The Lost Pilots Read online

  Clarke admitted that his and Jessie’s finances were “precarious,” but said he planned to write short magazine articles and continue playing bridge as a means of bringing in cash. As long as their neighbors kept raising chickens, Clarke noted, he and Jessie wouldn’t starve.

  Clarke then added a touchingly personal note: “Bill, I can’t begin to express my appreciation for the friendship you have repeatedly shown for me. To say that the feeling is mutual is putting it mildly. Nothing in the world would make me happier than to do everything in my power for you and Chubbie.” They were all “playing on the same team from now on,” Clarke concluded, and “whatever I have or can get goes into the pot.”

  When the replacement Challenger engine finally arrived in El Paso, neither Tancrel nor Lancaster could afford the collect charges on it, so the generous local mechanic with whom they were working paid the fee himself. Another stroke of luck occurred at the Hotel Hussman, where Tancrel managed to charm the manager into letting him and Lancaster depart without paying their ninety-five-dollar hotel bill.

  After driving out to the Guadalupe Mountains to install the plane’s new engine, Lancaster flew back to El Paso, where Tancrel was bickering with the staff of their new hotel. The so-called captain seemed “to rupture his credit” wherever he went, Lancaster drily noted in his diary. From the hotel, Lancaster phoned Shelton in Nogales, who told him some discomfiting news: Russell’s wife claimed that Jessie was having a “gay old time” in Miami. In Lancaster’s stack of mail sat a letter from Chubbie and Haden, but it did little to ease his mind. “Very disappointed. Looks as though Chub has dashed off a note as a sort of duty,” he wrote that night in his diary. “Haden a little more enlightening. Hope he is keeping his promise to me, feel sure he is. But Chubbie—Hell!!”

  In the morning Lancaster and Tancrel snuck away from El Paso “under great difficulties,” still owing money to the Hotel Hussman for lodging and to the Guadalupe Pump Station for gas. Once in the Robin, they flew to Nogales, their long-planned final destination. The journey from Miami had taken three weeks longer than Lancaster had anticipated. Despite everything he’d learned, Lancaster still somehow clung to the faint hope that Latin-American Airways might have legitimate business to offer. His reunion with Shelton in Nogales was a happy one, although Shelton, with Russell in tow, had been drinking. “Gent seemed so glad to see me . . . that I forgave him,” Lancaster wrote in his diary. Shelton had rented an apartment in which the group all stayed.

  The next day Lancaster paid a visit to Mexico, where, he wrote, he talked with several “interesting people,” but ultimately came to the conclusion that there was “nothing legitimate here.” It was finally time, he felt, to “put [his] foot down and call a showdown all around.” As it happened, he didn’t need to. A day later Tancrel convened a meeting in which he and Russell laid out a concrete plan for drug and human smuggling. Their chips were finally on the table. Operating under cover of darkness, Lancaster would fly the Robin to Mexico, where a group of Chinese nationals with drug-filled suitcases awaited him. Lancaster would fly these men to an isolated location, chosen by Russell, in the Arizona desert. All the groundwork had been laid, Russell assured Lancaster. The drugs would be sold in buyer-friendly San Francisco, where demand was heavy. The reward would be massive: within a scant ninety days, Tancrel, Russell, Lancaster, and Shelton stood to make a hundred thousand dollars each.

  Lancaster couldn’t believe he had been so gullible for so long. Angrily, he announced to Tancrel that he was going home to Miami. Shelton agreed. But Tancrel and Russell weren’t ready to give up. How, they asked, could Lancaster and Shelton fly back to Florida when they were completely broke? Their only hope of getting money resided with Latin-American Airways. “I can raise funds in Los Angeles,” Russell told them. He and Tancrel had just enough money to buy gas and oil for a flight to Los Angeles. Lancaster thought Russell was lying, but, being utterly penniless, his options for exit were few. “The whole bunch . . . are a complete wash-out,” he wrote disgustedly in his journal. “Dope-running was the game. Had to have turned down any proposition of this nature. Money or no money. Promise to Chubbie is coming first.” Not that he felt content on that front. “No news from Chubbie. . . . The little devil! I should not think of her so much. She does not deserve it.”

