Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (37 page)

But the Ederles had a contract, and now they held Burgess to his agreement and told him he would have to drop Cannon. It made sense, for as Trudy explained, "Suppose one man handles two women ... one is a slow swimmer and the other a sprinter. Obviously it would be impossible for this trainer to accompany both in the water." In this instance, Trudy was the sprinter, as Cannon, like virtually every other woman apart from Ederle who was planning on swimming the Channel, still depended upon the breaststroke and occasionally the sidestroke. In addition, were he to train both women, which of the two would receive priority when it came to actually swimming the Channel? There was simply no practical way for Burgess to train them both. Besides, after the trouble with Wolffe the year before, Trudy wanted no trouble from her new trainer. She needed someone she could trust without the slightest hesitation, and if Burgess was training two swimmers, how could she ever know for sure if he was acting in her best interests? When Burgess complained about the loss of income after he dropped Cannon, the Ederles reportedly increased his salary to make up the difference.

Westbrook Pegler watched the proceedings with detached amusement, as the disagreement reminded him of the shenanigans that sometimes went on between boxers and their trainers. He noted that the real issue at stake was not so much Burgess's ability as a trainer as much as it was his knowledge of the Channel. According to Pegler, after the disagreement, "Trudy didn't trust Bill as far as she could see him through a stone wall on a dark night ... She went along with him ... only because she thought he had the best route." Pop Ederle shared her distrust and was far blunter about it. Each evening, many of the hotel's residents and the locals took their leave in the hotel's primitive bar, which featured an ancient beer pump that operated on the honor system. According to Pegler, Pop Ederle was a regular, as were both Joe Corthes and Burgess, and "Ederle is a pretty outspoken gentlemen who becomes more outspoken as the evening wears along." Whenever Corthes and Burgess spoke French with each other, Ederle would burst from his chair, shouting, "We all speak English at this table. Burgess speaks English. Corthes speaks English. Then talk United States. We ain't a bunch of dummies."

Trudy's insistence on holding Burgess to his contract was the cause of a great deal of foot stomping in the Cannon camp. Lillian Cannon was now without a trainer. They'd had Cape Gris-Nez to themselves for nearly a month, but now that Trudy was in town she was getting all the attention—from the press and everyone else—leaving Cannon feeling like she'd been stood up at the altar.

Despite her newspaper deal, in reality Cannon had very little chance of swimming the Channel. Compared to Trudy, she simply wasn't that strong a swimmer. Pegler, who knew a thing or two about athletes, took one look at Cannon and immediately dismissed her chances of ever successfully swimming the Channel. He called her a "warm water swimmer" and described her as "short, like Trudie
[sic]
Ederle, but, unlike Trudie, she seems thin and insufficiently upholstered to stand the cold of the Channel water. Lillian's hands are feminine and experts who follow the Channel swims year after year hold that no person with delicate hands can ever swim across because after only a few hours in the water thin hands fold up into fists and can't be opened to make the strokes." Pegler was correct. A woman of Cannon's build and stature utilizing the breaststroke had virtually no chance of swimming the Channel—it simply took too long and the swimmer became too cold. Even Burgess seemed to sense that, as he had tried to convince Cannon to experiment with overarm strokes. Neither Cannon nor her ghostwriter, the Scripps-Howard newsman Minott Saunders, would admit it, but her effort was doomed before it even started. As a swimmer, Cannon was a fiction while Trudy, on the other hand, was the genuine article, a world-class athlete.

While some have argued that during the summer of 1926 there was a great competition between Ederle, Cannon, and several other female swimmers who were all trying to become the first woman to swim the Channel, that was far more the artificial hyperbole of a few newspaper reporters than fact. Among all the men and women trying to swim the Channel in the summer of 1926, Trudy Ederle's only real competition was history itself. The other female contenders at the Channel that year were not nearly as accomplished or talented, and as later events would demonstrate, their approach was far different and their chances of success far less likely. Only Trudy looked at the Channel and swam it like she was in a race, with the expectation she would finish. Everyone else just hoped to survive.

The dispute over Burgess created something of a chill between Cannon and Trudy, at least in Cannon's mind. A few days later, in a snit, she moved out of the Hotel du Phare, taking up residency in the small and even more primitive Hotel du Sirene directly on the beach.

