Chasing Icarus (23 page)

Aviation is vexation,

Postponement is as bad;

They call me rash, but I get the cash

As fast as I can add.

But Grahame-White was merely flying to his strengths. His Farman biplane was reliable but slow, ill equipped to challenge for any speed prizes or altitude contests. The Blériot racer that he’d ordered from France had yet to arrive, so all Grahame-White could do was enter the hourly distance events and use his exceptional physical stamina to good effect.
*
All the laps he clocked had another purpose, of course, one that hadn’t occurred to the public or the press; that was to familiarize himself with every nuance of the course, so that on the day of the International Aviation Cup race he would know when best to throttle, when to bank, where the wind swirled, and, most crucially, how best to take dead man’s turn. As for the charge of his being a harpy, that was nonsense. So far at Belmont Park he’d earned $1,700 in prize money, more than anyone else, but not by much. Arch Hoxsey had $1,575 and John Moisant had $1,300. As for the accusation of his being an air chauffeur, Grahame-White had taken up only one passenger at Belmont Park, and that was Eleonora Sears. It wasn’t as if he’d instructed spectators to form an orderly queue outside his hangar.

But Grahame-White guessed the real reason for the hostility, and it had nothing to do with aviation. The evidence was right there in front of him, in the photographs in the
World
and the
New York Herald
, which depicted him at the controls of his grounded biplane, while snuggled up behind was a laughing Eleonora Sears, wearing very much the look of a young woman in love. Inside the papers were sly references to the pair’s having lunched together at the Turf and Field Club. How romantic, was the intimation, were it not that Grahame-White was engaged to Pauline Chase. What sort of man would treat his fiancée with such contempt? Not a gentleman.

Now, as Grahame-White arrived at Belmont Park, he bridled with indignation at his treatment. Jumping down from the carriage, he glowered at the reporters and handed the driver a tip. The watching reporter from the
New York Sun
noticed that the “person on the box did not lose himself in transports of enthusiasm” at the size of Grahame-White’s largesse.

Eleonora Sears arrived not long after her alleged beau with her brother, Frederick, who was fresh off the midnight express from Boston. He had been dispatched by his parents with implicit instructions to prevent his sister from riding the sky with Grahame-White, and a telegram had also been sent to Miss Sears. Was it because they feared for their daughter’s safety, or her reputation? Eleonora didn’t know, but she told the reporters at the front gate of Belmont Park that she was “disgusted” at the order. “I love it,” she said of flying. “I’m crazy about it and I came down here to learn to fly.”

Sears and her brother showed their passes to the Pinkerton security men and headed toward hangar row. She had braided her long brown hair before leaving the family apartment, but she had to hold on tight to her sailor’s hat as the wind blew hard from the northwest.

Quite a throng had already formed in and around the aviators’ hangars, and it continued to swell throughout the morning. Katharine Wright appeared, having refused to say anything to the press about her brothers’ latest machine—reticence was obviously a family trait, said the reporters, laughing, after she’d gone—and the wives of Glenn Curtiss, Eugene Ely, and James Mars arrived laden with picnic hampers for a hangar lunch. Clifford Harmon escorted his wife through the gate, expressing his concern for Messrs Hawley and Post, and confirming he had indeed offered a reward of $1,000 for news of their fate.

The McKenzie sisters, Ethel and Grace, wafted through the entrance, with Grace blushing as she accepted the congratulations of everyone on her engagement to Jacques de Lesseps. Colonel John Jacob Astor emerged from his limousine with his eighteen-year-old son, Vincent, and Mrs. William H. Force and her two daughters, Katharine and seventeen-year-old Madeline, the latter trying her darnedest to look like an adult in a brown walking costume and a black felt hat topped with coque plume. Astor’s look of contentment was similar to Grace McKenzie’s, thought the reporters. Was he simply enjoying his newfound freedom after his recent divorce, or did it have more to do with the presence of Madeline Force, the teenage girl nearly thirty years his junior who was rumored to be his companion?
*
Then the reporters began to nudge each other and point toward an automobile that had just arrived. A dainty black boot emerged, then a small but perfectly formed leg . . . and out stepped Pauline Chase, looking like a million dollars in a navy blue suit with mink collar and cuffs. This should be interesting, the reporters said with a wink. The reporter from the
World
trailed Chase toward hangar row, willing Eleonora Sears to appear. And suddenly he saw her, just at the moment Chase did. “Hardly had the two conspicuous young women spied each other,” he wrote, “than they promptly proceeded to pass in opposite directions without recognizing. To the spectators standing near, the incident was immediately understood.”

