One Summer: America, 1927 Read online

  That was the last anyone heard of him or Levine for many hours, but on the morning of June 6, after nearly two days in the air, they came down in a field somewhere in northeastern Germany. Remarkably, neither Chamberlin nor Levine had thought to pack any maps of Europe, so they had no clear idea where they were. They had been in the air for nearly forty-three hours and had flown 3,905 miles, breaking both Lindbergh’s distance and duration records by considerable margins. The first person to greet them was a farmer’s wife, who was furious at the damage their plane had done to her cereal crop. Among others to turn up was—by rather extraordinary good luck—an airplane mechanic who was home visiting his mother. He spoke good English and informed them that they were at Mansfeld, near Eisleben, 110 miles from Berlin and heading the wrong way. The mechanic knew how to order a delivery of aviation fuel—something that would have been entirely beyond them otherwise—but when the tanker arrived its nozzle proved too big for the plane, so fuel had to be transferred laboriously via a long-spouted tea kettle borrowed from the farmer’s wife, who had presumably calmed down a little.

  When at last the plane was refueled, and the adventurers were pointed in the right direction, they took off again. Soon, however, they were lost once more. Chamberlin and Levine spent the morning flying around blindly and bickering over where they were before running out of fuel a second time and making another forced landing. This time they discovered that they had gone some distance past Berlin and were in a small town called Cottbus, almost at the Polish border.*

  Too tired to continue, they retired to Cottbus’s best (and only) hotel and fell into bed. When they awoke, they found that they were national heroes in Germany and that a fleet of military planes had arrived to conduct them to the capital. The following morning, under a guiding escort, the two men flew the last leg to Tempelhof airfield in Berlin. More than 150,000 people were waiting to greet them. An additional 20,000, misled by rumor, turned up at Warsaw Airport and were sent away disappointed.

  Germany gave the two fliers a reception as jubilant and welcoming as Lindbergh’s had been in Paris. No humans would attract larger and more enthusiastic crowds in Germany until the rise of Adolf Hitler. America grew nearly as excited as when Lindbergh had landed. For three days, the Times in New York gave the two heroes its maximum headline—three decks across eight columns—and covered their every thought and movement in exhaustive detail. The general public was excited, too. When Levine and Chamberlin’s wives traveled to Hoboken Pier to catch a ship to Germany, six thousand people turned up to see them off—at one o’clock in the morning.

  Soon, however, the celebrations took on a slightly strained air. President Coolidge sent congratulations from America—but only to Chamberlin. The president’s pointed snub was widely interpreted as anti-Semitic. The Jewish newspaper The Day observed from Manhattan: “Two men left New York; two men risked their lives; two men have shown heroism and created a record even greater than Lindbergh’s. Two men left; two men arrived, Americans both. But the President of the United States congratulates only one, and by strange coincidence the one whom the President has not found worthy of being mentioned by name is named Levine.”

  Lindbergh, in his daily dispatches to the New York Times from aboard the Memphis, also praised Chamberlin generously without once mentioning Levine, though this almost certainly was more out of bitterness at the way Levine had treated him over the Bellanca deal than because of any active anti-Jewish sentiment.

  The Germans, too, seemed a little uncomfortable with Levine. A restaurant in Berlin started offering roast beef à la Chamberlin with Cottbus potatoes, and a brewery sought permission to issue a Chamberlin beer, but again without mention of Levine.

  Levine for his part did almost nothing to ingratiate himself to the people of Germany. He visited no hospitals, called on no widows, offered no praise to German aviators. He didn’t even have anything good to say about Lindbergh, attributing his success to favorable weather rather than skillful flying. “Lindbergh was lucky and we were not,” Levine told reporters. “If we had one-tenth of Lindbergh’s luck, we would have done much better.” To the acute embarrassment of the German and American authorities alike, a German businessman, Dr. Julius Puppe, whom Levine had cheated out of $5,000 in a deal in America, now came forward with a writ and tried to have the Columbia seized. Chamberlin was amiable but had nothing to say, and gave the impression of having not a thought in his head when not in the air, which was perhaps not far from the actuality.

