America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (26 page)

As he looked down at the lights on farmhouses on the outskirts of Peoria, Lindbergh kept turning over in his mind the crash in New York a few days earlier of a Paris-bound flight piloted by the Frenchman René Fonck, which had killed two of his three crew members. Fonck’s three-engine Sikorsky biplane, he was certain, had been doomed by its weight. As he approached Ottawa, Illinois—about ninety miles from Chicago—he began fantasizing about a sexy new biplane, the Wright-Bellanca, and its efficiency. “In a Bellanca filled with fuel tanks,” he speculated from the cockpit of his old World War I Army plane, “I could fly on all night like the moon.”

Getting up at daybreak the next morning, Lindbergh flew back to St. Louis. As soon as he returned to his boardinghouse near Lambert Field, located in farmland ten miles northwest of the business district, he thought through the steps that he would have to take to get to Paris. So he took out a pad and began making lists.

For Lindbergh, travel and list making were already intimately connected. A few years earlier, he had compiled an exhaustive set of lists documenting all the trips he had taken as a child, which he then plotted on a massive map of the United States, color-coordinated by his means of transportation. In 1913, he and his mother had boarded the
Colon
, a second-class boat, which took them to Panama. Besides the train treks to Washington and Detroit (where he visited his grandparents), he also recorded various automobile excursions, such as a forty-day slog with his mother to California—he did the driving—in the Saxon Six in 1916.

For his new venture, he came up with seven lists: “Action,” “Advantages,” “Results,” “Co-operation,” “Equipment,” “Maps,” and “Landmarks.”

The lists reveal the nature of the man, who was all about practicality and efficiency. Each of the numbered points below the headings contained just a few words. “Action” was the longest list, with eight, which included such items as “2. Propaganda” (publicity), “3. Backers,” and “8. Advertising.” Having managed the family farm, the twenty-four-year-old was already well versed in the ways of the business world. Under “Advantages,” after writing that he would promote interest in aviation in both St. Louis and the nation as a whole, he let a bit of his personal passion seep in; in point 5, the lifelong machine lover noted how the flight would “demonstrate perfection of modern equipment.” “Results” was the shortest list, with just two points: “1. Successful completion,” which, as he jotted down, meant “winning $25,000 prize to cover expenses,” and its polar opposite, “2. Complete failure,” about which he chose not to elaborate.

“That…will do for a start,” Lindbergh later wrote of his own reaction to this initial set of lists. “I’ll add to it, improve it, and clarify it as time passes.” Thus would his nervous tic propel him across the Atlantic the following May. Out of his lists of his equipment and flying procedures, which he would constantly check and recheck on this and every other flight he would ever take, would later also come the safety checklist. As Reeve Lindbergh has noted, this legacy of her “obsessively meticulous” father, which has saved the lives of countless pilots, may have been even more important than his historic flight.

A few weeks later, Lindbergh called his first potential backer, Earl A. Thompson, a wealthy St. Louis insurance executive, to whom he had given flying lessons. Offered the choice between a meeting at his office or at his home at 1 Hortense Place, Lindbergh opted for the latter. But after a maid escorted him into the living room, Lindbergh had second thoughts. As he later described the scene, “I don’t seem to fit into a city parlor. It would be easier to talk on the flying field.”

Away from his workplace, which to him felt homier than the magnate’s mansion, Lindbergh lost his self-confidence. Ticking off the items on his “Advantages” list, he mentioned to Thompson that a flight to Paris “would show people what airplanes can do.” While the evening was not a disaster—Thompson remained interested—Lindbergh was unable to pry any cash from him.

But Lindbergh had better luck a few days later with Albert Lambert, the former Olympic golfer and aviation aficionado—Orville Wright had taught him to fly—whom he visited at his office rather than at his Hortense Place home (which was located next door to Thompson’s). Lambert, whose day job was running his family’s pharmaceutical company, promised one thousand dollars.
“I feel that my New York–to–Paris flight is emerging from the stage of dreams,
Lindbergh thought as he drove back to the field in his secondhand Ford. "
I have an organization under way.

