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

by Glenn Stout

  Dudley Field Malone was suddenly everywhere now, always at Trudy's side, telling her when to pose for pictures and when not to, what to say and what to hold in her hands—when he got a look at Trudy's doll, the Channel Sheik, he pulled it from her arms, disap proving of the impression it gave onlookers that Trudy was still a child, and besides, no one had paid her to hold it. He was sitting on a pile of commercial offers worth nearly one million dollars and was in no hurry, planning to play the offers off one another and up the ante. Various vaudeville producers had already offered her as much as six thousand dollars a week to go on tour, plus expenses, fronting an indoor water show, swimming in a portable tank, speaking to the crowds, and showing films of her swim. There were also piles of endorsements as makers of everything from swimming suits to cisterns wanted Trudy's name attached to their product, overtures from the motion picture industry, more requests to appear at banquets, and more marriage proposals than she could count.

  Based on the events of the day, Malone seemed like a genius. Just a few days before, Westbrook Pegler, who was already casting a cynical eye on the commercialization of Trudy, sensing that the real needs of the young woman were being overlooked, had interviewed C. C. Pyle. The manager of Red Grange and Suzanne Lenglen had been hypercritical of Malone. Pyle, whose critics referred to him as "Cash and Carry," derided Malone as a promotional novice and told Pegler that Trudy's delay in returning to the United States had already cost her hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pyle clearly lusted after Trudy as client himself and spoke to Pegler knowing full well that his words would carry weight in the Ederle camp, where Julia Harpman was still a trusted confidant. "I would have had Trudy write her grandmother a nice souvenir postcard," he said. "Altogether Trudy and I would have cleaned up about $200, 000 if she had not been under contract to Malone."

  But the reception that day seemed to absolve Malone. By waiting things out, interest in Trudy only seemed to be increasing, and now when he entered into negotiations, Malone could cite the tremendous crowds that had turned out to see Trudy's return as a measure of the public's interest in her. There were, in fact, still hundreds of fans gathered on the street outside the Ederles' tenement when Trudy and her entourage finally made it home at about 1:30 A.M., fourteen and a half hours after the Berengaria arrived in New York, precisely the same amount of time it had taken Trudy to swim the English Channel.

  She would have rather spent the time in the water, battling the waves and jellyfish. For as she exited the limousine that delivered her back home, she passed her beloved roadster, still parked along the curb. The windshield was broken and the car was covered with hundreds of scratches as overzealous fans peeled off the paint as a souvenir. Before Trudy even had a chance to start the engine the car had already been wrecked and needed repair.

  Trudy collapsed in her own bed, but when she awoke the next morning it was as if she opened her eyes to a new world. The phone rang nonstop in the Ederle apartment, and the crowd on the street outside began to grow and swell again in numbers only slightly smaller than the day before. As Trudy, her father, and Dudley Field Malone finally sat down and began sorting out the dozens and dozens of telegrams and contracts and offers of various kinds that had been sent their way, a policeman knocked at the door and delivered a request from the press gathered outside on the street. Just a few minutes before, reports had come streaming across the wires from Dover. Mille Gade Corson had swum the Channel, completing the task in fifteen hours and twenty-nine minutes, only an hour slower than Trudy. Trudy was still the first, and still the fastest, but she was not the only woman to have swum the Channel anymore.

  The air started coming out of the balloon. Gade Corson wasn't even dry yet, and her backer, Walter Lissberger, claimed he had won one hundred thousand dollars in wagers on her swim and had already given twenty-five thousand dollars to Gade Corson, exactly twenty-five thousand dollars more than anyone had yet given Trudy.

  Trudy could scarcely believe it. She didn't think much of Gade Corson as a swimmer, but she was smart enough to say the right things in public, and soon she and Malone released a statement congratulating Gade Corson and sent her a personal cable. In a way, it had been inevitable that another woman would swim the Channel, and it was confirmation of the great changes Trudy's swim had inspired. Her success had not only shown the correct route across the Channel, for Gade Corson's path was eerily similar to hers, but Trudy had broken whatever psychological barriers that had existed and had contributed to preventing a woman from ever swimming the Channel before. The old view was gone now, but it was still a surprise that the change happened so quickly.

