One Summer: America, 1927 (23 page)

With stops at City Hall, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Central Park, the parade took most of the afternoon. It was the start of four days of intense activity for Lindbergh—more speeches, receptions, honors, and parades—as well as a belated trip to see
Rio Rita
at the new Ziegfeld Theatre. For the duration of their visit, Lindbergh and his mother had been lent the use of a large apartment at 270 Park Avenue owned by none other than Harry Frazee, the man who sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees. By coincidence, Frazee’s building had also been well known to Charles Nungesser, whose beloved Consuelo Hatmaker had resided there when Nungesser was courting her. It was at Frazee’s apartment that Mrs. Lindbergh reluctantly agreed to meet the press in an informal press conference. Her performance was a master class in how not to answer questions.

“What do you think your son will do next?” one of the reporters asked her.

Mrs. Lindbergh said she had no idea.

“Did he bring you any souvenirs from Paris?” asked another.

“No.”

“Would you ever like to fly the Atlantic with your son?”

“He hasn’t asked me.”

“What are your plans for the next few days?”

“They are in the hands of the organizing committee.”

And so it went for half an hour until the reporters were out of questions and there were just long, awkward silences. When an assistant stepped in to end the conference, saying that Mrs. Lindbergh was expected elsewhere, Mrs. Lindbergh breathed an audible sigh of relief. “I’ve already said too much,” she confided.

There was no getting away from the fact that both the Lindberghs were a little odd, and that both together were
more
than a little odd. On the evening of his parade, Charles and his mother, accompanied by Mayor Walker, were driven to the Long Island estate of a multimillionaire named Clarence H. Mackay for a banquet to be followed by dancing. Shortly after dinner, it was noticed that Lindbergh was no longer present. A panicky Mackay instituted a search of the estate, unable to imagine
what had become of his prize guest. It turned out that Lindbergh and his mother had departed for Manhattan without saying thank you or goodbye to their host, the governor, the mayor, or any of the other five hundred guests. They evidently hadn’t told the mayor that they were leaving him without a ride either.

For three days Lindbergh stories completely filled the front page of the
New York Times
and most of several pages beyond. On the day of his parade, Lindbergh stories occupied the first sixteen pages of the paper. Such was the intensity of interest in everything to do with Lindbergh that when Mrs. Lindbergh went to Pennsylvania Station on June 15 to catch a train back to the Midwest, five hundred policemen had to link arms to hold back the crowds.

Lindbergh was now the most valuable human commodity on the planet, and he was bombarded with lucrative proposals—to make movies, write books and newspaper columns, advertise products of every description, appear in vaudeville productions, travel the world giving lectures. According to his own recollections, he was offered $500,000 and a percentage of the profits to star in a film based on his life story, and $50,000 to endorse a popular brand of cigarettes. Another company offered him $1 million if he would find and marry the girl of his dreams and allow the whole process to be immortalized on film. Senior figures in Washington urged him to enter politics. “I was advised,” Lindbergh wrote later, “that if I would enter a political career, there was a good chance that I could eventually become president.”

So many parties tried to cash in on Lindbergh’s name without his approval or knowledge that he had to hire a detective agency to track down the worst of them. The
New York Times
cited the example of an entrepreneur in Cleveland who found a man named Charles Lindberg, a railway mechanic who knew nothing of aviation, and made him the nominal head of a company called the Lindberg Aeronautics Corporation, with plans to sell $100 million in stock certificates to a gullible and admiring public.

The biggest event of Lindbergh’s week—of anyone’s week—was a
dinner given for him by the City of New York at the Hotel Commodore. The
New York Times
put the number of guests at 3,700—all male, since no women were invited. It was the biggest dinner ever given in the city. All the papers enjoyed listing the great quantities of food and crockery involved—300 gallons of green turtle soup, 2,000 pounds of fish, 1,500 pounds of Virginia ham, 6,000 pounds of chicken, 125 gallons of peas, 15,000 bread rolls, 2,000 heads of lettuce, 100 gallons of coffee, 800 quarts of ice cream, 12,000 pieces of cake, 300 pounds of butter, 36,000 cups and plates, 50,000 pieces of silver—though it may also be noted that only rarely did the numbers entirely agree from one publication to the next. Dinner was scheduled to start at seven, but because of the confusion of such a mass of people all searching for the right chairs, it was nine o’clock before everyone was seated and serving could begin. The speeches didn’t start until eleven o’clock—three hours late.

The increasingly surreal and draining nature of Lindbergh’s life was demonstrated on the evening of June 15. After a full day of speeches and receptions, he finally got to a performance of
Rio Rita
, but the audience was so ecstatic to see him that police had to be called in to calm them and the play started more than an hour late. It was nowhere near finished when Lindbergh had to leave to attend a benefit evening for Nungesser and Coli at the new Roxy Theatre. There he sat politely for an hour before slipping out a side door and being driven to Mitchel Field, where he pulled on a flying suit over his tuxedo and took off for Washington.

In Washington, he carefully went over the repairs done to the
Spirit of St. Louis
, climbed into the familiar cockpit, and returned with the plane to New York. At seven thirty in the morning he landed at Mitchel Field in New York, content that he was at last reunited with his beloved ship. After a quick shower and a change of clothes back at the Frazee apartment, he resumed his public engagements on no sleep.

As it turned out, the plans for Lindbergh for that day were wildly and unrealistically ambitious. He was sent on a long parade through Brooklyn, which included a speech to two hundred thousand people in Prospect Park, followed by a formal luncheon with a branch of the Knights of Columbus. Then he was to go to Yankee Stadium to meet the Yankees
and watch them play the St. Louis Browns before speeding back into Manhattan for the presentation of the Orteig Prize at the Hotel Brevoort, followed by yet another formal dinner.