Now that Trudy had Burgess to herself, she began training in earnest. Of all the swimmers on either side of the Strait of Dover planning a swim, Trudy was the clear favorite to succeed. Bookmakers were more than happy to take wagers on any of the swimmers, giving long odds for everyone but Trudy. A year before, she'd opened at 10 to 1 and the smart money pushed the odds down to 2 to 1 by the time she finally entered the water. This year betting on Trudy opened at 3.5 to 1, and after a flurry of bets against her pushed the odds up to 6 to 1, press reports indicated that bookmakers eventually expected Trudy to go off at even money. The smart money got their bets down early.

One man who did was Henry Ederle. No one seemed more aware of the financial impact a successful crossing would create—sometimes it was all he talked about. Before leaving New York he'd heard an erroneous report that the odds against Trudy were 50 to 1 and was prepared to bet $25, 000, ensuring a payout of $1.25 million if Trudy succeeded. Although Henry was disappointed to learn that the odds were far less lucrative, he still bet the full amount on Trudy to succeed. Even though Henry Ederle was wealthy, the Ederles had always lived somewhat frugally, their only real extravagance the cottage in the Highlands. But Pop Ederle anticipated that that was about to change. He'd always been a big supporter of Trudy's swimming career, but as her fame and her earning potential increased, Pop Ederle focused more and more upon the money. Although he had been driving the same car for years, now that he had promised Trudy that red roadster if she swam the Channel, he was also thinking that "maybe we get a new sedan for Momma and me."

Trudy's actual training schedule hardly varied from that of the previous year, consisting of increasingly longer swims in Channel waters, with Burgess either swimming alongside, trying desperately to keep up, or, more often, following Trudy in a rowboat. Meg often joined Trudy in the water, helping the time pass as the girls chattered away like they were back in the Highlands.

Burgess, unlike Wolffe, knew his role and knew better than to try to get Trudy to abandon the crawl. In fact, before Trudy had left New York, Louis Handley, while seeing her off at the pier, told Trudy, "Do me one big favor. Don't change your stroke. Never once do the backstroke, or the sidestroke." Then, looking her directly in the eyes and measuring every word he added, "Maintain your straight American crawl. It is faster and better, no matter how long the swim." Trudy promised Handley she would, and made certain Burgess realized that point was absolutely nonnegotiable.

Burgess had targeted several time periods when the tides would be favorable to make an attempt, focusing on a few small windows of neap tides surrounding July 26, August 10, and August 21, but although the weather was delightful when Trudy first reached Cape Gris-Nez, conditions soon turned terrible. The sun stayed behind the clouds, and it was cold and damp—some days the temperature never even reached fifty degrees. Old-timers who knew the Channel well believed the weather would remain off all summer and doubted that anyone would make it across. Even Trudy, who rarely complained about the weather, groused, "It seems like November."

While waiting for a break in conditions she tried to keep occupied. Once again she spent her spare time golfing on the beach on what she termed the "national course," one she laid out at low tide on the odd afternoon when it wasn't raining, and Trudy even introduced her father to the game. When the weather allowed they sometimes held cookouts, but otherwise there was little to do on Cape Gris-Nez apart from playing one of two Victrolas at the hotel—Trudy had left one behind in 1925 and brought another with her in 1926. Since Victrolas didn't get seasick, this time she planned to leave the band onshore and swim to the accompaniment of a gramophone instead.

As June dragged on everyone was getting a bit bored, particularly the journalists at the hotel bar, who had little to do but look at the Channel every day. Sydney Williams of the
Paris Herald
tried to break the monotony. He resorted to writing profiles about a fictitious swimmer of his own invention, an Eskimo he dubbed Itchy Guk, who found the Channel waters too warm and was waiting for them to cool. Then Helmi arrived in mid-June for his annual run at the Channel and was welcomed warmly, even by Trudy—she didn't blame him for the trouble the previous summer. The big Egyptian livened things up at the hotel, for he drank the same way he swam—slowly and for a long time—and he liked to talk and joke. His nickname for Trudy was "the Kid," and he told her a friend of his had named a thoroughbred "the Kid" after her, but joked that it was the slowest horse in the stable.

