Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties Part 8

As he perfected his craft during the early 1920s Lindbergh notched up his hours working as a stunt pilot, barnstorming through the country offering rides to anyone with $5 or performing tricks under the name "Daredevil Lindbergh."

Parachute-jumping and wing-walking were both regarded as suicidal-especially when the plane was looping the loop-but the fearless Lindbergh insisted that with careful preparation and precautions the risks were minimal. At college, he and a friend had amused themselves by shooting coins out of each other's fingers at fifty feet; being wired up to a wing at a hundred miles an hour, even if it was upside down, was hardly a frightening prospect by comparison.

When the St. Louis air-mail service opened in April 1926 Lindbergh was chosen as the route's chief pilot. He and two other aviators flew five round trips a week between Chicago and St. Louis for the handsome salary of $400 a month. Their planes were army-salvage de Havilland observation bi-planes with single engines, fondly known as Flaming Coffins because so few pilots survived cras.h.i.+ng them.

Two hundred people came to St. Louis's Lambert airfield to watch the dedication ceremony before Lindbergh took off on the city's first official mail flight. He and his fellow pilots, postal clerks and executives "felt we were taking part in an event which pointed the way toward a new and marvelous era." But to Lindbergh's disappointment, popular interest declined after that first burst of enthusiasm. For him, flight combined "science, freedom, beauty [and] adventure" and he was evangelical about the future of aviation, taking immense pride in being part of "man's conquest of the air." To ordinary people, though, an air-mail letter or even a flight in an airplane at a county fair were diverting gimmicks rather than heralds of a dazzling new future.

Lindbergh and his team were the explorers of the age, flying long distances in uncertain conditions in insecure planes. To begin with, they flew without night-flying equipment, carrying only a pocket torch ("pilot furnished," Lindbergh wryly noted) and an emergency flare, although eventually they were given red and green navigation lights. Despite these conditions Lindbergh's St Louis-Chicago run had the best record among the routes converging on Chicago, successfully completing 99 percent of their scheduled flights.

Several times, in poor weather, Lindbergh was forced to make crash landings on to Midwestern cornfields and cow pastures. He became known as the only pilot to have successfully saved his own life four times by parachuting out of his failing plane. His former Staff Sergeant wrote to congratulate him on his escapes: "It appears to me as though you are favored by the angels."

Although Lindbergh loved the camaraderie and pioneering spirit of mail-route life, he was soon made restless by its monotony. As he flew along the same route day after day he dreamed up new challenges for himself, the most persistent of which was the idea of flying the Atlantic. In 1919 two English pilots, John Alc.o.c.k and Arthur Brown, had flown the 2,000 miles from Newfoundland to Ireland. In the same year Raymond Orteig, a French-born hotelier living in New York, had focused pilots' attention on the 3,600-mile New York-Paris route by offering a prize of $25,000 for the first non-stop flight in either direction.

By 1926 several failed attempts at the Orteig prize had been made. Lindbergh thought he knew why: the planes were too heavy, carrying too many engines and too many pilots and crew members. One French team of four had set off in a magnificent triple-engine bi-plane upholstered with red leather and equipped with a bed and a batch of croissants; only the two pilots had survived the crash at take-off. Lindbergh reckoned that the more weight and engines a plane had, the greater the possibility of failure. What he wanted was simple: "one set of wings, one engine, one pilot."

Money was his first objective. His own savings of $2,000 wouldn't cover an aircraft engine, let alone an entire plane. Emphasizing the as-yet-untapped commercial possibilities of air travel and its benefits to St. Louis in particular if it were to become an "aviation city," Lindbergh persuaded a consortium headed by two businessmen he had taught to fly and his former commanding officer, and supported by the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat St. Louis Globe-Democrat, to guarantee him the $15,000 he estimated he would need. His successful crossing would, he promised, "promote nationwide interest in aeronautics, demonstrate [the] perfection of modern equipment" and help make America "first in the air."

Finding a plane was more difficult. Lindbergh was well known in Midwestern and military flying circles, but on the East Coast, where the major aeronautical companies were based, he was a n.o.body. Fokker turned his request down flat. They told him he would need at least $90,000 to buy and outfit one of their specially made planes, but even if he could afford their fee they would reserve the right to veto any pilot attempting an Atlantic flight. And only a fool, they implied, would attempt the flight with fewer than three engines.

Lindbergh deliberately set up his appointment with the Wright Aeronautical Corporation using a five-dollar long-distance telephone call from St. Louis to ensure that he would "get past the girl at the desk." He invested in a tailor-made suit and a new blue overcoat and suitcase for his trip to New Jersey where the company was based. But his efforts to impress came to nothing. The Wright executive was friendly but told him that the plane in which he was interested, the Wright-Bellanca, was only a prototype. He suggested Lindbergh speak to its designer, Guiseppe Bellanca, and arranged a meeting between them for the following evening. Bellanca was encouraging but, lacking his own production facilities, could only offer Lindbergh the chance to buy a plane in an existing three-motored design for $29,000, double Lindbergh's entire budget.

Several months later Bellanca got in touch with Lindbergh again. The aggressive young owner of the prototype in which Lindbergh had been interested was willing to sell it for $15,000. Although Lindbergh hesitated over the price, his backers agreed to cover the cost. But as he held out the check, Charles Levine, the plane's owner, added a caveat: he, too, reserved the right to choose the plane's crew. "You understand we cannot let just anybody pilot our airplane across the ocean."

Furious, Lindbergh had just one option left: the tiny Ryan Aeronautical Company in San Diego, which had started out building planes from war-surplus aircraft parts. He went to California to discuss the plane he hoped they could build him. Ryan was based in the port area of San Diego and comprised one dilapidated building with "no flying field, no hangar, no sound of engines warming up; and the unmistakable smell of dead fish from a nearby cannery [mixed] with the banana odor of dope from drying wings," but Lindbergh was immediately impressed by its workmanlike approach. With a Wright-Whirlwind engine and any extras included at cost price, Ryan would charge Lindbergh and his sponsors $10,580 to build the Spirit of St Louis Spirit of St Louis.

While his plane was being built Lindbergh spent his days meticulously studying nautical charts, planning his route (using fifty-cent drugstore maps for his journey over American land) and writing endless "To do" lists. He worked closely with Ryan's chief engineer, Donald Hall, to mold the plane around his needs, adapting everything to his long-distance flight plans and his own experience.