  The world quickly realized that it didn’t particularly like Charles Levine and was never going to get anything interesting out of Clarence Chamberlin, so its attention turned elsewhere.

  Lindbergh, though far away at sea and steaming home slowly, managed to raise a frisson of excitement with the news that he had come close to being swept overboard from the Memphis three days out from Cherbourg. The headline in the New York Times read:

  LINDBERGH IN PERIL

  AS WAVE TRAPS HIM

  ON CRUISER’S BOW

  The world’s most beloved hero, it turned out, had gone for a stroll after dinner in rough seas and was standing in the bow when a sudden succession of big waves crashed over the deck from the side, isolating him from the rest of the ship. Lindbergh had to hold tight to a lifeline to keep from being knocked off his feet and possibly swept overboard. B. F. Mahoney, the owner of Ryan Airlines, was also present, but safely on the other side of the crashing waves. Lindbergh waited ten minutes or so for the waves to ease, then strode smartly back to safety. “It was an exciting experience,” Lindbergh related afterward. It was not, however, a good omen for any nervous crew, of whom there were almost certainly many. This USS Memphis was a recent replacement for an earlier USS Memphis, which was sunk by a mysterious rogue wave in the Caribbean in 1916, with the loss of some forty lives. It would not have escaped many of the sailors that Memphis was something of a cursed name.

  With Lindbergh temporarily unavailable, what America needed was some kind of sublimely pointless distraction, and a man named Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly stood ready to provide it. At eleven in the morning on June 7, Kelly clambered to the top of a fifty-foot flagpole on the roof of the St. Francis Hotel in Newark, New Jersey, and sat there. That was all he did, for days on end, but people were enchanted and streamed to Newark to watch.

  Kelly had grown up in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan’s toughest district, in just about the grimmest circumstances possible. Seven months before he was born, his father, a rigger on construction sites, had plunged to his death when an assistant accidentally pulled the wrong lever on a derrick he was working on. Kelly’s mother, heartbroken and bereft of a breadwinner, then died in childbirth. Kelly was adopted by the assistant and thus raised by the man who had accidentally but carelessly killed his own father. Kelly ran off to sea at thirteen and spent most of the next fifteen years as a sailor. He got his nickname, according to Time magazine, by surviving the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, but that seems to have been just a bit of inventive whimsy by a Time reporter. In fact, the name came because he briefly tried to make a career as a boxer under the name Sailor Kelly, but he was beaten so often—he lost eleven bouts in a row—that he became known as the Shipwrecked Sailor. According to Kelly himself, he survived five other shipwrecks, two airplane crashes, three car crashes, and a train wreck, all without a scratch, during a busy career as a steeplejack, airplane stunt performer, and “human fly” (which is to say, someone who climbs buildings for publicity purposes) before taking up flagpole sitting in 1924. By 1927, he had pretty much made the business his own.

  Kelly would reside for days or weeks on a tiny perch—a padded disk about the size of the seat on a bar stool—attached to a flagpole on the top of a tall building. The most devoted admirers paid 25 cents to go onto the hotel rooftop, where they could see Kelly at comparatively close range and even engage him in conversation. The rest crowded the streets below, causing traffic jams and even trampling flower beds and breaking down fences through their force
of numbers. Food, shaving implements, cigarettes, and other vital items were conveyed to Kelly by rope. To sleep without tumbling off, he would lock his ankles around the pole and jam his thumbs into two small holes drilled into the side of the seat. Normally he dozed for no more than about twenty minutes so that he didn’t fall into a deep and forgetful slumber. Periodically, to please the crowds and relieve stiffening muscles, he would stand up on his precarious platform—an action that took considerable agility and not a little courage, especially if the wind was blowing. During the whole of his time aloft, he didn’t leave the perch. No record appears to indicate how he dealt with bodily functions. For two days beforehand and throughout the sitting he took no solid food—just milk, broth, and coffee—which may partly answer the obvious question. He smoked four packs of cigarettes a day. Otherwise he just sat. He billed himself as “The Luckiest Fool Alive.”

