Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World

by Glenn Stout

  In March she told reporters that she was training for another attempt at the Channel. As yet, however, she didn't quite know just how she was going to do that. Too many casinos and resorts had opened at nearly the same time. Crowds were smaller than anticipated that winter, and the swimmers hadn't proven to be quite as big a draw as the casino hoped, so it was now reneging on its promise to finance Trudy's swim. She'd have to find another way, and even if she could, without the support of the WSA, getting to Europe and making the many arrangements needed for the swim would be an enormous undertaking. Yet there was no time to wait, for it was becoming clear that if she were to attempt the Channel again, it would have to be in the summer of 1926. Although Helen Wainwright had decided to forgo the Channel, at least for the time being, inspired by Trudy's attempt of the previous year there were already upward of a dozen other female swimmers from America and elsewhere who had announced their intention to take a crack at the Channel, increasing the chances that one might be successful and making it imperative that Trudy get in the water as soon as possible.

  This time Trudy would get to make the decisions—there would be no chance of ingesting any poison—if she ever got there. She wanted both her father and Meg to accompany her, and even though Meg had recently become Mrs. Margaret Deuschle, she had already agreed to go along. Furthermore Trudy wanted to train not in Dover, but in France, at Cape Gris-Nez, under the tutelage of Burgess. Since accommodations in Gris-Nez were limited and Burgess's services were in demand, if she were to swim the Channel in 1926 she needed to find a way to do so—and fast.

  A swimmer from Baltimore provided some inspiration. Lillian Day, a professional lifeguard who also gave swimming and diving exhibitions and made occasional appearances in a vaudeville swim show under her maiden name, Lillian Cannon, had recently gained some local notoriety by swimming across Chesapeake Bay. The local newspaper, the Baltimore Post, had taken note of the way Trudy's story had dominated the newspapers the previous summer, and the Scripps-Howard syndicate, of which the Post was a part, signed Cannon to a contract. In exchange for exclusive rights to her story the syndicate agreed to provide financial support for her attempt to swim the Channel. It mattered little that the chances of Cannon succeeding were slim. She used a combination of the sidestroke and the breaststroke, and despite her swim across Chesapeake Bay, she was hardly in Trudy's class as a swimmer. But the mere fact that she was going to try guaranteed several months of breathless copy. The Post and other papers in the chain hoped that Lillian Cannon would prove to be their Floyd Collins.

  The Scripps-Howard syndicate wasn't the only news operation that wanted to create its own Collins-like story, albeit one with a happier ending. In only a few short years since its founding in 1919 by Joseph Medill Patterson, the New York tabloid the Daily News had become one of the biggest newspapers in the country, selling nearly one million copies per day. Patterson, whose grandfather had served as both the editor of the Chicago Tribune and mayor of the city of Chicago, had previously operated the Tribune, and his family still retained a stake in the paper. An innovative publisher, Patterson brought the tabloid format to America from England, where subway commuters found the garish headlines and oversized pictures—many of attractive women—perfect for browsing on their way to work.

  Patterson, who had been an avowed socialist as a young man, was possessed of a pronounced populist streak. He saw the value of a serialized story that appealed to the workingman. He could not have helped but notice the press attention Trudy's Channel effort had attracted in 1925. Her story was perfect for his paper—she was Floyd Collins in a swimsuit.

  At about the same time, dismayed by the casino's broken promise, Trudy and her father engaged the services of an attorney, Dudley Field Malone. She and her father had signed the original professional contract with the Deauville Casino without fully examining the terms. Trudy had since learned that the contract also bound her to an agent who had no plans to do anything for her except take the bulk of her income. Enter Malone, who had been born in the same Upper West Side neighborhood as Trudy and was married to the suffragette Dorothy Stevens. He may well have been put in touch with the Ederles either through Henry Ederle's political connections on the West Side or through Charlotte Epstein, who herself was well known in suffragette circles.