  On April 1, Lancaster flew Russell to Los Angeles, where they took a room at Hollywood’s Padre Hotel. Still determined to tie Lancaster to Latin-American Airways, Russell tried a new form of manipulation. Russell, Tancrel, and Shelton had all heard rumors surrounding Jessie and Clarke, suggesting that the two were becoming physically intimate with each other. Lancaster had been intentionally kept in the dark. But now, in their Los Angeles hotel room, Russell attempted to use this knowledge to his advantage. He pulled out two of his wife’s letters from Miami and handed them to Lancaster. Russell pointed to the sections of the letters describing Jessie’s behavior. “Chubbie and Clarke came round tonight,” Russell’s wife had written in one. “I really think now that Clarke has gained Chubbie’s affections, and Bill lost them.” In the other letter she wrote, “Was round at Chubbie’s tonight. She and Clarke got all ginned up together. Don’t tell Bill but I believe she is well satisfied.” The last two words were underlined.

  Why hurry back to Miami now? Russell asked Lancaster. He should earn all the money he could, and return to Florida when he was flush. It would only take one flight from Mexico, Russell prodded Lancaster; they could even cut Tancrel and Shelton out of the deal. Despite his vulnerable position, Lancaster flatly rejected Russell’s proposal. Instead he wired Jessie, “Flew Russell here yesterday but fruitless trip. Expect to fly Nogales tomorrow. Shelton’s father telephoned Nogales is willing to help with amphibian. Seems best thing. No news from you before leaving Nogales. Terribly anxious. Tell Haden stand by, I trust him.” In his diary that night, he revealed the intensity of his suffering. “Mental agony,” he wrote, before jotting: “Hell!”

  11

  EAGER, DRUNKEN LOVE

  Ever since moving to Miami, Jessie had found unexpected joy in having a house to call her own, and even small things like arranging the furniture brought her a sense of security, financial worries notwithstanding. During her five years of flying the thought of a house had seemed stifling, reminiscent of the confines of her old life in Australia, but now that feeling had dissipated, to be replaced with an air of satisfaction.

  Jessie’s life was evolving on the personal front, as well. Keith Miller had at last filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion, just one day after the three-year period required to file such a claim ended. He argued in his claim that, beginning in 1927, Jessie had “absolutely declined to be a wife except in name,” a coded reference to the fact that she had stopped having sex with him. Jessie unconcernedly told reporters that she welcomed the news: “He’s done me a favor and that’s fine of him. He had home and fireside ideas. I had others. I chose flying and demanded the right to live my own life.”

  The divorce itself was friendly enough, however, since both partners had long realized that they made an imperfect match, though Miller had tried harder than Jessie to salvage their marriage, pleading with her repeatedly to return home. In response to one of Miller’s earnest letters, Jessie had written, gently but firmly, “I am afraid that my career in aviation means too much to me to give it up. I am sorry to have to say that, but I feel as if I cannot live with you as your wife again, and I hope you will forgive me. I hope you find happiness and wish you the best of luck.”

  Jessie’s newfound freedom put her relationship with Lancaster into starker relief. Kiki, despite pressure from Lancaster, remained dead set against granting a divorce. Jessie and Lancaster’s romance would have to plod along in secret. How then, Jessie pondered, would she ever attain with Lancaster the kind of comfort that she yearned for? The two had been leading double lives for nearly five years now; Jessie was heartily sick of it. Social expectations for the two were different, as well. If Jessie remained single fo
r the rest of her life, she would be denigrated as a spinster. Despite all she’d shared with Lancaster, the thought of living out her life as the “hidden woman” depressed her. Over the previous years, her love for Lancaster had gradually shifted, almost before she’d noticed, from passionate to platonic. But even though she no longer felt romantic toward him, she valued his faithful presence in her life; occasionally they even still made love, though for Jessie this was more from habit than passion. “We were such good friends,” she remembered later. “We really got on well together; we were pals. We had great fun together.”