  Newark proved to be more or less the summit of Shipwreck Kelly’s brief career. He sat on many more flagpoles—once for up to forty-nine days—through blizzards, lightning storms, and other meteorological perils, but gradually the world lost interest in him and flagpole work dried up. Kelly dropped from sight and didn’t appear again until August 1941, when he was briefly jailed for drunken driving in Connecticut. He died of a heart attack on a New York street in 1952, by which time he was living in poverty. At the time of his death, he was carrying a scrapbook of newspaper clippings of his old exploits. His age was given variously as fifty-nine to sixty-seven years old.

  Even now in 1927 in Newark, newspaper interest in Kelly dwindled after the first few days, since there was never anything to report other than that he was still up there. By the time he came down and kissed his bride of six months, exactly twelve days and twelve hours after ascending, the public was little moved and the press barely noticed.

  Besides, a much, much bigger story had captured everyone’s attention. Charles Lindbergh was home.

  * * *

  * Coincidentally, just down the road from Kamenz, hometown of Bruno Hauptmann, the kidnapper of Lindbergh’s baby in 1932.

  11

  The more famous her son became, the more evident it grew that Evangeline Lodge Lindbergh was a little odd. Invited east for Charles’s homecoming, she ignored an invitation to stay with President and Mrs. Coolidge, and instead quietly checked in to a Baltimore hotel.

  Since White House officials had no idea what had become of Mrs. Lindbergh, they were naturally alarmed. It would hardly do to lose the mother of the nation’s greatest hero on the eve of his return. Luckily, a newspaper article disclosed her whereabouts and officials were able to send a car to bring her, however reluctantly, back to Washington.

  The Coolidges were not living in the White House at this time. They had been moved out in March—the president, it was said, all but wriggling in indignation—so that urgent repairs could be made to the roof and third floor. They resided instead in what was being called the “temporary White House,” a mansion at 15 Dupont Circle lent to them by one Cissy Patterson, a member of the Chicago Tribune–New York Daily News newspaper clan.

  One other house guest was present when Mrs. Lindbergh arrived—“a gnomelike little man of fifty-four,” the increasingly ubiquitous Dwight Morrow. Mrs. Lindbergh seemed to enjoy and relax in Morrow’s company—he was famously gracious—which was just as well because in a little under two years they would be bound by the marriage of her son to his daughter.

  Morrow had become almost absurdly rich as a banker with J. P. Morgan & Co. The Morrow family had a house with thirty-two servants in Englewood, New Jersey, and that was mostly for weekends. During the week they lived in a grand apartment in Manhattan. Stories of Morrow’s absent-mindedness were legion and reported with relish in such places as The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section. The most oft-repeated Morrow story concerned the time he climbed into his bath while still dressed. On another occasion, he was reported to have used a visitor’s bald head to knock the ashes from his pipe. Once a friend encountered Morrow at Grand Central Station looking perplexed and feeling helplessly in his pockets. “Lost your ticket?” asked the friend. “No, worse than that,” Morrow replied disconsolately. “I can’t remember where I was going.”

  His celebrated inability to keep himself satisfactorily dressed led Morgan Bank to post an attendant in the men’s room whose exclusive role was to make sure Morrow always returned to the world in a presentable state. In fact, in all these instances Morrow was not so much absent-minded as incapacitated by drink. He was, it appears, a hopeless souse. Yet his mind was so sharp that even the most copious infusions of alcohol couldn’t truly dull it. He was for years one of J. P. Morgan & Co.’s most trusted senior partners. Both Yale and the University of Chicago wanted him for their president.

