by Matt Higgins
Judge Farber said, “It is clear to me that defendant’s actions were reckless actions . . . Selfish actions designed to benefit himself.” The judge described the pressure he was under to mete out the harshest punishment. Representatives from the Empire State Building had sent four copies of a six-page letter asking for the maximum sentence. The president of the Real Estate Board of New York asked for the maximum, as did New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. During a dozen years as a judge, Farber had never been contacted by a police officer—and certainly not the commissioner—regarding sentencing. “From some of the letters I received, you would have thought the defendant tried to commit a terrorist act,” he said.
Farber allowed that Jeb’s statements to the media were “bizarre” and “absurd.” But he noted that jurors had asked that he not be jailed. He called Jeb a role model for courage, not recklessness, noting that he himself rode a motorcycle. He finished by saying that after careful consideration, he’d concluded that jail time was “simply not warranted in this case.”
Noting that the defendant had no prior criminal record and had merely been convicted of a misdemeanor, Farber gave Jeb three years of probation and a hundred hours of community service.
“It’s truly terrifying,” Jeb told the press afterwards about his feelings sitting in the dock. Reporters pursued Gigi into an elevator and outside to a waiting car for comment, but she shooed them away.
Still, the prints would have the final word, as they do. A headline in the New York Post the following day read “Chute-for-Brains Jumper Ducks Jail.”
Chapter 14
PAINT IT BLACK
Through the trial, Jeb had kept it together with help from Roberta Mancino, a model from Italy who had appeared in the pages of Vogue and Playboy. A pixie with large brown eyes, she was a champion skydiver, a black belt in kickboxing, and a scuba diver who had been underwater with sharks—as unlikely and beguiling a combination of traits as those of a unicorn or mermaid.
Although he had been facing prison, Jeb had continued to make future plans. In the interest of resuming his career, he had sent Roberta a business proposal concerning an animal conservation show he was pitching to producers. He wanted a female cohost, and Roberta possessed all the prerequisites. She was beautiful, fearless, and athletic. She lived in Arizona, where she trained as a competitive skydiver, yet she had never heard of Jeb.
Asking around the drop zone about him, she found that opinion was mixed. “‘How stupid is that to go and jump the Empire State Building when you know the security is going to be . . .’” she recalled some saying. She wondered if Jeb were perhaps crazy. Yet his skills as a jumper were beyond dispute. Some said all the carping about him amounted to professional jealousy because of the coveted commercial work he won.
When the trial was over and Jeb was a free man, Roberta agreed to come to L.A. to meet in person for the first time, provided Jeb would teach her to BASE jump. Of course, he said yes.
The animal conservation show never did get off the ground, the producers having become furious that Jeb had violated their mutual pledge to keep their appreciation for Roberta strictly platonic. “Fuck you, guys,” Jeb had told them. “What can I say? I’m in love.”
• • •
JEB FULFILLED HIS COMMUNITY service at a clothing store where proceeds benefit HIV charities, and brought Roberta to the Perrine Bridge, in Idaho, for BASE training. He cautioned her to proceed only if prepared to give her life for the experience. “‘Only do it if you love it,’” she recalled him saying. “‘Don’t do it to show off to other people, or for TV.’”
Jeb himself, however, was back on TV. A camera crew had followed him through the trial and sentencing for a British TV documentary to air on Channel 4, called “The Human Bird.” For the climax, Jeb jumped from a chopper and flew his wingsuit along the jagged dragon’s back of the Matterhorn. Yet not all was good in Jeb’s world as scenes in the documentary made plain. Fitzmorris and Gigi were on the outs.
