The Lost Pilots

by Corey Mead

  9

  FUTURE UNKNOWN

  Tancrel, still decked out in his naval captain uniform—which looked as ill-fitting on him now as it had at the Miami air races—wasted little time on pleasantries. Latin-American Airways’ planned charter business was finally ready to launch. After greeting Lancaster, Tancrel announced, “We want you to fly to Mexico almost immediately—in the next couple of days.” Lancaster, haggard and drained from his trip to New York, was taken aback, and somewhat unsure how to respond: in his diary that night, he confessed that he found himself “dazed” at the conversation with Tancrel and Russell’s wife. After leaving the airport, they ventured back to Coral Gables to discuss the offer with Jessie. In addition to his unsettled state, Lancaster was, as usual, more concerned with Jessie than with business. Her welcome-home greeting hadn’t been nearly as enthusiastic as he had anticipated during his journey down the coast. “Chubbie sweet,” he wrote gloomily that night, “but fear I expected too much!”

  The next morning Lancaster and Jessie visited the office of Ernest Huston, a respected Miami attorney, for a follow-up meeting with Tancrel, this time accompanied by Jack Russell. Lancaster couldn’t help but remain suspicious of Tancrel; he found him a “terrible storyteller (all lies).” His doubts were further compounded by Tancrel and Russell’s description of the Latin-American Airways charter work as involving, in Lancaster’s words, “(r)unning cash belonging to Chinamen in Mexico.” What, Lancaster wondered, could this mean? He understood that Tancrel and Russell were initiating a charter business between Mexico and the United States, but the specifics of that business remained frustratingly murky. Still, Ernest Huston, the attorney, certainly appeared trustworthy, as did Russell and his wife, and Huston’s law office provided the proceedings with a veneer of respectability. Lancaster and Jessie were also desperate enough for cash that they needed to pursue all potential sources of income. Whatever doubts Lancaster harbored were outweighed by a basic need to put food on the table. Compared with growling stomachs, and the utter absence of any alternative prospects, the air of mystery surrounding Latin-American Airways would have to be endured.

  Putting aside any qualms, Lancaster and Jessie signed an agreement in Huston’s office: “Captain Lancaster and Mrs. J. M. Keith-Miller, on behalf of themselves and Captain Shelton, agree to furnish for the uses and purposes of Latin-American Airways Incorporated . . . two airplanes of the type which they now possess. . . . Said planes to be used and piloted by Captain Lancaster.” The agreement’s execution depended on Gentry Shelton, whom Lancaster and Jessie needed in order to finance a second plane. Shelton was due in Miami soon; without his endorsement, the agreement would be annulled. If the deal went through, Lancaster, Jessie, and Shelton would each receive one-sixth of the venture’s net profits, along with travel expenses.

  The following morning Lancaster brought Tancrel out to the airport for a test flight in the Robin. “Feel safe,” Lancaster noted in his diary that night, “that he knows little or nothing about flying.” But Tancrel authorized repairs for the Robin on the company’s bill, and Huston provided twenty-five dollars to back him up. Still, Lancaster pressed Tancrel for more specifics regarding the venture. Were there any plans to break the law? Aside from cash, what type of goods would Lancaster be ferrying? Would there be any passengers? All flying would be done in Mexico, Tancrel assured him, so U.S. law was not a factor. Otherwise, Tancrel remained vague. Russell would be heading to Mexico the next day to set up business, Tancrel said, and his activities would determine the exact cargo. Lancaster, with other opportunities nonexistent, resolved to play along, at least for the moment.

  He was much less conflicted about another potential moneymaking project: the writing of Jessie’s autobiography. As Jessie had told him on the phone, a New York publisher had contacted her with just such a proposal, though no money would be offered until the book was actually written. Taking her friend Amelia Earhart’s best-selling books as an inspiration, Jessie felt sure her adventures could make for a compelling read, but although she’d written numerous articles, the thought of composing a full-length book intimidated her. In a rare display of insecurity, she was convinced she couldn’t do it alone.

