The Stowaway

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

  Bayside was secluded but a handy enough commute to Astoria, Queens, home of the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation (soon to be renamed Paramount Pictures) and the Kaufman studios, and also to Vitagraph Studios in South Greenfield, Brooklyn (a neighborhood now called Midwood), which was rapidly losing its woodsy setting for outdoor films to highways and automobiles. Not long before the Gawronskis arrived in Queens, Warner Bros. had bought Vitagraph and moved most of its operations to the more bucolic Hollywood, with the exception of a few Vitaphone short subjects shot until they closed shop altogether in 1939. Producer-director D. W. Griffith still filmed in New York City—even in Bayside—although his box-office pull was waning a decade after The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. The Jazz Singer, the first all-talkie feature-length film, premiered in 1927 at the newly opened Tower Theatre in Los Angeles, the first cinema specifically designed for these revolutionary chatty films, to unqualified success. The industry was going in a new direction—and out of Brooklyn. The rumored new studio had not yet materialized (and never would), and the glitterati had started a steady exodus to California.

  Francesca was spooked. Rudy, however, wasn’t worried about Los Angeles’s rise, reminding his wife that the economy was still booming. And even if all the actors left, more rich people would buy their homes and want new tables and chairs. They were in the upholstery business, not the film business.

  And for the time being, anyway, there were still actors around. Classes didn’t mix much in 1920s Bayside, but sixteen-year-old Billy saw the occasional star when he went to the local Capitol Theatre a few blocks from his home for vaudeville acts and motion pictures.

  Some of the more developed boys his age were having more luck snagging dates to the movies; unfortunately for Billy, he desired girls more than they liked him. He was a great friend to have, and they might go out with him to be nice, but he was still so short and boyish, with a squeaky voice. Because he’d stayed enrolled in his Manhattan school, it was hard to meet local girls. On weekends especially, there was time to kill. When he wasn’t at the local library, he often hung around the firemen at Bayside’s Hook and Ladder 152 and Engine Company 306 on 214th Place and Griffin Avenue. Billy learned their terminology—words such as pumper engine and pumper truck—and one fireman let him hold a smoke mask in his hands. Pleased by his curiosity, the men encouraged him to consider a life as a firefighter when he was old enough. He said he would think about it; he did want adventure.

  What every immigrant to New York craved was security, including Rudy Gawronski, who had no desire for a rootless existence. He was proud to have finally arrived in the (lower) middle class. Billy, however, let it be known that he preferred Manhattan to Queens, even with his friends at the library and the firehouse. One year, two years after he had left the Lower East Side, it was still where he felt most at home. Bayside was so far out in Queens that most kids didn’t know he was still in New York City; his old grade-school friends teased him about wherever the hell he was living these days.

  Textile High on Manhattan’s West Eighteenth Street was a competitive trade school where Billy specialized in interior decoration to please his father. He had a solid B average, with his highest marks in history and languages, but also more than one C. His Polish was fluent from his many years of Sunday studies, and Billy had little trouble with German; having parents who grew up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire helped. He loved science, but it didn’t come as naturally as language and history. This bright boy dreaming of excitement was suited more for gestalt experience than for traditional education.

  Textile High had been only two years along when Billy arrived for his first freshman day in 1924. Principal William Henry Dooley was a progressive educator who, after training at Columbia and Harvard Universities, visited garment trade schools in Europe and the high schools of the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, before setting up his great experiment: a feeder school for the New York garment industry. There were plenty of employment opportunities for Dooley’s well-trained graduates in the robust economy of the 1920s.

  Billy dutifully enrolled in interior design classes such as History of Furniture, Color Schemes, and Coherence in Decorating, but he excelled off-curriculum, mastering his own quirky enthusiasms and playing well with others. He studied costume illustration (mandatory for both boys and girls), batik (a dying technique especially popular in Javanese design), and life drawing, where nude models posed for students in the school’s exceedingly progressive classrooms. His classmates learned commercial poster design and advertising. And Billy adored his art history elective, especially rule breaker Vincent van Gogh and his friend Paul Gauguin, who painted sensual South Pacific women. Billy loved the racy Gauguins.

