The Lost Pilots Page 7

  During the two months of Jessie’s lecture tour, as they zigzagged across the Australian continent’s vast reaches, hitting big cities and midsize towns, they were welcomed by adoring crowds—nowhere more so than in Sydney, where a staggering hundred thousand people greeted them at the airfield with another fifty thousand waiting outside the fence. Throughout the tour Lancaster played the role of personal escort, introducing Jessie at events and sharing with audiences color lantern slides of the places and people they’d encountered on their journey. In his downtime he picked up freelance flying gigs. “I would be happy to render any assistance in civil aviation,” Lancaster announced to the press by way of promotion, “if I were approached and asked to do so.” He also found time to meet up with his brother, Jack, another former World War I fighter pilot who had resettled permanently in Australia. Though travel and lodging were expensive, Jessie still earned enough money from her lectures that she and Lancaster enjoyed a healthy profit. The pace, however, was exhausting, all the more so for Jessie because of her malaria. “Sometimes I wish I had never done it,” Jessie confessed wearily at one formal dinner reception. “I really feel scared stiff and want to creep away to bed. . . . I thought we would just arrive quietly, you know.”

  One of Lancaster’s freelance flying jobs during this time period turned out to be pivotal, and led to the next phase in his and Jessie’s post-journey lives. On June 8, legendary Australian aviators Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, along with the Americans Harry Lyon and James Warner, touched down at Eagle Farm Airport in Brisbane in their Fokker monoplane Southern Cross. This marked the completion of the first ever transpacific flight, from the United States to Australia, an eighty-three-hour and thirty-eight-minute journey across open seas, and one of the most astounding aviation achievements of the age. A rapturous crowd of forty thousand greeted the aviators in Brisbane. Lancaster flew a photographer to Eagle Farm Airport to document the historic moment.

  Lancaster and Jessie were only too aware that the Southern Cross’s arrival meant their own time in the spotlight was now coming to an end. There would be no rest following Jessie’s lecture tour; they needed to line up subsequent jobs before their achievements were forgotten. Here Harry Lyon, the Southern Cross’s gregarious American navigator, came cheerfully to the rescue.

  Lyon was the son of a prominent rear admiral in the navy, but he himself had failed out of the U.S. Naval Academy, embarking instead on an unremarkable career in the merchant marine. It was only through a high-placed friend in the Marine Department that Lyon ended up as navigator on the Southern Cross—a job prospect that he at first found ludicrous, given that he had absolutely no experience with aircraft navigation. Lyon hadn’t even flown in an airplane more than once or twice before.

  During his short time in Australia, Lyon, who hailed from the tiny village of Paris Hills, Maine, had become a beloved figure for his oversized personality and relentless good humor. He sported a thicket of black hair, jug ears, a broad nose, and a beaming, big-lipped smile. Fame, for this rural boy, was a pleasure he was only too eager to embrace. Now Lyon told Lancaster and Jessie that a Hollywood studio had contacted him with a $75,000 proposal—an immense sum for the time—to work on a film about flying. Lyon’s Australian crewmates, Kingsford Smith and Ulm, were forgoing the offer in order to stay in their home country. Might Lancaster and Jessie like to replace them? After the film there were plans for a transatlantic flight, to be followed by a flight from Australia to America.

  Financially, Lyon’s offer was enticing, and the word “Hollywood” may have held glamour, as well. Lancaster and Jessie were also eager to embark on the lecture circuit in America, hoping that it would prove as profitable as Jessie’s Australian junket. But what America promised them as much as anything was a chance to avoid their respective marriages without having to face the consequences of either personal turmoil or public reprobation. Their partnership could continue untroubled—it was perfectly natural that a successful flying team would head for Hollywood to make a film, after all, and thus no undue public suspicion would arise. Lancaster and Jessie were delighted to accept Lyon’s offer.

  On June 23, just fifteen days after the Southern Cross’s arrival in Australia, Lancaster, Jessie, and Lyon, along with James Warner, boarded the SS Sonoma for passage to San Francisco. Jessie didn’t even have time to bid her husband farewell. The group received a lively, raucous farewell as they waved to the crowd before leaving the harbor. The ear-splitting whistling and applause continued for what seemed an impossibly long time. When the Sonoma finally pulled out, the celebratory tooting of the other boats in the harbor only added to the cacophony.

