The Lost Pilots

by Corey Mead

  One night, when Lancaster and Jessie were at their lowest, Shelton suggested that the three of them use Lancaster’s new car to drive to Florida for the upcoming Miami All-American Air Races, which Lancaster had attended with Kiki back in 1929. The Miami air races were one of the nation’s largest such annual gatherings, with hundreds of participating aircraft. Not only might Lancaster, Jessie, and Shelton be able to participate in the races, but they could also network in the hopes of finding jobs. Even better, they could potentially use Shelton’s Lockheed to set up a small charter business in the tropics, one that would transport customers from the Florida Keys to Cuba and the Bahamas. Shelton had previously owned a charter company in Missouri, and though that company had failed, he was keen to try again.

  Only the briefest of discussions was required. At the end of December 1931, the trio hopped in Lancaster’s black Lincoln town car to set off for Miami. Along for the ride were Lancaster and Jessie’s fox terrier, Mickey, a “perfect house dog,” in Lancaster’s words, and their thoroughbred British bulldog, Bozo, a “delightful old fool.” Shelton would travel with them as far as New Orleans before boarding a train to New York to reclaim his Lockheed. Lancaster, Jessie, and Shelton hadn’t drawn up a contract; they were relying on the bonds of friendship instead.

  As the group sped on its way, Jessie began to think of Miami as an almost magical place, like Oz, where all their problems would be solved. Their planned charter company would provide them with enough money to survive in the current brutal economy, after which they could return to the more glamorous business of setting world records and basking in the public’s adulation. Bursting with anticipation, they stopped in the middle of the blazing Arizona desert to formally shake hands in acknowledgment of their new partnership. In Miami, Jessie imagined, the three of them “would ride out the Depression until the flush days came again with the blue skies above us and glorious days.”

  When they parted at the New Orleans train platform, Shelton pledged to meet Lancaster and Jessie at the Miami air races, with his Lockheed in tow. Following another round of handshakes, Lancaster and Jessie climbed back into the Lincoln for the final stretch of their journey.

  As soon as they arrived in Miami, Lancaster and Jessie joined up with Major Jack French, Jessie’s old booking agent in the city. Years earlier, French had been the first person to invite the couple to Miami; now, to help out with rent, he would serve as their housemate. On January 2, 1932, the three moved into an airy white terra-cotta-roofed house in Coral Gables, obtaining a twelve-month lease at forty-five dollars a month. It was, rather astonishingly, the first time that Lancaster and Jessie had ever lived together—though, ironically enough, their relationship had over the past twelve months morphed into something almost wholly platonic, not romantic, a fact that somehow failed to register with the always unmindful Lancaster. Their emotional connection remained as cherished as ever, and they were occasionally still physical, but the truth is that their life as a couple had grown stagnant, regardless of their intentions. Economic circumstances during the previous few years had forced them to spend so much time away from each other building—or attempting to build—their separate careers that they had never had a chance to properly create a life for themselves, in the same place, as a couple. The fact that their relationship remained a secret was, of course, an even more dominant factor, along with the concerted efforts of Jessie’s mother. Jessie was belatedly coming to realize that some major part of herself felt unfulfilled, even if Lancaster didn’t recognize it. With the romance gone, what remained in its place was the inexpressible but wholly unbreakable bond that had initially been forged during their England-to-Australia flight. That bond, which their series of near-death escapes had hardened, existed on a far deeper plane than mere romance—which the traumatic events of the coming months would all too soon prove.

  In Miami, their two-story property, at 2321 S.W. 21st Terrace, was surrounded by an acre of lush foliage. The setting was as peaceful as it was attractive, with the closest neighbor barely visible through the greenery. As Jessie later described the residence, “The windows were framed in purple bougainvillea and the trailing jasmine vine. At night time, [the] scent would drift through the open windows and fill the upstairs sleeping porch . . . with its overpowering sweetness.” Jack French occupied the lower bedroom, Lancaster the upstairs sleeping porch, and Jessie a main bedroom just steps away from the sleeping porch.

