Chasing Icarus (25 page)

Now it was Grahame-White’s turn to try out his new Blériot monoplane, the one that had finally arrived from France the day before. He had ordered it built to the exact specifications as Le Blanc’s racer: the same steering column, the same dimensions, the same wheels, the same fourteen-cylinder, hundred-horse power Gnome engine. But as Grahame-White’s mechanics trundled out the Blériot, he noticed a difference between the two: Le Blanc’s machine had a propeller manufactured by Regy Frères, while his was a Chauviere. The former was considered to be the best in the business, of a finer pitch than the Chauviere propeller. Curious, thought Grahame-White.

Once he was airborne, the English aviator handled his new machine with far less precision than Le Blanc. By now one or two of the other correspondents had appeared in the press stand, and so slow was Grahame-White in circling the two-and-a-half-kilometer course that the
New York
Herald
presumed he was flying a fifty-horse power machine. The
Evening
Sun
reporter timed Grahame-White for a lap and recorded one minute and forty seconds. He flicked back through his notes to find Orville Wright’s best lap time in the Baby Grand from a couple of days ago—one minute and twenty-three seconds.

After three laps Grahame-White had had enough and descended, making “rather a bad landing” on one wheel and nearly turning turtle. As he slid down from the seat, the Englishman seemed preoccupied. He said a few words to his manager, Sydney McDonald, and the two of them disappeared inside Grahame-White’s hangar.

Two issues weighed heavily on the broad shoulders of Grahame-White on Friday morning. The first required a firm and forceful approach, a
letting out
of the engine, to use an aviator’s vernacular. He and McDonald sat down at the table in his hanger and began to compose a letter, his response to the committee’s decision to overrule his protest regarding the Statue of Liberty race. Grahame-White considered that even though he knew the committee well, the letter should contain no chummy informality. Addressing it to the Aero Club, he began:

I must again on principle respectfully request you to reconsider your decision as I feel that it will be useless for me to take part in any further competition at the Belmont Park Meeting if the basic rules governing the competition are to be altered at the plea sure of your committee, in this case, ostensibly, so as to be able to draw a large entry for a competition for which only a few of the hardworking aviators, with great risk to themselves and their machines, have qualified.

In a subsequent paragraph Grahame-White accused J. C. McCoy, the committee chairman, of sophistry. Yes, the pair had discussed the Statue of Liberty race on Wednesday evening, and, yes, Grahame-White had replied to a casual inquiry from McCoy that he had yet to decide whether he would enter the race.

. . . But whatever influence [
sic
] your chairman drew from this reply it can in no way be construed into a legitimate excuse for so drastic an alteration of the rules. I cannot find that I am under any obligation to communicate my intentions with reference to contests to your committee until a few minutes before the starting of such contests.

Grahame-White read the letter through, nodded with satisfaction, and signed it. He asked McDonald to release its contents to the press. Then he turned to his second problem, one that required a gentler touch, as if he were negotiating dead man’s turn in a stiff breeze. What to do about Pauline Chase?

It was a most unfortunate situation, he and McDonald agreed, and one that was not of Grahame-White’s making, even though he was being cast as the villain. A week earlier Pauline Chase’s widowed mother, Mrs. Ellis Bliss, had died, and he’d been present in her final hours. Shortly before she’d slipped away, old Mrs. Bliss had asked a favor of Grahame-White: look after Polly. Of course, he had replied, he would support her during the difficult days and weeks ahead. But marriage? He hadn’t understood that to be part of his promise. Perhaps he had misconstrued the old girl’s dying words, or perhaps it was Pauline, grief-stricken, who assumed they were engaged and informed the world after another poorly attended per-for mance of
Our Miss Gibbs
.

Once the communiqué was finished, McDonald walked over to the press stand, where the correspondents were waiting for a flier to ginger up their morning. Gentlemen, he said, I would like to read a statement on behalf of my client. Mr Grahame-White and Miss Pauline Chase are not engaged, he began. “The engagement was not announced by either Miss Chase or Mr. Grahame-White, but was given to the public by the manager of the theater where she was playing at that time in New York. As the announcement has been spread broadcast [
sic
], Mr. Grahame-White, taking the stand any gentleman would in an affair of this kind, thought that silence in the matter was the best policy. He has at no time ever said he and Miss Chase were engaged.” But, continued McDonald, looking up fiercely at the faces before him, “when Mr. Grahame-White was criticized for being seen so much in the company of Miss Eleonora Sears of Boston, the matter had gone far enough . . . There is no reason why he should not pay attention to her as he owes no allegiance to Miss Chase.”