Flight efficiency was to be the primary consideration, then safety in case of a crash, and finally Lindbergh's own comfort. Everything unnecessary-even night-flying equipment, a radio, a s.e.xtant and gauges on the gasoline tanks-was jettisoned for the sake of weight. Every pound saved meant the plane could travel further without refueling. Lindbergh turned down the idea of an additional c.o.c.kpit because the s.p.a.ce could be used to store more gasoline. "I'd rather have extra gasoline than an extra man."

The empty plane, made of spruce and piano wire and covered in cotton finished with cellulose acetate dope in silver-grey, weighed 2150lb, of which five hundred pounds was the air-cooled, 223-hp radial Wright-Whirlwind propeller engine stored in the nose of the fuselage. "Nine delicate, fincovered cylinders of aluminum and steel," mused Lindbergh. "On this intricate perfection I'm to trust my life across the Atlantic Ocean."

The Spirit of St Louis Spirit of St Louis stood just under ten feet tall. She was nearly twenty-eight feet long, with a wingspan of forty-six feet, and carried 450 gallons of gasoline and forty spare pounds of oil. She was a monoplane, because single wings could cope better with ice in the freezing nighttime conditions high above the North Atlantic. Lindbergh's seat in the c.o.c.kpit was made of lightweight wicker. stood just under ten feet tall. She was nearly twenty-eight feet long, with a wingspan of forty-six feet, and carried 450 gallons of gasoline and forty spare pounds of oil. She was a monoplane, because single wings could cope better with ice in the freezing nighttime conditions high above the North Atlantic. Lindbergh's seat in the c.o.c.kpit was made of lightweight wicker.

Her accident equipment was minimal: a small black rubber raft weighing ten pounds; a knife; some flares and matches stored in bicycle inner-tubes; basic fis.h.i.+ng equipment; a hacksaw; some "awful" crumbly army-ration chocolate-like stuff. A parachute, weighing twenty pounds, was rejected-it meant losing twenty minutes' worth of fuel. Even drinking water Lindbergh thought would weigh too much; he ordered the prototype of a newly invented cup that would convert moisture from his breath into water.

Lindbergh himself was the last item, six foot two tall and (clothed) weighing a slim 170 pounds. He planned to wear a zippered flying suit made of wool-lined waterproof cloth weighing nine pounds, specially chosen because it would keep him warm if he crashed, even when wet. Underneath the flying suit he would wear army breeches and boots, a s.h.i.+rt and light jacket and a red-and-blue-striped tie. His vulnerability on the flight, alone and out of all contact, would be intense. "For the first time in my life," his mother Evangeline wrote to him, "I realize that Columbus also had a mother."

Spirit was ready towards the end of April 1927. Inspired by Lindbergh's quiet determination, knowing that other teams were preparing to make their own attempts at the flight, Ryan's thirty-five men had worked for long hours, often without pay, to finish her as quickly as possible. Lindbergh spent ten days performing twenty-three test flights. was ready towards the end of April 1927. Inspired by Lindbergh's quiet determination, knowing that other teams were preparing to make their own attempts at the flight, Ryan's thirty-five men had worked for long hours, often without pay, to finish her as quickly as possible. Lindbergh spent ten days performing twenty-three test flights. Spirit Spirit's top speed was 128 mph and he tested her take-off carrying 350 gallons of fuel. He was delighted to find that her performance was far beyond what he had hoped for.

Further encouragement had come that March with news of the arrival in Paris of a French team from Tehran, a non-stop journey of 3,200 miles, admittedly overland. In April information arrived about some of the other teams attempting the New York-Paris flight. Two of the U.S. teams, a $100,000 Fokker and the Bellanca owned by Charles Levine (who had decided to use his own pilots to make his own bid for the prize), had encountered problems and were waiting for repairs to be completed; a pair of French former flying aces had crashed during their final test flight and been killed; a two-man team sponsored by the American Legion had also crashed, killing both pilots. Lindbergh was shaken by his fellow pilots' bad luck, but the fact that his rivals' planes were large, multi-engine craft confirmed his conviction that the Spirit of St Louis Spirit of St Louis was the airplane best fitted to successfully fly the Atlantic. was the airplane best fitted to successfully fly the Atlantic.

On 10 May Lindbergh took off from San Diego headed for New York, stopping for a night in St. Louis to consult with his backers about the compet.i.tion-and casually breaking the records for the fastest times from the Pacific coast to St. Louis, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts. Two days earlier two French flying aces had taken off for New York from Le Bourget airfield outside Paris in their single-engine bi-plane, L'oiseau blanc L'oiseau blanc. By the time Lindbergh landed at Curtiss Field in Long Island on the afternoon of 12 May, hopes of the French team arriving in New York were fading.

The two American planes waiting to make their Atlantic attempts were in nearby hangars, and Lindbergh was surprised to find a spirit of cooperation and shared endeavor among the engineers and aviation companies there. People who had been unwilling to help him when he wanted to find a plane to fly across the Atlantic, or who were attached to one of the other teams waiting to make their attempt, were happily making repairs to Lindbergh's instruments, checking over his engines, sharing weather information or offering him free use of their runways. Men who had been far-off heroes to Lindbergh-one of those who had developed the Whirlwind engine in his plane, the French flying ace Rene Fonck, and aircraft manufacturer Anthony Fokker-stopped by his hangar to wish him luck.

Lindbergh's youth, his good looks and the courage of his decision to fly solo all combined to make him the focus of unrelenting journalistic attention for the first time since he had declared his intention of competing for the Orteig prize. At press conferences he was asked questions like, "Have you got a sweetheart?" and "How do you feel about girls?" Reporters called him the Flyin' Fool and pushed their way into his bedroom hoping to steal a picture of him shaving in his pajamas; from then on, Lindbergh locked his door. So many journalists crowded the airfield when he landed after one test flight that he broke his tail skid trying to avoid them.

Thirty thousand enthusiasts came out to Curtiss Field on the Sunday before Lindbergh's flight. He received hundreds of good-luck letters and telegrams from fans, many offering advice or hoping to interest him in business propositions, many more hoping he would post their letters in Paris. Interested grandees like Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Harry Guggenheim wished him well. Lindbergh fended off requests from theatrical agents and Hollywood producers promising to make him a star.

