Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  As Lindbergh’s fame escalated, so did the demand to see him. Alexander Pantages guaranteed Lindbergh $105,000 for fifteen weeks of appearances on his circuit of vaudeville theaters. A French theatrical agent bettered that—$250,000 for five appearances in South America. The Recording Division of Thomas Edison, Inc., wanted Lindbergh to cut a phonograph disk describing his flight, the royalties of which would easily reach six figures. A rival talking-machine company guaranteed a flat $300,000 for such a narration, opening with “The Star-Spangled Banner” and closing with “The Marseillaise.” Upon Lindbergh’s landing in Paris, Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures, had offered $50,000 for the flier’s appearance in two pictures, one of which he thought could be “The Great Air Robbery.” Shortly after seeing the meteoric rise of Lindbergh-mania, he upped his offer to $700,000 for a one-year contract. Yet another company offered $1,000,000 for him to appear in a film in which he would actually marry.

  The most extravagant offer came from William Randolph Hearst, whose media empire included Cosmopolitan Pictures. He wanted to star Lindbergh in a motion picture about aviation opposite his mistress, Marion Davies. Hearst had offered Lindbergh $500,000 plus ten percent of the gross receipts. Those extra points in the film would probably have been worth at least as much as his salary—leaving him financially set for life.

  Hearst invited Lindbergh to his sumptuous New York house on Riverside Drive, where he handed Lindbergh the motion-picture contract all ready for signing. Lindbergh explained that he never had any intention of going into films, and he felt uncomfortable about signing the document. In order to lure Lindbergh, Hearst assured him that this would not be a moving picture “in the ordinary sense of the word.” It would not be a fiction story, but the actual story of Lindbergh’s life—“an historical record of a fine life and a great achievement to be preserved in pictures for others to see in years to come.” He urged Lindbergh not to consider it merely for himself, “but as an inspiration to others.”

  “I wish I could do it if it would please you,” Lindbergh demurred, “but I cannot, because I said I would not go into pictures.” What Lindbergh did not say—until many years later in a book of memoirs—was that he objected to Hearst himself. The mogul, Lindbergh noted, “controlled a chain of newspapers from New York to California that represented values far apart from mine.

  They seemed to be overly sensational, inexcusably inaccurate, and excessively occupied with the troubles and vices of mankind. I disliked most of the men I had met who represented him, and I did not want to become associated with the organization he had built.

  “All right,” Hearst said at last, “—but you tear up the contract; I have not the heart to do it.”

  More embarrassed than ever, Lindbergh attempted to hand it back to him. “No,” said Hearst quietly, sizing up the young man, “if you don’t want to make a picture, tear it up and throw it away.” Double-dared, Lindbergh tore the pages in half and tossed them into the fireplace. Hearst watched with what Lindbergh would long remember as “amused astonishment.”

  As he was leaving, Lindbergh stopped at a table to admire a pair of silver globes, fourteen inches high; one was terrestrial, the other celestial. The silversmith was unknown, but they were thought to be crafted in Hanover around 1700. It was the only known pair in existence, valued then at $50,000. The next day, a messenger arrived at Lindbergh’s apartment on Park Avenue, bearing the two silver spheres as a gift.

  Within the first month of his return, Lindbergh received more than five million dollars’ worth of offers—at a time when income taxes would have taken less than five percent of his earnings and a most lavish rooftop triplex apartment on Park Avenue cost $100,000. The propositions seemed like fool’s gold to Lindbergh alongside some vague offers coming from the United States government. Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and Aviation Secretaries William P. MacCracken, F. Trubee Davison, and Edward P. Warner, of the Commerce, War, and Navy departments, respectively, hoped Lindbergh might come to Washington to discuss what role he might play in the expansion of commercial aviation. There was talk of creating a new Cabinet post of Secretary of Aviation just for Lindbergh.

  After a week of conferences in the capital and New York City, several ideas for promoting aviation emerged, as did a team of advisers who could actualize them. From different backgrounds, these well-educated men of great wealth were all consumed with the notion of public service.

