by Bryson, Bill
The tennis star Bill Tilden won his third Wimbledon title in 1930 at the age of thirty-seven. He would finish his career with a record of 907–62, a winning percentage of 93.6 percent. After retiring from tennis, he pursued an acting career and toured successfully in the lead role in a revival of Dracula, the hit production of 1927. He also developed a tragic weakness for slim young boys. In 1947, he was sentenced to one year in jail in Los Angeles for interfering with a minor. Soon after his release, he was caught doing the same thing again and imprisoned a second time. He lost his few remaining friends and declined into a shabby, malodorous poverty. When he died in 1953 of a heart attack at the age of sixty, he had a net worth of $80.
Chicago mayor Big Bill Thompson turned on Al Capone shortly after the Tunney-Dempsey fight in the belief—clearly delusional—that Capone was hurting his prospects for national political success, possibly as a presidential candidate for the Republicans. Shorn of protection, Capone moved to Florida in early 1928 and took up residence in Miami Beach. The next year he was arrested while changing trains in Philadelphia and sentenced to a year in prison for carrying a concealed weapon. In 1931, he was convicted of income tax evasion and given eleven years in prison.
Prison was not too tough for Capone. He had a bed with a spring mattress and had homemade meals delivered to his cell. At Thanksgiving he was served a turkey dinner by a butler hired for the day. He was allowed to keep a stock of liquor and to use the warden’s office to receive guests. The warden vehemently denied that Capone received preferential treatment, then was caught using Capone’s car. In 1934, Capone’s situation became considerably less attractive when Alcatraz opened in San Francisco Bay, and he became part of its first intake. Capone was released in late 1939, by which point he was suffering acutely from late-onset syphilis. He died, demented, in Florida in 1947.
At just the time that Al Capone was entering Alcatraz, on the other side of the country Charles Ponzi was being deported to Italy. He moved to Brazil and died in poverty on a charity ward of a hospital in Buenos Aires in 1949.
Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the lawyer who devised the idea of going after criminals like Al Capone on the grounds of tax evasion, lived until 1963, dying in California just before her seventy-fourth birthday. After leaving government in 1929, she took a high-paying job as chief counsel for Fruit Industries Limited, a California company that grew grapes and was well known for helping people make wine at home. This made Willebrandt look like a hypocrite (which indeed she was), and contributed in a small but psychologically significant way to expediting the end of Prohibition.
A motion to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment came before Congress in early 1933. The House debated the bill for just forty minutes. In the Senate, as Daniel Okrent notes in his history of Prohibition, “Of the twenty-two members who had voted for the Eighteenth Amendment sixteen years earlier and were still senators, seventeen voted to undo their earlier work.” In December 1933, Prohibition officially ended.
Also coming back into the news in 1933 was the all-but-forgotten aviator Francesco de Pinedo. After his return to Italy in 1927, Pinedo had resumed his career in Italy’s air force, the Regia Aeronautica, and there imprudently plotted to depose the air minister, Italo Balbo. Learning of this, Balbo posted Pinedo to the farthest and most pointless outpost it was in his power to send him—Buenos Aires. Pinedo languished in obscurity until September 1933, when he turned up unexpectedly at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn with a plan to fly solo to Baghdad, a distance of 6,300 miles.
Although this would be the farthest that anyone had ever flown, on the day of departure Pinedo arrived at the airfield dressed as if going out for a little light shopping—in blue serge suit, a gray fedora hat, and a light sweater. On his feet, it was noticed, he wore carpet slippers. The entire enterprise was patently misguided, but no one tried to stop him. As Pinedo’s plane hurtled down the runway, it began to weave from side to side, then veered toward an administration building where a small crowd had gathered. It missed the crowd but clipped a wing on some obstruction, tipped up on its nose, and crashed into a parked car. Pinedo was thrown clear. According to some accounts, he rose from the tarmac and tried to get back into the plane—presumably in a state of confusion. Other witnesses said he remained motionless on the ground. At all events, before anyone could get to him the plane exploded. Pinedo perished in a giant fireball. What was going through his mind that morning and why he didn’t abandon the takeoff when it was so clearly going wrong are questions that can of course now never be answered.