Apart from his effect on Trudy's mood, Helmi gave Meg a break by providing Trudy with another training partner. Once the two ventured so far out into the Channel that, as a cruise ship approached, Helmi had to warn her not to get too close. He was afraid she'd be spotted, mistaken for some poor soul who had fallen overboard from another vessel, rescued, and then taken back to New York.

Trudy continued to train and prepare herself for the ordeal ahead. To that end she sent her sister to Paris with instructions to buy some silk. Trudy and Meg had been experimenting.

When she had tried to swim the Channel the previous year she noticed that the longer she stayed in the water the more her swimsuit had bothered her. The one-piece singlet had caused significant chafing around her arms and had lost its shape over the course of her swim. By the time she was in mid-Channel, the neckline of the suit was gaping open like the mouth of the basking shark, creating considerable drag on Trudy as she tried to pull herself through the water.

Although many male swimmers, and even some female aspirants, swam either nude or topless, Trudy was far too modest to try that approach. This year she had brought with her a suit made of silk, which helped with the chafing, but the scoop neck still slowed her down.

She and Meg took matters into their own hands and came up with their own design. The original suit featured a small skirt, which they removed, and, using the skirt and additional material Meg bought in Paris, they fashioned a two-piece suit, rich blue in color, consisting of a brassiere that opened and closed in the front, and a bottom, akin to a pair of tight-fitting briefs. The clasps on the brassiere would allow Trudy to make adjustments in the water in the event the material stretched and began to bother her.

The result worked beautifully—Trudy could stay in the water day after day for hours. The tight-fitting top caused comparatively little drag, and she didn't have to worry about chafing. Although they did not realize it at the time, the two sisters had created the world's first bikini some two decades before Louis Reard and Jacques Heim received credit for it. Unfortunately, neither Trudy nor her sister realized they had created not only something brand-new but something with such commercial potential. They never thought to trademark or patent the design and lost the opportunity to earn untold millions of dollars.

As June turned into July the weather remained unforgiving. With the baseball season in full swing and an upcoming bout between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney for the heavyweight championship of the world, Westbrook Pegler returned to the United States, leaving Harpman behind until Trudy either swam or failed to swim the Channel. Apart from a holiday party on July 4, Trudy was beginning to get a little stir-crazy as day after day passed with the same rough combination of rain, wind, and clouds. The residents of the Hotel du Phare, virtually all of whom were either waiting to swim the Channel, working with someone waiting to swim the Channel, or journalists covering the Channel swimmers, began to experience the Cape Gris-Nez equivalent of cabin fever. Virtually every conversation, no matter how innocuous, ended up being a conversation about either conditions in the Channel or the weather. Trudy wanted to leave Cape Gris-Nez to spend a few days in Paris herself, perhaps even to participate in a swim down the Seine, but was afraid that if she did she might either miss a brief period of fine weather or that in her absence Burgess just might return to Lillian Cannon. In the meantime, as she told Harpman, "I am fed up on the Channel swim talk. It seems as though everybody I meet insists on talking about no other subject. Especially am I weary of those who delight in telling how terrible the Channel is to swim.

"I think," she added, "about half the difficulty of swimming the Channel is caused by having to listen to so much discouraging talk before you get started. Then, when you're in the middle of the Channel, you are apt to think all of this that you have heard and you lose your nerve."

One of those people full of discouraging talk was Jabez Wolffe. He showed up in late June, looking for a swimmer to train. Despite the huge number of competitors in Cape Gris-Nez, word had traveled fast since the previous summer, and no one, not even Lillian Cannon, who was still without a trainer, wanted to sign on with Wolffe. He even took up residence in the Hotel du Phare and made regular appearances in the bar. Trudy and Wolffe had brokered a public and, from Trudy's side of things, ghostwritten peace accord, but the two still had little use for each other. Trudy remained wary of her former trainer, and Wolffe wanted nothing more than to coach another swimmer across the water and thereby beat Ederle to her goal. He thought he had been hired by Clarabelle Barrett, who was financing her quest on a shoestring through a series of one-hundred-dollar subscriptions from family friends, but Barrett had yet to show. While he waited he simply added to the poisonous atmosphere in the hotel.