Chasing Icarus (3 page)

That the police agreed was a mark of the esteem in which Grahame-White was held in the United States, a mere six weeks since his arrival. He had come from England bearing a formidable reputation, with the
New
York Herald
calling him the “greatest all-round aviator in the world.” In April 1910 he had raced Louis Paulhan from London to Manchester (a distance of 185 miles) for a newspaper prize of $50,000; Grahame-White had lost, but only after he had become the first man to fly cross-country at night in a desperate attempt to overtake the superior airplane of the Frenchman. “The race, not of the century, but the centuries!” trumpeted New York’s
Evening Post
, which saluted the Englishman’s gallant flight. Overnight, quite literally, the thirty-one-year-old had become a sensation, the incarnation of the belle epoque, the decade before the outbreak of war in 1914 when gaiety and glamour reigned. From an early age Grahame-White had been fascinated by stories of flying found in the pages of penny dreadfuls,
*
such as
Deadwood Dick’s Electric Coach
and
The Voyage of the Flying Dutchman
. Obsessed with flying, Grahame-White used the family wealth to purchase a hot-air balloon. He went up a few times, usually with a picnic hamper and a pretty girl in tow, but the novelty soon wore off because “it was impossible to go where you wanted as one was compelled to go in the direction in which the wind carried you.”

Automobiles were more to Grahame-White’s liking, and he became an avid racing driver, striking up a keen friendship with the Honorable Charles Rolls (one of the cofounders of the motorcar company Rolls-Royce). In 1905 Grahame-White opened an automobile showroom in Mayfair, one of London’s most exclusive addresses. He plastered his office walls with the mottoes that would drive him through life: DO IT NOW!, HUSTLE LIKE HELL!, and his favorite: WHEN TRYING ANYTHING, TRY SOMETHING BIG! Soon business was going so well Grahame-White branched out. He bought a speedboat, called
Gee Whizz
, in which he took the pretty girls for a spin at speeds of 50 mph. Later he invested in a more leisurely vessel, a large yacht, which allowed Grahame-White more time to attend to the needs of his shipmates. He christened the yacht
L’Amoureuse
, or “love life.”

However, the arrival in France in 1908 of an American whose character was diametrically opposed to Grahame-White’s changed the Englishman’s life. Wilbur Wright lived almost puritanically. The son of a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, the forty-one-year-old bachelor had never touched a drop of liquor. He didn’t gamble, didn’t womanize, he didn’t even talk that much. His enjoyment came from hard work and aviation.

In the summer of 1908 Wright had come to France to show skeptics that he and his brother, Orville, had indeed invented the airplane with the first flight at Kitty Hawk, on December 17, 1903. On August 8 he flew for 107 seconds before a spellbound audience. Nothing like it had ever been seen in Europe, and the Wrights were acclaimed as the true inventors of the flying machine. For the next few months Wilbur Wright—the
homme-oiseau
(birdman), as he was labeled by the French press—gave regular demonstrations at Camp d’Auvours near Le Mans. Grahame-White was in a party of British flying enthusiasts who motored down from London one sunny September day to watch Wright in action. After the flight the group of Englishmen were introduced to the aviator, and Grahame-White was awed by the “ascetic, gaunt American with watchful, hawklike eyes.” It would be the one and only time the two men met on friendly terms, and on the journey back across the Channel Grahame-White thought of nothing else but the Wright invention.

The following year Grahame-White was one of the half million spectators who attended the Rheims Aviation Meet, the first international event of its kind. While most people were content simply to marvel at the skills of Glenn Curtiss and Louis Blériot, Grahame-White yearned to emulate them. Passing himself off as an official member of the British military delegation that had been invited to Rheims by their French counterparts, Grahame-White gained access to the hangars and buttonholed Blériot. In flawless French he commiserated with Blériot on his failure to win the International Aviation Cup but said how impressed he had been with his eponymous airplane. He would like to buy one and learn to fly. The Frenchman took an instant liking to the intruder, whose self-assurance was more Gallic than Anglo-Saxon. Within a few weeks Grahame-White had installed himself in Blériot’s Parisian factory and was overseeing the construction of his airplane. He christened it the
White Ea gle
, and by early November it was ready to fly. Unfortunately for Grahame-White, Blériot was out of town at a flying exhibition, so instead of waiting for tuition, he and a friend decided to learn on the job. “It’s a flying machine, isn’t it?” he said to his accomplice. “Then let’s see if it can fly.”

