Chasing Icarus (4 page)

Dwight’s prophecy came to pass, and by the end of the Boston Meet women were falling over themselves to fly with the Englishman. For Grahame-White it was the opportunity to combine several of his passions, and he instructed Sydney McDonald to charge $500 for a five-minute trip. Dozens of women were happy to pay this enormous sum, from Katharine Reid, “a spinsterish schoolmarm who arrived accoutered for the air in outsize motoring goggles, legs swathed mummywise in burlap,” to Marie Campbell, who, in the opinion of the
New York Herald
, was “an uncommonly attractive young woman . . . with comely features.”

Of even more interest was the sight of Miss Eleonora Sears being helped up into the seat behind Grahame-White. Instantly, the American newspapers identified the twenty-eight-year-old brunette as Grahame-White’s feminine equivalent. Sears was a Boston socialite, the great-great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson and the daughter of a father regarded as one of the wealthiest men in America. She had many other attributes: good looks, charm, talent, and an insatiable energy. The previous spring she had walked 108 miles in two days from Burlingame to Del Monte in California, and barely a day passed without the papers reporting on her latest athletic feat. As for potential suitors, they couldn’t keep up. In the same week that Grahame-White arrived in Boston, the
Chicago Daily Tribune
reported that Sears, “the society girl who plays polo, golf, tennis, rides to the hounds, shoots, hunts and fences, with a vim and a dash that have won her worldwide reputation, has two rivals for her hand.”

One, the paper continued, was the arctic hunter Paul J. Rainey, who had traipsed “almost to the north pole to get her some bear pelts,” and the other was Harold Vanderbilt, who had first come across Miss Sears in the fall of 1909 when, as a Harvard law student, he unsuccessfully defended her in a Boston court on charges of overspeeding her automobile. Vanderbilt was not a natural athlete, commented the
Tribune
, but so strong was his ardor that he “had to play tennis in the broiling sun, golf till the soles of his feet cracked and try out occasionally a bucking broncho [
sic
], when he would have much preferred reclining upon a silken divan.”

But with Rainey now in the snowy wastes in search of more pelts and Vanderbilt touring Europe, Sears saw nothing wrong in broadening her horizons. Of course, she had to put the opposition in the shade, and her flight time of eleven minutes and thirty seconds was a record for a female passenger in America. “It was perfectly heavenly!” she cried to reporters afterward. “Just the finest thing I ever enjoyed . . . Really, honest and truly, I wasn’t scared a bit. Mr. Grahame-White just makes you feel that it is all coming out all right. I knew from the time we left the ground until we landed that I wasn’t in the least danger when he was driving.” Miss Sears autographed a wing of the plane, as was the habit among Grahame-White’s admirers, then handed over the check for $500 with a promise that it wouldn’t be the last.

One person who hadn’t been persuaded to take a trip with Grahame-White—even a free one—was President Taft. He had been a fascinated spectator at the Boston Meet on September 9 but declined the invitation to fly with a quip about his 250-pound size. TAFT INTEREST PLEASES WHITE was the headline in the
Boston Globe
, leaving one to wonder if the Englishman hadn’t now usurped the president in national importance. John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston (and the grandfather of John F. Kennedy), accepted an offer and later praised Grahame-White’s “perfect control of his machine.” The three men got on famously, underlining the Englishman’s magnetic personality. Princes, presidents, pressmen, Peter Pan—they all appeared to be under the spell of Grahame-White.

But the nine-day Boston Meet had a serious side, and Grahame-White never let himself be distracted by a pretty face or a big name. He was in America to win, and at Boston he did so spectacularly, taking four first prizes, including in the blue-ribbon event, the thirty-three-mile race from the airfield to Boston Light
*
and back. That earned him $10,000, bringing his total earnings during the meet to $22,500. At a time when office clerks earned on average $5 a week, store assistants $7, and railway conductors $10, it was a fantastic sum. Boston threw a dinner in his honor, and a starstruck Mayor Fitzgerald handed over the check along with a silver loving cup on which was inscribed FROM BOSTON FRIENDS, IN ADMIRATION OF HIS SKILL AND SPORTSMANSHIP AS AN AVIATOR.

Grahame-White was now arguably the most famous man in America, and the size of the offers he received reflected his enormous pulling power. He accepted a $50,000 contract to fly at the Brockton Fair in Massachusetts in early October (but turned down a series of speaking engagements with the Keith vaudeville agency at $2,000 a throw), then left for New York with his manager to discuss with the event’s promoters the possibility of entering the International Aviation Cup race. Of course, he would make sure he found time to take in a Broadway show, perhaps
Our Miss Gibbs
at the Knickerbocker Theater.