For the motion picture industry, the transition from silent to talking pictures was faster than anyone ever thought possible. In June 1929, barely a year and a half after the debut of The Jazz Singer, of the seventeen motion picture theaters on Broadway, just three were still showing silents. The Great Depression, however, hit the industry hard. By 1933, nearly one-third of movie theaters in America were shut and many of the studios were in trouble. Paramount was bankrupt; RKO and Universal were nearly so. Fox was struggling to reorganize and eventually would have to be rescued by a much smaller studio, Twentieth Century.
In New York in 1932, Roxy Rothafel opened Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center. (The famous Rockettes were originally the Roxyettes.) But his time was running out, too. In May, the Roxy Theatre went into receivership. Two years later, Rothafel was put in charge of the failing Mastbaum Theater in Philadelphia. He reportedly spent $200,000 in ten weeks, but to no avail. The heyday of the great picture palaces was at an end. Rothafel died of a heart attack in a New York hotel in 1936. He was fifty-three years old. The Roxy Theatre was torn down in 1960.
Clara Bow, star of Wings, retired from acting in 1933 and became increasingly reclusive. She died in 1965 at age sixty. William Wellman, the director, made another sixty-five films before retiring in 1958. Many of his films were turkeys, but some were notable, among them The Public Enemy (1931), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), and The High and the Mighty (1954). He died in 1975 at age seventy-nine. John Monk Saunders, the writer who conceived of Wings, didn’t fare so well. He married the actress Fay Wray, but the marriage failed and his career went downhill because of drinking and drugs. He hanged himself in Florida in 1940.
Jerome Kern never had another hit on Broadway after Show Boat, though he tried several times. Eventually, like so many others, he moved to Hollywood. He died in 1945. Oscar Hammerstein II also seemed to have come to the end of his road with Show Boat. He went a dozen years without a hit, but then he teamed up with Richard Rodgers and between them they put together the greatest run of successes in the history of musicals: Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, Flower Drum Song, and The Sound of Music. Hammerstein died in 1960.
Jacob Ruppert, owner of the New York Yankees, suffered a heart attack in early 1939 and died nine days later at the age of sixty-nine. The world was astonished to find that he had left much of his estate, initially valued at between $40 million and $70 million, to a former showgirl named Helen W. Weyant, who confessed to reporters that she and Ruppert had had a secret friendship for many years, but insisted that it was no more than friendship. In the end, Ruppert’s estate turned out to be worth just $6.5 million—the Depression had severely hit his real estate holdings—and he had personal debts of $1 million on top. To pay the debts and his estate taxes, it was necessary to sell both the Yankees and the Ruppert brewery.
Also dying in 1939, following a long illness, was Raymond Orteig, the amiable hotelier who launched the Orteig Prize.
Gutzon Borglum didn’t quite live to see Mount Rushmore completed. He died in March 1941, of complications following prostate surgery, just a few months before it was finished. He was seventy-three.
Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England and close friend of Benjamin Strong, suffered a bizarre accident in 1944 that brought his career to a close. While visiting his brother on his country estate in Hertfordshire, Norman went for a walk in fading light and apparently tripped over a cow that was resting on the ground
. The startled cow may have kicked Norman in the head in scrambling to its feet. Norman never fully recovered and died in 1950 at age seventy-eight.
Alexis Carrel was pushed out of his role at the Rockefeller Institute because his views were becoming too embarrassing. Carrel returned to France and started an institute that specialized in matters outside the scientific mainstream, including telepathy and water divination. He openly supported the Vichy regime and would almost certainly have been tried as a collaborator, but he died in 1944 before he could be brought to trial. He was seventy-one. At the Nazi war trials at Nuremberg after the war, Carrel’s Man the Unknown was quoted in defense of Nazi eugenics practices.