It did, and the news that Grahame-White had soloed without a single lesson received widespread coverage in the French newspapers with one running the headline UN VOL SENSATIONNEL!When Blériot returned, he gave a rueful shake of his head at the impertinence of the grinning Englishman, but secretly he was deeply impressed. Over the next fortnight the pair flew together often with Blériot demonstrating to his passenger the skills that he had used on his historic flight across the English Channel four months earlier.
*
Then on November 25 the
White Eagle
suffered a catastrophic malfunction as they passed over Blériot’s new aerodrome in Pau, southern France, at 60 mph. The rudder control failed as Blériot banked to turn away from trees, and the small biplane flew straight on. Blériot remained unperturbed as he opened the throttle and gained a precious few feet of height, skimming so low over the trees that Grahame-White could have reached down and plucked a leaf from a branch had he not been holding on for dear life.

Having just cleared the trees, Blériot belly flopped down into a dried-up riverbed, incurring nothing more serious than a few bruises and a damaged ego. It would be the most important flying lesson of Grahame-White’s life, one that added another motto to his collection. “A man who keeps his head can never be injured through a fall,” said Blériot, as the pair scrambled up the riverbank and began to trudge home toward the aerodrome.

Grahame-White’s love of flying was only one of his passions. He had two others: money and women. After completing his flying instruction with Blériot, he returned to England and unsuccessfully competed for the London-to-Manchester prize. A fortnight later, with his star in the ascendancy, Grahame-White had hired Frank Marshall to act as his press agent with specific instructions to “circularize the whole of the British and foreign press to give the flights every publicity.” Marshall, however, hadn’t circularized to Grahame-White’s satisfaction, so he fired him and gave the job to Sydney McDonald. When Marshall took his former employer to court for alleged breach of contract (which suit he won), the British press rather looked down their noses at Grahame-White. Were not English gentlemen renowned the world over for their modesty and self-effacement?

Perhaps, but those two qualities were of little use in the lucrative and competitive business of aviation. Grahame-White had seen the money being offered to those men bold enough to risk their lives chasing records. Blériot was $5,000 better off after his Channel flight, Curtiss’s victory in the 1909 International Aviation Cup race had enriched him by a similar amount, and now Paulhan had pocketed the big one, $50,000 for being first to Manchester.

But where Frank Marshall had failed to sufficiently promote the Claude Grahame-White brand, Sydney McDonald succeeded. Throughout the summer of 1910, the flier “scooped the pool,” as the British press were wont to say, accepting a $10,000 retainer for a series of exhibition flights in the north of England and winning $5,000 in a distance race in Wolverhampton.

As for Grahame-White’s third passion, that required the least effort. He could handle the female of the species far more deftly than he could an airplane, and women were prone to go weak-kneed at the sight of his athletic six-foot frame in the same way men were the moment they spied a flying machine.

He was disarmingly handsome, with a strong mouth, full lips, and deep brown eyes, and he would tuck his shock of dark hair under his cap, then turn the cap back to front. To women, it was another sign of Grahame-White’s rakishness; to those of his own sex it was yet more evidence of his insufferable vanity. The man was preposterous, they seethed, more in love with himself than anyone else. But in truth it wasn’t so much Grahame-White’s undeniable ego that grated on many men, but his perfection. Tall, beautiful, debonair, witty, courageous, rich, talented . . . he damned well had the lot.

At an aviation meet in June at Brooklands racetrack, twenty miles southwest of London, Grahame-White had been at the center of an unseemly squabble between two women who should have known better. For many years he had been on friendly terms with Pauline Chase (to him she was Polly, to her he was Claudie), a twenty-five-year-old American actress with golden hair, a pert nose, and a gleam in her blue eyes that suggested that perhaps she wasn’t quite the ingenue she appeared to be at first glance. She certainly knew what she wanted from a man, and it wasn’t a good heart or a worthy talent. “I’ve no time to waste on duffers with no position or money,” she had once famously told a reporter.