A month later, on the morning of Saturday, October 15, Grahame-White had banked his Brockton check for $50,000 and was a member of the three-man British team that would contest the International Aviation Cup against America and France at Long Island’s Belmont Park racecourse.
†
He intended to leave Washington, D.C., in a couple of days, once he’d fulfilled his engagements, among them an appearance as the guest of honor at a party thrown by Mr. and Mrs. John Barry Ryan at the Cosmos Club that evening.

The six weeks he had thus far spent in the United States had been an unalloyed success. Aside from the money he had made and the women he had wooed, Grahame-White had enjoyed the American attitude to life. The Americans’ hard-nosed approach to business and their straight-talking was more in tune with his own personality than that of the pettifogging bureaucrats and out-of-touch imperialists who, in his opinion, held back Britain. He was in a sunny mood when he arrived at the Benning racetrack for another day’s flying. A reporter told him that the airship
America
was under way.

What did Grahame-White think of its chances? “I think Walter Well-man has every chance of success,” he replied, adding, “If I should say what I really think about the future of aeronautics, people would laugh at me. I believe that the time will come when the public will look back upon such men as I am and wonder how we could have been so foolish as to trust our lives in the airplane of today . . . the time will come when transatlantic airships will be as common as steamers are today, perhaps more so.”

A similar question was being asked that same day approximately seven hundred miles west of Washington in St. Louis, Missouri, by a reporter for the city’s
Post-Dispatch
newspaper. The respondents were some of the principal players in the field of American aeronautics, gathered in St. Louis either because they were aviators flying in the meet or because they were balloonists preparing to take part in the Fifth International Balloon Cup race. Harry Honeywell and Alan Hawley fell into the latter category, but neither could rustle up much enthusiasm for Wellman’s chances. “I hate to make a prediction,” said Hawley, who then didn’t and mumbled only, “I wish him success but . . .”

Honeywell was hardly any more enthusiastic, musing that he wouldn’t fancy being in Wellman’s shoes if the airship’s motor should pack up. Fortunately for the reporter, one of the aviators flying for the Wright brothers’ exhibition team was more forthcoming. “Wellman is taking an awfully long chance,” reckoned Arch Hoxsey. “He may make it, if he doesn’t encounter storms and if his equipment is absolutely perfect.”

It was Hoxsey’s twenty-sixth birthday and he could look back on the past year with pride. In January he had been one of the thousands riding the train from Los Angeles to Aviation Field to gape in awe at Louis Paulhan and Glenn Curtiss. That had been Hoxsey’s first sight of a flying machine, but just as Grahame-White had been mesmerized by his encounter with Wilbur Wright in France, so Hoxsey had undergone an epiphany. He had quit his job as a chauffeur to Los Angeles millionaire John Gates, kissed his widowed mother good-bye at the home they shared in Pasadena, and headed east to Dayton, Ohio, home of the Wrights. Orville and Wilbur had had their share of cranks turning up on their doorstep begging them to teach them how to fly, but Hoxsey was different. For a start he had studied automobile mechanics during his youth, which had led to a stint as a racing driver in Europe. Then there was his appearance, his cheerful blue eyes behind a pincenez balanced on a prominent nose. Marguerite Martyn, a reporter for the
St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
, who had visited the St. Louis Meet earlier in the week to see if any homegrown aviators were capable of giving Grahame-White a run for his money, described Hoxsey as “severely correct in his attire, you would take him for some rather ponderous scholar.” Miss Martyn was upbraided when she addressed Hoxsey as “Archie.” It was “Arch.” Hoxsey was clean-living—he wouldn’t have been taken on by the Wrights if he had been anything but—and he would even give his machine a good dusting before each flight. Just about his only vice was a fondness for chewing gum. His jaws were always chomping, either on the ground or up in the air when he was performing one of his stunts with his good friend and fellow Wright flier Ralph Johnstone, from Kansas City.

On Saturday evening Hoxsey was presented with a silver plate at a dinner held in St. Louis’s Racquet Club in recognition of all he’d accomplished during the meet, particularly the hundred-mile flight from Springfield, Illinois, to St. Louis, a feat that Hoxsey played down. “The credit is due to the biplane,” he told the audience of his three-and-a-half-hour trip a week earlier. “Several men could have made the trip.” Then Ralph Johnstone and another of the Wright team, Walter Brookins, received gold medals and warm words of appreciation for all their efforts. Johnstone had entertained the estimated sixty thousand at Kinloch Park that afternoon by flying “repeatedly close to the people in the pavilion, sometimes passing within 10 feet of them. Once he headed straight for one of the pavilions at a low altitude about 5 feet from the ground. For a moment it seemed that he would crash into the light fence and the crowd behind it, but when he was within 15 feet of it, he tilted his elevator and shot up over the people’s heads.”