  He happily took his commute on the Long Island Railroad from the barn-red Bayside train station to Manhattan’s Penn Station every day rather than go to school in Bayside with dreamless kids who moaned about dirty, greedy Jews and lazy Negroes. Several of his friends at Textile High were black women who had been elected school leaders, such as Aurie Aileen Carter, an officer in the history and law club who was headed to Pratt Institute, and the class vice president, Florizel Cunningham, who’d been accepted to New York University. Why couldn’t those living lusterless lives in Queens grasp there was another way to think?

  Sure, Billy appreciated some of the Bayside experience: the nearby Oakland Lake and the public tennis courts one block from his house. He even had a go at the local putting green. But overall, he found the neighborhood provincial and boring, even if his mother had written to her relatives in Poland that it was glamorous—that she lived where most of the American silent-film stars lived. (She neglected to mention the actors were in a snootier part of town.)

  • • •

  In the spring of 1927, Billy’s first year as a Queens resident and his junior year of high school, Richard Evelyn Byrd lost the Orteig Prize to Charles Lindbergh for being the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. (Back in 1919, New York City hotel owner Raymond Orteig had offered a prize of $25,000 for the first nonstop aircraft flight between the two cities.)

  Lindbergh was now the most lionized man in America, and Billy was undoubtedly disappointed and razzed about it by friends. His idol had long been Byrd, for years the heavy favorite to win the Orteig—until Lindbergh became an overnight sensation on May 21, 1927, the day he landed his single-engine plane at Paris’s Le Bourget Airport. Still, Billy was proud of Byrd when he read about the christening of the commander’s newest Fokker trimotor aircraft, designed to cross the Atlantic. In front of a brass band and two thousand admirers at Roosevelt Field, Byrd had been slipped a disturbing note: Lindbergh had beaten him to the punch and made it to Paris in thirty-three and a half hours. The astute commander had nothing but praise that day for the young upstart from the Midwest; knowing that he could no longer win, he announced that he would fly anyway for the experience. Byrd, as Billy saw it, was all class. Nothing set him back, not even public humiliation. He just powered on, in it for the adventure, not the prize.

  Of course, Byrd must have been crestfallen. But he had gentlemanly let Lindbergh use Roosevelt Field—a milelong patch of dirt that Byrd had leased personally—as a runway two days before. The beautifully smooth path from which Lindbergh’s custom-built Ryan monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, took off had been leveled especially for the commander.

  Mayor James “Jimmy” Walker—friend to celebrity, master logroller—gave Byrd his second tickertape parade in thirteen months for his sporting spirit. The turnout for the runner-up was sparse compared with Lindbergh’s record-breaking crowds, and it rained hard that Monday, and many left the July 18 parade early, but no way was Billy missing it: school was out, and he stayed to the bitter end.

  By the end of 1927, even though Byrd had been given a Congressional Medal of Honor for his troubles, pesky rumors about Byrd’s North Pole 1926 exploits on his Fokker trimotor aircraft Josephine Ford (shrewdly named after patron Edsel Ford’s daughter) weren’t going away. How co
uld he and his pilot, Floyd Bennett, have made a 1,500-mile return trip in such a short time: fifteen hours and forty-four minutes instead of the expected eighteen hours? Commander Byrd maintained they had been aided by strong tailwinds. But criticism smarted. And after having lost the Orteig to Lindbergh, Byrd longed to solidify his unexpectedly shaky place in history and hankered after everlasting fame. How to get the attention of a jaded America?

  He sought the guidance of Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and a trusted advisor who later would be credited as the founder of the public relations field. Bernays had salvaged President Calvin Coolidge’s public image during his 1924 campaign, inviting vaudeville stars to a pancake breakfast at the White House in hopes of enticing the notoriously dour politician to crack a smile for the cameras. With Bernays’s expert help, Coolidge won the office. Now Bernays brainstormed with Byrd: Why not replace that loss to Lindbergh with a win? Could he fly somewhere dramatic and film it? Americans were still enraptured by flight. A year after his victory, Lucky Lindy was still pictured everywhere holding up his $25,000 Orteig Prize check. He had toured seventy-five American cities in the Spirit of St. Louis the previous summer and fall, dropping messages printed on postcards where he couldn’t visit. Before 1927, most Americans had been afraid to travel by plane, but Lindbergh’s triumph cemented public confidence in flight; investors popped up, and aviation stocks soared. Private airlines surfaced—there were soon forty-four scheduled airlines and as many nonscheduled ones—and by the end of the 1920s, roughly three million Americans, mainly businessmen, had followed Lindbergh across their country’s skies.

