Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Frank went to work and in a week of concentrated effort redesigned the wing for the N-X-211, as it was called in the Ryan factory before Lindy christened it the Spirit of St. Louis. He created a series of interior metal angles, easily formed on ordinary shop tools, that solved Lindbergh’s lift problem with several hundred pounds to spare. Lindbergh was at his elbow constantly, asking questions, making suggestions, checking Frank’s computation of the plane’s ratio of lift to drag, the crucial factor in every design. Lindy had obviously learned a lot about planes since his stunt-flying days.

  At the end of April 1927, they rolled the completed plane out of the hangar and Lindbergh took it up for her first flight. She performed well in spite of her ugly shape, bounding from the runway in 165 feet. Frank stayed for the more important load tests at San Diego’s Dutch Flats airport. Lindbergh cautiously added fifty gallons of fuel for each test, until they reached the maximum load of 300 gallons. This time it took the Spirit of St. Louis 1,026 feet to get off the ground, but the wing did the job. Frank wished Lindy luck and headed back to Los Angeles to resume his toils for Donald Douglas.

  The next day he landed in the grassy field behind the Cadwallader orange groves. He had become a regular weekend visitor, ignoring scowls from brother Gordon. Amanda welcomed him eagerly. “You look tired,” she said as they drank iced tea on the porch.

  “I didn’t get much sleep this week,” Frank said. “I had to design a new wing for a fellow named Lindbergh who’s going to fly the Atlantic.”

  “Can he do it?” Amanda asked.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Frank said. “He’s got it figured out to the last ounce of gas and pound of lift.”

  “If he succeeds, maybe you could take some of the credit and raise enough money to start your own company.”

  This had never occurred to Frank. Neither he nor anyone else in California considered Lindbergh’s projected flight a significant event. Pilots were setting long-distance records all the time. Lieutenant Jimmy Doolittle had flown across the country in a single day in 1922. Two army planes had flown around the world in 1924. Two other army fliers were planning a flight from Oakland to Honolulu sometime in June.

  “Look at this.” Gordon Cadwallader strode onto the porch and threw a copy of the Los Angeles Times on the tea table. A streamer headline announced Lindbergh was halfway across the Atlantic and had an excellent chance of reaching Paris. Amanda read the story and gasped: “He’s flying alone?”

  Reading over her shoulder, Frank nodded: “All he has to do is keep himself awake.”

  “Now I know you can raise the money,” Amanda said.

  She told her brother that Frank had designed the Spirit of St. Louis’s wing. Gordon Cadwallader sat down and struggled to put a friendly expression on his usually sour face. “I’ve been studying the stocks of plane companies,” Gordon said. “Compared to the rest of the market, they’re all incredibly low. If someone like Lindbergh changed the way people think about planes, they could become the hottest investment in sight. If you agree to share the management with good businessmen, maybe we could start a company.”

  Beneath the table, Amanda took Frank’s hand. She was telling him she was ready to start something more serious than a company. The gesture annihilated Frank’s first inclination to explore Cadwallader’s offer with Buzz McCall and a lawyer at his side. Frank held out his hand. “I can put us in business in a month.”

  For the moment Frank was ready to believe love conquered everything—even greed.

  GOOD-BYE TO EVERYTHING

  Martini in hand, Adrian Van Ness sat beside John Hay Whitney on a leather banquette in the elegant cabin of Whitney’s Sikorsky Amphibian, one of the first business planes in America. Opposite the banquette, in a stylish wicker pullup chair, sat Jock’s cousin, strapping Richard Whitfield, vice president of the New York Stock Exchange. They were all listening to Winston Churchill, the volatile British politician who had been England’s chancellor of the exchequer for the past five years, tell how he had accidentally made a fortune in the stock market.

  “My old friend Tillotson asked me just before I sailed if I had any money to invest and I told him I could always find two or three thousand pounds. I meant this was the limit for me and let it go at that. I had no intention of speculating. He went out and bought shares on margin in your aircraft stocks through this young rascal—”

  He beamed at Adrian Van Ness and took a hefty swallow of his brandy and soda.