Everyone who visited hangar row was asked to make a contribution to the reward on offer to find Alan Hawley and Augustus Post (on top of the $1,000 offered by Clifford Harmon). Aviators, their friends, and their families opened their wallets, and $2,000 was collected in little more than an hour. Glenn Curtiss and his team of fliers pledged $1,000 among them, Charles Hamilton and Ralph Johnstone threw in $100 apiece, and even Grahame-White was rumored to have dipped into his deep pockets for something. The Wright brothers were generous, too, remembering well the help Augustus Post had given them during their aeroplane trials at Fort Myer two years earlier.

The benevolence seemed to be infectious at Belmont Park this day, penetrating even the aloof exterior of Monsieur Pierre Gasnier, representative of the Aero Club of France. He, Allan Ryan, and Cortlandt Bishop had spent the greater part of the morning touring the course and discussing the French objections. Gasnier suggested that certain trees be cut down, that depressions be filled, and that half a dozen telegraph poles be removed. He laughed off Le Blanc’s suggestion to demolish a row of houses; that was just Alfred’s inimitable sense of mischief. After the trio had returned to the club house Gasnier announced with a smile that, provided the changes were made before Saturday’s race, “there is no further cause for controversy.”

At one thirty P.M. a member of the Signal Corps knelt beside a hole in the ground at the back of the scoreboard and lit the fuse of a signal bomb. As its yellow smoke scooted across the course, the hangar doors remained firmly shut: after Sunday’s debacle, no one would risk taking off in such a wind. The
Evening Sun
reporter noted that the inactivity on hangar row “brought disappointment to the calamity howlers who looked . . . for tumbles if the airmen should decide to risk their necks.” The crowd had come expecting to see a battle royal—eight Americans in four types of planes flying twenty laps to decide the three places in the Stars and Stripes’ team for Saturday’s grand race. The fans had talked of nothing else on the trains out from New York (except whether Hawley and Post had been eaten by wolves or bears, or frozen to death, or perhaps starved), and they wanted action, but the committee had no intention of endangering America’s top fliers three days before the biggest competition in international aviation. Cortlandt Bishop and Allan Ryan called a meeting of the eight competitors, and the elimination race was postponed to Thursday, with the aviators free to begin the twenty-lap course anytime between nine A.M. and five thirty P.M.

The crowd was becoming restless as the hands of the clock on the scoreboard neared four. The wind had eased since Peter Prunty’s announcement two hours earlier that the International Aviation Cup elimination race had been postponed to Thursday, and the spectators wanted some action. Suddenly, over on hangar row “they saw the long shape of Hubert Latham’s Antoinette being coaxed out of its lair by the diligent hostlers.”

With Latham in the air, others followed, and soon a swarm of airplanes were in the sky: Emile Aubrun in his Blériot, then Count de Lesseps, René Simon, and Roland Garros. Out came the Americans, headed by Armstrong Drexel, with Arch Hoxsey and Ralph Johnstone in close attendance, and the newest of the Wright fliers, Phil Parmalee, also up. Good grief, exclaimed the reporter from the
New York Sun
, was that Grahame-White? It was, and he “was spurning his old stone sled of a Farman . . . [and] cutting aerial didoes in a Blériot.”

Latham, Aubrun, and Drexel headed east, toward the captive balloon over Hempstead Plains, racing each other the twenty miles there and back in the cross-country event. Hoxsey and Johnstone laid on a few of their favorite aerial cowboy stunts before the gallery, and Parmalee and Brookins circled the course in the hourly distance event.

