Chasing Icarus (31 page)

Claude Grahame-White heard the news of the double tragedy from his hospital bed in Dover, where he had lain since December 18, after a horrific accident that shattered his leg and ankle, slashed open his temple, and reduced his airplane to “matchwood.” In chasing a $20,000 prize for the longest nonstop flight from England to the Europe an mainland, Grahame-White had crashed into a stone wall on takeoff. He was helped in his recuperation by the charming bedside manner of Pauline Chase, who had returned to England with him in early December. Miss Sears? A delightful young woman, he had told reporters quayside in New York, but she was just a good friend, at least as far as he was concerned. Marry Miss Chase? “Oh, dear, dear. Stop your spoofin’!” he’d said, laughing.

A Grahame-White quip, now that was a rarity in the weeks that had followed the Belmont Park kerfuffle, although admittedly there’d been precious little to smile about for the Englishman since that roistering good evening at Sherry’s. He’d become Public Enemy Number One in the eyes of the American press, with the
Philadelphia Inquirer
accusing him of “mighty poor sportsmanship,” the
New York Morning Telegram
labeling him “foolish, unsportsmanlike and grasping,” and the
New York
Town Topics
ridiculing him in a poem called “Discontent”:

Britons never shall be slaves

Britain h’always ruled the air

Blimey, and it ain’t quite fair

Why she shouldn’t rule the air

I’ve a challenge for the world

Everywhere the same I’ve hurled

Blast yer eyes, come get in line

Guided by these rules of mine.

The hostility had eventually died down, but then, on the eve of his departure from New York, Grahame-White was informed that the Wrights had filed suit against him. He was summoned to appear before a circuit court judge on December 4 and told to bring with him details of his earnings in the three months he’d been in America. As for his airplanes, the port authorities in New York had been ordered to embargo them the moment he tried to ship them back to Europe. Grahame-White was livid and he impugned the Wrights’ integrity to the papers because “they had promised they wouldn’t make trouble.” But he wasn’t that surprised, he added, as “the Wrights are frightened. I’ve scared them so bloody well that they are terrified. I’m their most formidable competitor and they know it.”

Grahame-White let it be known that if there was any trouble at New York, he’d contact his friend the British ambassador, in Washington, but behind the threats he moved with alacrity to outwit the Wrights; he sent his machines home on a freighter from Philadelphia, then booked his passage from New York at the very last minute. He left on board the
Mauretania
, not only with Pauline Chase, booked to play Peter Pan for another season, but with checks totaling $82,000 (approximately $1,312,000 today). That didn’t include the $10,000 for the Statue of Liberty race, a sum he vowed to pursue with the same dogged endurance that he’d exhibited in winning the International Aviation Cup at Belmont Park.

The conquering hero was feted upon his return home. Photographs of Grahame-White posing with the International Aviation Cup adorned the London papers, and in one, the
Evening Times
, he hinted at skulduggery. Leaving aside the question of the Belmont Park organizers and their tinkering with race rules, the Englishman found it “unaccountable” that Moisant had beaten his time to the Statue of Liberty when he was flying a markedly inferior airplane to his own. “The same judges [who had changed the rules] acclaimed him the winner, and as having beaten my time by forty seconds. This in a thirty-five-mile flight is a narrow margin.” The inference was clear: Grahame-White believed that the judges had knocked off a few minutes from Moisant’s time so that their man would win.

A year later, in December 1911, Grahame-White returned to America, this time alone. He and Pauline Chase had drifted apart six months earlier, and while the aviator had remained tight-lipped on the subject, she was happy to inform reporters from her suite in London’s Savoy Hotel that she had “concluded that Mr. Grahame-White could not compensate me from retirement from the stage.”
*

To Chase’s evident dismay, Grahame-White had plowed most of his earnings from 1910 into forming the Grahame-White Aviation Company, and into establishing London’s first aerodrome, at Hendon, on the northern outskirts of the city.