  “I get off the boat and find out I’m a bloody millionaire. I’m tempted to call him Santa Claus but he’s too young.”

  “There’s no question, the market Adrian’s made in aircraft stocks is one of the accomplishments of the decade,” Richard Whitfield said in his clipped Locust Valley lockjaw way.

  “I think the real credit belongs to one Charles E. Lindbergh,” Adrian said.

  There was more than a little truth to Adrian’s modesty. Since the Lone Eagle flew the Atlantic, Americans had invested an astonishing four hundred million dollars in aircraft stocks. Airlines had sprung into operation in all parts of the continent. Manufacturers were eagerly building planes to meet their growing schedules.

  “Nonsense,” Richard Whitfield said. “You were the only man on Wall Street ready to do something about it.”

  The praise was equally true. Adrian, backed by Tillotson’s money, had already bought into many of these airlines and aircraft companies at bargain rates—and was in an ideal position to become Wall Street’s leader in financing new ventures through stock offerings.

  It was hardly surprising that Adrian had become Richard Whitfield’s favorite young comer. He was escorting Whitfield’s older daughter, Cynthia, around New York. Adrian’s yellow Hispano-Suiza roadster was parked outside the Whitfield Seventy-third Street town house two or three nights a week. He had put off indefinitely a reconciliation with his wife Amanda. He soothed his conscience by sending her a hefty check each month—and advising her brother Gordon on his investments. Recently he had helped Gordon make a million dollars selling a small aircraft company he had founded with a designer named Buchanan to United American Aircraft, a Detroit company that proposed to become the General Motors of the plane makers.

  Very little of the airplane investments had yet to return a nickel but the paper profits were marvelous. That was the way things worked in America in the year 1929. You could buy town houses and diamond necklaces and Hispano-Suizas simply by displaying your stock portfolio to your banker. Stocks had been going up for eight years and there seemed to be no reason why they would not go up indefinitely. In the White House, President Herbert Hoover was confidently predicting the end of poverty. A jingle in the Saturday Evening Post summed up the national attitude, in which Adrian heartily, even defiantly, concurred.

  O hush thee, my babe, granny’s bought some more shares,

  Daddy’s gone out to play with the bulls and the bears,

  Mother’s buying on tips and she simply can’t lose,

  And baby shall have some expensive new shoes.

  Down came the New Haven Amphibian for a gossamer landing a few hundred yards from John Hay Whitney’s dock. The plane taxied to the pier and the copilot helped them debark. Cynthia Whitfield strolled toward them in gray slacks and a monogrammed white Bergdorf blouse, pouting. “Why didn’t you wake me? I adore that plane.”

  Adrian smiled tolerantly. Vassar had taught Cynthia that most men were lunkheads. But Adrian did not particularly care what she thought of him. Cynthia was an appurtenance he needed to be a man of substance as successful as Richard Whitfield and possibly, in the not-too-distant future, as rich as John Hay Whitney, with his strings of polo ponies and racehorses and mansions in Cannes and Long Island and North Carolina and Florida.

  “If you spent less time imitating Scott and Zelda you wouldn’t have to sleep until ten-thirty every morning,” Adrian said.

  “What’s all that about?” Churchill asked.

  “A writer named Fitzgerald and his wife. Wr
ote a book about a gangster. Typical Irish moonshine,” Whitfield said.

  Churchill chuckled and they all trooped into the house for lunch. Adrian entertained them with tales of new air records. Two Australians had flown the Pacific, British flyers had winged nonstop from London to India. You could fly all over the Caribbean now thanks to enterprising Juan Trippe, who had launched an international airline named Pan American. Adrian basked in the glow of admiration these stories evoked.

  Cynthia announced a determination to take flying lessons. Adrian coolly declared he was opposed to it. He said there was some evidence that frequent flying disordered a woman’s body chemistry. They were studying the problem in Germany. It was a lie but Cynthia promptly lost interest in flight. As she left with the other females for tea on the terrace, Adrian lit a cigar and smiled at Mr. Churchill. Women were as easy to manipulate as the stock market.