Also dying in 1944 were two of Chicago’s leading figures. The first to go was Big Bill Thompson, who died in March at the age of seventy-six. The following month, Kenesaw Mountain Landis took his earthly leave at the age of seventy-eight. Landis had spent most of the later part of his career fighting attempts to let blacks play in the major leagues. That ignoble battle was lost in 1947 when Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Lindbergh’s mother, Evangeline Lodge Lindbergh, died in 1954 from Parkinson’s disease at the age of seventy-eight. His widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, gave birth to five other children apart from the murdered Charles Junior, and became a successful and admired writer, mostly of memoirs. She died in 2001 at the ripe age of ninety-four, the last person of consequence to this story to have lived through that long, extraordinary summer.
Acknowledgments
As ever, I am greatly indebted to a number of people and institutions for kindly assistance in the preparation of this book. In particular I wish to thank Dr. Alex M. Spencer, Dr. Robert van der Linden, and Dr. Dominick Pisano of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.; my saintly editors, Marianne Velmans, Gerry Howard, and Kristin Cochrane; my British agent, Carol Heaton; my esteemed friend Larry Finlay; and my extraordinarily bright and diligent copy editors, Janet Renard and Deborah Adams, who saved me from a thousand careless mistakes, though of course any that remain are my own.
I am also most grateful to the ever helpful staff of the London Library; to Jon Purcell and his colleagues at the library of Durham University; to Bart Schmidt and colleagues at the Drake University Library in Des Moines; and to the staffs of the New York and Boston Public Libraries, the Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, and the library of the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.
For advice, encouragement, introductions, and occasional meals I am most grateful to Keith and Win Blackmore, Jonathan and Rina Fenby, Tim and Elizabeth Burt, John and Anne Galbraith, Chris Higgins and Jenifer White, Anne Heywood, Larry and Lucinda Scott, Patrick Janson-Smith, Patrick Gallagher, Brad Martin, Oliver Payne, John and Jeri Flinn, Andrew and Alison Orme, Daniel and Erica Wiles, and Jon, Donna, Max, and Daisy Davidson.
Special thanks go also to my children, Catherine and Sam Bryson, for their generous and extremely affordable research assistance, and, above all and as always, to my dear long-suffering, imperturbable, all-forgiving wife, Cynthia.
Notes on Sources and Further Reading
Below are the principal sources used in this book, as well as suggestions for further reading. Full publication details for books can be found in the accompanying bibliography. Notes on individual citations and other sources used can be found at www.randomhouse.com/features/billbryson/.
General
The most entertaining and briskly informative account of the period remains Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen, originally published in 1931, but reissued many times since. Also excellent is Mark Sullivan’s six-volume history, Our Times, though it goes only to 1925. More recent works of value include J. C. Furnas’s Great Times and Nathan Miller’s New World Coming. The only book specifically on 1927 of which I am aware is The Year the World Went Mad by Allen Churchill. A website containing an encyclopedic range of background information, including photographs and reprints of articles on Charles Lindbergh, is CharlesLindbergh.com. For the New York Yankees, a similar service is provided by the Unofficial 1927 New York Yankees Home Page at www.angelfire.com/pa/1927.
Prologue
Particularly valuable for the history of flight in the period were the similarly named Aviation: The Early Years by Peter Almond and Aviation: The Pioneer Years edited by Ben Mackworth-Praed. Very good on the technical side of matters is L. F. E. Coombs’s Control in the Sky: The Evolution and History of the Aircraft Cockpit. Much additional detail came from Graham Wallace’s The Flight of Alcock & Brown, Robert de La Croix’s They Flew the Atlantic, and the semi-official American Aircraft Year Books for 1925–1930, published by the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce of America, Inc. Hiram Bingham’s An Explorer in the Air Service, though only incidentally useful for this volume, is a fascinating study of America’s position with respect to military aviation in the period of World War I. For America’s financing of World War I, see The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow and Empire of Wealth by John Steele Gordon.