When his mother arrived from Detroit to say goodbye she refused to kiss him for the photographers, protesting that they came "of an undemonstrative Nordic race" (the Lindberghs' independent, non-conformist Swedish-Scottish bloodlines made them the anti-immigration lobby's idea of ideal Americans) but a tabloid faked one of them kissing anyway. The usually unperturbed Lindbergh was angry. "They didn't care how much they hurt her feelings or frightened her about my flight, as long as they got their pictures and their stories."

After ten days, Lindbergh heard that the overcast weather was forecast to break the next day and he decided to leave the following morning-before his rivals, who he guessed would wait until they knew for sure that the cloud cover was clearing. Only a mail pilot, with flying experience in all weathers, would have dared start his journey in such uncertain conditions.

After a sleepless night, Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field at 7.51 on the windless, rain-sodden morning of 20 May in front of a crowd of several hundred. Spirit Spirit, fully laden with 451 gallons of gasoline, bounced along the runway and cleared the telegraph wires at the end of the field by just twenty feet. A newspaper plane flew alongside him as far as Long Island Sound. News came over the wire that Lloyd's of London were not taking bets on Lindbergh's arrival in Paris because they considered he had too slim a chance of making it. Fortunately, without a radio he would not have heard it.

The thirty-five-mile stretch of ocean between Long Island and Connecticut was the longest expanse of water Lindbergh had yet flown over. When he reached the Atlantic coast, "looking ahead at the unbroken horizon and limitless expanse of water," he was "struck by my arrogance in attempting such a flight." His little Spirit Spirit resembled nothing more than "a b.u.t.terfly blown out to sea" but to him she felt more like "a living partner in adventure than a machine of cloth and steel." resembled nothing more than "a b.u.t.terfly blown out to sea" but to him she felt more like "a living partner in adventure than a machine of cloth and steel."

America held its breath. "Alone?' demanded Harold Anderson in the New York Sun New York Sun. "Is he alone at whose right side rides Courage, with Skill within the c.o.c.kpit and Faith upon the left? Does solitude surround the brave when Adventure leads the way and Ambition reads the dials? Is there no company with him for whom the air is cleft by Daring and the darkness is made light by Enterprise? . . . Alone? With what other companions would that man fly to whom the choice were given?"

For the next twenty-eight hours Lindbergh fought off sleep, kept awake by the instability of his plane-"this little box with fabric walls"-an unexpected blessing because it meant he could not switch off for a second. He preferred not to eat, knowing that his empty stomach would also keep him alert, and kept the plastic windows out of their frames, fearing the barrier they would create between him and the outside elements, the crystal "communion of water, land and sky."

He was acutely conscious of his vulnerability as he flew over Newfoundland. "Nine barrels of gasoline and oil, wrapped up in fabric; two hundred and twenty horsepower, harnessed by a layer of cloth-vulnerable to a pin p.r.i.c.k, yet protecting an airplane and its pilot on a flight across an ocean, between the continents-suspended at this moment five hundred feet above a frigid, northern land."

And yet there was also a strange sense of security and peace. Life had suddenly become wholly simple. His c.o.c.kpit was tailored to him "like a suit of clothes": "Each dial and lever is in the proper place for glance or touch; and the slightest pressure on the controls brings response." The only thing he had to do was fly, and that felt "like living in a hermit's mountain cabin after being surrounded by the luxury and countless responsibilities of a city residence." He became minutely conscious of every detail of his surroundings-the weld marks on the tubing, a dot of paint on the altimeter's face-and "the grandeur of the world outside. The nearness of death. The longness of life." He was utterly alone.

The urge to sleep was strongest in the dark, when he was over open water. It felt like a leaden coat pressing down upon his shoulders. He forced himself to squeeze his dry eyes open and shut, to stamp on the floor of the c.o.c.kpit, shaking the tiny plane, to flex his cramped muscles as he sat. Concentration was his only weapon against sleep-the power of his mind over his body. Relentlessly he made himself think of possible problems and how he would deal with them, created imaginary emergencies, checked and rechecked his route, envisaged how he would cope if he crashed.

Throughout the freezing, misty, moonless night, ghostly spirits crowded around him in the tiny c.o.c.kpit, "neither intruders nor strangers," speaking intangible messages of great importance, discussing the flight, offering advice, rea.s.suring him. Dazed with exhaustion, Lindbergh accepted them as normal because he was so far removed from everyday life, existing only in "this strange, living dream." The next day he could not remember a word the spirits had said to him.

Mirages of land appeared on the horizon in front of him alongside s.h.i.+mmering ice cakes and vast icebergs. For a time he flew with his head thrown back, looking up through the skylight at the stars just visible in the thickening night fog and the mountainous clouds, racing perilous ice-storms. He was entirely "conscious of the minuteness of my plane and of the magnitude of the world."

"Aren't my silver wings fully as remarkable as those Daedalus made of wax and feathers?" Lindbergh wondered. "Sometimes, flying feels too G.o.d-like to be attained by man." The implications of his record-breaking solo flight, should he survive it, pressed upon him. "Will men fly through the air in the future without seeing what I have seen, without feeling what I have felt? Is that true of all things we call human progress-do the G.o.ds retire as commerce and science advance?"

Waiting for dawn in the unmarked night over cold unfriendly seas, on the second morning of his journey (and the third without sleep), he felt senseless, accomplis.h.i.+ng only what he needed to do to survive in a state of semiconsciousness. After more than twenty hours of flight, Lindbergh remembered that he had smelling salts in his medical kit. He broke open one of the capsules but was so out of touch with reality that he could not smell it and his eyes did not water. He felt as though he was hanging in s.p.a.ce, divorced from his body. Finally he saw beneath him harbingers of land: a porpoise leaping through the water, then a gull, then the black specks of fis.h.i.+ng boats-and at last the emerald-green fields of the west coast of Ireland.