  As the day went on, it all caught up with her, all of it. By swimming the Channel Trudy had done something no woman had ever done before, but she had never expected that once she had done so she would find the veracity of her accomplishment attacked, or that once she returned home she'd have to continue to be a trailblazer and face the sudden onslaught of fame in a way no one, man or woman, had ever had to do before. And now, just as it seemed that everything was about to quiet down, Gade Corson had crossed the Channel, and everyone wanted to know what Trudy thought, what she would do, if she would swim the Channel again, and could she swim it even faster than before—or another dozen or two dozen or a hundred questions, it didn't matter because no matter how many times she answered or what she said, everyone still wanted more from her.

  Later that day, in the early evening, as the phone kept ringing, Malone and her father kept discussing money, and Trudy was told to get ready to see this person tomorrow morning and that person in the afternoon and go here and say this and stand here and smile, Trudy reached her breaking point. What half a day in the English Channel could not do, twenty-four hours as the most famous woman in the world could. Moaning, she wrapped her arms around her head and curled up like a baby with her hands over her ears and tears streaming down her cheeks.

  Trudy was put to bed, and the family physician was called as everyone waited breathless outside her room. After a thorough examination he pronounced Trudy physically fine but utterly exhausted and ordered her to stay in bed for the next twenty-four hours and not do anything or go anywhere. Trudy, Conqueror of the Channel and Queen of the Waves, needed rest. More than anything else she needed to be just plain old Trudy again.

  Yet after only one day of rest Trudy resumed her rigorous schedule—there were luncheons and block parties and meetings with the rich and famous that couldn't be rescheduled. Not that anyone asked her if that's what she wanted, but she was caught in a current stronger than any the Channel had ever offered. The world still wanted her after Gade Corson's crossing—not quite as badly or for quite as much money—but still badly enough to sweep her along as if she'd lost her feet in the middle of the rapids.

  C. C. Pyle had been right after all. The three-week delay had proven costly. Unlike Trudy, Gade Corson didn't hang around Europe visiting her relatives but left almost immediately for the United States, anxious to get her piece of the pie. Although Gade Corson was not the first woman to swim the Channel, she marketed herself as the first mother to swim the Channel, the next best thing and in some ways better. While Trudy attended a luncheon in her honor at Wanamaker's restaurant the following day, a representative of Gade Corson's handed a letter to Malone, challenging Trudy to a race around Manhattan for a purse of twenty-five thousand dollars, a publicity stunt, but an effective one. Malone probably should have milked the offer for all it was worth—Trudy was twice the swimmer Gade Corson was and would have beaten her easily—but his defensive response made it seem as if Trudy were somehow afraid of the competition, making Gade Corson's recent accomplishment seem even greater. "The air is full of challenges," wrote Malone. "They will all be considered according to time, place and importance.

  "It is not necessary for Miss Ederle to swim around Manhattan Island with anybody to prove that she is the champion woman swimmer of the world. Her established record proves that. Mrs. Corson, favored by good weather in the daytime and the
moon at night, made the crossing in slower time by an hour than Miss Ederle's record. This means that if Miss Ederle had swum across the Channel with Mrs. Corson on the same day with the same weather she would have bettered Mrs. Corson by about two hours.

  "As soon as any woman equals or breaks Miss Ederle's record it will then be time enough to discuss a match race to decide who is the better woman.

  "The champion in any line of athletic endeavors always has the say as to the time, place and circumstances of a meeting. Miss Ederle, the champion, will therefore have the say as to where, when and under what conditions the race will take place.

  "Gertrude Ederle intends to be a swimming champion, not a talking champion."