  Among them was perhaps the most important but least known figure in the development of American aviation, Harry Guggenheim. His grandfather Meyer Guggenheim was a Jewish peddler who had emigrated from Switzerland to Pennsylvania and parlayed money he had made from a stove-cleaning solvent into a copper mining and smelting empire. Few in America had ever made so much money so quickly, amassing in a few years one of the nation’s vastest fortunes.

  None of the great Jewish families who had immigrated to America assimilated faster than the Guggenheims, promptly abandoning their orthodoxy, even marrying outside the faith. Meyer’s seven sons chose different fields in which to grow the money and different charities in which to re-sow most of it. Daniel Guggenheim became the family’s leading industrialist; and among his many philanthropies was a Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, which he established in 1926 with $500,000. It could not have come at a more propitious moment, for aviation was then struggling through what Lindbergh would call the “period of transition between invention and commerce.” While Guggenheim supplied the money, he left the task of dispensing it to his son, Harry.

  A blue-eyed Navy aviator from the War, he and his gentile wife, the former Caroline “Carol” Morton, had recently moved onto an estate adjacent to his father’s on the north shore of Long Island. His duties, as described by the Fund, were: “to promote aeronautical education throughout the country; to assist in the extension of aeronautical science; and to further the development of commercial aircraft, particularly in its use as a regular means of transportation of both goods and people.” With the rest of his board—which included Air Secretary Trubee Davison and Dwight Morrow—Guggenheim felt “that no man could demonstrate more satisfactorily to the American public the progress of aeronautics than Colonel Lindbergh.” In fact, after three weeks of receptions in America, Guggenheim considered him nothing less than a godsend to aviation, a natural generator of only the most positive publicity. The Fund invited Lindbergh to embark on a three-month tour that would take the Spirit of St. Louis to all forty-eight states in the Union.

  Lindbergh accepted. While planning the trip, he even hired Guggenheim’s attorney, Henry Breckinridge—a Princetonian who had served as Woodrow Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of War—to act as his personal adviser, to sort through the hundreds of offers coming his way and to challenge the hundreds of illegal abusers of Lindbergh’s name in promoting products.

  “Col. Lindbergh’s airplane tour will be undertaken for the primary purpose of stimulating popular interest in the use of air transport,” read the Guggenheim Fund’s press release on June 28, 1927. “It will enable millions of people who have had an opportunity only to read and hear about the colonel’s remarkable achievement to see him and his plane in action.” The fund had two other goals:

  … first, to encourage the use of our present air transport facilities for mail express and passenger carrying purposes, aerial photography and other services, and thereby foster the growth of this means of transportation, and second, to promote the development of airports and air communication services.

  While Guggenheim, Breckinridge, and the Air Secretaries prepared the itinerary, Dwight Morrow devised a scheme to benefit the flier and his original backers, which would also allow Lindbergh to keep the Orteig Prize. So as not to steal any thunder from the men who had paid for the winning plane, Morrow diplomatically raised $10,000 from his Morgan partners, which he sent to the backers, reimbursing them for their expenses above their initial investments in the plane. He also saw that Lindbergh’s own $2,000 share was quietly replaced in his
bank account. Finally, Morrow recommended to Harry Guggenheim that the Guggenheim Fund pay Colonel Lindbergh $50,000 for his upcoming tour.

  His affairs in the most responsible hands in the nation, Lindbergh could at last devote himself to his most pressing obligation, his book. While Lindbergh had been on public display, Carlyle MacDonald had holed himself up with a staff of secretaries in publisher George Putnam’s house in Rye, New York. No sooner were the pages typed than they were rushed to the Knickerbocker Press in New Rochelle, where extra printers had been laid on. “MacDonald did a good job,” Putnam later stated, “and a quick one. The crescendo of incoming orders from book-sellers was music to a publisher’s ears.” The fastest book produced up to that time, a complete set of galley proofs was ready for Lindbergh’s approval in less than two weeks of his return to America.