When he reached the mouth of the Seine nearly five hours later he remembered that he had neither eaten nor drunk anything since leaving New York. Someone had handed him five drugstore sandwiches as he left and he attempted a few mouthfuls before packing them carefully away. His mouth was too dry to swallow and he didn't want to taint his landing with discarded sandwich wrappings. He flew over Paris, which looked like a "lake of stars," and circled the Eiffel Tower (then the tallest man-made structure in the world) at 4,000 feet, waggling his wings.

Lindbergh's moment of greatest confusion came when he arrived at Le Bourget airfield on the outskirts of Paris, just over thirty-three hours after he had lifted off. Where the empty field should have been was an erratic pattern of lights, dimming the beacons he was expecting to see, and a long string of pairs of lights reaching off into the distance. Flying past a second time, he realized that these were the headlights of thousands of Parisians coming out to greet him.

In the crowds beneath him were Harry and Caresse Crosby, marveling at the crowds, the colored flares and the great floodlights sweeping the sky. Lindbergh's engine whirred like a toy as he circled the field in preparation for landing. Lost and then captured in the moving lights, the Spirit Spirit gleamed and flashed in the night sky like a shark darting through water. A mood of suspense built as they waited for his approach. "Then sharp swift in the gold glare of the searchlights a small white hawk of a plane swoops hawk-like down and across the field-C'est lui Lindberg [sic], LINDBERG! And there is a pandemonium, wild animals let loose and a stampede towards the plane . . . thousands of hands weaving like maggots over the silver wings of the Spirit of Saint-Louis . . . scratching and tearing." gleamed and flashed in the night sky like a shark darting through water. A mood of suspense built as they waited for his approach. "Then sharp swift in the gold glare of the searchlights a small white hawk of a plane swoops hawk-like down and across the field-C'est lui Lindberg [sic], LINDBERG! And there is a pandemonium, wild animals let loose and a stampede towards the plane . . . thousands of hands weaving like maggots over the silver wings of the Spirit of Saint-Louis . . . scratching and tearing."

The 150,000-strong crowd surged on to the runway as Spirit Spirit landed and the mob lifted Lindbergh out of the plane. He said later that "it was like drowning in a human sea." A couple of French pilots, realizing how disorientated Lindbergh must be, quickly threw a coat over his shoulders, took off his helmet and placed it on the head of a nearby American reporter, and spirited him into the airfield's office, leaving his subst.i.tute to the crowds, who carried the wrong man triumphantly towards the official reception committee. His hosts laughed off Lindbergh's worries about not having a French visa; France was his, they said. After meeting the American amba.s.sador, at whose house he was to stay, his new friends bundled him into a car bound for Paris by back roads. landed and the mob lifted Lindbergh out of the plane. He said later that "it was like drowning in a human sea." A couple of French pilots, realizing how disorientated Lindbergh must be, quickly threw a coat over his shoulders, took off his helmet and placed it on the head of a nearby American reporter, and spirited him into the airfield's office, leaving his subst.i.tute to the crowds, who carried the wrong man triumphantly towards the official reception committee. His hosts laughed off Lindbergh's worries about not having a French visa; France was his, they said. After meeting the American amba.s.sador, at whose house he was to stay, his new friends bundled him into a car bound for Paris by back roads. Spirit Spirit was left under armed guard to protect her from souvenir hunters. was left under armed guard to protect her from souvenir hunters.

News of the hero's safe arrival was wired to New York and bells rang out across the country. That night, at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, a new version of the Charleston, the Lindy Hop, was danced in Lindbergh's honor to accompanying screams of "Lindy's done it, Lindy's done it!"

Amba.s.sador Herrick's motorcade took so long to get back to Paris through the celebrating throngs that Lindbergh had eaten his first meal in two days (light soup and an egg) and had a bath by the time his host arrived home at 3 a.m. After a short press briefing Lindbergh got into bed, sixty-three hours after he had last slept.

Herrick cabled Evangeline Lindbergh in Detroit: "Warmest congratulations Stop Your incomparable son has honored me by being my guest Stop He is in fine condition and sleeping sweetly under Uncle Sams roof." When she went out to meet the press, Evangeline's usual restraint failed her. With tears in her eyes, she said that although she had never doubted that her son would complete his journey, "I am so happy that it is over, more happy than I can ever tell . . . He has accomplished the greatest undertaking of his life, and I am proud to be the mother of such a boy."

The next few days-and weeks, and months-pa.s.sed in a whirl. When, next afternoon, Herrick led Lindbergh on to a balcony to wave to the cheering crowds below, he realized that his flight had transformed his life forever. Aged twenty-five, he had become public property. Everywhere he went people pressed forward to shake his hand, to touch his clothes, to congratulate and applaud him. From then on, he reflected years later, life "could hardly have been more amazing if I had landed on another planet instead of at Paris."

Harry Crosby and his father were among hundreds who called on Herrick to meet Lindbergh the day after his landing. Thousands more lined the streets every time he ventured out in public. Lindbergh insisted on calling on the parents of the French airmen who had disappeared while making their Atlantic attempt two weeks earlier. He paid his respects to Louis Bleriot, who told him that he was his heir "and the prophet of a new era." Most of his time was spent at receptions and meeting the press. He was presented with the Legion of Honor. Everywhere his behavior was marked by patience, good-humor, courtesy and humility-an achievement, as one historian observes, even more impressive than his flight.

After a week of official engagements and adulation, Lindbergh left Paris for England, spending a night in Belgium en route. In London he met the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and was personally congratulated by the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace. George V presented him with Britain's highest peacetime honor, the Air Force Cross, but a more private matter was of greater interest to him: "Now tell me, Captain Lindbergh. There is one thing I long to know. How did you pee?"

At the beginning of June, Lindbergh returned to the United States aboard the USS Memphis. As the guns.h.i.+p cruised up the Potomac towards Was.h.i.+ngton, Lindbergh was given a twenty-one-gun salute-a tribute previously reserved for heads of state. Over the next three months Lindbergh toured the country attending parades, receptions and benefits in his honor, promoting and "stimulating popular interest in the use of air transport." Countless reams of ticker tape filled the air as an estimated thirty million people turned out to see him in eighty-two cities. During his tour he was only late for one appointment.