Like other obsessives, Lindbergh was clueless about how to handle intimate relationships, but he did develop a knack for networking with the powerful. This lover of propriety also learned how to dress for success. That fall, he shelled out $100 to buy a “traveling outfit,” which consisted of seven sartorial items including a silk scarf and felt hat for which, Lindbergh conceded, he “didn’t have the slightest use.” But the right impression, he realized, “may be as essential for my Paris flight as a plane.” He soon assembled a team of investors that also featured Bill Robertson, his boss; Harry Knight, a stockbroker and the president of the St. Louis Flying Club; and Harold Bixby, a bigwig at the State National Bank and the president of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce. These men all believed in Lindbergh and his lofty aspirations for aviation. Promising that they would handle the finances, they told him to worry only about the technical details of the flight. The man who was used to going it alone was deeply moved. “I went to them hoping only for financial aid,” he later wrote, “and…I…found real partners in the venture.”

With the dollars secured, Lindbergh tried to acquire the Wright-Bellanca that he had long lusted after. Over the next few months, dressed in his elegant new togs, he made three trips to Manhattan to visit with the plane’s Italian-born designer, Giuseppe Bellanca. While Lindbergh was quoted a reasonable price—$15,000—Bellanca’s business partner insisted on “managing the flight to Paris” and selecting the two-man crew. These conditions were deal breakers. Since the Wright-Bellanca was the only off-the-shelf product that could do the trick, Lindbergh was forced to put his own engineering skills to the test. This setback, he soon realized, turned out to have a silver lining. “Every part of [the new plane],” he noted, “can be designed for a single purpose.… I can inspect each detail before it’s covered with fabric.” In the end, he would control everything to do with
The Spirit of St. Louis
. Lindbergh was not only its pilot, but also its father; the first of his many children would be a machine. And like Pygmalion, he would fall in love with his own creation.

On Tuesday, February 22, 1927, racing against the clock—several other pilots were also finalizing plans to make the first transoceanic flight—Lindbergh boarded a train to San Diego to meet the management team of Ryan Airlines. Soon after his arrival, Lindbergh and Donald Hall, Ryan’s chief engineer, squirreled themselves away in the company’s huge drafting room. As Lindbergh rattled off the requirements for his dream machine, Hall sketched. When asked where to put the cockpits for the pilot and his navigator, Lindbergh responded, “I’ve thought about it a great deal.… I’d rather have extra gasoline than an extra man.” Though surprised, Hall immediately understood that this specification would mean a shorter fuselage. Ryan’s CEO then also got on board, and a deal was consummated. For just $10,580, Lindbergh could expect his plane within two months.

Staying in San Diego, Lindbergh supervised Hall’s every move. He devised a list of three principles to guide the plane’s construction—“efficiency in flight,” “protection in a crack-up,” and “pilot comfort.” He told Hall, “I don’t see why cockpit in the rear doesn’t cover all three.” The conscientious Hall, who would put in eighty-hour weeks (and once worked thirty-six hours straight), would come to depend on Lindbergh’s judgment. The pilot spent part of every day at the Ryan plant, looking over Hall’s shoulder; Lindbergh was also busy compiling and checking the lists in his little black notebook in which he kept track of the maps, weather information—particularly wind currents—and landmarks that he would need to study. In the third week of April, with his plane nearly completed, he purchased the twelve items on his emergency equipment list, including his Armbrust cup, which could convert his breath into drinking water, an air raft, and five cans of Army emergency rations (chocolatelike bars).

Lindbergh then churned out a new series of to-do lists for each of the four cities his plane was to be in—San Diego, St. Louis, New York, and Paris. With his anxiety mounting, these lists had a robotic quality; they referred to items that he was unlikely to forget. Under “N.Y. Take-Off,” he mentioned the need to notify the papers and cable St. Louis and San Diego. “Paris Arrival” also covered just the basics plus a reminder to cable his mother. He had no list for “Paris Take-Off.” “I…concentrated so intensely on the preparation and execution of the flight,” he later wrote, “that I had thought little about what I would do after landing.”