The proclamation was finished, but McDonald wasn’t getting away that easily. If not Miss Chase, shouted the reporters, then what about Miss Sears? Rumor had it that young Harry Vanderbilt had cut short his Europe an tour in light of what he had heard about Miss Sears and the Englishman, and was “hurrying to the scene of action at the Belmont Park aviation field.” McDonald knew nothing about the movements of Mr. Vanderbilt. But might not he return to find the woman he had “tacitly” asked to marry him engaged to another? “I am in no position to say anything about it,” replied McDonald. “It is not likely Mr. Grahame-White would take me into his confidence anyway, but I can say I do not believe there is any engagement at present.” Rubbish, someone cried, the rumor is they’re already engaged. “If that’s the case,” retorted McDonald, “it’s only one of the many injustices that has been done Mr. Grahame-White by bally fabrications.”

With the nature of his relationship with Miss Chase straightened out, Grahame-White went to lunch at the Turf and Field Club in a more relaxed frame of mind. Accompanied by McDonald and Miss Sears, he stopped outside the restaurant entrance and, in reply to a question from a waiting reporter, said he’d released the statement because he could “not allow it to be said that he had no right to pay attention to whom he pleased.” What about the letter to the committee? Was it true he wouldn’t fly again at the meet? Grahame-White laughed. Not at all. In fact, “he would probably make the trip to the Statue of Liberty in the afternoon in his 100-horsepower Blériot, just to show the other fellows that he really meant business.”

Not a table was to be had in the sheltered sumptuousness of the Turf and Field Club at one o’clock. As Grahame-White and Sears flirted over the starters, the Duke of Richelieu, son of the prince of Monaco, was being entertained at another table by Cortlandt Bishop. Baron von Hengel-muller, the Austrian ambassador, was dining with Mr. and Mrs. August Belmont; and the dean of Columbia University, Frederick A. Goetza, lunched with a colleague, Professor Arthur Walker. Elsewhere, the table of Mr. George Huhn Jr., head of the Broadway banking firm Huhn, Edey & Co., was in an uproar after one of their guests, a woman from Philadelphia, had discovered several items of precious jewelry missing from her handbag. As the Pinkerton guards took down a description of the stolen gems, they sighed and shook their heads: Belmont Park’s notorious handbag crook had struck again.

A similarly agitated atmosphere prevailed outside the Turf and Field Club as the hour of the afternoon program approached. The wind had begun to flex its muscles, slapping the flags on top of the hangars and throwing particles of dirt from the track into the faces of the mechanics who were working on the airplanes on the grass. When the signal bomb exploded at one thirty P.M., the
New York Times
correspondent estimated that over twenty thousand spectators were on the grounds, “but the prospect of seeing any immediate flying seemed remote because of the proximity of the big [International Aviation] race.” Instead those fliers selected to represent their countries spent the afternoon giving their airplanes a thorough overhaul, all except Hubert Latham, who took off in his Antoinette into a wind that was now as belligerent as it had been on Thursday. Going down the back straight on his fifth lap, “he encountered an unusually strong head wind . . . and was carried over the hangars and turned completely around.”

Latham landed but was soon up again, this time taking his hundred-horse power machine around the five-kilometer course so he could familiarize himself with its features. The
New York Herald
was impressed with the way Latham handled the corners in such a high wind and regarded him as “one of the strongest contenders” in the big race.

Where was Ralph Johnstone? That’s what Belmont Park wanted to know on Friday afternoon. Arch Hoxsey had returned from Brentwood at noon, pausing just long enough to shake hands with the Wrights before he was up again, this time rising to 6,705 feet, two thousand feet higher than Phil Parmalee, who deputized for the absent Johnstone.