At Yankee Stadium, three sections of box seats had been freshly painted to receive Lindbergh and his party, and twenty thousand fans turned out to cheer him. Babe Ruth had promised to hit a home run in his honor, but the great aviator was nowhere to be seen at game time. The teams and spectators waited nearly half an hour for Lindbergh to get there, but when word arrived that he was still in Manhattan the umpires started the game without him.

Baseball seasons unwind slowly, and at this stage of proceedings no one had any inkling that this season would prove unusually productive for Ruth or any other Yankees. Just before the season started, Ruth himself told a reporter that he didn’t expect ever to break his 1921 home run record. “To do that, you’ve got to start early, and the pitchers have got to pitch to you,” he said. “I don’t start early, and the pitchers haven’t really pitched to me in four seasons.” As if to prove his point, he left the first game complaining of dizziness and failed to hit with vigor through the first month of the season. By May 21, the day Lindbergh landed in Paris, Ruth had just 9 home runs in 32 games.

Then two things happened:
Babe Comes Home
went on general release, and Ruth suddenly came to life. Goodness knows exactly how the movie galvanized him, but its release coincided exactly and peculiarly with his hitting a lot of home runs—5 in two days, one of which, in Philadelphia, was hit so far that it left the park and cleared a two-story house across the street. By June 7, Ruth’s total had jumped to 18—a much more respectable and promising number. Two days later against Chicago at Yankee Stadium, Ruth stole home plate—something that thirty-two-year-old men with paunches didn’t normally do. The season was suddenly getting interesting.

True to his word, Ruth hit a home run for Lindbergh on Lindbergh Day. It came in the bottom of the first against Tom Zachary, who would yield a rather more momentous home run to Ruth at the end of the season. Lou Gehrig followed Ruth to the plate and hit a home run to almost
exactly the same spot. Lindbergh, alas, never arrived to see either. “I’d been saving that homer for him, and then he doesn’t show up,” Ruth said afterward. “I guess he thinks this is a twilight league.”

Lindbergh, through no fault of his own, simply couldn’t get there. Delayed at every turn by people wanting to speak to him, shake his hand, have a moment of his time, he didn’t reach Yankee Stadium until well after five, when the game was nearly finished, at which point it was decided that he didn’t have time to go in anyway, so his motorcade turned around and went back to town for him to collect the Orteig Prize from Raymond Orteig at the Hotel Brevoort in Greenwich Village. There, as everywhere, he was met by a mob and had to be bundled into the building through a sea of straining hands.

Lindbergh was beginning to look distinctly shell-shocked. The historian Hendrik Willem Van Loon met him in the midst of all this and reported with genuine concern: “Never have I seen anyone as hopelessly tired, as courageously tired, as that boy whose brain was still doing a duty which the rest of his body could no longer follow up. Another three days of this and the reflected-glory hounds will chase him to his death.” In fact, Lindbergh had much more than three days of it to get through, and it would only get worse.

He must at least have been glad to meet Raymond Orteig, for Orteig was a delightful and likable man with a knack for putting people at their ease. He had started life humbly as a shepherd boy in the French Pyrenees, but in 1882, at just twelve, he had followed an uncle to America. There he taught himself English, got a job as a hotel waiter, and worked his way up the ladder of opportunity until he was first the maître d’, then the manager, and finally the owner of two of Manhattan’s smartest hotels, the Lafayette and the Brevoort, both in Greenwich Village. For Orteig, Lindbergh was a savior. The Orteig Prize, offered in a moment of impetuous magnanimity, had become something of a nightmare for the Frenchman. Six men had lost their lives trying to win the prize, and until Lindbergh’s triumph it had seemed likely that that number would just keep rising. Critics had begun to observe that Orteig, however well meaning, was a murderer—a thought that was understandably painful for him to bear.

So it was with relief and pleasure that he handed Lindbergh his check—though he must also have felt a stab of unease at parting with such a hefty sum, for $25,000 was a great deal of money in 1927 and rather more than he could comfortably afford.

The unfortunate fact of the matter was that Orteig was going slowly out of business, and he was being killed by the same thing that was killing lots of other people, sometimes all too literally: Prohibition.

*
New York’s Woolworth Building, 792 feet high, built in 1913, was still the tallest in the world. The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, which would both overtake the Woolworth, would not be built until 1930 and 1931, respectively.

12

Sometime on the night of June 23, 1927, Wilson B. Hickox, age forty-three, a wealthy businessman from Cleveland, Ohio (and, coincidentally, a neighbor of Myron Herrick’s in the suburb of Cleveland Heights), returned from an evening out in New York City and poured himself a nightcap in his room in the Roosevelt Hotel.

Shortly thereafter, Hickox began to feel some peculiar and unpleasant sensations—a tightening of the throat and chest, a kind of bitter pain spreading through his body. We may reasonably imagine the glass slipping from his hand and Hickox rising with difficulty and stumbling toward the door to summon help as his symptoms swiftly worsened. One by one his body systems were collapsing into paralysis as the toxic effects of strychnine swept through him. Mr. Hickox never made it to the door, but died slowly and wretchedly on the floor of his room, bewildered, frightened, and unable to move a muscle.

What was most notable about Hickox’s death was not that he had been poisoned but that it was his own government that had killed him. The 1920s was in many ways the most strange and wondrous decade in American history, and nothing made it more so than Prohibition. It was easily the most extreme, ill-judged, costly, and ignored experiment in social engineering ever conducted by an otherwise rational nation. At
a stroke it shut down the fifth-largest industry in America. It took some $2 billion a year out of the hands of legitimate interests and put it in the hands of murderous thugs. It made criminals of honest people and actually led to an increase in the amount of drinking in the country.