  Malone was one of a kind, a hard-drinking yet pleasant and glib raconteur, the kind of man who appeared to lead several lives, each one more remarkable than the last. Malone's first wife was the daughter of Senator James O'Gorman, and Malone became a pro-tégé of Woodrow Wilson, parlaying his connections first into a role in Wilson's administration and then as collector of the Port of New York. In 1921, when he and his first wife decided to part, Malone traveled to Paris and managed to secure a divorce, something almost unheard of for two Catholics, and an act that brought him more business than he could imagine. For the remainder of the decade Malone was the world's "greatest international divorce lawyer." But while he was freeing couples from the bonds of matrimony he still found time to take on a host of liberal causes. He defended suffragettes—which is how he met his second wife—fought Tammany Hall and Prohibition, and in 1925 assisted Clarence Darrow in the famous Scopes "monkey" trial over the teaching of evolution. Later in his life he placed the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt before the delegates at the 1932 Democratic convention, and after World War II, due to his resemblance to Winston Churchill, he became an actor, playing Churchill in several films, and served as counsel for Twentieth Century Fox.

  Yet even in the context of Malone's full life, his involvement with the affairs of Trudy Ederle would eventually come to represent a rare failure, although at first he seemed to work magic. In 1925 a theater manager named C. C. Pyle took over the affairs of University of Illinois football star Red Grange and made a killing in endorsements and other financial opportunities. Malone took note and fancied himself as another Pyle, viewing Trudy as the female equivalent of Grange.

  Malone traveled all the way to Miami to meet with Trudy and used his legal magic to extricate her from her disadvantageous contract. Malone then started trying to peddle Trudy's story. In the spring of 1926, probably inspired by Cannon's arrangement with Scripps-Howard, several New York papers were grappling for the attention of Henry Ederle, all of them trying to secure the exclusive rights to the story of Trudy's attempt to swim the Channel in 1926, if she made such an attempt. Malone stepped in and made sure of that. He handled all the negotiations, getting Trudy a contract variously reported as either $5, 000 or $7, 500 from Joseph Medill Patterson and the Tribune-News syndicate, plus a bonus if she succeeded. Malone not only sealed the deal, but became Trudy's agent himself and advanced her five thousand dollars to help underwrite the cost of swimming the Channel, money he expected to earn back from his percentage of her earnings. Problem solved. Trudy was fond of Malone, at least at first, and understandably thrilled. She called him "Uncle Dudley."

  Soon after Trudy returned to New York in April she and her father began to make arrangements for her to make another attempt to swim the Channel. They contacted Bill Burgess and hired him to serve as Trudy's trainer in 1926 for a sum reported to be ten thousands francs, a significant amount of money in postwar France but the equivalent of only 250 American dollars. They also made reservations to take the Berengaria to Cherbourg and planned to set sail on June 2. In the meantime Trudy continued to more than earn her keep, appearing in a popular water show at the Hippodrome, where she shared the billing with Aileen Riggin and Helen Wainwright.

  The only loose end that needed to be tied up was for the Tribune-News syndicate to select a journalist to accompany Trudy on her journey to ghostwrite Trudy's dispatches. Joseph Medill Patterson wisely chose a woman: vivacious, twenty-nine-year-old Julia Harpman. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Harpman had been a reporter with the Commercial Appeal in Knoxville before Patterson recruited her in 1919 to write for the Daily News. She was put on the crime beat, where her hard-boiled accounts often appeared under the nom de plume "
The Investigator." The most notable crime she covered was the infamous murder of Joseph Elwell, a bridge champion and spy whose body was discovered in a room locked from the inside and whose murderer was never identified. The case inspired'S. S. Van Dyne's mystery novel The Benson Murder Case, the first in a series featuring the character Philo Vance. But Elwell's murder was notable to Harpman for another reason. While sitting on Elwell's front stoop, working the story, she met fellow journalist Westbrook Pegler.

