Show Me a Hero

by Jeremy Scott

  20.

  STANDING OVATION

  Meanwhile, three weeks before, another hero has returned in triumph to his native land, coming home victorious on a bright and breezy morning to the best of all possible worlds.

  Airplanes swoop low over the ship, dipping their wings in salutation to greet the returning Byrd expedition as the Chantier steams through the Verrazano Narrows to enter New York harbour. The vessels it passes are strung with coloured pennants and signal flags, the morning strident with their tooting and shrieking whistles and the scream of gulls. Sunlight flashes on high parabolas of foam from the jets of red fire-boats lined up to receive the explorers home. The welcoming committee comes out to meet them in a tug, its decks crowded with the media. The pier is jammed by a dense mob of well-wishers; the mayor has declared the day a holiday. Commander Byrd walks off the ship dressed in blue and gold Navy uniform. Floyd Bennett follows him, uncomfortable and a little awkward in dark suit and tie. A warm sun lights up the summer day and a brass band is crashing out a triumphant accolade.

  Byrd returned a national hero and Bennett his assistant hero, a little bashful in the role. The mayor presented both with the keys to the city. At noon there was a parade up Broadway in their honour, with drum majorettes, marching bands, the fire brigade in burnished helmets and the fifty members of the expedition swaggering proud beneath a fluttering snow of ticker-tape. That afternoon the party moved on to Washington. In the Municipal Auditorium the president of the National Geographic Society announced that Byrd’s flight records had been examined and certified by experts, confirming his claim to the Pole. He awarded him the Society’s Gold Medal (and also to Bennett, though now and always the spotlight remained on Byrd). President Coolidge presented the medals that night.

  It was all so appropriate somehow, so entirely apt. ‘Can do’ was the buzzword of the 1920s, the faith underpinning the American Dream. It had all happened so quickly, the growth, technological marvels, prosperity and good times had come in such a breathless rush. The modern epoch had burst into spontaneous existence, bringing with it everything – everything, that is, except one thing. What the era did not yet have was a figure to represent the spirit of the age. A pedestal stood vacant.

  Byrd’s timing was impeccable. There was a demand for symbolic figures, a need created by mass media with its constant requirement to fill radio airtime and the pages of the growing number of tabloids. Mostly it was Hollywood that fed the demand for personal role models, together with sport. Movie idols such as Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Snr and Rudolph Valentino provided archetypes of beauty, youth and glamour; the Yankees star slugger Babe Ruth – brutish, uncouth and nicknamed ‘Niggerlips’ – epitomised a macho ideal to many males. And there were business successes like Henry Ford. But a figure to answer the yearning of the imagination for the inspiring, uplifting and incorruptible, an individual who might represent struggle, heroism and the triumph of the human spirit over adversity… as yet no candidate had come forward to step onto the public stage.

  America was on a roll with business booming and cash rattling merrily in the tills, but spiritually the country was a wasteland. Despite its sudden wealth – perhaps in part because of it – people had grown disillusioned and cynical. There was little left to believe in, what values had not been swept away were tarnished. The war to end wars had failed to do so; it had been followed by labour disputes, strikes, by Bolshevism and the Red Menace, by witch-hunts, race riots and the Ku Klux Klan. Religion was under challenge and the Puritan certainties of the nation’s origin had been undermined by scientific progress. The small-town values of God’s own country were mocked by writers such as Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Menken, its sexual probity labelled ‘inhibition’ by Dr Freud. Daily the tabloids exposed a world of sex and scandal, crime, corruption and political graft. In the defiled dark firmament where was the clear light of one bright star? Where was a gentle parfit knight riding to the rescue with a banner of redemption? Where was a seemly hero worthy of the name?

  Byrd, who became world famous in a single day, stepped into the flashlights and into a role which had been waiting ready for him. Schools, buildings, streets, ships and awards were named after him, and that winter President Coolidge pinned to his chest the Congressional Medal of Honor, the supreme accolade America can bestow upon its heroes.