  The greeting was even more rapturous when they arrived in San Francisco three weeks later, following brief stopovers in Fiji and Hawaii. A contingent of planes accompanied the ship as it steamed through the golden opening in the bay, escorted by boats crammed with prominent local citizens. Lyon and Warner, as Americans and as newly crowned heroes, were the focus of attention, but Lancaster and Jessie received an enthusiastic welcome, as well. All four aviators were paraded in open cars through the city’s famously hilly streets as ticker tape fell around them. When they arrived at City Hall, a magnificent Beaux Arts structure in the city’s Civic Center, town officials inquired as to their preferred choice of alcohol. Lancaster and Jessie were perplexed. “I thought you had prohibition in America,” Jessie ventured. The officials broke into loud guffaws. With wolfish grins, they threw open a cupboard; housed inside was a gleaming collection of bottles, complete with refrigerated compartments. The women in the room confided to Jessie that they had never drunk so much as they had since Prohibition.

  A few days later Lancaster, Jessie, Lyon, and Warner flew to Los Angeles—Jessie did most of the piloting—where they were greeted with an official reception at the lavish Biltmore downtown. But when they drove over to Hollywood, they were distressed to find that the proposed film project had been canceled; the financing had unexpectedly dried up. In a matter of moments, their imagined futures—and imagined profits—had vanished. Anxious and fuming after this whipsaw of emotions, the aviators considered suing the studio, but they were advised not to pursue the matter, as the efforts would deplete their hard-won finances. This counsel appeared particularly sage as another project swiftly popped up to boost their fortunes. The Cunningham-Hall Aircraft Corporation, a brand-new American manufacturer, was building a powerful new monoplane, and it wanted Lancaster, Jessie, and Lyon to perform a test flight—from New York to London and back—when the venture was complete. If all went according to schedule, the plane would be ready within the next couple of months. In the meantime, the aviators could continue planning their own proposed transatlantic journey, though without Warner, who had dropped out following a spat with Lyon.

  With excess time on his hands, Lyon descended in Los Angeles into a punishing routine of all-night drinking and carousing. Lancaster and Jessie enjoyed their alcohol, too, but it never hampered their productivity. Lyon was far less disciplined, and though he was always an amusing companion, the myriad pleasures of L.A. nightlife were rendering him a drunken, bumbling mess. Lancaster and Jessie pressured him to fly home to Maine to dry out in order to salvage their three-way partnership. With inebriated insistence, Lyon said he wouldn’t consider it unless they came, too. To Lancaster and Jessie, this idea seemed ridiculous: How could they possibly build their careers if they were stuck in Maine? But as Lyon kept pushing, Lancaster and Jessie reconsidered. They wanted to stick together as a three-person team, and they could live rent-free with Lyon’s mother while preparing for their Cunningham-Hall Aircraft flight.

  In August 1928, four and a half months after landing in Darwin, the trio flew to Maine, where the village of Paris Hills welcomed Lyon like a returning hero, with a rousing parade, speeches by local dignitaries, and a fine reception at the country club. But as the August weeks crept by—and with a profound lack of action in their rustic Maine location—all three aviators grew fidgety with bo
redom and anxiety. Matters were made worse by frequent cables from Cunningham-Hall Aircraft postponing the completion date of their airplane.

  With their restlessness at its pitch, the three headed to New York City to seek out additional work. What awaited them in the city could not have been further from the tranquility of Maine. In New York, their reputations were such that the luxury Biltmore Hotel offered them free suites, a perk reserved for celebrity guests. The city’s wealthy and intellectual classes happily embraced them, throwing frequent parties and celebrations in honor of their achievements in aviation. Operating from their home base in the Biltmore, Lancaster, Jessie, and Lyon attended endless meetings with agents, managers, and lecture bureaus.

