takeoff was the
most skilful thing I have ever seen on the part of any aviator,” he told reporters. “He is a wonderful boy.”

What most spectators remarked on afterward was the silence. As the
Spirit of St. Louis
took to the sky, there was no cheering—just an uneasy quiet at how close Lindbergh had come to those wires and how alone he now was in that small fabric-covered plane. The time of takeoff was officially recorded as 7:52 a.m. The spectators watched until the plane was no longer visible, then quietly dispersed in a contemplative frame of mind.

From Roosevelt Field, Lindbergh turned north, passing over the great estates of Long Island’s North Shore before heading out over the misty gray waters of Long Island Sound at Port Jefferson. Across the sound lay the Connecticut shore, thirty-five miles away. Perhaps nothing speaks more powerfully of the challenge that faced him than that that was more water than he had ever crossed by plane before.

Through most of that Friday Lindbergh’s progress could be followed fairly closely. As the
Spirit of St. Louis
sailed over Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts reports came in more or less constantly confirming his position and that he seemed to be doing fine. By noon he was over Nova Scotia, and at mid-afternoon over Cape Breton Island. In Washington, Congress interrupted its proceedings for regular announcements of his progress. Everywhere people gathered outside newspaper offices for updates. In Detroit, Charles’s mother taught chemistry at Cass Technical High as on any other day. She wanted to keep the flight out of her mind, but students and colleagues constantly brought her the latest news. Shortly after 6:00 p.m. eastern time Lindbergh passed over the last rocky extremity of North America on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland and headed out over open ocean.

Now he would be out of touch completely for sixteen hours if all went well; forever if it didn’t.

At Yankee Stadium that night, an audience of twenty-three thousand people attending a fight between Jack Sharkey and Jim Maloney bowed their heads in a minute of silent prayer before Sharkey beat Maloney
senseless. All across America wherever people gathered, prayers were said. No one could do anything now but wait. For many the tension was too much. Ten thousand people called the
New York Times
asking for news even though everyone knew there couldn’t be any.

In Paris the possibility of Lindbergh’s arrival stirred little sense of anticipation at first. Myron Herrick, America’s ambassador to France, had no idea at all when he awoke on Saturday, May 21, what excitements the weekend had in store for him. He planned to spend that Saturday at the Stade Français at Saint-Cloud watching his fellow Americans Bill Tilden and Francis T. Hunter compete against Jean Borotra and Jacques Brugnon in Franco-American team tennis matches, a kind of warm-up for the coming Davis Cup tournament.

A wealthy widower in his seventies, Herrick was a former governor of Ohio (Warren G. Harding had been his lieutenant governor) and now was a good and caring ambassador. He had matinee-idol looks—silvery hair, excellent teeth, dapper mustache—and the kind of effortless charm that wins hearts. He had made his wealth as a lawyer and banker in Cleveland. In Paris, he endeared himself to the locals with his warm manner and deep pockets. In two years he spent $400,000 of his own money on entertainments and improvements to the ambassador’s residence.

The match at Saint-Cloud offered a welcome and very exciting diversion, for tennis was a big attraction in 1927 and Bill Tilden was the greatest—and most improbably great—tennis player of the age. For the last seven years, he had utterly dominated the game. Yet curiously before that he had shown almost no special aptitude for tennis at all.

Tilden grew up in a rich and distinguished family in Philadelphia—a cousin, Samuel Tilden, had been the Democratic Party nominee for president in 1876—but his personal life was full of tragedy. All four of his siblings and both of his parents died before he reached adulthood. It was his older brother, Herbert Marmaduke, who was the star player of the family. Tilden himself couldn’t even make the team at the University of Pennsylvania. But after his brother’s death from pneumonia in 1915, Tilden decided to become a great player and devoted himself tirelessly, obsessively, and without the help of a coach to improving his game. He
hit balls against a wall over and over until he was flawless from every position on the court. When he emerged from his fours years of intensive preparation, he was not just the world’s best player at that time but the best who had ever lived.

Beginning at the advanced age of twenty-seven, he was number one in the world for seven straight years and was not beaten in a significant tournament in the whole of that time. America under his leadership won the Davis Cup seven times in a row. He won seven U.S. clay court titles and five U.S. doubles championships. In 1924, he didn’t lose a match, and in the summer of 1925, age thirty-two, he reeled off fifty-seven consecutive winning games—a feat as rare as Babe Ruth hitting sixty homers or Joe DiMaggio hitting safely in fifty-six straight games.

On the court Tilden’s grace was balletic. He didn’t run so much as glide, and he had an uncanny knack for being perfectly positioned for every return shot. It often looked as if the ball was following him around the court rather than he the ball. When serving, his favorite trick was to hold five balls in his hand, firing off four aces in a row and tossing the fifth ball aside as obviously unnecessary. His manner was arrogant and insufferable. He was widely hated by other players, but his skills on the court broadened tennis’s appeal greatly.

Tilden’s career almost ended before it began. In September 1920, he was playing for his first national singles title at Forest Hills before an audience of ten thousand when a plane carrying a pilot and a photographer approached to take aerial pictures of the contest. As the plane neared the stadium, its engine sputtered and then cut out altogether. For several seconds, Tilden and his opponent, Bill Johnston, and all the people in the grandstands watched in eerie silence as the plane, itself silent, headed straight for them. The plane just cleared the court and crashed in an open area a short distance beyond. The pilot and photographer were killed instantly. Tilden and Johnston looked uncertainly at the referee, who nodded for them to resume. Tilden served and won the point en route to winning the set and match, 6–1, 1–6, 7–5, 5–7, 6–3. It was the start of a streak in which he did not lose a significant match for five years.