Brookins was flying one of the Wrights’ new machines; it wasn’t the Baby Grand, but it was a similar design and Orville had given him instructions to put the wind up Grahame-White. Show him what it can do, Orville told Brookins. Grahame-White had swapped his Farman for his Blériot as a defiant response to his knockers, but it was his old fifty-horse power Blériot and not the hundred-horse power racer that was scheduled to arrive in New York in twenty-four hours. Orville Wright didn’t care. He kept a stopwatch on the pair for several laps, jotting down their times in a note pad. The reporter from the
New York Sun
watched as Brookins gained on Grahame-White until they were virtually nose to tail. The American drew level, then eased ahead, to the evident delight of his compatriots. In the grandstand a man in a leather coat leaped to his feet and screamed, “There goes the winner of the big race!” Orville Wright shared the man’s confidence. He snapped shut his stopwatch and turned triumphantly to the correspondent of the
New York Herald
standing alongside him. “Seven seconds better in each lap than Grahame-White in his Blériot,” Orville said with just the faintest of smiles.

In all the excitement caused by Brookins’s humiliation of Grahame-White—and the return of the three machines in the cross-country race—many people had failed to spot Arch Hoxsey and Ralph John-stone climbing off southeast into the slate-colored sky. But now, nearly an hour later, neither man had reappeared out of the night sky. Hundreds of spectators loyally waited for their return, and though the correspondent from the
New York Sun
could no longer see those people around him, he heard how they “raised their voices in excited arguments as one assured his neighbor that he could see the stars blotted out where the airplanes were coursing aloft in the blackness.”

At the entrance to one of their hangars Wilbur and Orville Wright were becoming increasingly concerned. “Where are they?” fretted Wilbur, looking to the heavens. “Where are they?” The brothers ordered their mechanics to pour the contents of two five-gallon drums of gasoline onto the grass, and with a great whoosh the markers were ignited. A few minutes later people heard the “whir and thudding of propellers,” then someone gave a yell “and a black form was seen flitting across a star lighted space.” Then a second shape became discernible, and within sixty seconds both airplanes were safely back on the ground. Their barographs when compared showed that Hoxsey had climbed to 6,183 feet, three hundred feet higher than his friend. Not that Johnstone cared, for it took several minutes to pry his gloves from his frozen fingers, and “it was only after an hour of brisk rubbing with alcohol that he was able to dress in his street clothes and leave the tent.”

The many aviation parties in Manhattan were already in full swing by the time Ralph Johnstone got back to the Hotel Manhattan and the warming embrace of his wife and son. Armstrong Drexel and Claude Grahame-White were guests of Jay Gould and his wife at their Fifth Avenue mansion, and Count de Lesseps was the host of a sumptuous banquet at the St. Regis Hotel for the French aviators. Red roses adorned each table—a celebration of his love for Grace McKenzie. Colonel John Jacob Astor had commandeered another of the St. Regis’s private dining rooms, and he and his guests—including members of the Guinness family—were discussing the day’s events at Belmont Park. The dining room of the Hotel Astor had been decorated to reflect New York’s modish mania for all things aeronautical, with souvenir pennants from Belmont Park, model balloons and biplanes, and even airplane-shaped ices for dessert.

Amid the festivities only a spoilsport would have drawn attention to the evening papers and the news that another aviator—the third in as many days—had been killed.
*
The unfortunate man, Fernard Blanchard, had dropped to his death from one hundred feet during a Paris air show.

*
Was his stamina innate or induced? Throughout his flying career, Grahame-White was a regular user of Phosferine, an opiate marketed as a liquid “tonic.” Along with stars of cricket and soccer, Grahame-White appeared in a Phosferine advertising campaign in 1910, saying that it was “most effective in preventing and overcoming the effects of nerve strain and exposure. Phosferine braces and tones the system until one is capable of exceptional endurance.” Phosferine was later banned in the UK.

*
Astor married Madeline in September 1911, and to escape the disapproval of New York society they fled to Europe on tour. In April 1912 they returned, on board the
Titanic.
The pregnant Madeline survived, but her husband went down with the ship.

*
A German called Monte had been killed on a Wright biplane during a meet in Germany on Tuesday.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

There’s Always a Chimney for a Man

to Hang On To

Thursday, October 27, 1910

Charles Heitman had been packing a few essentials into his valise on Wednesday afternoon when he heard a knock on the front door of his Manhattan home. He presumed it was his chauffeur, come to drive him to Grand Central Station so he could take a train to Canada to help in the search for his missing friends. But it wasn’t his chauffeur, it was a messenger boy, and he handed the maid who answered the door a telegram for her master. When Heitman opened the message, he cried out in astonishment.