  As it happened, when Lancaster was in New York City, Jessie had spoken at a local Miami function about her life in aviation. Afterward she had fallen into conversation with a beautiful, fiery woman named Ida Clarke, who was the widow of a Nashville newspaper editor and the descendant of a long line of newspaper workers. Ida Clarke had worked as a journalist since graduating college, and she was now a powerful, and powerfully connected, advocate for women’s rights, as well as a professor of journalism at the University of Miami. When, in a follow-up meeting, Jessie had mentioned her anxiety about writing an autobiography, Ida Clarke had excitedly suggested that her son Haden, himself a published writer, might make the perfect collaborator.

  Charles Haden Clarke was a towering, darkly handsome thirty-one-year-old Columbia University graduate whose unforced confidence was coupled appealingly with an earthy charm. When Jessie met him a few days later, she found him bright, witty, and easygoing, his considerable allure magnified by his strikingly blue eyes. Still, she remained uncertain about hiring him to be her ghostwriter, and passed the final decision on to Lancaster, who, with genuine enthusiasm, declared his first impression of Clarke to be “very good,” though he had done little more than shake his hand. So excited was Lancaster about the idea of Jessie collaborating on a book with Clarke, in fact, that he immediately whisked her off to a Lionel Barrymore film to celebrate. On that heady Miami night, as they sat together in the darkened theater, their spirits high, neither took particular notice of the film’s grim title: The Man I Killed.

  The next day Clarke swung by the house for a more detailed conversation with Lancaster. Clarke claimed his writing credentials included a stint at Good Housekeeping magazine, along with various newspaper jobs, but now that the journalism market had dried up in the Depression, he was unemployed and penniless, despite his master’s degree. He had a wife in California, Clarke added, but they were divorcing. He also described his vision of a ghostwriter’s role: to present a book in the subject’s own voice. “Like him very much,” Lancaster affirmed in his diary that night, an impression likely fostered in part by the fact that he recognized so much of himself in Clarke’s current situation.

  Lancaster told Clarke that he and Jessie couldn’t afford to pay any money up front, but if the book sold, Clarke would receive half the profits. To ease Clarke’s immediate financial difficulties, Lancaster proposed that he move into the house in Coral Gables. (He also suggested that Clarke’s mother could join them, replacing the freeloading Major Jack French, but Clarke refused, saying he could only tolerate his mother in small doses.) Rent would be free, and Clarke’s access to Jessie would be total. Clarke leaped at the opportunity. He moved in the following day. Once he was settled, Clarke and Jessie proceeded to get “cock-eyed, but not unpleasantly so,” Lancaster wrote in his diary. During the languid Miami days and nights, alcohol was as robust and constant a presence as the salty ocean air.

  Not long after, Lancaster turned thirty-four years old. To celebrate, he, Jessie, Clarke, and Mark Tancrel, of Latin-American Airways, drove over to Miami Beach to fish—although, Lancaster later wrote, “Chubbie and Haden drank instead.” Tancrel, hoping to ease Lancaster’s financial anxieties, advanced another fifty dollars to help with rent in Coral Gables. Lancaster appreciated the gesture, but admitted that he felt “more mystified than ever over the whole [Latin-American Airways] affair.” Still, that day, and the following two days, passed happily, with Jessie acting sweetly and the “ideal” Miami weather a constant boon. But by midweek Tancrel appeared to have blown through all of Latin-American Airways’ cash, and Lancaster and Jessie decided it was high time to investigate his difficult-to-swallow claim of being a U.S. naval captain.

  Lancaster contacted an old acquaintance in the Navy Department, who reported that Tancrel’s name did
not appear anywhere in their files. Confident that Tancrel was indeed a fraud, Lancaster showed him the Navy Department’s letter, and demanded to know the truth. He also informed the lawyer Ernest Huston, whom he trusted, of his discovery. Tancrel, however, appeared unperturbed, telling Lancaster, “They lost my records at Washington when the Bureau of Records burned.” There actually had been a Bureau of Records fire, and yet Lancaster couldn’t shake his conviction that Tancrel was a phony, even after Tancrel provided documentation from the U.S. Navy Reserve. But by this point Lancaster felt financially indebted to Tancrel—not to mention that he’d signed an agreement with Latin-American Airways—and he lacked the resources to simply repay the money and walk away.