Hoping to tempt Lindbergh into starring in a biopic opposite Marion Davies, W. R. Hearst hosted a dinner for him in New York at which the bashful young aviator sat between Davies and Mary Pickford. Halfway through, Pickford slipped Davies a note: "He won't talk." Davies wrote back, "Talk about airplanes." In Detroit, Lindbergh took Henry Ford up for his first flight. Al Capone was on Chicago's official welcoming committee when Lindbergh landed on Lake Michigan in a seaplane.

Lindbergh's solo flight created an extraordinary level of interest in aviation. Harry Crosby was not the only man inspired by Lindbergh to take to the skies ("I do do know how to fly in the know how to fly in the final final and and real real sense of the word that is in the soul Flights to the Sun but now I want to learn also in the Lindbergian sense of the word," he wrote). As Gloria Swanson put it, after Lindbergh's flight, "everybody wanted wings." sense of the word that is in the soul Flights to the Sun but now I want to learn also in the Lindbergian sense of the word," he wrote). As Gloria Swanson put it, after Lindbergh's flight, "everybody wanted wings."

Applications for pilots' licenses went up by 300 percent in 1927. New airfields were laid; the manufacture of aircraft soared. Ryan Aircraft, who had made the Spirit Spirit, received twenty-nine orders for new aircraft within weeks of Lindbergh's flight and were soon manufacturing three planes a week. In 1928 Wright Aeronautical stock soared from 69 points to 289.

The companies that would become United Airlines, American Airlines, Eastern Airlines and Trans-World Airlines were founded, carrying twelve or fifteen pa.s.sengers rather than the one or two whom mail pilots had occasionally transported. In 1928, the same year that the Havana Air Convention established the first rules for air traffic in the Americas, Pan American Airways used Lindbergh to publicize their international mail routes between the US, the Caribbean and South and Central America. By the spring of 1929 there were sixty-one U.S. pa.s.senger airlines and forty-seven air-mail companies.

The popularity of flying mirrored the advent of the motorcar at the start of the century, which had brought with it a host of new industries and infrastructures, from a network of roads to soaring steel, rubber and petroleum production. People began speaking of transatlantic pa.s.senger and mail routes as certainties, rather than as science fiction. In an era transformed by technological developments from the telephone to nylon to typewriters to electricity, a new airborne world had arrived. Lindbergh, who had loved "the sky's unbroken solitude," feared what the spread of aviation might lead to. "I feel like the western pioneer when he saw barbed-wire fences encroaching on his open plains. The success of his venture brought the end of the life he loved."

In the rush towards the future, the negative aspects of progress and technological advancement were ignored. Nature was seen not as a treasure to be conserved and husbanded, but as a resource to be used up. In Middletown even before Lindbergh's flight, people no longer walked or rode their bicycles, they scorned home-grown and home-made food in favor of shop-bought and were unable to fish the town's polluted river, stinking with industrial run-off. But as the Lynds observed, people themselves had changed far less than the objects they dealt with every day: "Bathrooms and electricity have pervaded the homes of the city more rapidly than innovations in the personal adjustments between husbands and wives or between parents and children." Those would come later.

Another fundamental social change revealed by Lindbergh's flight and his extraordinary personal popularity was the introduction of the idea of modern celebrity. Americans made Lindbergh into a symbol of all that was best and purest about their country. He was modest, idealistic, a prophet of the future and yet untainted by modernity, radiantly handsome, virtuous, disciplined, selfreliant-in short everything that Americans aspired to be, as well as a blank canvas on to which people could project their dreams and fantasies. Former Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes declared that Lindbergh had "displaced everything that is petty, that is sordid, that is vulgar"; a journalist said that Lindbergh had "shown us that we are not rotten at the core but morally sound and sweet and good." He was, wrote Frederick Allen, a "Galahad for a generation which had forsworn Galahads."

Lindbergh's achievement brought him fame, riches and a wife (Anne, the daughter of Dwight Morrow, a J. P. Morgan banker and the U.S. amba.s.sador to Mexico; as a modern 1920s woman, she learned to navigate so that she could work alongside her husband), but it also brought him tragedy. On 1 March 1932, Charles and Anne's baby son was kidnapped. After ten agonizing weeks his corpse was found nearby. The publicity surrounding the disappearance of the "Lindbergh baby" and the trial of his abductor was too much to bear. In 1935 the Lindberghs left the United States and spent the next few years in Europe. They returned home in 1939 when war broke out, but Lindbergh's a.s.sociation with the Third Reich (he received the same award as Henry Ford, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, in 1938) and his arguments for non-intervention in the Second World War tarnished his public image. In the years before his death in 1974 he was an ardent conservationist, seeking the balance between nature and technology he had meditated upon during his epic transatlantic flight.

In 1927, only the worldly-wise writers at the New Yorker New Yorker, while expending as many column inches on Lindbergh as any other publication of the day, expressed the hope that he would be able to readjust to being a man after becoming a G.o.d. Detailing his potential earnings, they advised him to be restrained about capitalizing on his achievements and congratulated him rather backhandedly. Simple admiration for the old-fas.h.i.+oned values of courage, strength and modesty that Lindbergh represented seemed to sit uneasily with their hard-won metropolitan sophistication.

Jack Dempsey being given a ma.s.sage by his trainer, 1925. Although he had been World Heavyweight Champion in six years, at this point he had been World Heavyweight Champion in six years, at this point he was more focused on his Hollywood career than on defending his t.i.tle. was more focused on his Hollywood career than on defending his t.i.tle.

Dempsey coming towards the fallen Gene Tunney during the Long Count in Chicage, 1927. The box office take was $2.5 million. Count in Chicage, 1927. The box office take was $2.5 million.

13.

THE BIG FIGHT.

ALTHOUGH HE PROTESTED AGAINST BEING TURNED INTO A "TIN saint," Charles Lindbergh was an image of moral perfection to most 1920s Americans. Other heroes were more fallible, beloved for their vulnerabilities and complexities as much as for their achievements. Charlie Chaplin was one such flawed idol; the salty, sulky baseball star Babe Ruth another. But the greatest sportsman of the 1920s, in terms of drawing power and personal celebrity, was the untamed boxer Jack Dempsey. The total gate receipts for his five big fights between 1921 and 1927 were almost nine million dollars, sums unequalled until the advent of Mohammed Ali forty years later.