  He came home a star in a country which was hungry for stars. Receptions and dinners were given for him, he was invited to speak to universities and learned societies, a medal was struck bearing his profile, babies were given his name, he became a myth. In the US not a single newspaper, magazine, radio station or dissenting voice questioned his achievement. In Italy and Norway some did, but this was seen as the carping of small-minded losers and drowned out in worldwide media acclaim. This was a triumph people wanted to believe.

  Byrd stood for flight, speed, achievement, for modernity. And his plane, the Jo Ford, itself became an icon. The aircraft was put on display in New York at Wanamaker’s store and the man who stood minding the exhibit was Bernt Balchen, who had accepted the offer Byrd had made him aboard the Chantier and was now on the payroll. It was his job to answer the customers’ questions and field their comments, one from an elderly lady, ‘Tell me young man, how many miles do you get to those tyres?’, another from a teenage girl snapping gum to her friend, ‘Lookit his big boycep muscles! Ain’t he cute, Moitle? Like Francis X Bushman almost!’ Exhibited alongside the plane like a prize bull at a country fair, Balchen writhed with embarrassment. ‘Of all the things I wanted least in the world, this is it,’ he wrote. He so hated the work he was ready to chuck the New World and go home, when the Guggenheim Foundation agreed to finance a tour of the Jo Ford around the US. Floyd Bennett and Balchen were the pilots. Starting in Washington, for two months they flew the historic aeroplane around America, covering 9,000 miles and visiting fifty cities. In each the Jo Ford was put on public display, in each they were the guests at a municipal banquet where the menu was always Chicken à la King and peas. After which Bennett – and later Balchen – delivered the same set speech written for them by Byrd’s publicist.

  The two men passed every day together, each night they shared another hotel room. They became best friends. They had much in common, most notably a passion for aeroplanes and flying, but much else as well. Both had a country background and were short on formal schooling; they were utterly unsuited for what they were doing: public speaking. Byrd their absent leader was cut out for the role in which he found himself, they were hopeless in the part. They loathed it, and this created a powerful bond between them. Their incompetence made not a scrap of difference to their reception, they and their aeroplane were illuminated by the spotlight of celebrity and their artless clumsiness was only endearing to their audience.

  While they hopped around the country city to city, Balchen sat by Bennett in the cockpit of the Jo Ford, navigating, writing up the flight log, and observing the instruments. Every night he worked out the results on a pocket slide-rule. He noted that the plane’s speed averaged 70 mph. This was with landing wheels fitted; equipped with skis, as it had been for the polar flight, the speed would have been 3–5 mph less. On these figures it seemed improbable that Byrd had flown the 1,550 miles to the Pole and back in fifteen-and-a-half hours. Of course, if the flyers had had the good fortune of a high tailwind in both directions it was theoretically possible – but Balchen knew from experience that this was unlikely; the wind would have had to back 180º in less than an hour.

  So what did Balchen do with his suspicion?

  He had good reason not to raise it. He worked for Byrd, his future was built on the man and he didn’t want to hear the explanation he suspected. But we do know that at some point, then or later, Balchen did speak to Bennett about the Jo Ford’s performance, and because of timing and circumstance – the forced intimacy of a shared hotel room – it is likely that it was now. We know this crucial conversation took place but we don’t know how the dialogue played.

  It
is perhaps possible to recover it. A writer composes dialogue from a character’s motivation; Balchen and Bennett’s exchange maybe can be reconstructed by the same method. Balchen’s query was prompted by nagging curiosity, a desire to know the truth, however awkward. And Bennett must have been anticipating it for weeks, as Balchen had come to know the Jo Ford’s capability as well as he did himself. At the moment it was asked, each man probably held a drink in his hand, and surely Bennett’s immediate reaction was to sober up fast. And then? Did he say, ‘Don’t ask!’ Did he say, in effect, ‘Look we’re both of us only hick mechanics but right now we’re sitting in the cat-bird seat. We’ve got a great future with Byrd, don’t rock the boat!’ And did Bennett then unfluently continue, and grope to explain another reason beyond personal expediency? That if Balchen should pursue this line of questioning it risked not only disgracing Byrd but the scandal would bring shame upon America.