In the Lauterbrunnen Valley with Roberta, he coached her to track from an exit called Yellow Ocean, an ocher-streaked cliff fourteen hundred feet above the valley floor. By October 22, Jeb and Roberta were in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the KL Tower International Jump, a festival where about seventy plunged from a thousand feet up an antenna. There, they were invited to jump the fifty-five-story Menara Telekom tower, an office building known as the Shark Fin for its distinctive profile. It was Roberta’s first building, a chance for the crucial B and completion of the BASE cycle. On a scorching-hot equatorial morning, she launched and opened without a hitch. Jeb followed, bending a gainer and plummeting fast down the face of the building. From the ground, Roberta counted four seconds until Jeb pitched, black parachute blooming off-heading, lines twisting into spaghetti. Without time to correct, the parachute swung into the building, Jeb’s left hip striking the glass with a resounding boom. Canopy still intact, he managed to turn from the building, and disappeared from view behind a stand of trees.
Roberta took off running and found a cluster of people gathered around where Jeb had crashed into a concrete retaining wall. Shouts for “Medical!” crackled on radios. His face a mask of pain, Jeb laughed at the sight of Roberta. “My love, are you okay?” she sobbed.
“Yeah, yeah,” he replied through clenched teeth. He had broken his left hip and foot.
Back in the States, wheelchair bound, Jeb returned to Venice Beach. With Barry Fitzmorris and Gigi bound for divorce, mother and son had moved from Malibu down the coast. It was not beachfront, but it was hardly hardscrabble, either.
Still, friends noted that it was as if the prince had been banished from the palace. Long sheltered by family money and a lifestyle of privilege, his new circumstances chastened Jeb somewhat. He was experiencing, he said, “how normal people have to live.”
“You’re just a person,” Iiro would recall his friend realizing. “Jeb can do amazing things, but you’re just a person like everyone else.”
Jeb adjusted, decorating his place in Venice with black carpet, black bedsheets, a black sectional sofa, and black knickknacks, including plates printed with black skulls beneath the enamel. Roberta prevailed against painting the walls black, explaining that the rooms would feel claustrophobic. She also coaxed Jeb out more socially, although she could not convince him to dance. Mostly he sat in a dark corner of L.A. clubs, wearing earbuds and playing Angry Birds on his iPhone.
Back home late some nights he would express frustration concerning the Wingsuit Landing Project, how sponsors and TV executives had failed to support his vision. Roberta warned about the dangers, but Jeb was not swayed, and in those moments Roberta understood that she, and anything else in Jeb’s life, would simply have to settle for being number two.
• • •
As 2008 gave way to 2009, wingsuits were gaining increasing prominence as footage of pilots rocketing along big walls and into valleys across Europe thrilled viewers online and went viral.
In February, the Golden Knights, the U.S. Army’s Parachute Team, pulled a world record flight above Yuma Proving Ground, in Arizona, flying from more than thirty thousand feet. A month later, the Sunday Times, the national newspaper in the UK, published a feature about BASE, focusing on a phlegmatic train driver in Paris named Hervé le Gallou. He had made more than a thousand jumps, launching from the Eiffel Tower perhaps more than anyone. He was one of the first off the Burj, in Dubai, the tallest building in the world, stretching 155 stories toward the desert sun. Le Gallou’s dream, one he’d had from childhood, was to fly like a bird, which he predicted he would fulfill soon by landing a wingsuit without a parachute.
Later in 2009, a thirty-seven-year-old American named Dean Potter would pull off a record wingsuit BASE flight. Jumping from eighty-eight hundred feet up on the North Face of the Eiger, in Switzerland, he stayed aloft for two minutes and fifty seconds. Known as the Dark Wizard for his brooding intensity, Potter was a world-renowned free climber who stood six-five and weighed 190 pounds, an
d spawned Paul Bunyanesque stories about incredible feats and eccentricities, which all happened to be true. He once dwelled in a cave. He walked barefoot in winter around his home in California’s Sierra Nevada to toughen up his feet. In 2003, Potter made a BASE jump into Mexico’s twelve-hundred-foot-deep Cave of Swallows. His parachute opened into line twists, and he wound up colliding with a dangling rope that jumpers used to pull themselves back to the surface. The result was that his parachute collapsed, but Potter had the presence of mind to grab the rope and, dangling two hundred feet off the deck, slid safely to the bottom.
Potter would popularize slacklining over a yawning chasm while wearing only a BASE rig on his back. If he lost balance, he would fall away from the rope and pitch his parachute.