  He could say that again. Since Trudy returned to New York she had done very little talking on her own. Virtually all of it had been done through the mouthpiece that was Malone, and he'd done all her thinking as well.

  Then it happened again. On August 30 Ernst Vierkoetter, a twenty-six-year-old German baker, took advantage of extraordinary weather conditions and, using the crawl just as Trudy had, swam the Channel in only twelve hours and forty minutes, breaking Trudy's record by nearly two hours. In three days she'd lost her notoriety as both the only woman to swim the Channel and the fastest person to ever swim the Channel.

  With every passing minute Trudy's monetary value dropped. Most of the reported nine hundred thousand dollars in offers began to dry up. Of those that did not, Malone ignored those that required little of Trudy, such as endorsements, rejecting out of hand contracts that promised only a few thousand dollars, even if all that was required of Trudy was a signature and a few photographs. Gade Corson and her representatives wisely scooped them up. Malone also failed to realize that the real gold was probably in Trudy's revolutionary single-view goggles and two-piece swim swimsuit, either of which could have made her millions of dollars with very little effort. Instead he signed a deal with the William Morris Agency to send Trudy barnstorming across the nation headlining an indoor water show. It wasn't a bad deal on the surface—Morris promised six thousand dollars a week—but the agency took ten percent off the top, Malone and Henry Ederle each received a twenty percent commission, and now Trudy had to pay all expenses—salaries for both Aileen Riggin and Helen Wainwright, who would also appear, room and board, transportation, and the cost of setting up and tearing down the portable water tank the three women would use in their swimming demonstration. It was good for the Ederle family—they bought a house in Pelham for eighteen thousand dollars soon after the papers were signed—but not good at all for Trudy.

  It was the last thing she needed to do, or should have done, but Trudy wasn't in control. She deferred to her father and Malone in almost everything. Just before the tour started in late September with an engagement in New York, Trudy was finally allowed to take a brief vacation, but by then interest in her had waned even more. The 1926 World Series between Babe Ruth's New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals was about to get underway.

  The nationwide tour wasn't a complete disaster, but such small-scale shows were becoming a little old-fashioned. Using the same tank that had been built for Annette Kellerman and used by Thelda Bleibtrey, and accompanied by a local band hired to play the same songs Trudy had listened to while swimming the Channel, the show began with a swimming and diving exhibition by Riggin and Wainwright. Then Trudy came out and swam the crawl back and forth in the little tank, then took the stage, told the story of her swim, and showed the same newsreel footage that had already appeared in local theaters weeks before. That was it.

  The show had little of the appeal such shows had a decade or so earlier when the chance to see scantily clad women in the water, like Annette Kellerman, had been titillating enough to guarantee a full house. Women didn't often still wear stockings while swimming anymore, and much of the public saw no need to pay for ticket to see in a theater what could already be seen for free at the beach.

  By the time the tour finally got underway—Trudy's sister Helen accompanying her—even swimming the Channel had lost much of its luster and almost appeared anachronistic as yet another swimmer, Georges Michel of France, swam the Channel. He claimed to accomplish the feat on September 10, swimming even faster than Vierkoetter. Even though Michel was later discredited, the fact that others swam the Channel in such close proximity to Trudy made swimming the Channel seem less difficult than it was. In fact, it was still extremely difficult—by World War II only another eighteen people would swim the Channel—but impression was everything. In one more year swimming the Channel would not even be worthy of a front-page story in the newspaper, much less a banner headline

  All Trudy had ever really wanted to do was swim the Channel and then drive off happily ever after in her new car, but now she found herself on the road playing to half-empty theaters in places she'd never heard of with hardly any time at all to herself. While Riggin and Wainwright could perform and then enjoy whatever charms each city offered, Trudy was stuck looking after the show and giving interviews. Wherever she went, the questions—and the requests—were numbingly the same.

  What was particularly difficult for Trudy was that in nearly every town she appeared, if someone had recently drowned, Trudy, because of her swimming prowess, was often called upon to help search for the body. It was a gruesome duty she didn't want but one that was impossible to refuse.