  After so many years in transit, with countless hours spent in apartments and hotel rooms, Lancaster and Jessie were delighted at their find. The night they moved in they celebrated by pretending that their moonshine was Bacardi and gin. “This time I really believe it will be for a lasting period,” Lancaster wrote joyfully in his diary. “For once we have had the best of a bargain. Chubbie seems so happy over the house. She is her old sweet self again.” (Lancaster always called Jessie by her childhood nickname, “Chubbie,” which her family had originally dubbed her because of her chipmunk cheeks.)

  One wrinkle in their happiness, however, was lack of news from Gentry Shelton, which served to compound their money worries. Shelton cabled from Ohio the night they moved into their house, but he offered no real information. “Damn Gentry!” Lancaster jotted in his diary, calling him a “blighter.” “Am keenly disappointed. . . . We telegraph him imploring him to communicate—but no reply.” Still, the couple didn’t lack for friends. With the Miami All-American Air Races only days away, pilots from several countries, many of whom they’d known for years, descended on Miami. On January 4 Lancaster and Jessie threw a party at their house, where the drinking started early and vigorously. Their friends were “here for a good time and [got] very tight,” Lancaster noted. In varying states of collapse, many of these friends crashed for the night in the enclosed second-floor sun porch that housed Lancaster’s bed.

  When the revelers awoke the next morning the drinking picked up where it had left off. By evening Jessie was swimming in alcohol, and when she tried to drop one of their friends back at the Columbus Hotel, she smashed the Lincoln into another car. Lancaster, in the backseat, immediately switched places with her and pretended to have been the driver when the police came. As a result, his driver’s license was suspended and he received a $50 fine, leading him to grouse, “American justice is all wet.” At least, Lancaster hoped, Jessie had learned a valuable lesson about drinking and driving.

  The 1932 Miami All-American Air Races, meanwhile, proved far less successful than in previous years. Trapped in the throes of the Depression, few potential audience members were willing to pay the required attendance fees. Competitive aviation was also becoming old news, and it no longer possessed the ability to surprise. Even a performance by a Jimmy Doolittle–led contingent of military aircraft couldn’t quite make up for the gloom. In his diary Lancaster wrote that he and Jessie felt “out of things” at the meet, since they “had no ship to race,” thanks to Shelton’s continued absence.

  Only a single business contact at the air races proved hopeful: two men from a new company called Latin-American Airways told Lancaster and Jessie they might be interested in employing them as charter pilots if they could procure an airplane. The men, Mark Tancrel and Jack Russell, announced they were about to travel out west to investigate potential flight routes between the United States and Mexico. Lancaster thought the idea had potential, and he told Tancrel and Russell about Shelton’s monoplane. He couldn’t help feeling slightly suspicious of Tancrel, however, who was decked out in a naval uniform and claimed to be a former captain in the U.S. Navy. Lancaster was dubious: the skinny, dark-haired Tancrel, who had a sunken chin, wide cheeks, and a prominent nose, seemed more like a disreputable salesman than like a former military officer. He found Jack Russell, a rugged, solidly built man with large ears and an expansive smile, to be more reassuring.

  Between setting up their new house and the social activity surrounding the air races, Lancaster and Jessie’s first days in Miami passed in a whirl. But with no work lined up
and no sign of Shelton, financial worries ate at them. They loved their house, and they loved the warm Miami weather, but Lancaster’s diary entries reveal the depth of their anxieties. “Cash getting low!!! . . . The outlook for the immediate future is none too bright. I cannot see daylight yet. Chubbie very depressed. . . . It’s a sort of helpless feeling, this utter lack of cash. No sign of work, either! . . . Chubbie still the best little sport over matters, but she is blue, too. . . . Money seems to be getting scarcer every day.” At the rare times when they scrounged up enough cash for fuel, Lancaster would fly them over Miami while they basked in the sights of their new sun-splashed metropolis.