  Pegler, who at the time was writing for the Chicago Tribune and just beginning to gain a national reputation, later aptly dubbed the 1920s the "Era of Wonderful Nonsense." Although he appreciated athletes such as Trudy, he looked disdainfully at stunts like flagpole sitting and dance marathons and couldn't understand their attraction. His acerbic, somewhat jaundiced, world-weary view would one day make him one of the most famous American journalists of his era. A muckraking columnist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1941 for an exposé of racketeering in Hollywood labor unions—the first columnist ever to win the award—Pegler finished third in reader nominations as Time's 1941 Man of the Year, behind President Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. After World War II Pegler grew increasingly vindictive, and, particularly after Julia's death from heart disease in 1955, he became consumed by his own vitriol and personal prejudices. In his later years Pegler, who had been an early critic of Hitler and Mussolini, became an anti-Semite who eventually ended his career writing for American Opinion, an organ of the uberconservative John Birch Society. Yet when he met Harpman (who, ironically enough, was Jewish) during the Elwell investigation he had not yet become the jaded and embittered journalist of his later years—it was love at first sight and the two married in 1922. Pegler was a Tribune sports columnist at the time and was soon named the paper's East Coast sports editor.

  Harpman may not have quite been Pegler's equal as a journalist, but in an era in which few women earned bylines in the daily press, Harpman was one of the best, a dogged reporter who knew how to tell a story and turn a phrase—her review of the Louise Brooks film American Venus included the memorable line, "has small plot—also few clothes." By 1926, Hartman, not unlike the Rosalind Russell character in the classic newsroom comedy His Girl Friday whom she vaguely resembled, was ready to put her writing career on hold for her husband. When Patterson asked her to accompany Trudy and ghostwrite her accounts of the swim, she agreed only because of the understanding that it would be her final journalism assignment—and that Pegler could accompany her on the trip. Although he wasn't assigned to cover Ederle's Channel attempt per se, Pegler was still a journalist, and he knew a good story when he encountered one. His periodic dispatches from Cape Gris-Nez would prove to be revealing.

  For Trudy, everything was now in place. While her second assault of the English Channel would cost more than her compensation from the syndicate, if need be Henry Ederle could afford to make up the difference. Besides, in the previous year Trudy's eyes—and, more acutely, her father's—had been opened to the potential financial windfall that being the first woman to cross the English Channel could deliver. If Helen Wainwright, a mere Olympian, could earn five figures endorsing cigarettes, what would the first woman to swim the English Channel be worth?

  The Ederles were not alone in making that kind of calculation. Joseph Corthes, described as the "magnate who cornered the seagoing tugs of Boulogne" and the "czar of Channel swimming" told a reporter, "I look for the busiest season in history." He was right, for a record number of swimmers of both sexes were making plans to spend the summer in the Channel, and in the case of the women, they were not doing so for their health. On the opposite shore they expected to find the proverbial pot of gold. In addition to Trudy and Lillian Cannon, Jeanne Sion and Lillian Harrison were likely to take on the Channel once more and were expected to be joined by Clarabelle Barrett of the United States, who had originally competed as a member of the WSA, Eva Morrison of Nova Scotia and Boston, Mille Gade Corson, Suzanne Wurtz of France, Mercedes Gleitze of England, and a host of lesser-known swimmers of little credibility.

  Things were just as busy in the men's camp. Helmi was planning to return, and he was likely to be joined by several American men—Norman Ross of Detroit and Dick Howell of Northwestern University—Omer Perrault of Canada, Georges Michel and Georges Polley of France, and Colonel Freyburg. As summer wore on others were certain to enter the surf. Corthes, who had witnessed Trudy's attempt in 1925, gave her the best chance of the bunch and said, "Followers of the sport expect to see Miss Ederle cross successfully this summer ... She knows something about the coldness of the water and the treachery of the tides."

  If Trudy was looking for a portent for her second attempt to swim the English Channel, as she made her way to the pier with her father and sister to board the Berengaria en route to Cherbourg, the sun shone bright and warm and the waters of the Hudson River were a dazzling blue. Before the boat even left the dock Trudy already felt better and far more confident than she had one year before.

  This time, she would be in control, staying where she wanted, training with Burgess, and with her father and sister Meg, whom Trudy referred to as her "rock" and "inspiration," for support and company. As Trudy posed for pictures on the deck of the ship, receiving a kiss goodbye from friends like Aileen Riggin and from her mother, she absolutely glowed, resplendent in her serge suit, clutching a bouquet of flowers, a smart cloche hat perched on her head, and a rare extravagance, a fox stole wrapped around her neck.