Born in 1895, Dempsey came from the small town of Mana.s.sa, Colorado, the ninth of thirteen children of poor, itinerant parents of largely Irish stock with a splash of Cherokee blood. He left school after eighth grade and found work as a miner, saying later that his two career options had been mining and cattle-working. Dempsey's adolescence was a rough one, lived in the mines and the hobo "jungles" where he and other impoverished workers and outlaws camped between catching dangerous but free rides on the undercarriages of cross-country trains.

Soon he found that he had another talent: fighting. Encouraged by his elder brother, who had made a name for himself as a bar-room brawler, Dempsey began taking on all-comers in local saloons. "I can't sing and I can't dance," he'd say, in his incongruously girlish voice, "but I can kick any man's a.s.s." He chewed pine tar to strengthen his jaw and soaked his fists in brine to toughen them against cuts. By the early 1910s he was touring the bars of the Southwest looking for fights, and at twenty he hired a manager and went professional. Although his real name was William Harrison Dempsey, he used the name Jack Dempsey in homage to a great nineteenth-century middleweight.

The next few years were hard. Managers came and went; a good-for-nothing wife demanded generous support; boxing promoters in New York, where he first arrived in 1916 with less than $30 in his pocket, had no interest in a skinny kid from out west. Only the hard-boiled young sports-writer Damon Runyon, whom he met as a youngster scuffling in Denver, saw Dempsey's potential and encouraged him to continue. Runyon watched one of Dempsey's early fights and gave him his ring soubriquet, the "Mana.s.sa Mauler."

Finally, after dropping out of boxing for a time and working in the s.h.i.+pyards of Philadelphia, Dempsey was taken on by the manager Jack "Doc" Kearns and the promoter Tex Rickard, and his career began in earnest. Dapper Kearns was a con man, a master of the 1920s art of marketing "ballyhoo." When someone accused him of being a crook, he responded, "I prefer to be called a manipulator." Rickard, tall, taciturn and elegant, was cleared in the early 1920s of accusations of abducting and s.e.xually a.s.saulting young girls. Despite this shadow over his reputation, from which he never quite recovered, Dempsey adored him. Rickard was, he said, "a bourbon-and-branchwater man who could drink all night and not get drunk...a gambler of the old school." The sports journalist Paul Gallico said Rickard instinctively understood the power of money: "He knew how to exhibit it, use it, ballyhoo it, spend it, and make it work for him." Their informal partners.h.i.+p of Dempsey, Kearns and Rickard would make all three rich.

In 1919, under Kearns's management, Dempsey knocked out his opponents in the first round in five consecutive fights. That July he challenged the World Heavyweight Champion, Jess Willard, for his t.i.tle in Toledo, Ohio. No one in the audience thought Dempsey could win, although sports-writers were starting to take notice of the young boxer. Ring Lardner and Scoop Gleeson came to shake Dempsey's hand before the bout, as well as his old friend Runyon.

At six-foot-five Willard was four inches taller than Dempsey and sixty-five pounds heavier, and far more experienced. But Dempsey was an instinctive fighter, lightning fast and graceful on his feet, possessing a devastating punch with both right and left fists. What set him apart, though, was his savage street fighter att.i.tude. One journalist called him "part tiger, part wildcat and all killer"; others described him pursuing his opponents in the ring like a panther, smoldering with the intensity of his desire to win.

"Dempsey was a picture-book fighter," wrote Paul Gallico in the 1930s. "He had dark eyes, blue-black hair, and the most beautifully proportioned body ever seen in any ring. He had the wide but sharply sloping shoulders of the puncher, a slim waist, and fine, symmetrical legs. His weaving, shuffling style of approach was drama in itself and suggested the stalking of a jungle animal. He had a smoldering truculence on his face and hatred in his eyes. His gorge lay close to the surface. He was utterly without mercy or pity, asked no quarter, gave none. He would do anything he could get away with, fair or foul, to win.

"This was definitely a part of the man, but was also a result of his early life and schooling in the hobo jungles, bar-rooms, and mining camps of the West. Where Dempsey learned to fight there were no rounds, rest intervals, gloves, referees, or attending seconds. There are no draws and no decisions in rough and tumble fighting. You had to win. If you lost you went to the hospital or to the undertaking parlor. Dempsey, more often than not, in his early days as hobo, saloon bouncer, or roustabout, fought to survive. I always had the feeling that he carried that into the ring with him, that he was impatient of rules and restrictions and niceties of conduct, impatient even of the leather that bound his knuckles."

Dempsey knocked Willard down seven times in the first round alone. By the time the dazed, defenseless Willard was forced to retire, at the end of the third round, he looked like he was sleepwalking. He had lost several teeth and his jaw, cheek-bone and some ribs had been broken. The scale of Dempsey's victory was such that rumors that he had worn loaded gloves to gain his t.i.tle swirled around him for the rest of his career.

The Mana.s.sa Mauler's success in the ring was marred by allegations outside it of his having dodged the draft during the First World War. Harold Ross, who had known Dempsey as a kid in Colorado, led a campaign against "Slacker" Dempsey in the U.S. Army magazine, Stars and Stripes Stars and Stripes, of which he was then editor. Dempsey's estranged wife, Maxine, whom he had married at twenty-one when she was well into her thirties, had accused him of beating her and of falsifying his draft papers; she was hoping for a large payout.

In court in June 1920 Dempsey testified that he had tried to enlist but been turned down by the army; his appeal had not come through by the time peace was declared. He said he had spent the war years supporting his wife and parents, and helped the war effort by working in a s.h.i.+pyard and recruiting other workers. Although he won his case against Maxine, the photograph he supplied the court of himself working in the s.h.i.+pyard was rendered suspect by the fact that patent leather boots and pinstriped trousers were visible underneath his overalls. It would take Dempsey many years to shake off his slacker reputation.

Tex Rickard capitalized on Dempsey's unfavorable publicity to promote his fights. After Dempsey had twice defended his t.i.tle, Rickard set up a bout with the French light heavyweight Georges Carpentier in July 1921. No image could have been in greater contrast to Dempsey's than Carpentier's: he was a former flying ace, a decorated war-hero whose nickname was Gorgeous Georges, graceful, clean-cut, sophisticated, well-dressed, a good dancer. Ring Lardner said he was "one of the most likeable guys you'd want to meet-even if he did have a Greek profile and long eyelashes." Rickard had no scruples about presenting Dempsey in a negative light as compared to this paragon. As he said, "hatin' is as good for box office as lovin'."