  So, a flight, then. But the North Pole was getting old. What about an expedition to the South Pole that involved airplanes as well as ships?

  The Antarctic story to date was wed to European history. Explorers such as England’s Shackleton and Norway’s Amundsen—and Belgium’s Adrien de Gerlache, the first to winter in the region, from March 1898 to March 1899—had captured the fancy of their nations; they’d certainly enjoyed their taste of the sublime. But Americans hadn’t particularly followed those expeditions. Byrd understood that Americans needed their own heroes before they’d care. However, to stake his claim to immortality, he needed money. Lots of it. In 1927 the United States government was not in the habit of financing expeditions, a costly business. It was time to hustle, Bernays advised.

  Luckily, Byrd was exceptionally good at hustle. Within weeks, he’d written an article in the monthly World’s Work magazine titled “Why I Am Going to the South Pole,” which included the lines “Man cannot claim mastery of the globe until he conquers the Antarctic continent. It is the last great challenge.” Here the commander first mentioned his plans to explore from the air, shipping over his planes in a small fleet. Alas, he got carried away during this gestation period. A week later, Byrd “confided” to an already intrigued Associated Press reporter his far-fetched plan not only to take the four best Eskimo hunters out of their blustery rockbound community but also to start a yearlong colony in Antarctica by sending along two squaws to cook their meals and to “breed” more Eskimos. One can only imagine Billy’s reaction to this flamboyant update.

  Sensationalism and patriotism—those did the trick. The public clamored for more news, any news. Eskimos going to the South Pole! Anything else?

  TWO

  GOOD MEN SHOULD APPLY

  By February 1928, plans for Commander Byrd’s Antarctic expedition were popping up in reputable and disreputable papers alike, although at this stage, the mission was still being followed mostly by science and adventure buffs devouring gossipy reports in somewhat niche publications. Byrd’s most loyal fans, like Billy, were informed that male Inuits would indeed be part of the official crew. And Byrd had names: he’d decided to take along Nukaping (who stood just four foot seven and weighed less than 130 pounds) and several other Kalaallisut-speaking Inuits who had proved invaluable to his previous Arctic exploits in northern Greenland’s Etah Fjord, so close to the North Pole. “Etah,” Byrd said, meant “windy place.” Even the name of their home, he explained, signaled their expertise; these were men who lived in sealskin tents and hunted caribous, polar bears, walruses, and seals.

  Byrd had thought more about “Eskimo duties” near the South Pole, which, as he saw it now, would include handling dog teams, helping his otherwise all-American team transform fifty reindeer skins into Southern Hemisphere survival clothing, and hunting seal to feed the party.

  “I don’t know how the Eskimos will take to the heat,” he joked to a newspaper reporter at the New York World. “Maybe I’ll have to put the whole lot of them on ice until we reach colder climes.”

  Over at Popular Science, writer “Fitz” Green teased readers with more details. Green was already the explorer’s trusted ghostwriter, though this was not disclosed. Green had traveled with Byrd on his North Pole exploits and knew his “Eskimo friend” Nukaping, offering, “He is stockily built, has never had a bath, and prefers raw meat to cooked. The only food he eats regularly besides meat is raw eider duck eggs.” How would he fare so far from the windy place he called home? Green quoted Byrd: “Nukaping will not realize that we are going to the southern end of the globe. He’ll think he is back home when he sees the ice and snow again.”

  Someone as canny as PR strategist Bernays was pulling strings as enthralling plans (not all of them plausible) continued to leak out. Small newswire pieces and science magazine scoops would help amass crowds for a profitable fund-raising lecture-circuit trip around the nation.