  On Saturday, June twenty-fifth, he drove into the city from the Trubee Davison estate on Long Island to read them. He was appalled. MacDonald had not only written the book in the first person, but he had reverted to the bombast Lindbergh thought they had abandoned back in Paris. Lindbergh began blue-penciling the purplest prose, but the task seemed hopeless. More annoying than the factual errors, the entire book struck him as false in tone, “cheaply done.” Lindbergh knew he could not renege on his contract, especially as Putnam’s had already begun to publicize the book, promising copies by July first. At the same time, the book’s editor, Fitzhugh Green, pointed out, “It is your book: we wouldn’t want to publish it if it weren’t.”

  Lindbergh saw only one solution—that he would write the book himself. That was more than acceptable to the publishers, until they learned that Lindbergh did not intend to address the job until the autumn, after his crosscountry tour. “At that juncture high blood pressure pretty nearly overcame us,” George Putnam later recalled. “We were only publishers, to be sure, and he was Lindbergh; but at that a contract was a contract and irate customers were stalking us with knives.” At last, Lindbergh figured that if he could hunker down in absolute peace during the month that remained before his tour, he could deliver a complete manuscript. He would use MacDonald’s draft as an outline and write ten thousand words a week, a prodigious effort for even a seasoned writer. Lindbergh agreed to start work right after the Fourth of July, which he had promised to spend in Ottawa as part of the diamond jubilee of the Confederation of Canada. There he faced more crowds and received a specially engraved gold medal bearing the profiles of King George V and the Prince of Wales.

  Upon his return, Lindbergh settled into Falaise, Harry Guggenheim’s twenty-six-room manor house in Sands Point. It had been built in 1923, but upon entering the brick-sheltered courtyard, guests felt transported back to medieval France. The château was complete with high oak-beamed ceilings, detailed work on every door and window, a Norman tower, and an arcaded loggia in the rear practically at the edge of a cliff that dropped to the Long Island Sound. Its topography was reminiscent of Lindbergh’s house in Little Falls; but the similarity ended there. Falaise was the epitome of luxurious living, replete with fine antiques and artwork—especially saints and Madonnas.

  Lindbergh moved into the northeast bedroom, which had a small balcony and windows looking across the Sound to Connecticut. His suite afforded him complete privacy. The Guggenheims kept visitors at a minimum that July, because whatever time Lindbergh could take from his book went into discussing his forthcoming tour. He worked most of every day—sitting alone at the inlaid wooden desk in his room or at a wooden table outside on the grounds east of the house. He wrote in blue ink with a fountain pen on plain eight-by-ten-inch white bond in his largest, most readable script. Mindful of his contract to deliver at least forty thousand words, he counted his output and ran the total at the top of each page.

  As soon as he had a few pages under his belt, Lindbergh read them to Fitzhugh Green over the telephone. “I was much pleased,” Green wrote him afterward. “It was clear, precise and well-balanced narrative. My only suggestion is that you might brighten it up a little by a personal touch now and then. But it showed me beyond a doubt that you are quite as competent to write a good book as to fly the Atlantic.”

  Less than three weeks later, Lindbergh delivered the last of his pages, just under the agreed length. Nobody complained. Lindbergh recorded his life story, from birth to Le Bourget, in serviceable prose, mostly simple sentences; and his calm, objective voice proved especially effective in understating the more melodramatic incidents of his flight. Without Lindbergh’s knowledge or approval, Putnam’s selected what struck them as an obvious title for the book—“We.” Lindbergh would forever complain about it, that his use of “we” meant him and his backers, not him and his plane, as the press had people believing; but his frequent unconscious use of the phrase suggested otherwise.