  The ship left the dock at 11:00 A.M. and steamed out of New York Harbor under near-perfect conditions. Even the trip aboard the Berengaria was an improvement on Trudy's journey a year before. Her name led the passenger manifest published in the New York papers, ahead of such luminaries as Mrs. Zane Gray, wife of the author and adventurer, Prince and Princess Basil Mirski of Russia, and Vicome-tress dejonghe of Belgium. As soon as the Berengaria left the dock the crew of the British-based liner distributed champagne, something not widely available in the United States during Prohibition, lending a festive air to the journey. Although Trudy did not drink she was treated as a celebrity as she and her father and sister received the best of everything from the boat's crew.

  There were no demands on Trudy's time during the six-day journey to France. She did her best to stay in shape, walking the deck, knocking golf balls into the North Atlantic, swimming in the ship's pool, even giving swimming demonstrations and posing for pictures boxing with the ship's athletic director. She spent much of her time with Meg and with Harpman, getting to know her ghostwriter.

  Harpman liked her young subject. She found Trudy full of personality, even if she was a bit shy at the outset and it took a bit of effort to become accustomed to talking with her. Like others who spent much time in Trudy's company, from the volume of her voice Harpman couldn't help but notice that Trudy's hearing was deteriorating, but in every other way she was a typical young woman of the era. Although Trudy was no flapper, she used the latest slang, was fashion conscious to a fault, and together with her sister Meg practiced all the latest dances. She could be a bit moody, and her moods often depended on her superstitions, which were many. Trudy disliked the number thirteen and much preferred the color red. Most of her bathing caps and hats and dresses were, in fact, red, and her father promised her a red roadster if she successfully crossed the Channel, a prize she chattered about constantly. She believed it was good fortune to see the new moon over the right shoulder and that after one spilled salt it had to be thrown over the left shoulder or else it was certain to cause a quarrel.

  Good luck was indicated by broken glassware and rain, as Trudy accurately told Harpman, "Whenever I entered a swimming competition on a rainy day, I won." But as Harpman got to know Trudy even better, another characteristic stood out.

  Trudy, wrote Harpman later, "seems to withdraw herself from the world and drift into some personal sphere," particularly when she was in the water, swimming. Harpman assumed that it was because of her deafness, but as Harpman spent more time in T
rudy's company she found it astounding that Trudy could swim for hours without ever stopping, not saying a word, apparently oblivious to everything else.

  Harpman was an acute observer. Trudy did, in fact, "withdraw from the world" in the water, but it was not so much an escape from the world as a journey to another place. In the water, Trudy truly felt completely at peace. As she herself later said, when swimming she always felt that she could go "on and on ... when we're in the water, we're not in this world." In a sense, she had developed a real relationship with the water, once saying about swimming in the open ocean, "To me, the sea is like a person—like a child that I've known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I'm out there."

  Together, Trudy and Harpman produced the first few of what would eventually be several dozen dispatches recounting her quest to swim the Channel. They hardly qualified as literature—the WSA had taught Trudy well and she generally measured her words. Trudy was not drawn to hyperbole and rarely spoke in terms that were anything but modest—even if she had, Harpman knew her job was to present Trudy to the her readers as a subject worthy of their interest and sympathy. As Trudy "wrote" in one early dispatch, "I am determined to swim the Channel. I want to do so more than anything in the world. I hope I will swim across this time and I feel that I am going to do it." Still, Harpman occasionally managed to write some more lively copy. In one ghostwritten dispatch Trudy wrote, "Every day is Christmas afloat," and went on to describe in copious detail her diet aboard the vessel, which consisted of eating as many as five meals a day. She weighed 149 pounds upon her departure and intended to gain at least an additional ten pounds to protect her from the cold water, writing, "Some trainers probably would have hysterics seeing the amount of food I consume ... Most girls fear gaining an ounce worse than they do a mouse; but I'm not worrying about my figure."