  Lancaster, needless to say, had a different view of their relationship. As much as he claimed to want a divorce from Kiki, he never worked up the initiative to actually do so, and he never gave serious thought to—or he was simply incapable of imagining—Jessie’s emotional needs. His adoration of her was such that he appeared wholly satisfied just to be in her presence. At no point did he seem to grasp that Jessie was no longer in love with him, and that her attitude toward him was simply that of an intensely devoted friend.

  Jessie found the days after Lancaster’s departure for Nogales to be an unpleasant slog, owing in large part to a crushing lack of funds. She begged Lancaster not to send his wires collect, since she and Clarke had to pay cash for them. Matters were worsened by the fact that Jessie and Clarke were completely out of alcohol, and too broke to replenish their stock. As a result, friends no longer came to see them. With no drinks, no company, and no car, the two were “bored to sobs,” Jessie moaned, and had “nowhere to go in the evening—it’s hell!” She hocked her watch, but the money didn’t last; days later she was down to twenty cents again. “I do hope you can come back soon,” she plaintively told Lancaster, “as I’m so lonely here without you.”

  To Jessie’s strain was added the pressure of trying to coax Haden Clarke into the difficult business of actually writing the book. Clarke kept insisting that writing depended on inspiration—which in his case meant smoking a great deal of marijuana, though Jessie was too naive at the time to realize this. Once the proper moment arrived, Clarke assured her, the book would be completed on time. Jessie was briefly sympathetic, acknowledging, as she told Lancaster in a letter, that it was “hard to write in a light and airy fashion when you don’t know where the next meal is coming from and you can’t get the laundry out.”

  Jessie knew, of course, that Lancaster was working assiduously to get his hands on some money, and that his flying skills were his most promising asset. As much as she distrusted Tancrel and Russell, she also knew that Lancaster couldn’t evaluate the situation in Mexico without seeing it firsthand. She genuinely missed his presence, and her concern for his welfare was sincere. “I can’t tell you how worried it made me to know of the awful times you are having,” she wrote to him, before reminding him to “[k]eep away from Chinamen!”

  Still, Jessie couldn’t keep her increasing frustration with Lancaster’s Latin-American Airways jaunt from rising to the surface. She was gentle at first: “Darling, I hate to nag, but maybe [this] will teach you a lesson,” she wrote. “We all begged you not to start off unless there were enough funds to get you back again.” But soon the tone of her letters grew more brittle: “I simply can’t understand why you give checks when you know they are no good. I think it’s dishonest and it makes people very suspicious. . . . The best thing is to burn your check book if you can’t resist giving bad checks.” Nor did she shy away from calling Lancaster to account as a supposed provider: “I am sorry to have to write this, but I told you when you cleaned me out of the little reserve I had in the bank that I would be stranded in the end. . . . Is there any chance of you being able to send me anything soon? I am feeling quite desperate. . . . I have used every cent I have in the bank and am completely penniless.”

  Jessie grew gradually more annoyed at Lancaster’s complaints that she wasn’t writing him enough. “I have been unable to wire you for days as I didn’t know where you were,” she admonished him. “I wired you twice before and the wires came back to me.” In the meantime, the letters she did write to him were held up in the mail for more than a week. To make matters worse, she kept receiving conflicting (and confusing) reports of what Lancaster and the others were up to in El Paso and Mexico. “There is just one thing I wish you would do and that is please all get together and decide what you are going to wire us in Miami and stick to the same story,” she complained. “Tancrel wires one thing . . . Gent tells Helen something different and you tell me something different again. They all phone me up when they get a wire and I simply don’t know where I stand.” Jessie apologized to Lancaster for sounding so depressed, but confessed that she was depressed.