By ten to four there was still no sign of Johnstone, and people were beginning to worry. The wind was blowing hard, and even Charles Hamilton and Walter Brookins lasted only a couple of laps before beating a retreat to their hangars. Suddenly those spectators on the grass on the opposite side of the course to the grandstand jumped to their feet and began pointing toward the southeast. The reporters twisted in their seats and looked up under the eaves of the press stand to see what the fuss was about. The
New York Times
correspondent saw “just a spot against a sky that near the horizon was pink with the reflection of the setting sun.” It was John-stone, no doubt about it, but it took him nearly twenty minutes to battle the headwinds toward Belmont Park. He was flying at about three thousand feet as he approached the course, reckoned the
New York Herald
, and “as he neared the enclosure he dropped three or four hundred feet at a time, ‘terracing’ downward, and at last he drove his machine over the field, hardly fifty feet above the turf.” Every man, woman, and child at Belmont Park stood and cheered Johnstone as he touched down in front of the grandstand. Unbelievable, people said, laughing, pointing at the flier, he’s even smoking a cigar!

He was greeted by Cortlandt Bishop and Major Reber of the Signal Corps, and for several minutes Johnstone “stood enjoying the applause of the spectators as a schoolboy would the applause of admiring friends and relatives at a school entertainment.”

While Johnstone savored his cigar, his barographs from Thursday’s flight were taken to the judges’ box. A couple of minutes later an excited Peter Prunty picked up his megaphone and asked the crowd to show their appreciation for a new American altitude record—8,471 feet. Reporters ran from the press stand to grab a few words with happy-go-lucky Johnstone. “Tell you what, boys,” he said, hoping they wouldn’t notice how the hand that held his cigar trembled, “it was just the mercy of Providence that I saved my neck when I thought I was within touching distance of the new world’s record. I kind of forget all about the wind and began to reach out for more height. Then I suddenly said to myself, ‘Young man, you better see how much gas you have got.’ It’s the truth, I had just enough to turn over the two propellers. When I kept her nose up, the juice ran down into the engine and she coughed. The minute I pointed down, I lost my fuel and she began to miss.”

Sounds a thrill, a reporter said, laughing. “It was just like shooting the chutes,” said Johnstone. “First I’d take a header, with the power off, and when the wind began to carry me out of control, I’d point up a bit, get a little headway, run level for a hundred yards, then dip again.” He described how he had come down in a field, not much larger than the span of his wings, probably the best landing he’d ever made. Had he been afraid? they asked, thinking he’d laugh off the question. His face hardened. “Deathly afraid,” he replied.

With the crowd still agog at the return of Johnstone, Peter Prunty announced that the wind had put paid to the Statue of Liberty race. It was now blowing at thirty miles per hour, too strong to risk a flight over Manhattan. However, he boomed, he was delighted to reveal that the twenty-mile cross-country passenger-carrying flight had three entrants.

The first to ascend was Count de Lesseps, accompanied in his Blériot by his brother. Together they disappeared toward the captive balloon ten miles east, and a short while later Claude Grahame-White prepared to take off in his Farman biplane, with Sydney McDonald as his passenger. Unfortunately, a week of lavish lunches in the Turf and Field Club had added a few pounds to the waistlines of both men, and no sooner had the Farman got off the ground than, like a father buckling under the weight of his son in a piggyback race, the machine flopped down a few feet past the start line.

John Moisant was the third entrant in the race, and with him was an employee of the Lovelace-Thompson Company; the pair cleared the perimeter fence, but the Blériot gave out a couple of minutes later and came down in a cabbage field three miles west of Belmont Park. At five P.M. Count de Lesseps telephoned to say he and his brother had been forced down by the wind and were taking tea in a delightful place called Garden City; please send an automobile at the earliest convenience. The crowd had one last quiver of excitement before the day was out. Edmond Audemars went up in a Demoiselle, only for it to come down a few minutes later on its back. “He’s walking away,” shrieked Peter Prunty as Audemars lurched across the grass like a punch-drunk boxer. “He’s not hurt, and the Demoiselle is unhurt as well!”

Another extraordinary escape, the spectators said to one another, as they queued to ride the railroad back into Manhattan. Perhaps John Moisant is right, aviation isn’t as lethal as some would have us believe. Others referred to the small paragraph in their newspapers that described the death of Saglietti, an Italian, during an exhibition on Thursday. That made four deaths in four days, what with Madiot, Monte, and Blanchard as well. Only luck had prevented a similar tragedy at Belmont Park.