On May 20, 1927, at 7:52 a.m.,
The Spirit of St. Louis
took off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island. Exactly thirty-three hours, thirty minutes, and twenty-nine and eight-tenths seconds later, Lindbergh landed in Le Bourget Airport in Paris. The pilot was stunned when nearly 150,000 “cheering French,” as the
New York Times
noted the next day in its banner headline, greeted him and began carrying him off the field. Amid the frenzy, Lindbergh kept worrying about the welfare of his beloved traveling companion. “Are there any mechanics here?” he shouted to no avail. “I was afraid,” he later wrote, “that
The Spirit of St. Louis
might be seriously injured.” French officials whisked Lindbergh away to a big hangar, where the American ambassador to France, Myron T. Herrick, congratulated him. Herrick, who would laud Lindbergh in the foreword to
We
as “an example of American idealism, character and conduct,” offered the pilot shelter at his elegant residence at no. 2, Avenue d’Iena. Though Lindbergh was exhausted—he also had not slept his last night in New York—he insisted on seeing
The Spirit of St. Louis
before turning in. After a careful inspection, he discovered “that a few hours of work would make my plane air-worthy again.” A relieved Lindbergh then stepped into the Renault, which took him to the ambassador’s mansion by the Seine. After slipping into borrowed pajamas in the blue-and-gold guest bedroom, he provided laconic answers to the questions posed by reporters while sipping milk and munching on a roll. At last, at 4:15 a.m., he fell into the arms of Morpheus.

When Lindbergh awoke a little after noon on Sunday, May 22, 1927, he was already a luminary known throughout the world. The front page of newspapers in countless countries carried news of little else. That afternoon, he stepped out onto the balcony to wave to those who had been gathering below for hours, chanting, “Vive Lindbergh! Vive l’Amérique!” His privacy was a thing of the past. “If I had gone around the block,” he later noted, “I would have been leading a parade.” The hero was in constant demand. Decked out in a new tuxedo made by a Paris tailor, he shuttled from one ceremonial function to the next, collecting awards and gifts. On May 23, the French president, Gaston Doum
ergue
, gave him the Cross of the Legion of Honor—the nation’s highest civilian honor. But despite all the plaudits, separation anxiety continued to gnaw at him. “I did not have time,” Lindbergh later lamented, “to be with my
Spirit of St. Louis
.” On Saturday, May 28, he could finally escape from the social whirl by going back to his favorite refuge—his plane’s cockpit. Lindbergh circled over Paris before heading off to Belgium and England for visits with royalty. And then he stepped aboard the USS
Memphis
, which President Calvin Coolidge had assigned to haul the aviator and his plane back to Washington, D.C. While Lindbergh preferred to fly—he felt uncomfortable about “bind[ing] my silver wings into a box”—he chose not to disobey the president’s directives.

The nonstop feting of the man and his machine would continue for nearly a year. Upon disembarking in the nation’s capital on June 11, Lindbergh was reunited with his mother in the backseat of President Coolidge’s touring car; with a quarter of a million people looking on, the president promoted him to colonel of the United States Reserve Corps. Two days later, on “Lindbergh Day,” the financial markets were closed and four million New Yorkers lined the streets of downtown Manhattan for a ticker-tape parade. In July, Lindbergh took
The Spirit of St. Louis
on a victory tour to all forty-eight states. Over the next three months, he would ride in 1,300 miles of motorcades and be glimpsed by one-quarter of America’s 120 million citizens. At the end of 1927,
Time
’s first “Man of the Year” flew his alter ego to a half dozen countries in Central and South America. On April 30, 1928, after completing a final four-and-a-half-hour flight from Lambert Airport, Lindbergh officially handed over
The Spirit of St. Louis
to the Smithsonian Institution, where it has safely remained ever since.

While Lindbergh smiled at the adoring crowds, inwardly he seethed. Like Kinsey, he hated engaging in small talk with his fans, or with just about anyone else. Fame did not make connecting any easier or more enjoyable. A quarter century later, when the author John P. Marquand—Lindbergh had gotten to know the bestselling novelist because Anne was a close friend of his wife, Adelaide—suggested that he go on a tour to promote his autobiography, Lindbergh responded that he could not do it. “I thoroughly dislike such things,” he wrote, “and feel they are mostly a waste of time and life. I fulfilled a lifetime’s obligations along these lines in the year or two following my flight to Paris.… I have the hope of never going to a big dinner party again.” The Lone Eagle would always be a loner. Even Marquand, whose home Lindbergh visited on numerous occasions, found him “pretty tough to converse with as he does not understand the light approach to anything.”

During their ten-minute chat at York House in late May 1927, the Prince of Wales—later King Edward VIII—asked Lindbergh about his plans for the future. “Keep on flying” was his response.