Tilden’s unbroken run of achievement was made all the more remarkable
by the fact that in the midst of it, in 1922, he suffered an injury that should by any reckoning have ended his career altogether. While playing in a tournament of absolutely no consequence in Bridgeton, New Jersey, he lunged for a ball and caught the middle finger of his racket hand on the perimeter fence. The injury itself was trifling, but the wound became infected and two weeks later the top joint of the finger had to be amputated. Today the problem would be resolved with a course of antibiotics. In 1922, Tilden was lucky not to lose his arm or even his life. (Calvin Coolidge’s son would die from a similar infection two years later.)

Tennis in the 1920s was a much more innocent pastime than it would become. In a thrilling men’s singles final at Wimbledon in 1927 Henri Cochet beat “the Bounding Basque,” Jean Borotra, with a dubious shot in which Cochet appeared to hit the ball twice, which should have cost him the point. The referee asked him if that was in fact so, and Cochet, with a look of childlike innocence, replied,
“Mais non.”
So the point, match, and championship were awarded to Cochet on the grounds that tennis was a gentleman’s game and no gentleman would lie, even though it was pretty clear to all concerned that Cochet just had.

To win a major tournament in the 1920s, a player had to win five or six matches in as many days, so it was a highly taxing sport. Yet it was also an amateur one. Competitors didn’t receive prize money and had to pay their own expenses, so it was a sport confined to the wealthy. Those who didn’t fall into that category—and Tilden, his father dead, didn’t quite—had to make money elsewhere. At the peak of his career, Tilden decided to become a Broadway impresario. He began to write, produce, and award himself starring roles in plays that always lost a fortune. In 1926, he launched and starred in a production called
That Smith Boy
, which was such an embarrassment that the theater owner asked him to close the show after two weeks even though Tilden was prepared to cover the costs. Subsequent plays did little better, and exhausted his savings. Remarkably, throughout this period he would often play in the U.S. Open or Davis Cup tournament by day, then rush to the theater to appear on stage by night.

Not surprisingly, age began to catch up with Tilden. By the summer
of 1927, he was still great but no longer invincible. The French now had four of the best players in the world—Cochet, Borotra, Brugnon, and René Lacoste.

Tilden and Hunter played valiantly against Borotra and Brugnon at the Stade Français that Saturday, but the Frenchmen were too youthful and strong and won the match 4–6, 6–2, 6–2. A reporter for the Associated Press called it “probably the greatest men’s doubles match ever staged in France.” Herrick, alas, didn’t get to see it all. Halfway through the third set he was handed a telegram informing him that Lindbergh had been sighted over Ireland and would be in Paris that evening. Herrick recalled later that he had not until that moment recognized the importance of Lindbergh’s takeoff. Rodman Wanamaker had so inundated him with cablegrams that it had not actually occurred to him that someone other than Byrd might get there first. He now left the stadium in a hurry. To him the prospect of Lindbergh’s safe arrival in Paris was not good news, but a source of serious concern.

In 1927, Americans were not terribly popular in Europe and not popular at all in France. America’s insistence on being repaid in full, with interest, the $10 billion it had lent to Europe during the war seemed a bit rich to the Europeans since all the money borrowed had been spent on American goods, so repaying it would mean that America profited twice from the same loans. That didn’t seem to them quite fair, particularly as the European economies were uniformly wrecked while America’s was booming. Many Americans failed to share this perspective. They took the view that a debt is a debt and must be honored, and they interpreted Europe’s reluctance to pay as a shabby betrayal of trust. For those Americans of an isolationist bent—of whom our hero Charles Lindbergh would one day become the most strikingly outspoken—the situation offered powerful vindication of the belief that America should always avoid foreign entanglements. In a renewed spirit of isolationism, America increased its already high tariff barriers, making it nearly impossible for many European industries to trade their way back to prosperity.

The result of all this was quite a lot of anti-American sentiment, especially in France, where the struggling natives had to watch American tourists—many of them young, noisy, and made obnoxious by wine and no doubt sometimes also by nature—living like princes and whooping it up on Europe’s debased currencies. The number of francs to the dollar had almost tripled in the last year, making life a struggle for the French and a frolic for visitors. On top of this, the French keenly felt the humiliating failure of Nungesser and Coli’s mission; many were reluctant to give up the suspicion that American meteorologists had withheld crucial information from the Frenchmen. In consequence, American tour buses in Paris sometimes felt the thump of an angry stone, and American parties sometimes found it hard to get served in cafés. The atmosphere was unquestionably uneasy. Ambassador Herrick had every reason to urge caution. No one could begin to guess what would happen when the first American flew in.

What happened, remarkably enough, was that a hundred thousand people dropped whatever they were doing and went, entranced, to Le Bourget.

Charles Lindbergh’s achievement in finding his way alone from Long Island to an airfield outside Paris deserves a moment’s consideration. Maintaining your bearings by means of dead reckoning means taking close note of compass headings, speed of travel, time elapsed since the last calculation, and any deviations from the prescribed route induced by drifting. Some measure of the difficulty is shown by the fact that the Byrd expedition the following month—despite having a dedicated navigator and radio operator, as well as pilot and copilot—missed their expected landfall by two hundred miles, were often only vaguely aware of where they were, and mistook a lighthouse on the Normandy coast for the lights of Paris. Lindbergh by contrast hit all his targets exactly—Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, Cap de la Hague in France, Le Bourget in Paris—and did so while making the calculations on his lap while flying an unstable plane.