Rickard's marketing genius was to draw in his audience by making each fight he promoted into a narrative, pitting a hero against a villain, turning a boxing match into an elemental struggle between glory and humiliation, triumph and disaster, good and evil. He expanded boxing's appeal far beyond its traditional audience of working-cla.s.s men, the kind of people who would have crowded the sawdust floors of Colorado bars to watch the young Dempsey take on all-comers. Having never watched boxing before, respectable and respected public figures-even women-attended the spectacles Rickard staged.

Dempsey's fights generated extraordinary popular interest, even at a time when sportsmen were acknowledged heroes. Sports-entertainers like Dempsey, Babe Ruth, the golfer Bobby Jones and the tennis player Bill Tilden were idolized for their courage, heroism and strength. Sport provided a vicarious release for the new generation of white-collar workers who spent their days sitting behind desks, as well as an outlet for the surplus money they were earning and their newly acquired leisure time. Managers used sport as a business model, encouraging teamwork and a sense of compet.i.tion among their workers. Like movies, radio and advertising (to all of which sport was closely linked), great sporting events helped create a sense of national ident.i.ty and unity over and above differences in ethnicity, cla.s.s and religion.

The tickets to the Dempsey-Carpentier fight were beautifully made, oversized, engraved and gold-embossed. They brought in the first ever million-dollar box-office take (of which Dempsey and Kearns were to receive a third each), and the audience of 80,000 was as starry as Rickard could have hoped, including tyc.o.o.ns like Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, various Vanderbilts and Astors, diplomats, politicians, musicians, movie stars and three of former President Roosevelt's children. Alice Roosevelt Longworth recalled playing poker on a special train with the Vice President, Calvin Coolidge, and his party all the way from Was.h.i.+ngton to New York, where the fight was being held.

Despite the public rivalry Rickard encouraged between his two fighters, when they met Carpentier and Dempsey took to one another immediately. Carpentier thought Dempsey was "a man made expressly to be a fighter" with his high Native American cheekbones and dark narrow eyes. His smile, said Carpentier, was almost childlike and lit up his face. Although Dempsey said little except to express the hope "that we would both make a packet" out of the fight, Carpentier found him immensely likeable. "Under the traditional rough exterior," he wrote, Dempsey had "the equally traditional heart of gold."

But Dempsey, dark and glowering, was cast as the villain. Even though Carpentier was a foreigner the crowd hoped he would win-he was smaller than Dempsey and it was so clearly an uneven match-and Dempsey sensed their antagonism. Carpentier looked like a statue, said Dempsey, while he was just a street fighter.

The street fighter knocked the statue out in the fourth round. Even the press reports afterwards favored the loser. "The more powerful but not the better man won," said the Morning Telegraph Morning Telegraph. The New York Times New York Times stated that "Carpentier was quite rightly the more popular of the two men. He was beaten as a fighter but he remains superior as a boxer . . . Carpentier was the spirit of the fight; Dempsey was its body. Carpentier lost like a gentleman." stated that "Carpentier was quite rightly the more popular of the two men. He was beaten as a fighter but he remains superior as a boxer . . . Carpentier was the spirit of the fight; Dempsey was its body. Carpentier lost like a gentleman."

Ring Lardner's short story of 1921, "The Battle of the Century," was a fictionalized account of the meeting between the hungry young American and the urbane foreigner. It focused less on the good-natured Jim Dugan (Dempsey) than on his wheeler-dealer manager, Larry Moon, a portrait of Kearns, whose pursuit of a triumph for his champion had brought about such a dangerously mismatched compet.i.tion.

The next fight Rickard organized for Dempsey was against the Argentinean champion, Luis Angel Firpo, in September 1923. Paul Gallico remembered Dempsey's training camp at Saratoga Springs before this meeting as "the most colorful, exciting, [and] picturesque" of gatherings. Sitting at a rickety wooden table with an illicit beer and a steak sandwich in front of him, Gallico joined the ribald, thrill-seeking gang of Dempsey's supporters: "lop-ears, stumble-b.u.ms, cheap, smalltime politicians, fight managers, ring champions, floozies, gangsters, Negroes, policemen and a few actors thrown in for good measure."

Jack Kearns, "smart, breezy, wise-cracking, scented," guarded access to his champion. "Doubtful blondes who wandered in and out of the layout of wooden hotel and lake-front bungalows, and blondes about whom there was no doubt at all" mingled with sports-writers and aging boxers "with bent noses and twisted ears." Dempsey himself, blue-black hair gleaming, "dressed in trousers and an old gray sweater, [played] checkers on the porch of his bungalow with a sparring partner." Gallico was moved by the moments of beauty he glimpsed amid the organized chaos of the camp, "the smooth swiveling of Dempsey's shoulder as he punched a rataplan on the light bag."

For the editor of The Ring The Ring magazine the Dempsey-Firpo bout was the most exciting fight he witnessed in fifty years. The two men fought like animals, wrote another commentator, with "abysmal, unreasoning fury." "Firpo came at me as no other living man ever did before, or since," remembered Dempsey. The Argentinean matched Dempsey's aggression, responding to his initial onslaught by knocking Dempsey out of the ring in the first minutes of the fight, only for Dempsey to be pushed back through the ropes by the ringside reporters on to whom he'd fallen. There were eleven knockdowns in the first round. Dempsey knocked Firpo out for a count of ten in the second, and then helped him up as he was declared the winner. magazine the Dempsey-Firpo bout was the most exciting fight he witnessed in fifty years. The two men fought like animals, wrote another commentator, with "abysmal, unreasoning fury." "Firpo came at me as no other living man ever did before, or since," remembered Dempsey. The Argentinean matched Dempsey's aggression, responding to his initial onslaught by knocking Dempsey out of the ring in the first minutes of the fight, only for Dempsey to be pushed back through the ropes by the ringside reporters on to whom he'd fallen. There were eleven knockdowns in the first round. Dempsey knocked Firpo out for a count of ten in the second, and then helped him up as he was declared the winner.