Given his many business commitments throughout 1911, Grahame-White had done precious little flying. One or two exhibitions here and there, but he’d been unable to find the time to participate in the International Aviation Cup race, and in the United States, the Wrights kept him grounded when he returned at the end of the year. Although a judge had thrown out one of the brothers’ suits—the one that demanded a full accounting of Grahame-White’s earnings in 1910—on the issue of the airplane patents the judge was waiting for a panel of experts to report back before delivering his verdict.
†

Not that Grahame-White minded his aerial embargo when he arrived in New York in December. On the passage out from England he had got talking to a beautiful American socialite named Dorothy Taylor, and by the time they docked, they were in love. In between calling on old friends such as Armstrong Drexel, Clifford Harmon, and Eleonora Sears—with whom he attended a charity ball in Madison Square Garden
*
—Grahame-White wined and dined Miss Taylor and had his proposal of marriage accepted.

His spat with the American press had long since been forgotten— particularly since his appeal against Moisant’s victory in the Statue of Liberty race had been successful
†
—and he happily consented to have lunch with Walter Brookins on December 30 as guests of the
World
. The venue, appropriately, was the Plaza Hotel, where fourteen months earlier he and Cortlandt Bishop had glared at each other over the International Aviation Cup. Brookins and Grahame-White had never been good friends, but a warm camaraderie prevailed between them as they shook hands like two old soldiers at a regimental reunion.

Brookins, like Drexel, no longer flew. Hoxsey’s death had made him realize that Charles Hamilton was right when he’d said, “We’ll all be killed if we stay in this business.” As for news of other aviators, Brookins informed Grahame-White that Eugene Ely and Tod Shriver were dead, and Hamilton had suffered a nervous breakdown.

The purpose of the lunch was to hear the men’s thoughts on the future of aviation, and the
World
’s reporter listened intently as the aviators chatted over their food, frequently pausing to smoke cigarettes “with the long drawn inhalation of the devotees.” The question that the newspaper wanted them to answer above all others was, would transatlantic air journeys happen? “I would like to make a bet with anyone that in twenty years’ time we will be flying across the Atlantic Ocean in fifteen hours,” said Grahame-White, taking a sip from his wineglass. “Fifteen hours?” replied Brookins in what the newspaper described as a doubtful tone. “Yes,” asserted Grahame-White, “and by that I mean also that it will be a regular service carrying passengers back and forth between London and New York. It will surely be done long before that time.” Brookins remained skeptical, and later, over dessert, when Grahame-White began talking about airplanes traveling “175 miles or thereabouts an hour,” Brookins “halted the flights of fancy with observations along strictly practical lines.” Further good-natured disagreement occurred when the reporter steered the discussion toward aviation’s role in any future war. Brookins considered the latest German Zeppelin dirigible a most “dreadful” weapon, but Grahame-White reckoned it would soon be rendered obsolete, adding that he was “so optimistic about the airplane in warfare that I fear my views do not agree with most people of today. In fact, I have made it a rule of late to avoid speaking about the uses of the airplane in warfare to avoid being laughed at. People don’t realize the importance of this branch of the military service. It is enough to say that the airplane’s field in military and naval work is unlimited.”

“It’s incredible,” said the old man in a voice unscratched by the passage of time, “that here we are sending up sputniks to the moon, and yet the first airplane flight in Europe was as recent as 1906.” The writer agreed, and in an unobsequious tone pointed out that much of the startling progress was down to men like him, Claude Grahame-White, and the other brave pioneers. Who was left now? he asked, and Grahame-White’s memory traveled slowly back over the years. Not Armstrong Drexel, who had died a few months prior in March 1958, after a life abundant with achievement. A decorated war hero (the First World War, in which Grahame-White had flown bombers against German targets, and in which Roland Garros had distinguished himself as a fighter ace), Drexel had for many years been one of London’s most successful bankers. Walter Brookins had passed away not that long ago, too, in 1953, but the rest were long dead.