  But against all expectations, and despite an effusive stream of promises, firm offers of employment never quite materialized. In the meantime, their money was rapidly draining away, despite their free lodging. Keeping up the social pretenses that staying in a high-end hotel demanded was far from cheap. In an effort to economize, the three took to sneaking out of the hotel for five-cent meals at a nearby Automat. To their embarrassment, one of the Biltmore’s bellhops strolled into the Automat one evening as they sat eating their meat pies. Thinking quickly, Lancaster affected an imperious accent: “Quite an experience to eat in a place like this,” he told the bellhop. “Frightfully interesting.” From then on they ate at an Automat several blocks farther away.

  Of the several thousand pounds Lancaster and Jessie had saved from Jessie’s Australian lecture tour, they had given a chunk to Kiki, put another chunk in savings, and spent most of the rest on daily expenses. Their monetary situation already precarious, they took another blow when Cunningham-Hall Aircraft again postponed their project for financial reasons. With at least three months to go before the company’s monoplane would be ready, they needed to find another contract to support themselves in the meantime, even as they continued to insist that their own transatlantic flight was still in the offing, provided funding could be located.

  Their most promising New York contact so far was the famed publisher George Putnam, a fellow aviation enthusiast. In July 1927 Putnam had published Charles Lindbergh’s blockbuster autobiography We, one of the bestselling nonfiction books of all time up to that point. (Four years later, Putnam would marry Amelia Earhart, whose book 20 Hrs., 40 Min. he helped write and published.) Now Lancaster and Lyon pitched Putnam on the idea of financing a flight from New York to Bermuda; as of yet no plane had reached the subtropical British colony. After some consideration, Putnam agreed to put up the money—on the condition that he could join them on the flight. But the journey was not to be: problems with fueling kept delaying the flight, until Putnam, fed up, withdrew his support.

  Not long after, Lancaster and Jessie decided to end their partnership with Lyon. As much as they liked him personally, and as much as they enjoyed alcohol themselves, Lyon’s dissipated behavior simply made him too unreliable a partner. Nor, from a practical standpoint, had the partnership generated any financial reward. Lyon had become “a dead loss,” as Jessie bluntly put it. The happy-go-lucky Lyon took no offense at the separation; he even continued to tell reporters, inaccurately, that he and Lancaster had plans for a future round-the-world flight.

  Despite its financial difficulties, Cunningham-Hall Aircraft continued to provide Lancaster and Jessie with regular updates on the monoplane’s progress. In November, Cunningham-Hall invited Lancaster back to California to thrash out the fine details of the aircraft’s finished design. Lancaster’s schedule had suddenly tightened, however. He had recently proposed to a Manhattan banking firm a licensing deal in which the Cirrus engine model that powered the Red Rose would be built in America. Now, at month’s end, the contract was approved, and Lancaster was appointed chief test and demonstration pilot, a New York–based position. Flying to Los Angeles was out of the question.

  Instead, Lancaster gave Jessie a thorough rundown on the Cunningham-Hall monoplane, and she flew out in his place. Once in California, Jessie immediately signed up for a radio operator course at the YMCA, taking cheap lodging nearby. Her independence was again on display: the class, Jessie aside, consisted exclusively of men. At night she would bring a small tapping machine back to her apartment to practice Morse code. Before long she was an expert in wireless theory and in working and repairing radios, with the impressive test scores to prove it. As Jessie saw it, her newfound radio operator skills meant that one less crew member would be required for future flights.

  Twenty-five hundred miles away, in New York City, Lancaster found himself on the receiving end of increasingly plaintive letters from Kiki. During the journey itself, and in the months since, Kiki had magnanimously supported the children in England while Lancaster sought his fortune overseas. She did not resent it; on the contrary, she’d eagerly followed the media reports of Lancaster and Jessie’s progress, and had kept a proud collection of all the letters she’d received.

  Still, despite her generous personality, Kiki couldn’t help but feel jealous of Lancaster and Jessie’s adventures. Though she enjoyed her work, life in a cramped apartment in Southwest London couldn’t compete with what she imagined as the glamour of her husband’s new life in America. Lancaster had plans to visit her when he flew the Cunningham-Hall Corporation’s plane to London, but that date remained uncertain. Kiki was eager to see him, and she didn’t want to wait. Perhaps egged on by Lancaster’s parents, who were eager to see their son reunite with his wife and children, Kiki told Lancaster that she would meet him in New York for the Christmas holidays.

