One Summer: America, 1927 Page 11
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 an
d 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.
That achievement alone makes him unquestionably a candidate for greatest pilot of his age, if not all ages. He was the only pilot that year to land where he said he would. All the other flights that summer—and there were many—either failed, made forced landings on water, or came down without knowing where they were. He seemed to think that flying straight to Le Bourget was the most normal thing in the world. For him, in fact, it was.
As Lindbergh covered the last leg from Cherbourg into Paris he had no idea that he was about to experience fame on a scale and intensity unlike any experienced by any human before.
It never occurred to him that many people would be waiting for him. He wondered if anyone at the airfield would speak English and if he would be in trouble for not having a French visa. His plan was, first, to see to it that his plane was stowed securely and, second, to cable his mother to give her the news that he had arrived. He supposed there would be one or two press interviews, assuming reporters worked that late in France. Then he would have to find a hotel somewhere. At some point he would also need to buy clothes and personal items because he hadn’t packed anything at all, not even a toothbrush.
A more immediate problem confronting him was that his map didn’t show Le Bourget. All he knew was that it was some seven miles northeast of the city and that it was big. After circling the Eiffel Tower, he headed in that direction, but the only possible site he could see was ringed with bright lights, as if it were some kind of industrial complex, with long tentacles of additional bright lights stretching out from it in all directions. This was nothing like the dozing airport he had expected to find. What he didn’t realize was that the activity was all for him; the sinuous tentacles of light were the headlights of tens of thousands of cars all spontaneously drawn to Le Bourget and now caught in the greatest traffic jam in Parisian history. Cars and trams were abandoned all along the roads to the airport.
At 10:22 p.m. Paris time—precisely 33 hours, 30 minutes, and 29.8 seconds after taking to the air, according to an official barograph that the National Aeronautic Association of America had bolted into the plane just before departure—the Spirit of St. Louis touched down on the grassy spaciousness of Le Bourget. In that instant, a pulse of joy swept around the earth. Within minutes the whole of America knew he was safe in Paris. Le Bourget was instantly a scene of exultant pandemonium as tens of thousands of people rushed across the airfield to Lindbergh’s plane—“a seething, howling mass of humanity … surging towards him from every direction of the compass,” in the words of one onlooker. An eight-foot-high chain-link fence that surrounded the field was flattened, and several bicycles were crushed under the mass of charging feet. Among those in the rush were the dancer Isadora Duncan (who would die four months later in a freak accident, strangled when the long scarf she was wearing got caught in the wheel of a car) and the tennis player Jean Borotra, who with Jacques Brugnon had beaten Bill Tilden and Francis T. Hunter at Saint-Cloud that day.
For Lindbergh, this was an entirely alarming circumstance, as he was trapped and in actual danger of being pulled to pieces. The throngs hauled him from his cockpit and began to carry him off like prize booty. “I found myself lying in a prostrate position, up on top of the crowd, in the center of an ocean of heads that extended as far out into the darkness as I could see,” he reported. “It was like drowning in a human sea.” Someone yanked his leather flight helmet from his head and others, worryingly, began to pull at his clothes. Behind him, to his greater alarm, his beloved plane was being ruined by the swarms climbing over it. “I heard the crack of wood behind me when someone leaned too heavily against a fairing strip,” he wrote. “Then a second strip snapped, and a third, and there was the sound of tearing fabric.” Souvenir hunters, he realized, were going wild.
Somehow in the confusion he found himself on his feet and the crowd moving past him. Miraculously, in the poor light their focus switched to a hapless American who bore a passing resemblance to Lindbergh, and they now carried him off, wriggling and protesting vehemently. A few minutes later, officials in the airport commandant’s office were startled by the sound of breaking glass and the sight of the unfortunate victim being passed through the window to them. Wild-eyed and bedraggled, the new arrival was missing his coat, his belt, his necktie, one shoe, and about half his shirt; a good deal of the rest of his clothing hung from him in shreds. He looked rather like the survivor of a mining disaster. He told the bemused officials that his name was Harry Wheeler and that he was a furrier from the Bronx. He had come to Paris to buy rabbit pelts and had been drawn to Le Bourget by the same impulse that had attracted much of the rest of Paris. Now he just wanted to go home.
Lindbergh, meanwhile, was rescued by two French aviators who conducted him to the official reception area. There he met Myron Herrick and Herrick’s son, Parmely, and daughter-in-law, Agnes. They gave Lindbergh a few minutes to catch his breath and assured him that his plane would be made safe. It took some hours for Lindbergh and the Herrick party to make their way through the congested streets to the ambassador’s residence on the avenue d’Iéna in central Paris. There Lindbergh declined the offer of a medical examination but gratefully accepted a glass of milk and a little food, followed by a brief hot bath.
By now Lindbergh had been up for over sixty hours, but he agreed to meet with reporters who had collected outside the residence. Parmely Herrick showed them in. Though Lindbergh was clearly very tired, he chatted genially with them for several minutes. He told them that he had fought sleet and snow for a thousand miles; sometimes he flew as low as ten feet, sometimes as high as ten thousand. Then, in a pair of pajamas borrowed from Parmely, he crawled into bed. It was 4:15 a.m.
The most famous man on earth closed his eyes and slept for ten hours.
* * *
* Casts in the 1920s could be enormous. A Max Reinhardt production of 1924, The Miracle, had a cast of 700.
7
It was daytime in America. The news of Lindbergh’s arrival was known all over within minutes. Horns sounded, sirens blared, church bells rang. From end to end the nation erupted in the kind of jubilant cacophony made when wars end.
Newspapers struggled to find words adequate to Lindbergh’s superlative achievement. The New York Evening World called it “the greatest feat of a solitary man in the records of the hu
man race.” Another called it “the greatest event since the Resurrection.” According to the North American Review, the earth reverberated with “the long-waiting joy of humanity at the coming of the first citizen of the world, the first human being truly entitled to give his address as ‘The Earth,’ the first Ambassador-at-Large to Creation.” In terms of rhetoric and emotion, this was a Second Coming.
The New York Times gave Lindbergh’s flight the whole of the first four pages of the paper even though there was little more to say than that he had made it. In the first four days after the landing, American newspapers ran an estimated 250,000 stories, totaling 36 million words, on Lindbergh and his flight. Unsuspecting of just how much attention he would get, Lindbergh had subscribed to a newspaper-clipping service, with the articles to be sent to his mother, who discovered to her horror that a fleet of trucks was preparing to deliver to her several tons of newspaper articles by the end of the first week.
A kind of mania swept the nation. Proposals were put forward to exempt Lindbergh for life from paying taxes, to name a star or planet after him, to install him in the cabinet as permanent head of a new aviation department, and to make May 21 a national holiday. He was given a lifetime pass to all major league baseball games everywhere. In Minnesota a proposal was made to rename the state Lindberghia.
President Coolidge announced that June 11 would be Lindbergh Day in America—the highest tribute ever paid to a private citizen by the nation. The post office rushed out special airmail stamps—the first time a living person had been so honored.
Parks were named after him, children were named after him, streets and mountains, hospital wards, zoo animals, rivers, high schools, and bridges—all were named after him. In Chicago, plans were announced to erect a 1,328-foot-high commemorative Lindbergh beacon with a beam that could be seen three hundred miles away.