LANDED PERIBONKA RIVER. LAKE CHILAGOMA, NINETEENTH. ALL WELL. HAWLEY.

Within minutes Heitman’s chauffeur had arrived, but instead of driving his master to the station, he was ordered to deposit him at the headquarters of the Aero Club of America in the Engineering Society’s Building at 29 West Thirty-ninth Street. Once there Heitman “began sending messages to all points where searchers were busy, advising them of the safety of the men they sought.”

Edward Stratton of the Aero Club received the news in Ottawa, where he had established a control room to liaise between the club’s New York HQ and Lewis Spindler, who was in the isolated Ontarian town of Chapleau, 350 miles northwest of Toronto. Stratton gave a joyful shout, then rushed over to the “huge map of Ontario and Quebec” in his office on which were plotted the routes of the other nine balloons. The
Düsseldorf
II
was represented by a circled 9 on the map; it lay east of Kiskisink, and south of Lake St. John. Stratton checked the telegram in his hand. He hadn’t been mistaken, the
America II
had landed north of the lake. He banged the map in delight and hollered, “He wins the cup!”

William Hawley had been so overwrought when Heitman broke the news over the telephone, all he could muster in response was “My God.” A few minutes later, however, his own telegram arrived, and he stared in mute wonder at the piece of paper that proved his brother’s survival. Later, speaking from the doorstep of the apartment he shared with Alan, William described how his brother had conditioned himself prior to the contest. “For two weeks before leaving for St. Louis he planned his days with reference to the strain that would be placed upon him during the race,” William said. “He retired early, almost at sundown, and gave himself time for all of the sleep which nature would accept. He was under a rather nervous tension for a few days preceding the race, but physically was in superb condition.”

“Overjoyed” was the reaction of Samuel Perkins to the news, at least according to the
New York Herald
, when it called on him in New York. By then he’d had time to compose himself after the shock of receiving Hawley and Post’s teasingly terse message. Perkins showed the
Herald
a facsimile of the telegram he had sent to St. Ambroise (with forwarding instructions):

Indications are that you have beaten the world’s record for sustained flight in a balloon. Please accept my sincerest congratulations on your success. You are the only ones I would be glad to see win outside myself. I know from my own experiences what you must have risked to make such a trip.

Charles Heitman had telephoned the news to Belmont Park, and the message was taken by the committee’s treasurer, Charles Edwards, who “immediately dropped the telephone receiver” and rushed into the office of J. C. McCoy, chairman of the Belmont Park committee. McCoy was deep in discussion with Cortlandt Bishop and Allan Ryan about what to do if the blessed wind didn’t die down, but Edwards didn’t care. He threw his hat to the ceiling and shouted, “Hurrah, Hawley and Post are safe and are returning.” After a round of hearty rejoicing, Bishop addressed the assembled reporters outside the clubhouse and explained that Hawley and Post’s disappearance had “cast a gloom over the international meet, which will now be removed.” A few minutes later Peter Prunty broke the news to the crowd, and for the next hour everyone forgot about the wind as Hawley and Post “became the sole topic of conversation” in Belmont Park.

The cartography skills of the American press left a lot to be desired when Thursday’s newspapers were published. Or perhaps something had been lost in communication with all the telegrams buzzing between Canada and the United States. But no two publications could seem to agree on exactly how far the
America II
had traveled. The
New York Herald
credited Hawley and Post with 1,460 miles, but the
New York Times
was sure it was 1,450 miles. The
Daily Picayune
of New Orleans considered it more like 1,350 miles, while the
New York Sun
’s distance of 1,300 miles was the most conservative. Newspapers in Britain, such as the
Pall
Mall Gazette
and the
Daily Mirror
, alighted on 1,355 miles, the number supplied to them by the
Post-Dispatch
.