  By November, only one month into her tour, Harry Carr, well-known columnist for the Los Angeles Times, was driven to write, "The glowing fame of Trudie [sic] Ederle, who swam the English Channel, went out into the blackness the quickest of any athletic hero I can ever remember."

  Nothing was going well. While she was on the road a cousin was shot and nearly killed in a mail robbery back in New Jersey, and her uncle John died in a car wreck that also injured several other family members. Meanwhile Trudy soldiered on before dwindling crowds. In the summer of 1927 she received a brief respite when she was offered a small part in a film, Swim, Girl, Swim, starring Bebe Daniels, and while she enjoyed the experience and received second billing to the Hollywood star, the end product, which has since been lost, did not launch Trudy into stardom. Yet while she was at the beach in Los Angeles, posing for publicity pictures, she dashed into the surf and rescued Mary Ashcroft, a Ziegfeld girl who had gone under and was drowning.

  By the end of the summer in 1927, the tour finally petered out, and the grind had worn Trudy down. "It was just too much for me," she later admitted. "It was appear here, attend a tea, greet city officials, talk at luncheons, and good-hearted Trudy couldn't refuse. I finally got the shakes. I was a bundle of nerves," later saying she "broke down," and "having achieved fame upsets your life." Plans to take the show to Europe collapsed, and Trudy returned to New York. Instead of earning nine hundred thousand dollars, she had earned far less than that, later saying her total take, excluding the expenses she was forced to pay, ended up being something around fifty thousand dollars. That was still no small sum of money, but it hardly set up Trudy for life.

  Apart from appearing in her act, she hardly had the chance to swim anymore, and although she was invited to participate in potentially lucrative, competitive swims to Catalina Island and elsewhere, she knew she was in no shape to do so. Besides, since swimming the Channel, her hearing had begun to deteriorate badly. Day after day of being immersed in water while training for the Channel and then on tour had taken its toll, causing additional ear infections and exacerbating her original condition caused by the measles. By 1928, the girl who had been in the papers nearly every day only a few years before had drifted almost out of sight, back, in her own way, to that special place Julia Harpman had written about only a few years before, secure in the womb of her own family in Pelham, virtually forgotten by everyone else. For a time, it appeared as if she would marry, as she was, as she described it, "practically engaged" to a family friend, a handball player she later identified only as "Charlie." But one day in conversation Trudy mentioned to him, "With my poor hearing, it might
be hard on a man," expecting him to disagree. He did not, saying instead, "I guess you are right," and broke off their romance. "I never got over it," she admitted years later. "There never was anyone else. I felt too hurt ... I've often wondered, though, that maybe I didn't hear him right."

  She briefly emerged in 1930, when Lorena Hopkins, star reporter for the Associated Press and later known as a confidante and possible romantic partner of Eleanor Roosevelt, discovered Trudy teaching swimming at a public pool in Rye, New York.

  Apart from her bathing suit, which had her last name stenciled across the back, Trudy was utterly anonymous. Hopkins described her as a "bronzed young woman with a determined grin," but "unless you raise your voice she can not hear you, and looks at you with an expression that has in it embarrassment, bewilderment and fear." When she asked Trudy about her Channel experience, Trudy was brutally frank.

  "I'm not sorry I did it. Only—if I'd known how it was going to be, that I'd lose my hearing—I don't think I'd have done it.

  "It wasn't worth it."

  She was twenty-four years old.

  Although Trudy tried to back away from those comments when they appeared in the press, they left the impression that her story was, in the end, a tragedy, a perception that only a few years later nearly became true. In 1933 after moving out of her house and into her own apartment, Trudy fell on some broken tile while walking down the stairs, twisting her spine, leaving her in a cast, periodically bedridden, hobbling around on a cane or with crutches, her legs all but paralyzed, unable to work, and hardly able to stand. No less than nineteen doctors pronounced that she would never swim again or walk with anything approaching normalcy.