  And how did Balchen respond? Or did he not, but instead remain silent, because he knew all Bennett said was undeniable and the reasons to go along with it were both bad and good… for during the last weeks Balchen had looked down daily from the cockpit upon a green and pleasant land of endless opportunity unrolling beneath him and he knew he wanted to make a life in the US.

  From this moment on the relationship between Balchen and Bennett, already warm, will grow yet closer, for the two share a secret – and share also the same reason not to divulge it.

  21.

  LEADING MAN ASSUMES NEW PART

  We are in the White House where, in the summer of 1927, the chief executive of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is suffering from a troublesome personal difficulty. President Coolidge’s problem is a serious deficiency in charisma. In this new age of mass media, that particular shortcoming matters in a way it never did before. The two preceding presidents had at least looked the part. Woodrow Wilson was seen as scholarly and austere; Warren Harding came over as a handsome hail-fellow-well-met glad-hander even while presiding over an administration roiling in wholesale graft. In contrast, Calvin Coolidge is a rhiny, pointy-nosed, prissy-mouthed hick lawyer with a fixed expression described as ‘blithe as a mourning card’. Notoriously stingy, he and the First Lady were constantly invited out to dinner in Washington. Painfully shy, he detested these evenings yet accepted every invitation, enduring them in glum silence. A woman guest, observing his discomfort, asked him why he came to them. ‘Gotta eat somewhere,’ Coolidge told her brusquely. He was so taciturn by nature that it was said that every time he opened his mouth a moth flew out. One of his rare pronouncements, delivered in his sour New England twang, was ‘The business of America is business.’ Having articulated this creed he sat back and let America get on with it. Believing sincerely that the least government was the best government, he provided a personal example, cutting the duties of the chief executive by 70 per cent, working less than four hours a day and, between meetings, resting with his feet up on the desk. After lunch usually he retired upstairs to his bedroom, though some afternoons he dragged his rocking chair onto the porch of the White House to rock and snooze in full view of Pennsylvania Avenue.

  When Will Rogers asked him how he maintained his health and balance in a job which had broken its two previous incumbents, Coolidge answered, ‘By avoiding the big problems.’ In fact he avoided all problems, big and small, and this inertia – dignified as a policy of laissez faire – seeped down to infect the various federal agencies responsible for running America. The country was thriving, enjoying a period of dizzy growth, and no checks, no regulation or restraint were imposed on business which might in any way impede that growth. The unlawful prospered with the lawful, and lushly in the rank marge that lay between. Prohibition had become a joke, nobody observed it. Bootleggers, gangsters and racketeers added a racy tone to the garish spectacle, part of its high-strutting style; mobsters were out there with the rest, foot on the brass rail, wisecracking in a snap-brim hat, cigar in hand.

  With prosperity and instalment-buying a vast unity came upon America (except for its farmers, who knew no wealth); a democratisation of fashion and style swept over the country in a conformity of desire. The Sears Roebuck catalogue formed its bible, movies its store window. Clothes, furniture, home interiors, appliances, cars, everyone united in wanting the same things. Consumer values, instant gratification, mass media, the cult of the individual and of celebrity… this was the infancy of our cultural identity today; here we are witnessing our own beginnings.

  The era was the golden age of American advertising. Ad revenues quadrupled between 1914 and 1929. Two thousand broadsheet newspapers were published daily in the US, plus another 500 on Sunday, and their huge circulation was dented not at all by the advent of the tabloids – of which there were now three in New York alone – for the tabloids tapped into an entirely new readership. Then radio appeared, and by this date in our story one out of every three people owned a set; virtually every family and every home possessed at least one. Mass media had exploded across America and the country became a gigantic sellers’ market. Ad agencies were awash with cash as they orchestrated this bonanza, but not the least of their problems lay in controlling the runaway megalomania of their major clients for – in the same way as today every academic secretly longs to be a media personality – in the mid-Twenties every corporate president had an overweening urge to produce his own radio show. The most notorious of these manic despots, George Washington Hill – president of American Tobacco and sponsor of the Lucky Strike Dance Hour, airing three nights a week – wore a cowboy hat indoors, chewed a gross cigar, shrieked abuse, exposed his parts and selected the bands who would feature on the show by forcing the president of NBC to dance before him to their numbers while he deliberated his choice.