Yet despite all the discrepancies in distance, Thursday’s newspapers were as one in making the “back from the dead” heroics of Post and Hawley their headline story. Everything else was reduced to a few paltry paragraphs at the foot of the front page—the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the subsequent death of two hundred Italians in the Bay of Naples; the confirmation that Dr. Hawley Crippen intended to appeal his death sentence passed by a London court earlier in the week; the escalating violence in Jersey City between police and several hundred striking express workers.

One notable feature of all the hyperbolic newspaper coverage was the ignorance displayed of the region from which Hawley and Post had emerged. The
New York Herald
described it as a “jungle”; the
New Orleans
Daily Picayune
said the two balloonists were on their “way back to civilization”; and the
New York Times
commented how fortunate it was that the two trappers (few papers bothered to mention Joseph Pedneaud and Joseph Simard by name) had been “friendly.” To city-dwelling Americans in the early twentieth century, any area without stores, bars, and picture houses was wild and uncivilized, inhabitated by grunting Stone Age creatures. For them the way of life of Simard and Pedneaud was as inconceivable as the Sioux’s had been to Lewis and Clark a century earlier.

Of course, what most aroused the newspapers was that the
America II
had broken all existing balloon distance rec ords, further proof of man’s advancement. Maps showing the balloon’s route proliferated on the pages, and from coast to coast people read the interview with Augustus Post that had been telegraphed late on Wednesday night by the lucky reporter from the Associated Press.

The
World
newspaper described how its representative had spent Wednesday evening at the headquarters of the Aero Club of America with “an excited group” that included Colonel Theodore Schaeck and Paul Armbruster of the
Helvetia
. When Clifford Harmon arrived from Belmont Park, he had been only too happy to tell the paper how glad he was that his pessimism had proved groundless. “I am frank in saying that I never expected to see either Post or Hawley again,” he said. “It took men of the greatest courage to do what they have done, and ordinary courage is not enough. I know the character of that country well and I would not venture into it . . . I am mighty glad they are safe and they deserve all of the glory.”

The joy of sleeping in a warm bed was short-lived for Augustus Post. At six o’clock on Thursday morning, six hours after he had bidden the reporter good-night at the Château Saguenay hotel, Post was woken by Joseph Guay, the hotel manager, who reminded him that the train for Quebec City left in an hour. Post had to summon all his willpower to slip out of his bed and into the clothes loaned him by Guay. He shaved and tidied up his goatee, then descended into the dining room, where he and Hawley breakfasted on trout and another moose steak. There was plenty of hot coffee, too, the surest sign that they were back in the benign embrace of civilization.

They boarded the train at seven o’clock with their dirty clothes folded into their ballast bags and with a small brown leather valise given them as a farewell gift by Guay. The train stopped for lunch at Kiskisink, and Hawley and Post were wined and dined by the division superintendent at the station restaurant. It escaped neither of the balloonists’ attention that Kiskisink was close to where Samuel Perkins had come down, “believing that he had won the race.”

Post and Hawley slept off their lunch on Thursday afternoon as the train puffed south toward Quebec. Fifty miles outside the city they pulled into a station, where waiting on the platform was Lewis Spindler, who had dashed east from Ontario the moment he heard the news. He found the pair “well but somewhat fatigued but [they] have one predominant joy—we hold the cup.” Spindler accompanied Post and Hawley on the final leg of their journey, explaining on the way that they would have four hours in Quebec City before catching a sleeper to Montreal at eleven P.M. In the intervening hours an informal dinner had been organized at a nearby hotel by the American counsel, Mr. Gebhard Willrich. Spindler also laughingly warned them to expect a monumental reception when their train arrived because Canada had gone “balloon crazy.”

Police had thrown a cordon around the platform by the time the train carrying Post and Hawley reached Quebec at six forty P.M. They were greeted by Willrich and “several prominent men of the city,” but the hoipolloi were held back, and reporters could only stretch up on tiptoe over the policemen’s heads in a vain attempt to have their questions answered. The two men were escorted to the Château Frontenac hotel and “made comfortable in a room, the luxurious arrangement of which must have furnished a striking contrast to the wilderness of the Canadian bush.” At dinner they were presented with a tottering pile of telegrams, among which were messages from Count Zeppelin, Cortlandt Bishop, the Campfire Club of America, and Walter Wellman. August Belmont, owner of the eponymous racecourse, extended his heartiest congratulations and hoped the pair “may join in the last days of our meeting and receive the homage of your expectant associates of the air and of a proud and admiring community.”