  Jessie’s aggravation with Clarke’s lack of progress on the book continued to deepen. “He is without doubt the laziest and slowest writer I have ever seen,” she informed Lancaster, “but for God’s sake don’t tell him I said so or he will walk out and leave me alone.” When Clarke finally cobbled together a brief first chapter, it was riddled with errors, partly due to his refusal to read the material that Jessie had prepared two years earlier. “The only thing seems for me to write the whole [book] and then have him re-write it, so this I’m doing,” she exasperatedly reported. “Am getting writer’s cramp!”

  In the third week of March, with Jessie’s frustration—and, equally potently, her boredom—at their apex, she decided to confront Clarke about his procrastination. He’d retreated to the sun porch, where his desk and typewriter were, to take another stab at the manuscript, but after a few minutes the noise of the typewriter ceased. When Jessie went to investigate why Clarke had stopped working, she was incensed to see him staring dumbly out the window, a joint in his hands. She lashed out: Why wasn’t he typing? Clarke yelled back that he was waiting for the proper inspiration; he couldn’t just “write to order.”

  Rather than ratcheting up the tension, the brief eruption served to calm them both down. Jessie didn’t quite regret her actions, but she realized that every penny Clarke had managed to scrounge up—whether from editing jobs or from gambling—he’d shared with her. And it was hard to stay irate at such a charismatic yet vulnerable man, especially one with those captivating blue eyes and mischievous smile. She and Clarke were also looking forward to a break that night in the relative isolation and monotony that had marked their past three weeks: they’d been invited to a party.

  As they prepared to go out, Clarke asked Jessie a seemingly innocuous question: “What are you going to wear?”

  “Oh, just the old black one I expect,” Jessie replied.

  “I’d like you to wear the one with the rose on it,” Clarke told her. “I like you in that.”

  A small gesture, yes, but Jessie was floored. She couldn’t remember the last time a man had commented on her appearance. Lancaster peppered her with professions of love, but he never mentioned her outfits or how she styled her hair. Now Clarke told her how nice she would look with the popular flapper hairstyle known as the “Eton crop.” Flattered, Jessie wetted and trimmed her hair, then brilliantined it into the distinctive short bob. Clarke gazed approvingly at the result, producing in Jessie a surprising sense of gratification.

  Though the moment was brief, it reminded Jessie how long it had been—Lancaster’s attentions notwithstanding—since she’d felt physically appreciated. For years Lancaster had none-too-subtly steered away any men who exhibited potential interest in Jessie, operating in that regard as much as bodyguard as lover. “They used to call him my ‘old man of the sea,’ ” she later recalled, in a reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” “I couldn’t get rid of him.” But despite his obsessive interest in her, Lancaster also seemed, in many regards, to take her for granted.

  That night at the party Jessie and Clarke happily partook of the freely flowing alcohol. They stumbled home long after midnight and collapsed into their respective beds. But when Jessie opened her eyes the following morning, she found Clarke lying across the
foot of her bed, asleep. Mortified, she tiptoed out of the room while he slept. When Clarke awoke, Jessie pretended that they’d agreed to change rooms for the night. Both of them were acutely embarrassed, if also secretly beguiled.

  They received another party invitation that evening, which, still hungover, they willingly accepted. The night was lush and warm, with a bright moon in the sky. When Jessie and Clarke returned home, they plopped down on the lawn with some home-brew alcohol and drank in the verdant aroma of blooming fruit trees and vines. Clarke took the moment to finally mention his transgressive behavior the previous night. But rather than disavow it, he confessed to Jessie that he was fervently in love with her. Overwhelmed by the moment, they sought out each other’s mouths and began passionately, if sloppily, kissing. A short time later they stumbled back inside the house, to the sun porch on the second floor, and made eager, drunken love.

  All of Jessie’s discontentment from the previous weeks—indeed, the previous several years—seemed to coalesce. Her yearning for passion and excitement, combined with her desire for the stability and safety of a proper relationship, seemed to find a valve in the way she and Clarke now physically exhausted themselves. And the attraction wasn’t just sexual: Clarke was a highly intelligent and wide-ranging individual, who could talk as knowledgeably and ardently about poetry as he could about, say, politics or culture. Lancaster, by contrast, only ever spoke of aviation.