Dempsey's no-holds-barred approach was becoming legendary. His rage in the ring seemed to express all the frustration of America's marginalized undercla.s.ses, humiliated by the injustices of the society in which they sc.r.a.ped survival. Dempsey "seemed to have a constant bottomless well of cold fury somewhere close to his throat." The champion of the underdog, the victim, the ignored and the hungry, his furious fighting style and rugged individualism reflected where he had come from and what he continued to battle against. He represented the desire for rebellion against the demands of an increasingly modern, stratified, bureaucratizing society, the impulse to smash and destroy the things that a man cannot control.

Some observers said that Dempsey fought foul, but it was more that he recognized that any ideas of fair and foul were irrelevant in the ring, where all that mattered was winning or losing. "Sometimes, with a touch of macabre humor, he liked to test out the courage and opposition of his opponent with a few low ones," said Gallico, "but he was simply unconcerned with such niceties and obvious decencies as a belt line...When the bell rang he ran out and began to attack his opponent, and he never stopped attacking him, trying to batter him to the floor, until the bell ended the round."

"Many said I was ruthless in the ring," said Dempsey, looking back on his career. "How I'd stand over a fellow who was down and clout him again as he tried to rise. How I would get behind an opponent staggering back to his feet and flatten him with a sucker punch as he turned to face me. Guilty! . . . Why shouldn't I have been adept at such tactics?...It was part of the rules-or lack of rules-through many of my ring years. I've been beaten into a coma in rings. I've been knocked down too often to remember. I've been knocked out...But I never lost a fight on a foul. Nor was I ever thrown out of a ring for not trying."

In the 1920s stardom beckoned anyone with a saleable talent. America was looking for idols, and when it found them, it sent them to California. Increasingly celebrities were "normal" individuals who had transformed their circ.u.mstances through their own efforts, rather than men who had greatness conferred upon them by their rank or office. Few people in the 1920s would have called politicians or industrial magnates "great"; instead they venerated popular heroes like Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth or Jack Dempsey as their own. But while high-minded Lindbergh resisted Hollywood's siren calls, Dempsey was utterly seduced by them.

After winning his t.i.tle in 1919, Dempsey had starred in a series of short films called Daredevil Jack Daredevil Jack. In late 1923 he returned to the West Coast and resumed his career as an entertainer. He had always done traveling vaudeville work-shadow boxing, rope skipping, laying out a stooge from the audience, offering $1,000 to anyone who could knock him out-but now a circus paid him $45,000 for a three-week tour.

In Hollywood, Dempsey found a group of people like himself from poor backgrounds who had suddenly made it big. As he put it, they were all just "freaks of nature," handed success, vast wealth and popular adulation because of a good profile or a pretty mouth, or in his case a mighty punch. Until he died of a heroin overdose in 1923, Dempsey's best friend in the film business was the matinee idol Wally Reid, "the best looking and most reckless of them." Douglas Fairbanks took Dempsey under his wing; he made friends with Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin, and went to Marion Davies and W. R. Hearst's parties at San Simeon.

Dempsey was becoming more of an entertainer than a boxer, a product of the press and the movies rather than the world of the ring. The only fight Rickard planned for Dempsey in 1923 after his meeting with Firpo was against Harry Wills, a black contender for the heavyweight t.i.tle, but fears that a mixed-race bout would cause riots resulted in its being called off. Rickard was content for Dempsey not to fight because he realized that the less often people saw Dempsey in the ring, the more they would pay when he did defend his t.i.tle; Doc Kearns, milking Dempsey's new Hollywood income, was equally happy to let him enjoy the softer side of success.

Dempsey made half a million dollars in 1924 although he did not fight once, leaving himself open to accusations that he wanted to retain his t.i.tle without bothering to defend it. By contrast the other sporting legend of the 1920s, Babe Ruth, was paid a yearly salary of $52,000 by the New York Yankees, over three times what the next highest-paid baseball player made.

In 1925 Dempsey married an actress called Estelle Taylor and moved with her to an expensively decorated hacienda-style house complete with its own pool, golf-course, bridle paths and Rolls-Royce in the garage. Estelle persuaded Jack to have his nose fixed. When Dempsey and Kearns fell out over Doc's spending of Dempsey's winnings, Estelle, hoping Jack would give boxing up altogether, encouraged him to sack his manager.

Kearns had been taking half of all Dempsey's earnings, when the legal limit for an agent was a third, without declaring his income or paying tax on it. At first, Dempsey admitted, he had been so thrilled to be making so much money that he had not thought to question Kearns's high-handed appropriation of his earnings, but when he began to feel that Kearns was mistaking "grat.i.tude for stupidity" he had no choice but to get rid of him (while maintaining his links with Rickard).

One of the early issues of the New Yorker New Yorker in the spring of 1925 carried a typically arch profile of Dempsey whom it described as having "learned that the camaraderie of poverty cannot survive the blight of wealth. Splitting the first dollar with a friend is not so much, but sharing the first million is a large contract." Dempsey, the in the spring of 1925 carried a typically arch profile of Dempsey whom it described as having "learned that the camaraderie of poverty cannot survive the blight of wealth. Splitting the first dollar with a friend is not so much, but sharing the first million is a large contract." Dempsey, the New Yorker New Yorker reported, had the high, piping voice of a teenage boy and could not sit still. He didn't take himself seriously and-hardly surprisingly-he didn't read much. His appeal to women was admiringly noted, and his apparently happy surrender to the trappings of respectability commented upon. "If he is ever invited to become a Rotarian, he will accept, eagerly." reported, had the high, piping voice of a teenage boy and could not sit still. He didn't take himself seriously and-hardly surprisingly-he didn't read much. His appeal to women was admiringly noted, and his apparently happy surrender to the trappings of respectability commented upon. "If he is ever invited to become a Rotarian, he will accept, eagerly."

Paul Gallico saw Dempsey's Hollywood years rather differently. The wild animal had been "caged in a silken boudoir... He moved in those days through those absurd frills like a tiger in the circus, dressed up for the show in strange and humiliating clothes." Dempsey was as intimidated as he was attracted by his beautiful, ambitious wife and her sparkling friends. Every now and then he'd realize that he "didn't know what the h.e.l.l they were talking about." "I tried like the devil to fit in and couldn't," he admitted. He felt excluded and lonely; Estelle worried that "being married to a pug" was ruining her career.