  Meanwhile, Gentry Shelton had wired with some welcome news: he would be arriving in Miami that Friday. When Lancaster and Clarke met him at the train station early Friday morning, Shelton was nursing a terrible hangover, and yet he still, undaunted, proceeded to get drunk before lunch. Clarke, obviously sensing a fellow enthusiast, eagerly joined Shelton on a drunken bender that ended up lasting seventy-two hours. The scene that weekend was chaotic: the Coral Gables house’s landlady was “raising hell” about rent; Major Jack French had accused Jessie of rudeness, infuriating Lancaster; and Lancaster and Clarke had to resort to poaching two rabbits and two ducks, with Mickey the dog’s help, for meals. Yet Lancaster confessed, “This place is getting into my blood! . . . Here it is in the middle of New York winter and we can swim and bathe in the sunshine.”

  Over the next week Lancaster, who was responsible for test-flying the Robin, mostly refrained from drinking, but Clarke and Shelton, with assorted hangers-on, continued their partying. Jessie often joined them, though she was drinking as much from boredom as anything else. Still, she harbored a growing resentment of the young, healthy men who, instead of working, were lolling around her house all day getting smashed, and not lifting a finger to help her. “I was pretty acid about the whole thing,” she later admitted. Lancaster, displaying his customary obliviousness, appeared not to notice. “Chubbie adorable, as usual,” he wrote in his diary. “Future unknown! But what the hell!”

  Clarke shared Lancaster’s room in the second-floor sun porch, an arrangement that enabled them to become fast friends. They spent long hours making up wild tales of heroic sea adventures, and trying to penetrate the veil of mystery that hung around Tancrel, Russell, and the entire Mexican venture. They played afternoon cards at the Miami Beach Club, winning almost seventy dollars in a few short days, though this didn’t stop the Florida Power and Light Company from shutting off the electricity at the house due to nonpayment of bills. But when the landlady showed up early one morning demanding the remaining fifty-dollar rent balance, she was shocked to discover that Lancaster had the money. He and Jessie were now set in the house until June, when the next rent came due.

  “Chubbie quite sportful about everything,” Lancaster wrote in his diary, but his perception was wrong; in fact, Jessie’s frustration with the situation in Miami continued to increase. Yes, the rent was now covered, but the electricity was still out—Lancaster had to boil water for his coffee over a backyard fire—and Jessie didn’t like the way Lancaster and Clarke squirreled themselves away for hours, with seemingly nothing to show for it. Clarke had yet to produce a single sentence of the book. Every day, it seemed, Jessie had to remind Lancaster that they were offering Clarke free lodging so that he could work on her autobiography, not so that Lancaster could take him gallivanting around Miami like some freeloading party companion.

  In the first week of March, Mark Tancrel swooped back into the picture to demand that Lancaster leave immediately for Mexico. Tancrel’s Latin-American Airways partner, Jack Russell, had just confirmed from out west that the company’s planned charter routes were fully in order. Despite Tancrel’s brash insistence, however, Lancaster refused: he was unwilling to abandon Jessie before the electricity and telephone bills had been paid. He also wanted to leave Jessie with a nest egg that would last for several days. Liberty had just rejected her story “Flying for Fun,” and she needed income. An irritated Tancrel lashed out heatedly at Lancaster, claiming the airline would lose money unless they departed at once. Lancaster, standing firm, wrote in his diary that while he hated “to appear hard-boiled,” his concern for Jessie trumped everything else. Tancrel, despite his aggravation, pledged to secure twenty-five dollars for her.

  Soon after, Lancaster sat down with Clarke for an intimate discussion. Clarke had heard wild tales of Lancaster and Jessie’s flying escapades, but now, as daylight streamed through the sun porch’s open windows, Lancaster confessed the truth: he was profoundly in love with Jessie, and had been for the past five years. If anything happened to her, Lancaster said, he would have no reason to carry on living. With his trip to Mexico, Lancaster was taking a marked leap of faith that he could trust Clarke to protect Jessie’s well-being. With similarly patriarchal solemnity, Clarke pledged to be Jessie’s caretaker, to curb his drinking and his partying, and to make progress on the book.