Chapter 1
Details from the Snyder-Gray case come mostly from the New York Times and other contemporary accounts. A good general overview is provided in Landis MacKeller’s The “Double Indemnity” Murder. Other details come from The American Earthquake by Edmund Wilson and “The Bloody Blonde and the Marble Woman: Gender and Power in the Case of Ruth Snyder,” by Jessie Ramey in the Journal of Social History, Spring 2004. An interesting essay on the influence of the Snyder-Gray case on Hollywood is found in the October 2005 edition of the academic journal Narrative, “Multiple Indemnity: Film Noir, James M. Cain, and Adaptations of a Tabloid Case,” by V. P. Pelizzon and Nancy Martha West. Many of the details on the extraordinary quirks of Bernarr Macfadden come from a three-part series that ran in The New Yorker in October 1950.
Chapter 2
Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg is the standard biography. Kenneth S. Davis’s The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream, though more than fifty years old, is beautifully written and contains a great deal of detail not found elsewhere. Nothing, however, better captures the challenge and excitement of that summer than Lindbergh’s own Pulitzer Prize–winning account of 1953, The Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh offered a few additional observations on his life in Autobiography of Values, published shortly after his death. Technical details of Lindbergh’s flight and a superlative analysis of its importance are provided by Dominick A. Pisano and R. Robert van der Linden in Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis. All the titles mentioned here were of great help in this chapter and throughout the book.
Chapter 3
The definitive work on the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 is Rising Tide by John M. Barry. Herbert Hoover’s personal role in relief operations is neatly surveyed in “Herbert Hoover, Spokesman of Humane Efficiency,” American Quarterly, Autumn 1970. A more general book, but also excellent, is Floods by William G. Hoyt and Walter B. Langbein. Hoover’s rise to greatness is chronicled by Kendrick A. Clements in The Life of Herbert Hoover; by George Nash in a two-volume work also called The Life of Herbert Hoover; and by Richard Norton Smith in An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover. Hoover himself left the exhaustive and surprisingly readable The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover. Details on the financial maneuverings of Andrew Mellon are largely taken from David Cannadine’s elegant biography, Mellon: An American Life. The comments on Calvin Coolidge’s work habits are found in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s Crisis of the Old Order; in Wilson Brown’s “Aide to Four Presidents,” published in American Heritage, February 1955; in Donald R. McCoy’s Calvin Coolidge; and in “Psychological Pain and the Presidency” by Robert E. Gilbert in Political Psychology, March 1998.
Chapter 4
Statistics on the comforts of American homes in 1927 come principally from the March and July issues of Scientific American. Other details come from American Culture in the 1920s by Susan Currell. For the state of American highways at the time, see The Lincoln Highway by Drake Hokanson. The situatio
n at Roosevelt Field in May 1927 is well covered in “How Not to Fly the Atlantic,” American Heritage, April 1971, and in The Big Jump by Richard Bak and The Flight of the Century by Thomas Kessner.
Chapter 5
The case of United States v. Sullivan is discussed in “Taxing Income from Unlawful Activities,” Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, Faculty Scholarship Series, Paper 2289, and in the March 2005 issue of the Columbia Law Review. Mabel Walker Willebrandt was the subject of an admiring profile in The New Yorker in the issue of February 16, 1929. Details of the American tour of Francesco de Pinedo come principally from contemporary reports in the New York Times, as do those of the murderous attack in Bath, Michigan, by Andrew Kehoe.
Chapter 6
Charles Lindbergh’s flight to Paris remains one of the most written about events of modern times, so details here are taken from many sources. I have at all times taken Lindbergh’s own, meticulous Spirit of St. Louis as the last word on the flight itself. For details of Rio Rita and other Broadway productions, see American Theatre by Gerald M. Bordman and The Theatrical 20’s by Allen Churchill. The biographical details for Bill Tilden come mostly from Frank Deford’s Big Bill Tilden. Myron Herrick was profiled in The New Yorker in the issue of July 21, 1928. Little else has been written about him.