  Morrow and Coolidge had been friends since they were classmates at Amherst. Morrow seems to have been one of the few people of that era who thought that Calvin Coolidge had the makings of greatness. In 1920, he formed a committee to promote Coolidge, who was then governor of Massachusetts, for president. In the event, the Republican Party chose the more charismatic Warren G. Harding, but the selection of Coolidge as vice president was in large part thanks to Morrow’s efforts behind the scenes. Coolidge proved remarkably ungrateful. Three years later, when Harding died and Coolidge succeeded him, it was widely expected that Morrow would be appointed to the cabinet as secretary of state or the treasury. But no call came. Not until 1925 did Coolidge give Morrow any post at all—and that was a slightly demeaning one as head of the commission appointed to bring some order and discipline to America’s chaotic aviation business.

  Now he was being invited to become ambassador to Mexico—another dubious proposition since Mexico was in the throes of revolution and in a strongly anti-American frame of mind. Bandits roamed the country, often killing foreigners. Morrow accepted anyway.

  The morning of June 11—Charles Lindbergh Day—dawned hot and clear. As the USS Memphis steamed toward its berth at the Washington Navy Yard, it was accompanied by four naval destroyers, eighty-eight airplanes, two giant dirigibles (one of them the Los Angeles, whose last official duty had been to look for Nungesser and Coli on the lonely north Atlantic), and fleets of private boats whose sheer numbers and slapdash maneuverings added an element of mayhem and near misses to the proceedings. Onshore a festive atmosphere reigned, with bands playing merry airs and a large crowd waiting in happy expectation. Mrs. Lindbergh was present, too, but was unaccompanied by the president, to the surprise of many. In fact, Calvin Coolidge was not always terribly comfortable in a nautical setting. Recently he had been sent to review the American fleet from the bridge of the presidential yacht, the Mayflower, at nearby Hampton Roads, but he got seasick even though the ship wasn’t moving and refused to wear the naval uniform provided—a breach of protocol and an insult to the navy. He went below after just twenty minutes and completed his review from a reclining position while looking bleakly out a porthole. For Lindbergh’s arrival he decided to wait in the city.

  Mrs. Lindbergh was piped aboard and met Charles privately in the captain’s quarters. Then the two of them stepped out onto the deck. Charles, dressed in a blue suit, looked rested and refreshed after a week at sea. The crowd issued an adoring roar at Lindbergh’s appearance and he was given a twenty-one-gun salute of cannon fire—a tribute normally accorded to heads of state. Across the city, factory whistles sounded and church bells rang.

  Through the happy din a radio broadcaster named Graham McNamee kept up a steady patter. McNamee was himself making history. His broadcast was being carried by fifty stations across the nation by the new National Broadcasting Company (NBC), America’s (and indeed the world’s) first radio network. Twelve thousand miles of AT&T telephone cables were pressed into service to give America its first coast-to-coast broadcast. It was believed that virtually every radio set in the nation was tuned in. No person in history had spoken to so many people at one time as Graham McNamee did now.

  McNamee’s p
osition as America’s most trusted voice was entirely an accident. A Minnesotan like Lindbergh, he had moved to New York as a young man to pursue a career as a singer in both light and serious opera. In 1923, while walking along lower Broadway, he passed the offices of radio station WEAF. Knowing that radio stations sometimes aired recitals, he asked if there was any chance of an audition. The station manager, Samuel L. Ross, thought McNamee had the perfect voice for radio—warm and clear—so he hired him on the spot to introduce programs, read news bulletins, and occasionally sing. That autumn WEAF had the rights to broadcast the World Series between the Yankees and Giants—the first time the series had been broadcast to a mass audience. W. O. McGeehan of the Tribune was employed to provide play-by-play, and McNamee was sent along to assist him. McGeehan had no talent for broadcasting. He spoke in a flat tone and made no effort to fill the dead space between plays. During the fourth inning of the third game, he told McNamee he didn’t want to do it anymore and left. McNamee had no choice but to take over, which was something of a challenge since he knew very little about professional baseball.