  Hundreds of magazines circulated in America, ranging from fanzines and sports mags to the glossies. The glossies provided the ideal of style and wealth, those things and manner of living which are most to be yearned for, the ultimates in choice. Their pages were thick and stiffly shiny, you could cut your finger on the edge. Illustrations too were sharp in high definition, executed with bold colours in Art Deco design. The images they showed were of cars and planes and transatlantic liners, of grand hotels and racehorses and fair women, the appurtenances of careless wealth. Their message was aspirational: the pictures sold freedom-to-be, mastery of a fashionable milieu, familiarity with the capitals of Europe, a cosmopolitan self-assurance. The people in the ads were constantly on the move. These handsome men and sleek flat-breasted women in short straight dresses and cloche hats which looked like flying helmets were always going or arriving somewhere, and always accompanied by a large amount of matched luggage, skis, golf clubs and tennis racquets, which they left others to deal with.

  Transatlantic liners were still the most fashionable method of travel to Europe. The five-and-a-half-day crossing could be enjoyed in considerable luxury and the modish company of the best people. Airships too now plied the crossing, providing novelty in ultra-modern comfort together with first-class food and wine. Aeroplanes were the most up-to-the-minute form of travel, ultra chic but only for the young and bold, for they were uncomfortable, unreliable and often dangerous. The first daily scheduled commercial air service, London–Paris, had started up in 1919, but not until 1927 (the date we’ve now reached in this book) did the US see its first passenger air service. At first the aircraft (the word ‘airliner’ had not yet been coined) that flew these routes were First World War bombers adapted to carry five to eight passengers well wrapped up for the trip. But all of these journeys were short-hop flights. Liners and airships monopolised the Europe–US route, no aeroplane had yet flown a non-stop transatlantic crossing. In the winter of 1926/7 Raymond Orteig, a millionaire New Yorker, offered a prize of $25,000 to the first man to fly New York–Paris.

  Richard Byrd determined to go for it.

  Undoubtedly it must be gratifying to become a national idol, to have plazas, schools and sons named after you and medals struck
in your image, but the modern hero has a finite shelf-life. What to do for your next trick? He or she has achieved stardom, become a performer in their own soap opera. But a soap opera requires new episodes to endure.

  Fame also brings with it a personal problem, a problem so intimate that the celeb cannot, dare not, mention it to anyone for to do so is to admit that you are not cool, not cool at all but only a needy schmuck made of the same base clay as your fans. This shameful frailty that can be revealed to nobody is that you have contracted an addiction, for the heady rush of fame has established a need within you similar in effect to some drugs which create not just a pleasurable buzz but an absolute requirement in the blood and nerves, for nothing, nothing else can come close to the rush that celebrity provides.

  Byrd already had a sponsor lined up to back him in the race in the substantial shape of Rodman Wanamaker, owner of the so-named Manhattan department store and a fervent patriot who believed in the popular movement America First. Now Byrd asked Tony Fokker, America’s leading aircraft designer, to build a plane for the transatlantic flight. Fokker’s latest innovation was wing flaps, which he’d invented a year earlier – still in use today – which considerably lower an aircraft’s take-off and landing speed, permitting shorter runways. This device so opened up the convenience of flight as a means of public transport that there were plans to build an inner city airport in lower Manhattan on top of a 150-storey super-skyscraper at Broadway and Church Street, whose rooftop area would be a landing field. It was around this date that Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter Scottie telling her she must overcome her neurotic fear of flying and learn to board an aeroplane as thoughtlessly as she stepped on a bus.