  The pain of losing Beryl Suydam had receded to a bittersweet memory. In fact, Beryl’s fame as a long-distance pilot was worldwide since she flew from Moscow to Vladivostok. It added to Adrian’s aviation persona when he casually remarked that he had given Beryl her first flying lessons.

  The next day, Adrian sat in his mother’s Fifth Avenue dining room, eating this sense of male superiority—and little else. Clarissa had come back from England only a week ago—and become an instant critic of the bull market. The burden of her speech was a grave warning to get most of his money into cash as soon as possible. She saw portents of the crash of 1893 everywhere.

  “What does Geoffrey think?” Adrian said.

  “He’s as bad as you. Totally infatuated with the airplane. Irrational on the subject. He feels he’s creating a monument to Peter, I think.”

  That remark made Adrian even less inclined to take her advice. With icy élan, he explained Wall Street to his mother. “They simply won’t let the market go down,” he said. “There’s too much money at stake.”

  “They” were the big operators, the bankers and brokers who had loaned six billion dollars to speculators who had bought stocks on margin. Then there were the investment trusts, worth eight billion dollars. With such titans involved, the idea of a crash was ludicrous.

  Clarissa Ames Van Ness raised her wineglass to her lips. Her hand trembled. “Adrian, for God’s sake. I heard your—your father say the same thing thirty-six years ago.”

  Icy fury replaced icy elan. She was still mouthing the lie. For a moment Adrian almost told her he knew everything. He knew his real father. But forethought rescued him. He recoiled from the ensuing scene. What would he do if she wept and begged his forgiveness?

  “You’re talking about another century, Mother. You’re hopelessly out of your depth. Do you know how much I’m worth, personally?”

  “No,” Clarissa Ames Van Ness said, her head bowed. She was still beautiful, even with age’s wrinkles making their first inroads around her eyes and mouth.

  “Ten million dollars.”

  Clarissa rang for the maid to take away their unfinished dinner. That done, she gazed at Adrian with something very close to loathing in her eyes. “I won’t give you a cent if you fail. I won’t go destitute into my old age to support your New York arrogance. I told your father the same thing in 1893.”

  “Your compassion is overwhelming. It makes me think he was glad he ran into that tree limb. He may even have done it on purpose.”

  His mother struggled to her feet, knocking over her wineglass. She was as white as the tablecloth. “I think we’ve said more than enough for one evening.”

  A month later, on October 24, 1929, Adrian stood in the visitors gallery of the New York Stock Exchange beside Winston Churchill, watching traders scream orders on the jammed floor. Huge blocks of stock in companies such as General Motors and Kennecott Copper were being thrown on the market. There were no buyers. Prices were in a vertical dive and “they”—the big operators and investment trusts—seemed powerless to pull them out.

  With class A stocks dropping ten points an hour, it was almost a waste of time to ask the latest quotation on anything as speculative as airline and plane maker stocks such as United American Aircraft. They were already in the dust, mangled bits of wreckage.

  “My boy,” Churchill said. “We’re both learning a lesson here today. There’s no such thing as Santa Claus.”

  Adrian could not even muster a smile. All he could hear amid the frenzy on the exchange floor was his mother’s voice tolling ruined. Was it his turn now to dwindle beneath her scorn? To live as her humble servant until fate or his own decision arranged an accident to remove him permanently from the scene?

  Alone in his office, Adrian struggled to still the winged thing that looped in his chest. He was back in Anson, the American wog again. He was watching Beryl Suydam walk out the door, her radical shoulders squared. There was only one hope—his British father. The fountain pen slithered and slipped in Adrian’s sweaty fingers as he composed the cable. CAN FIRM EXTEND FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS CREDIT? SITUATION GRAVE BUT GREAT OPPORTUNITIES FOR THOSE WHO STAY CALM.

  He sat in his office for another two hours, watching the stock ticker fall farther and farther behind. Richard Whitfield called asking Adrian if he could spare any cash. “I’ve had to sell out my Harvard roommate,” he said. “He’s threatening to kill himself.”

  Adrian’s male secretary came in with the brown cable from London. “What should I do, Mr. Van Ness?” he asked. “I’m getting creamed.”

  “Sell,” Adrian said, ripping open the cable.