  Though Lancaster and Jessie were both by nature spirited and upbeat, their savings were nearly gone, and their moods couldn’t help but be affected. They still owed their landlady half of a six-month advance. Their housemate, Major Jack French, despite his pledges to the contrary, proved unable to scrounge up any money for rent, and he was a lazy, inconsiderate cohabitant. Lancaster was reduced to “hunting” for dinner with Mickey, the fox terrier—which, in reality, meant stealing chickens from neighbors’ yards. Lancaster and Jessie’s only success came in selling short articles about their flying adventures to magazines like Adventure and Liberty. A story about the venomous krait snake that had invaded their plane in Burma; a how-to article by Lancaster titled “If You’re Fit, You Can Fly”: these were their specialties.

  Jessie, the primary breadwinner for the past several years, knew how doggedly Lancaster was searching out work. But her nerves were growing frayed by their near-poverty existence, and, unfairly or not, she sometimes begrudged his failed efforts. None of his harebrained schemes for success ever seemed to pan out, while his signature heedlessness had, if anything, only grown more pronounced over time. Not that she thought for a moment of breaking up their partnership. But despite her best efforts, her frustration with Lancaster increased. Irritated, she would retreat to her room, which soon became her coveted private space. “I was able to lock myself in away from everything whenever I wanted to,” she later recalled. “I would read or write or just go there to get away from all the flying talk for a little while.”

  The truth is that, from a business standpoint, Jessie no longer needed Lancaster. She had become the more celebrated pilot of the two, and indeed, many people had advised her that Lancaster’s presence was actually a drain on her career. Repeatedly, she had been urged to cut him loose, though she was far too loyal to ever consider that an option. But after so many years of drifting in America, and still nothing to show for their once-ardent affair, Jessie’s sense of their relationship was undergoing a significant transformation. “I was cooling off,” she later admitted. “I thought there was no future for us.”

  In mid-January, Lancaster finally talked with Shelton, who called from Floyd Bennett airfield in Queens. Shelton had gotten his hands on a Curtiss Robin monoplane, which he promised to fly down to Miami. By this point Lancaster had little faith in Shelton’s promises; he was therefore disappointed, but not surprised, when Shelton phoned the next week to say that Lancaster should come to New York instead.

  Though Lancaster had misgivings about the trip, he and Jessie desperately needed a plane if they were to earn a real living. So Lancaster reluctantly sold his watch, bid a sad farewell to “little Chubbie,” and took a train to the Jacksonville airport, where he hoped to hitch a ride to New York. His efforts failed. The airport manager and the manager of the hotel where Lancaster stayed were “kind, but not helpful,” Lancaster wrote, but “(w)ho is, these days?” He hopped on a bus instead, using the money from his watch to buy a twenty-five-dollar ticket to New York City. He spent a rough two days stretched out in the bus’s backseat, feeling “as dirty as a chimney sweep.”

  When he arrived in New York, Lancaster quickly rounded up Shelton, who was getting drunk with an old friend. Shelton and his friend had dates with two young women that evening, but early the next morning, Lancaster shook Shelton awake, and they headed out to Floyd Bennett Field to examine the Robin. The plane, Lancaster grimly reported, was “not new by any means.” One day later Shelton left New York to visit his father in St. Louis. He promised to wire Lancaster money to fly the Curtiss Robin to Miami, but, as Lancaster had half-expected, the funds never materialized.

  That night, Lancaster telephoned Jessie, but the call went poorly: “She disappoints me greatly by her failure to be her sweet self for a few minutes,” he dejectedly wrote afterward. “(D)id so want cheering up as things are still black. . . . Oh, it’s vile.” Two nights later, still in low spirits, he wrote, “Miss Chubbie more than anything. . . . A dog’s life!” Lancaster spent his time in the city visiting old friends, many of whom owed him money but were far too broke, in such dire times, to pay him back. “Everyone is very nice to me,” he wrote. “Have no money, but what the hell!” The Depression had its cold fingers into everybody. Stress, desperation, hopelessness: these were the overriding emotions of the men and women in Lancaster’s aviation circle. Everybody owed everybody money, and no one had a penny to pay.