After supper Post and Hawley sat before the newsmen and gave them the story of their adventure. The dozen or so reporters may have been scooped by their colleague from the Associated Press, but that made them no less attentive as Hawley spoke: “There was never a time when I considered that our lives were actually in danger, but our food supply was very short, and I consider that we were very fortunate in reaching Jacques Maltais’s cabin [
sic
] in the woods when we did.” Nonetheless, butted in a reporter, it must have been a harrowing ordeal. Hawley shook his head. “Taken altogether it was not a disagreeable experience.”

Post took the newsmen back to the beginning, that long-ago afternoon when they had departed. With his logbook on his lap for reference, Post described their forty-six hours in the air and summed up their descent in a single sentence: “We made a good landing in the trees and had no difficulty in getting to the ground.” Post then elaborated on their plight through the wilderness—“the baffling thicket of brambles . . . branches standing out at every angle and interlacing.” Hawley interjected only when his companion told of his fall. “I can stand a good deal of pain,” said Hawley, looking around at the faces of the reporters, “but I never had anything take hold of me like that.”

What about the
America II
? one of the correspondents asked when they had finished their tale. Post said that the owner of the hotel in Chicoutimi had promised to try to retrieve the balloon, but if he didn’t, they wanted it known that they would pay $300 to any person or persons who brought it back. However, added Hawley, if it was lost, then “it’s lost in a good cause. We have without doubt beaten the world’s record by more than two hundred miles.”

The euphoria that had greeted the news of Hawley and Post’s reappearance on Wednesday afternoon had vanished, blasted miles across the Hempstead Plains by the keen southwest wind that violated through every nook and cranny of Belmont Park on Thursday morning. What do you reckon it is? the reporters sheltering in the press stand asked one another: 30 mph? 35 mph? maybe even 40? No one wished to hazard a guess, but with the flags atop the hangars “bent before it like reeds,” the wind was considerably more than a zephyr and likely to scupper both the Statue of Liberty race and the elimination trial for the U.S. team.

The meet’s nine A.M. start was too early for the special aviation trains laid on by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which didn’t start running for another two hours, so instead the die-hard fans bought tickets for Jamaica Station, the main hub of the Long Island Rail Road, and completed their journey in trolley cars and hacks. Elsewhere the “roads swarmed with automobiles, a long motor caravan threading across the bridges.”

The signal bomb was exploded, but the doors of the hangars remained resolutely closed. Men and women sat in their seats, grappling with the pages of their newspapers as they tried to read of Hawley and Post’s miraculous resurrection. The band played, but no one listened; it was too cold, too windy, too depressing. The aviators refused to budge from their hangars, except one or two who, “heartbroken at the gale, took trains into town.”

At least it was a bumper day for the society correspondents, all of whom were kept busy by a steady stream of illustrious arrivals. Baron von Hengelmuller, the Austrian ambassador, was a guest in the box of Mr. and Mrs. August Belmont, and the novelist Rex Beach “attracted much attention in a sort of Richard Harding war correspondent’s suit.” The sister of Count de Lesseps, the Countess de la Bergassiere, was wrapped up warm against the elements in a full-length sealskin coat and large beaver hat, while nearby the wife of Cortlandt Bishop amused herself with some crochet work. Vincent Astor returned for another day’s aviation, minus his father, and Mr. and Mrs. Morris Kellogg made their first appearance of the week, having just returned from their wedding trip. Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt swanned into her box in a tailored suit of London smoke frieze and large velvet hat of the same color, but Eleonora Sears was conspicuous by her absence. Perhaps she had been grounded, so to speak, speculated the correspondents, by her concerned parents. But she soon arrived, and what a sensation when she did. It wasn’t what she wore that sent a hurricane of gossip ripping through the Turf and Field Club—although the skirt of the blue serge suit was considered a fraction short by some—it was that, as the
New York Evening
Mail
reported, “she reached Belmont Park with Claude Grahame-White in the latter’s limousine.”