Given his reputation, Potter’s announcement that he wanted to land without a parachute was taken seriously. “It’s not crazy to think we can fly,” he had said during an interview in Austria, “because we’re already doing it. And we can land. . . . Now my ultimate goal, or thing that drives me, and I dream of night after night and in every waking moment, is to do just that: to fly my human body and land it on the perfect snow slope.”
Still, Jeb was the most prominent exponent of wingsuit flight. He pitched TV executives his landing project, opening with video of a record ski jump by Matti Hautamäki, of Finland, as he traveled 235 meters (771 feet) through the air, nearly the length of a long city block in Manhattan, before setting down smoothly eight seconds later on snow. “He’s doing the exact same thing we’re doing,” Jeb would say. Next he would play footage of Loïc buzzing the skiers above Verbier. Finally, he showed video of motorcycle racers going over on asphalt at 150 miles per hour, sliding in their leathers and standing up without a scratch. “You put these three things together,” Jeb intoned, “you’re doing something no one has ever done before . . . It is every bit as big a deal as summiting Everest for the first time.”
Jeb’s idea was to attach his runway to a building—say, the six-hundred-foot Wynn Las Vegas, on the Strip. The landing apparatus would attach to the building via two twenty-foot towers at the corners of the roof, spaced twenty feet apart, like football goalposts. Cables would run from the top of the towers to twenty-foot towers located below on the resort’s golf course. These congruent lines would narrow to shoulder width as they descended at a forty-five-degree angle. Stretched between them would be fabric, followed by a flat run extending two thousand feet to allow Jeb to bleed off speed. Dampeners similar to the suspension springs used on off-road motorbikes would prevent Jeb from being bounced off the landing as he touched down at terminal speed.
“It’s a very simple concept,” Jeb would say in summation, animation of his landing playing in the background for potential patrons to see, a cartoon Jeb Corliss looking as though he were flying and landing on a massive waterslide. “Everything is going to be completely controlled,” he would reassure nervous executives. “The variables have been eliminated.”
• • •
ONE VARIABLE THEY WOULD have to contend with, though, was Jeb himself. Although a dynamo during prepared remarks, he had a tendency to veer into discomfiting tangents during ad-libs.
When he and his Wingsuit Landing Project were profiled in Smithsonian, Popular Mechanics, and Men’s Journal, Jeb at times betrayed a tone-deaf quality with some comments that he would come to regret. One producer he worked with said Jeb doesn’t fear your judgment and that frees him to be himself. Yes, he was himself, but sometimes he didn’t know when to stop talking.
“I guess that I come off like a douchebag to some people,” he complained after a profile appeared in May 2010, in which other jumpers sneered at his frequent use of the first person. “I guess that my personality is a bit abrasive, and some people take it as me being a self-centered conceited douche. I see it and say, Yeah, I guess I could see how someone could perceive my personality that way. I guess if someone writes an article that paints me like that, I don’t know if I can really argue with that.”
In interviews, he had a habit of invoking the Columbine High School massacre to explain his own simmering rage in school. “This makes me look like a fucking psychopath,” he said afterwards. “When you read it, the feeling you get is you have just read about an absolutely dangerous crazy person [who] would take out half the planet if it would get whatever he needed to get done, and it also paints me as this total media whore that’s just about publicity and will do anything to get on camera.” For the record, he added: “I’m not a psychopath, and I don’t want to go on a mass murdering spree, and I never did want to go on a mass murdering spree.”
Later, though, he would tell another journalist: “When the Columbine thing happened, it was so absolutely clear what happened to these kids. And if I had been in school for another year or two, there’s a very good chance I would have been one of those guys. I was on the verge. I was on the verge of going through my school and taking people out.”
Expressing kinship with school assassins was one thing. It certainly did not help Jeb’s case when the producer assisting him through the process of pitching his wingsuit landing to TV executives, an industry veteran who had worked on Survivor, a man named Bruce Beresford-Redman, became the focus of a Mexican investigation into his wife’s murder at a Cancún resort in April 2010. (Arrested in Los Angeles by U.S. marshals the following November, Beresford-Redman was extradited to Mexico to face charges in the killing; as of this writing the case was still in the courts.)