  With a foreword by Myron Herrick—linking him to Joan of Arc, Lafayette, and David, three other exemplars of youthful idealism—a long afterword by Fitzhugh Green—recounting the triumphant marches from Paris to St. Louis—and forty-eight photographs, Putnam’s published a highly respectable book of more than three hundred pages. They offered special autographed editions for $25 apiece, all of which were sold before publication. When the typesetters had finished their work, George Putnam had the original manuscript bound in two leather volumes, for which a collector offered $50,000.

  Putnam considered accepting the money. He even explained to Colonel Breckinridge that a reading of the contract suggested that he technically owned the pages; and he offered to split the $50,000. Lindbergh considered the suggestion and said, “No. If it’s yours, you do as you wish. If it isn’t, I want it.” Humbled by Lindbergh’s rectitude, Putnam backed off. After the author received his pages, he donated them to the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis.

  Lindbergh had not even had the time to reread most of his handwritten manuscript; and the scheduled first flight for the Guggenheim Fund precluded his waiting for galleys. Amazingly, in less than two weeks, books were in the stores. Within a month, “We” had sold close to two hundred thousand copies, and sales showed no signs of letting up before Christmas, for which Putnam’s prepared a special boxed edition for boys. It lingered at the top of bestseller lists well into the next year, netting more than six hundred thirty-five thousand copies. It was translated into most major languages in the world and sold in large numbers from Germany to Australia. “We” earned more than a quarter of a million dollars for its author, most of which was paid to him the following year.

  Part of the book’s success must be credited to the fortunate timing of the Guggenheim Fund tour, which proved to be the most exhaustive author tour ever scheduled. The coinciding of the two events created a publicity storm that resulted in the entire country’s becoming obsessed with Lindbergh. Until then, he had been a marvel people outside a few cities could only experience secondhand. The summer of 1927, however, afforded every American the opportunity to become part of the phenomenon, as the frenzy at each stop only fueled the enthusiasm at the next.

  The tour began July twentieth at Mitchel Field, Long Island. From there, Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis over Niantic, Connecticut, to Hartford, where he was greeted by one hundred thousand people. The Department of Commerce supplied an advance man named Milburn Kusterer, who had co-ordinated receptions at each stopping point. Commerce also provided Lindbergh with a personal aide named Donald Keyhoe, who flew in close pursuit with a mechanic from Wright in a plane piloted, at Lindbergh’s request, by his friend since Kelly Field, Philip Love. The tour continued with hardly a pause until October twenty-third, zigzagging northward to Portland, Maine, west across the northern half of the country to Seattle, south to San Diego, east to Jacksonville then north to New York again. No American was more than four hundred miles off the Lindbergh route; most lived within fifty miles.

  It was three months of ceaseless adulation, a tour that wavered between the historical and the hysterical. For most of the places Lindbergh flew over, touched down, or spent the night, it
was the biggest event people had ever seen. He had already learned not to make eye contact with individuals but only to see the crowds; and experience quickly taught him to let somebody else order his breakfast from room service, because his calls were usually met with long silences and giggles from the telephone operators. He stopped sending laundry out under his name because it never came back.

  Most days on tour began with a short flight to a city for a parade, lunch, and a meeting with the press. Then he would fly over four or five large towns—dropping greetings in a muslin sack with an orange streamer—en route to the next major city for a dinner, reception, and more press. Major cities staged elaborate welcoming ceremonies. Wherever possible, he inspected sites for airports and talked to engineers and the leading state and local dignitaries. Spare time was consumed by visits to hospitals and orphanages, then more press.

  Lindbergh never failed to put on his best face. He lost his patience only when the press grilled him about his personal life. Donald Keyhoe remembered Lindbergh’s being asked, “Is it true, Colonel, that girls don’t interest you at all?”—to which Lindbergh replied, “If you can show me what that has to do with aviation, I’ll be glad to answer you.” He did no stunting on this tour, and he limited his remarks to one simple message—“that aviation had a brilliant future, in which America should lead.” He insisted to his entourage that no matter how early they had to leave, they must never arrive late anywhere. Although Lindbergh grew to dread the daily routine, he thrilled at seeing America as, in his words, “no man had ever known it before.”