Chase had made her stage debut at age thirteen at the Casino Theater in New York, but apart from a colorful role as the Pink Pajama Girl in the racy Broadway show
Liberty Belles
, her early career was uneventful. Then in 1904 she was offered the part of First Twin in a new production about to open in London called
Peter Pan
; audiences were captivated by the play and its writer, James Barrie, was similarly entranced by Chase. She became his goddaughter when she was christened in 1906, and the same year Chase was elevated to the title role in
Peter Pan
. The
Times
of London considered that she brought a certain “delicate grace” to the part, and the
Chicago Tribune
found her “distractingly pretty.” Her name became synonymous with the little boy who wouldn’t grow up, and Grahame-White had lost count of the number of times he had sat in the front row of the Duke of York’s Theater scowling at Captain Hook.

On the June day in question, Grahame-White had promised Chase over lunch that he would take her for a spin in his Farman biplane later that afternoon.
*
Chase was thrilled. Her self-promotion was as ardent as Grahame-White’s, and she could picture the following day’s headlines: PETER PAN FLIES FOR REAL.

Unfortunately for Chase, when she arrived at Brooklands she was confronted by an indomitable English aristocrat, Lady Abdy, a “rather massive but handsome woman . . . who had taken a violent fancy to Mr. Grahame-White.” So violent was her fancy that Lady Abdy had bid £150 ($750) for the chance to fly with her very own Eros in a lunchtime charity auction held in Grahame-White’s absence. As he helped Chase up into the seat of his biplane, Lady Abdy thundered across the racetrack and “with an evident dislike of his attractive companion, angrily and abusively asserted her right to the first flight.” Grahame-White tried to explain to her ladyship that he needed first to go for a quick test flight, but she was having none of it. Did he really expect her, Lady Abdy, to play second fiddle to a common American actress? Fearing the Englishwoman might physically assault Chase, Grahame-White “gave in and took-off in a foul mood, with Lady Abdy triumphantly ensconced behind him.” Within seconds of taking off, however, the airplane’s engine stalled (probably unable to withstand the weight of the “massive but handsome” passenger), and Grahame-White had to crash-land in the sewage farm that bordered the racetrack. Both walked away without a scratch, much to the relief of Pauline Chase, who, with a perfumed glove over her nose, inquired ever so solicitously after the well-being of Lady Abdy.

Grahame-White’s charismatic appeal in Europe hadn’t gone unnoticed by the promoters of American aviation meetings, and neither had his fondness for Pauline Chase. That she was coming to New York to star in a Broadway production of
Our Miss Gibbs
at the Knickerbocker was doubtless used by the promoters as another reason why Grahame-White should accept an invitation to tour the United States. He sailed from En-gland at the end of August, a few days after he had been paid $50,000 for putting on a show in Blackpool on the northwest coast of England. Hundreds of his fans, mostly female, were quayside to wave him off, and only after several minutes did they quiet enough for him to say a few words to the press corps. “I hope to give a good account of myself in the various competitions,” Grahame-White began, at which point a young woman pushed past the reporters and thrust into his hands a good-luck sprig of white heather, asking nothing more in return than a kiss. “I am confident,” he continued, “of being able to maintain the reputation of Great Britain, which I regard as being in advance of America with reference to aerial navigation.”

When Grahame-White arrived in a rainy Boston on September 1, dozens of American reporters were there to greet him. “Fine flying weather for ducks,” he joked, adding that he was eager to get into action at the Boston Meet in two days’ time. Ever the consummate showman, Grahame-White patiently answered every question with a smile, and he was particularly attentive to the female correspondents who had braved the weather. His diligence paid off handsomely. The
Boston Post
’s sob sister wrote that Grahame-White “is possessed of a fine athletic figure and is the best set-up man in the whole flock of birdmen who have entered the Meet. Unlike the silent, mysterious Americans, who seem to be out of their element on the ground, Grahame-White is thoroughly at home with his two feet everywhere.” Another reporter, Phoebe Dwight (this was her nom de plume, her real name being Eleanor Ladd), had a warning for the men of Boston: “If you want your lady-loves’ hearts true to you, it’s hardly safe to amuse them by taking them out to the aviation Meet. For before you know it these hearts may be fluttering along at the tail of an airplane, wherein sits a daring and spectacular young man who has won the title of the matinee idol of the aviation field, Claude Grahame-White.”