The most unambiguous setback, though, came when Vertigo Inc. was sold to a military defense contractor from Ohio called Hunter Defense Technologies. The result: Haggard was no longer free to work on outside projects, including a wingsuit landing. Jeb needed a new partner.
He was searching in April 2010, when he showed up to speak at a TEDx conference at the University of Southern California. Perched on a high chair on a round red carpet bathed in a cone of light, he explained innovations in his sport, specifically proximity flying, which, he said, “is the apex, where everything goes right now because it is the closest a human being can come to being that bird, stepping off a telephone pole and flying. That’s what we do—we fly.”
The moderator asked where Jeb was going next. “I’m going to be jumping from an aircraft, and I’m going to be landing on the ground without deploying a parachute, at over 120 miles an hour, and then standing up and doing it again,” he said. “We’ve been spending the last seven years working with NASA engineers and really smart people to make that happen.”
Moderator: “Maybe Nick can help.” Nick was Dr. Nicholas Patrick, a Cambridge- and MIT-educated astronaut who was also speaking at the conference.
“Maybe he can,” Jeb said.
Afterwards, the two men talked. “It’s not like going to the moon,” Jeb would admit. “I’m not going to pretend it’s as big as that. It’s not going to the moon and it’s not curing cancer. But I do believe it’s every bit as important as summiting Everest.”
• • •
It was hardly going any better for Gary Connery in late 2010. He had been making the rounds, too, trying to interest TV in his landing plans, and mostly they thought he was nuts. “I knew back in 2003, with my calculations, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to afford 250 grand,” Gary says. “It was a huge structure with cranes and everything else. I hadn’t told anyone, because nobody would take me seriously. I had approached people and asked them to fund the training, because that would make a great show—to see how you would go through the process of doing this.”
He had been working with a production company on a proposal to pick up a series of world-record and world’s-first stunts, culminating in landing a wingsuit without a parachute. “What I was finding,” he says, “was that it was a real struggle to get people to part with their money for me to go off and do what are, in their minds, some crazy, bonkers stunts.”
As Jeb Corliss and others talked publicly about their plans, Gary remained in the background, biding time. “So I just so
rt of kept all my ideas to myself,” he says, “and of course I wasn’t a name in the sport anyway.”
A break finally came when Vivienne made an introduction with some live event and television producers in the UK. The producers heard Gary’s proposal for landing and decided to back him. They paid for parachutes and wingsuits. Workers on the production side were hired, and Gary set aside time for training. In July 2010 he spent five days at the drop zone in Empuriabrava, Spain, getting reacquainted with the latest modern suits during test flights, working on basic performance, from consistent turns to dives and recovery. “They put some money towards it,” Vivienne would say. “The project was moving ahead. The money had been spent, and it hit us out of the blue.” A few days before Gary was scheduled to get on a plane to begin training in the States, he got a phone call from the producers, telling him the project was canceled. There was no more money.
“Very disappointed,” Vivienne says of Gary’s mood. “But this project had been on and off for many years.”
It was around this time, in September 2010, that something else unexpected happened: Vivienne left. In the days and weeks and months that followed, Gary would have occasion to reflect on his life. Falling down stairs, staging fights, and performing high falls had all been done to support his family. He seldom loved the work, and never the paperwork. He had sacrificed his ambitions. At last, he vowed, this would be his time. He had worked hard for others; now it would be time to do something for Gary: He would land a wingsuit. His reasons were personal. He had always wanted to be the best at something. He had fallen short of his ambitions as a kayaker and skier. He was forty. His window of opportunity was closing. Life had carried him down a path to skydiving, BASE jumping, and wingsuits and although his actions might not alter the way others flew wingsuits, possibly he would gain recognition from his peers. Maybe some would marvel. Gary would have to leave it up to others to decide if what he was planning had any relevance for them.