  DEEPLY REGRET MR. GEOFFREY TILLOTSON HAS RESIGNED AS MANAGING PARTNER EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.

  Ruined. He had hoped a reply that was even faintly encouraging would open his mother’s checkbook too. Once and for all he abandoned that alternative. What was the other alternative? As he returned from the visitors’ gallery, his secretary told him that eleven men had already committed suicide.

  Adrian stared at the brown cable. Faintly, as if it were coming from a great distance, he heard Geoffrey Tillotson say: Men carry on. It does a man no good to whine. Adrian Van Ness was not the son of that ruined speculator of 1893, no matter how much sympathy he would always feel for him. He was the son of that hearty chunk of England, who stood with feet planted wide and told life to deal what blows it might, he would take them standing. He was the great-grandson of Oakes Ames, the flinty Yankee who had defied a world that pronounced him ruined.

  Adrian summoned Bleriot’s plane soaring over Dover Castle in 1909. He remembered Peter Tillotson in the Bristol Scout banking over Anson in 1912. He recalled the transcendence of flight above England, the sense of soaring above history into the future. He still believed tomorrow belonged to these miraculous machines.

  The future. Forethought. He could hear Geoffrey Tillotson pronouncing them. The words would always have an English echo in his ear.

  Father, Adrian whispered. O Father.

  Although a winged creature looped in his chest, Adrian Van Ness would carry on.

  Where, how? In the chaos of a collapsing economy, mere determination seemed futile. As he sat in his Wall Street office, his mother’s presence uptown loomed above the skyline. It was only a matter of time before he succumbed to that invincible checkbook.

  Unless he got out of New York. Unless he went someplace where planes were being made, some place Clarissa Van Ness would never follow him.

  That was when Adrian remembered Amanda and Prince Carlo Pontecorvo’s advice about those two thousand acres of orange trees in California.

  GREED: THE SECOND ACT

  While a half-dozen reporters watched, the gleaming white monoplane emerged from Buchanan Aircraft’s dim main hangar into the brilliant California sunshine. The plane emanated modernity. Her sleek fuselage had a shark-like shape. Her streamlined engine cowling, her art deco wheel pants, added speed as well as beauty. The twin tail fins doubled her stability and maneuverability. Her 400-horsepower radial engine would enable her to fly twice as fast as the lumbering Ford Trimotors which most airlines
were currently using. The multicellular wing, each cell a complex of metal angles, was so strong a steamroller could be driven across it repeatedly without damaging it.

  “What’s her name?” asked one of the reporters who had not bothered to read the publicity release.

  “Lustra Two,” Frank Buchanan said and explained the poetic allusion. He did not have to explain Lustra I. That plane was already well known to aviation writers. It had challenged the Lockheed Vega for the supremacy of the skies, setting records for speed at air races and on distance flights. Lustra II was an attempt to take the basic design and convert it into a ten-passenger airliner.

  “I’m in favor of changing it to Hot Pants,” Buzz McCall said. “In a minute, you guys’ll see why.”

  Buzz climbed into the cockpit and the engine rumbled. Minutes later, the Lustra leaped off the runway and whirled around Buchanan Field at 500 feet. At this dangerous height, Buzz did stalls and spins and banks that demonstrated the plane’s amazing responsiveness. He opened her up to full throttle and whizzed across the airport again, a white blur, then all but turned her on her axis to slide in for a perfect landing.

  “You’re looking at the next generation airliner,” Tama Morris (aka Moreno) said.

  They were all working for Buchanan Aircraft—Buzz, Tama and her friend Gloria Packer, and several former mechanics from the Buzz McCall Flying Circus. Frank had hired them when Buzz agreed to take over as chief of production. Buzz and Tama had gotten married in 1929, shortly before the stock market crashed.

  Frank had not had much difficulty persuading Buzz to take the job. His movie career had popped like a soap bubble in the sun as talking pictures arrived in 1927. Airplane movies went into eclipse around the same time when several stunt pilots died trying to fulfill impossible demands by directors who knew nothing about flying. The talkies had been fatal to Tama too. Her acting skills were rudimentary.