  When she arrived in Manhattan, Kiki ran headfirst into a farcical manifestation of Prohibition. She carried with her, at Lancaster’s request, the Red Rose’s old compass, which Lancaster had invested with almost totem-like powers, and which the Avian company had just repaired. The customs inspectors in New York, however, blocked her entry. The compass contained alcohol, the inspectors declared, and was thus illegal in America. If she didn’t break the compass’s glass and pour the alcohol out, they would have to impound it. Kiki, astonished at this ridiculous demand, summoned Lancaster, who used his charms to convince the inspectors that the compass’s pure alcohol didn’t fall under the Eighteenth Amendment’s purview. The New York Times plastered the incident on its front page.

  For both Kiki and Lancaster, the Christmas holiday was unsatisfying: Kiki missed the children, while Lancaster yearned for Jessie. But with January’s arrival, their reunion was enlivened by a piece of new business. The Manhattan firm with which Lancaster had negotiated a deal to manufacture Cirrus engines had shipped to America two Avro Avians—complete with said engines—for public display. Lancaster would be the firm’s test pilot, tasked with exhibiting the efficiency and reliability of the Cirrus part.

  The Irish aviator Mary, Lady Heath, known in America as “Britain’s Lady Lindy,” was also involved in the Cirrus venture. A longtime friend of Lancaster’s, and one of the world’s most famous women after her recent record-setting flight from South Africa to England, Lady Heath had been the first woman to hold a commercial pilot’s license in England, as well as the first woman to parachute from an airplane. Now she was due at the annual Miami All-American Air Races in early January 1929, and, for publicity’s sake, Cirrus’s American backers wanted Lancaster to join her at the show. He would make the flight down in one of the Avro Avians with seventeen-year-old American aviatrix Elinor Smith as his copilot. Lady Heath, with Kiki as her passenger, would travel to the air meet in her de Havilland Moth light biplane.

  When the two women took off in the de Havilland from New York, Lancaster and Smith briefly followed, but their Avro Avian was no match for Lady Heath’s far fleeter craft. Heath and Kiki hadn’t gone far, however, before biting wintry winds forced an emergency landing in a farmer’s field. Two days later, Lady Heath overshot the landing strip at Savannah, but the farmer in whose field the de Havilland touched down proved far less understanding than his compatriot to the north. Only after a great deal of appeasement
did he agree to fetch some fuel. Yet Kiki and Lady Heath’s travails weren’t finished: they ran out of gas just short of Daytona and had to land on a narrow strip of beach.

  Despite these brief setbacks, the Miami air show was a happy experience for all, with Lady Heath and Amelia Earhart the two stars of the event, and Lancaster displaying the Avro Avian for the crowd. Kiki watched the proceedings from the privacy of the Miami mayor’s viewing box.

  Lancaster and Elinor Smith’s return flight to New York featured its own dramatic turn. During the final hop of the journey, the two aviators mysteriously failed to arrive at Curtiss Field airport on Long Island after departing from Philadelphia shortly before noon. Anxious airport authorities kept the floodlights burning at Curtiss Field all night, while a search was mounted for the wreckage of the missing airplane in the wooded areas of central New Jersey.

  Unbeknownst to the authorities, Lancaster and Smith had been forced down in a small field near Belleville, New Jersey, during their flight. It wasn’t until the following morning, when the pair, having abandoned their aircraft, arrived quietly in New York by train, that the mystery of their whereabouts was cleared up.

  Toward the end of January, Kiki boarded a return ship for England. For her, the visit to America had been decidedly stimulating, and once back home she made a detailed scrapbook of her holiday adventure. Lancaster, however—truthfully or not—told Jessie that he had repeatedly raised the issue of divorce during Kiki’s visit, but that she’d refused to consider the possibility unless he could provide enough money to secure his children’s future. Religion played a role, as well, Lancaster claimed: the devoutly Catholic Kiki simply didn’t believe in divorce. Did Kiki also suspect that Lancaster and Jessie were having an affair? Perhaps. But as a supremely moral person, Kiki may simply have found it unimaginable that Lancaster would abandon his family for such an appalling act of deceit.