The thirty-year-old Johnstone collected his medal and returned to his table, where his wife, a former actress, greeted him with a kiss. This was a rare night off for the couple, a break from their six-year-old son, Ralph junior, who was back at the Jefferson Hotel in the care of a nanny. The pair had met a few years earlier when Johnstone toured America and later Europe as a trick cyclist, earning a decent wage, but nothing compared with what he raked in now as an aviator. Even though he’d been one of the Americans eclipsed by Grahame-White at the Boston Meet, Johnstone had still earned $5,000 for nine days’ work. Unfortunately for him, it all went to the Wrights, as did every last dime of prize money won by one of the brothers’ exhibition team. In return the aviators were paid $20 a week and a further $50 for every day they flew. The fliers had at first refused the terms, to the amusement of the Wrights. No contract, no airplane. So with a grumble the men all signed, promising as they put pen to paper that they would also not drink or gamble during a meet.

Johnstone had been taught to fly six months’ earlier by Walter Brookins on Huffman Prairie in Ohio, where the Wrights had experimented so often with their invention in 1904–5. They made for an odd couple, Brookins and Johnstone, even though they enjoyed one another’s company. The twenty-two-year-old Brookins had singularly failed to impress Marguerite Martyn, the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
reporter, who reckoned that Brooky, as the Wrights called him, was a chip off the old brothers’ block, though that was no surprise for Brookins had grown up in the same neighborhood and had been taught at public school by their sister, Katharine. “It may be that the Wrights have succeeded in converting him into one of their perfectly adjusted pieces of machinery,” wrote a dismayed Martyn. She found the dark-eyed Brookins “unapproachable” and “diffident” and, worst of all, he displayed “genuine boyish scorn for all things feminine.” No, concluded Martyn, Walter Brookins was most definitely not heartthrob material. Johnstone, on the other hand, showed potential. “He is quite the most ‘showy’ in his personality,” wrote Martyn, “and he is the handsomest of the [St. Louis] aviators, and fits the popular description of a matinee idol, but his qualifications are signally reduced by the fact that he has already succumbed to the net we would weave for him.” In other words, Johnstone had a wife.

At the St. Louis dinner Johnstone was his usual ebullient self, “happy go-lucky . . . big-hearted, good-natured, one always found him joking and smiling.” But it was all an act. In reality his bonhomie was like a bandage that concealed from his wife his sense of impending doom. Neither she nor little Ralph was allowed near his hangar in the final few minutes before a flight because it was there, as he prepared to go up into the air, that Johnstone’s fear began to seep out like blood through the bandage. First he became quiet, then mournful, and Hoxsey, though the younger of the pair, would play the part of the mother Johnstone had lost in his youth. Don’t worry, Ralph, he would tell him with a tonic smile. Remember what they call us, we’re the “Stardust Twins,” the best stunt fliers in the world. Nothing will happen to us.

When Brookins collected his gold medal from Albert Lambert, president of the Aero Club of St. Louis, he declined to make a speech: “I do not care to speak quite as much as I care to fly.” If Grahame-White had been present, he would have choked on his cognac at such a missed opportunity for self-promotion, but Brookins had the Englishman very much in his sights that evening, even though he was seven hundred miles east in Washington. Brookins still seethed at the memory of his recent role in Boston’s Claude Grahame-White show, where, on the orders of the Wrights, Brookins hadn’t contested the race to Boston Light and back. “The course is too dangerous for our machines,” Wilbur Wright had told reporters later when asked why no American had challenged Grahame-White. The admission humiliated Brookins and the Wrights, as did the sound of thirty-five thousand American voices singing “God Save the King” when Grahame-White stood on the winners’ podium. But the hour for revenge was fast approaching, and as Brookins endured the small talk of his fellow diners he was confident that in exactly two weeks’ time, on the day of the International Aviation Cup race, Grahame-White would get his comeuppance. The Wrights had just finished testing their latest airplane, and the results had even put a smile— albeit momentarily—on the faces of Wilbur and Orville. Vague news of these trials had leaked out to the press, but as
Fly
magazine reported at the start of October, no one could yet shed much light on the matter: “Orville Wright has been flying at Dayton with a new machine so swift that it recently got away from him, ending its flight in a smash. Nothing definite is known of this machine except that its planes have been trimmed down to their lowest margin of lifting capacity. Who will drive the machine is still a mystery.” Not for Brookins, it wasn’t.