  That afternoon, Lancaster and Clarke won $17.50 in a Miami Beach bridge game, prompting merriment when the two returned to Coral Gables. With the bill now paid, the house’s electricity was turned back on, and Lancaster gathered himself to leave for Mexico in the morning. Tancrel had informed him that their ultimate destination would be the city of Nogales, located on the Arizona-Mexico border. Lancaster studied maps of the route, predicting that that the journey would last no more than four days. In addition to clothing, Lancaster packed a loaded .38 revolver that Ernest Huston, the lawyer, had given him, after Huston suggested obliquely that it might be a useful item to carry on his journey to Mexico. Gentry Shelton, true to form, headed out to the bars for a last round of drinking before the trip commenced. As Lancaster slept, a heavy rainstorm pounded the house until the early morning hours.

  10

  MENTAL AGONY

  Vestiges of the overnight storm remained in the morning, but Lancaster, Shelton, and Tancrel were too keen to begin their journey to wait for the weather to settle. The Robin had hardly left Miami, however, when the blustery conditions transformed into a full-force gale. Lancaster worked hard to keep the plane on course, but the Robin’s pace remained glacial as it steered its way through heavy winds. Yet even as Lancaster’s shoulders ached from his tight grip on the plane’s controls, his passengers appeared unmindful: Shelton, badly hungover, slept for hours on end, while Tancrel blithely ate fruit and rambled on about nonsense. After touching down at last in St. Petersburg, in the middle of high-speed winds, the trio checked in to the Commodore Hotel. “Feel as if I had been drinking myself,” Lancaster noted in his diary, describing his wobbliness after the taxing flight.

  Lancaster tried to ring Jessie from the Commodore, but the unpaid phone bill at 2321 S.W. 21st Terrace had come due, and service had been shut off. He cabled Jessie instead, then dispatched a letter prodding her to tie up a few loose ends, including restoring phone service. He gently chided her and Clarke to “keep sober and write the book,” before concluding with his usual proclamations of love.

  Lancaster, Shelton, and Tancrel departed St. Petersburg at daylight, spending an exhausting eleven and a half hours in the air, but the Challenger engine threw oil the whole time, a worrisome sign, and Tancrel continued telling bad jokes, an ordeal Lancaster described as “hell!!!” When they finally landed in Beaumont, Texas, a mechanic diagnosed a thrust bearing gone on their engine. That night Lancaster wrote Jessie an apologetic note: “Tancrel has only just got enough to get the troops to Nogales, so have not been able to get any cash to send.” He enclosed what little money he had—a single dollar—in the envelope. “Don’t laugh,” he wrote, “[the dollar] will put five gallons of gas in the Lincoln.”

  The Challenger engine was still throwing oil the next morning, forcing a delay while Shelton phoned Dallas for replacement parts. The wet day passed drearily. Tancrel, much to Lancaster and Shelton’s annoyance, continued his babbling, spinning a string
of fanciful yarns. Lancaster was dealing with other stresses, as well. “No news from Chubbie,” he wrote in his diary, “which worries me far more than flying in this bad weather.” Eager to reach Nogales—in part to escape Tancrel’s yammering—Lancaster instructed the Beaumont mechanic to warm the Robin’s engine for a 6 a.m. departure.

  When Lancaster, Shelton, and Tancrel arrived at the airfield, they were horrified to discover the Robin flipped on her nose, her propeller blades broken. The mechanic had made the mistake of warming the engine with the plane’s tail facing the wind. Lancaster borrowed a replacement propeller from the Orange County airfield, and then wired Jessie to send her own spare propeller straight to Nogales. Funded by Huston, Jessie promptly did so, and by noon the Robin was in the air. Lancaster, eager to make up for lost time, flew to the Chihuahuan Desert’s northeastern edge.

  Overnight the temperature dropped to a frigid six degrees below zero, freezing the Robin’s engine. When the sun rose, Lancaster and Shelton exhausted themselves trying to turn the engine over, until a midday snowstorm, an infrequent West Texas occurrence in winter, rendered their efforts moot. Returning to the Hilton Hotel, they ran into an ex-navy pilot named Lon Yancey, who offered them drinks. Shelton, to Lancaster’s “surprise and delight,” declined. Shelton was determined to stay on the wagon—beer excluded—until the journey was complete. As Lancaster wrote to Jessie that night, “Old man Gen has been a brick; he has not taken a drink since leaving Miami.” Lancaster’s largesse even extended to Tancrel, who was acting “well subdued and not so annoying. The cold has frozen him up.” Lancaster confided in his diary his main excitement of the day: “Wire from Chubbie, thank God. God bless her, how dear she is to me.”