Like Garros, Count Jacques de Lesseps had flown in the French air force during World War I, but unlike Garros, de Lesseps had survived, for a few years at least. In 1927 he’d vanished during a survey flight over the Gulf of St. Lawrence; his body was recovered some weeks later, so at least his wife—Grace McKenzie—and his two children had a body to mourn. René Simon and René Barrier had both died in flying accidents in the 1920s, but not Monsieur Le Blanc—dear old Alfred—who never did manage to get his hands on the International Aviation Cup, and who succumbed to illness in 1921. Glenn Curtiss had also died in his bed from complications following appendicitis surgery in 1930. The Wrights’ bêtenoir went to his grave with a reputation as America’s greatest aircraft manufacturer, having founded the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company. He had been a pioneer of the seaplane, and his H-12 flying boat was used by the British during the war. Then, in 1919, Curtiss’s NC-4 flying boat became the first aircraft to successfully cross the Atlantic, in a voyage that included a stop in the Azores. Although Curtiss’s involvement in the aviation industry effectively ceased in the 1920s, his company merged with the Wrights’ to become the Curtiss-Wright Corporation in 1929. During World War II they produced, among others, the Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commando transport plane and the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter.

Tuberculosis had claimed Charles Hamilton in 1914, but in truth he’d been dead long before that, since the day he’d been admitted to the madhouse. And Hubert Latham, with whom Grahame-White had enjoyed such a splendid dinner at Sherry’s, had never flown again after Hoxsey’s death. Instead he had returned to his first love, big-game hunting. The odds were better. But in the summer of 1912, deep in the Congo, Latham was trampled to death by a buffalo.

Latham’s legacy was the same as that of all the other aviators who had been killed in the nine short years since Orville and Wilbur Wright had proved it possible that man could fly: their courage had silenced the world’s skepticism and proved that the air was indeed conquerable—in an airplane. Perhaps it was tragically appropriate that as news of Latham’s death reached the United States, Melvin Vaniman embarked in the
Akron
on another attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an airship. The dirigible had just crossed the New Jersey coastline when it exploded. Neither Vaniman nor any of his four crew members survived.

Despite his vigorously stated belief in the efficacy of the airship in the days following the
America
debacle, Walter Wellman never again took to the skies. The rest of his days passed by uneventfully, though the happy occasions—such as the marriage of his daughter Rebecca to Fred Aubert— were balanced by spells of misery, such as his short prison term in 1926 for failure to pay a $250 debt. Wellman died of liver cancer in 1934, the same decade in which the world decided that dirigible aviation had no serious future.

Two years after Wellman’s death, Alan Hawley died at age sixty-eight. His passion for balloon flight had cooled after his experiences in the Canadian wilderness, but in its place had grown an intense ardor for the airplane, following his visit to Belmont Park. Hawley was elected president of the Aero Club of America in 1913, and over the next six years he was at the forefront of the drive to incorporate aircraft into the U.S. military. As well as being one of the organizers of the Lafayette Escadrille—the squadron of American airmen who flew in the French air force during the First World War—Hawley also campaigned for the establishment of an aerial reserve corps of the National Guard.

Right up until his death in 1936, Hawley remained good friends with Augustus Post, who, like his former pi lot, had shown no inclination to continue ballooning after the 1910 victory. Instead Post, once he’d got his divorce out of the way, wrote and lectured extensively on aeronautics, and for a while in the 1920s, he edited a journal called
Aero Mechanics
. In November 1949 his photograph appeared in the newspapers when he led a campaign for the resurrection of the International Balloon Race, ten years after its demise. The goatee was still there, though with a seam of gray, the eyes shone with vitality, and age hadn’t withered his turn of phrase. “There’s really no sensation in the world like that of floating between the earth and the heavens with the winds of the world,” he explained to a reporter, having enjoyed a brief flight in a free balloon as part of his campaign. “Some of my friends claim you can create the same feeling by partaking of four very dry martinis on an empty stomach— but I don’t believe it.” Post died three years later aged seventy-eight, and though the balloon race wasn’t reestablished in his lifetime, it has been held annually since 1983.

Grahame-White died in August 1959, two days before his eightieth birthday, and a few weeks before the publication of his biography. His death went largely unreported around the world, most notably in Britain, where he had long since been forgotten. For years he had lived in Monte Carlo—enjoying the sun and the sea, and the casinos—and his involvement in aviation had ended shortly after the war when he sold the Hendon aerodrome to the British government for approximately $2 million. He’d never needed to work again, but he went into the real estate business with spectacular results.