  Then, on March 11, 1928, premier aviation reporter Russell Owen announced the whole game in the New York Times. Owen was an unlikely adventurer. Three years earlier, the bespectacled thirty-six-year-old had covered the Scopes trial—a national victory for science, when a high school substitute teacher named John T. Scopes was exonerated for violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which outlawed the teaching of human evolution in public schools. After his exemplary coverage, Owen had more say in his assignments and won the right to cover Byrd’s 1926 North Pole trip, flying as far as Ny-Ålesund, on the Norwegian Arctic Ocean archipelago of Svalbard, where he met and interviewed Byrd. With that relationship in place, Owen had been a natural choice to cover the 1927 Lindbergh-Byrd race. The navy commander had been thrilled to give Owen the scoop and privately asked the Times to later send Owen along on his Antarctica voyage, where he could cover the flight over the South Pole. Still, the New York Times paid good money for Russell Owen’s access to Byrd.

  Reclining in an easy chair in the governor’s mansion in Richmond, Virginia, Byrd formally revealed his plans. He and Owen were there at the invitation of Byrd’s older brother, Harry, who had been elected the state’s governor two years before—the latest in a long line of Byrd overachievers. Richard Byrd’s base of operations was a lackluster room in the Hotel McAlpin in New York’s Herald Square; perhaps Harry’s new mansion was a more impressive backdrop for this interview and would reinforce the luster of the Byrd name.

  As for the specific details divulged: “On the final dash for the pole,” the Times reported, “we shall carry a Primus stove, a reindeer sleeping bag, two months’ food supply, including Danish-made pemmican (a highly caloric emergency ration), chocolate, tea, hardtack, and dog food. We will also have skis, snowshoes, medical kits, extra clothing, and rifles and ammunition.” With this much thought having gone into preparations, the expedition would surely be under way soon.

  As a longtime Byrd devotee, Billy’s ears pricked up whenever he heard new press dispatches on the American South Pole trip. Owen’s scoop was cut and pasted into his scrapbook, a craft he’d learned from his mother. Photos of Billy, like the clippings from his pet show win, featured prominently in hers, but his was devoted solely to the expedition. Clipping news for it was the most exciting part of his day. Otherwise, like any restless senior, Billy trudged through his final year at Textile High.

  The Times soon ran almost daily stories about “America’s Explorer.” Bravery was a c
onstant theme, and Commander Byrd was often photographed in his full-dress white uniform, which he had obtained permission from the US Navy to wear. In truth, he fared only moderately well in the navy, exiting as a junior-grade lieutenant after having sustained a personal injury outside the line of duty. Although acquaintances knew that his fine charm masked a huge ego (and an even more select few knew that he possessed dodgy flying skills), nothing disparaging about Byrd was considered fair copy—even from the Times’s rivals, which had begun to cover the growing story, too.

  The newsmen of Owen’s generation were invested in making their countrymen proud. Even after World War I, America was still widely regarded as something of an upstart country, with Europe considered the height of sophistication. Now here was a man who conveyed an unimpeachable high-WASP elegance: a handsome, slender figure with a shock of black hair, a delicate nose, eyes ringed with dark, long lashes, a square jawline, and an “Old Dominion” Virginian refined demeanor. If a risk taker, Byrd was a genteel one: curious, focused, gracious to his competitors, a dog lover, and in it for something larger than the prize. He was a homegrown hero who might inspire jealousy from even the old-boys-club Europeans emulated by the American wannabes.

  Not that Byrd was getting all the attention—the unexplored expanses of Antarctica intrigued readers, too. At night, after finishing homework, Billy swooned at electrifying rumors that there could be unknown creatures in its uncharted lands. He pasted these reports into his scrapbook too, among them one particularly stirring quote attributed to Byrd in a February 1928 Popular Mechanics article:

  “Does it seem reasonable that lands which for months of the year are swept by sunshine twenty-four hours a day should not somewhere support life? Not on the great plateaus which stretch out inland to the pole; here there is only snow and ice. But somewhere in those tremendous areas there must be lowlands where temperatures rise sufficiently to permit vegetable and animal life—the latter very possibly as different from any we know as the penguin is different from birds of climes with which we are familiar.