  By February 1, Lancaster had grown “heartily sick” of New York, so it was all the more unexpected when, two days later, he received a mysterious reprieve: a Miami attorney named Ernest Huston wired him a hundred dollars. Lancaster didn’t know what the money order was for; he only knew it was enough to cover his debts in New York, and to pay for his return to Miami. But this good news was briefly overshadowed when he returned to the Aberdeen Hotel to find two telegrams from Jessie imploring him to call right away. “Am in a cold sweat . . . What can it be?” he wrote in his diary, after his first calls didn’t go through. “[T]his urgent request to telephone Chubbie has knocked me flat. God, if anything has happened to her I shall suffer as I have never suffered in my whole life.”

  Unaware of Jessie’s waning feelings, Lancaster’s obsession with her had, by this point, become the overriding factor in his existence, with his own well-being now entirely dependent on his perception of Jessie’s happiness. Though his diaries are filled with details of regular social interaction with a wide swath of friends, he offers no evidence that these brought him much pleasure. Instead, his thoughts return constantly to Jessie—what she might be thinking or doing at any particular moment—and how he might further sacrifice himself for her. When, late on February 3, he finally got through to Miami, he wrote, “Just talked to Chubbie. Gee! It was wonderful to hear her voice. I love her more than my very life. I think she needs me. If I did not think this I would give my life to make her happy. . . . Longing to hold [her] once again.”

  In fact, Jessie had wanted to talk with Lancaster to deliver good news. The hundred-dollar money order had come attached to a job offer: Jessie had been approached once again by the men from the Miami All-American Air Races, Mark Tancrel and Jack Russell of Latin-American Airways, who remained interested in hiring her and Lancaster as pilots. There was additional good news, as well: a New York publisher had contacted Jessie to express interest in a book about her life, provided she could write one. But as evidenced by Lancaster’s diary, neither of these facts particularly registered with him; he was relieved only to hear Jessie’s voice. So great was his excitement at returning home to see her that he rolled out of bed at 6 a.m., having not slept a wink.

  Much to his chagrin, poor weather kept him grounded in New York for the day. Killing time, he met George Morris, a literary agent who had sold one of his stories to Liberty magazine, for lunch. They kicked around ideas for additional articles and stories. Lancaster then headed to the Army and Navy Club, where he won six dollars in a game of bridge, improving his mood. (A few days earlier he’d tried to cancel his club membership for financial reasons, but they had waved him off, saying that many of their members could no longer afford to pay club dues.) He spent the rest of the day trudging around Manhattan, up to West 97th Street and down to East 47th Street, saying goodbye to friends and repaying the small loans that he had racked up during his visit.

  The following day he
managed to fly the Curtiss Robin to the Washington, D.C., naval field, but the plane engine’s cylinders misfired the entire way, forcing three emergency landings. Navy mechanics fitted the Robin’s engine with twenty-four dollars’ worth of spark plugs, which vastly improved the plane’s performance, but rendered Lancaster effectively broke. He flew to the small, impoverished town of Florence, South Carolina, where Jessie wired him money. Liberty magazine had just published his article “If You’re Fit, You Can Fly,” and a Standard Oil Company man at the airport who had read it treated Lancaster like a celebrity, bringing him home for dinner. For a “brief time,” Lancaster noted in his diary, the article had put him “to the front again.” It was a nostalgic taste of the old life.

  When he finally made it back to Florida, he landed at Jacksonville, where the friendly airport manager fronted him ten dollars’ worth of fuel. His subsequent flight down the coast to Miami was “delightful,” but, to his great disappointment, neither Jessie nor Major Jack French had come to the airport to greet him. He found himself shaking hands instead with Mark Tancrel and a woman who introduced herself as Jack Russell’s wife. Latin-American Airways was, it seemed, chomping at the bit to hire him and Jessie for their proposed charter route between the United States and Mexico. In his dismayed, rumpled, travel-weary state, Lancaster had no way of knowing that this unexpected meeting would kick off the final, tragic act of his and Jessie’s time in America.