Birdmen

by Lawrence Goldstone

  In an irony he likely did not appreciate, Wilbur’s newfound leverage with promoters came not from having the law on his side but from the quality of his exhibition team. Wright aviators Johnstone, Hoxsey, Brookins, and even newcomer Phil Parmalee had soundly beaten Curtiss flyers at Belmont and, except for Moisant, were now the biggest American headliners around. Hamilton pleased the crowd but rarely won anything. In addition, with aviation entering a more mature and more flamboyant era, the roster of exhibition flyers no longer contained some of the field’s most famous names. Curtiss, Blériot, and Paulhan had by then largely restricted their activities to design and manufacture—and in some cases management and legal affairs—and left exhibition work to surrogates. But the surrogates had changed the rules. Selling airplanes for their employers was far less important than making names for themselves and notoriety was best achieved by performing feats of greater and greater daring.

  Some flyers, of course—most significantly Hoxsey, Johnstone, Hamilton, and now John Moisant—had already understood the publicity value of flirting with death, or at least seeming to do so. All except Hamilton insisted privately that they never performed a stunt they were not certain was safe, but pushing their airplanes to the very limit of prudent operation belied those assurances.

  The Moisants, as always, had chosen to go their own way. With his brother now one of the most famous men in America, Alfred decided aviation was a coming business. In typical Moisant fashion, Alfred dove in. Only days after the Belmont meet, Alfred capitalized the new Moisant International Aviators, Inc. with $250,000 of his own money and committed another $500,000 to cover anticipated expenses. His immediate plan was to organize a “flying circus,” a traveling airborne extravaganza with his brother as the feature attraction. He also planned to establish a complex in Garden City, near the site of the just-concluded meet, to use as a base of operations and home for a flying school.

  He began with seven aviators and a distinctly Gallic flavor. Three of the seven were French, including Roland Garros, a fourth was a French-speaking Swiss, and John Moisant was of French lineage. The remaining two were American, one of whom was the peripatetic Charles Hamilton, who would finally have a venue for his Hamiltonian, which he decided to rename the Black Devil. Hamilton was drinking more than ever and rarely took to the air without a couple of shots of whiskey. That he didn’t die in one of his many crashes amazed his peers.*2

  Alfred was generous, even profligate, with salaries, promised bonuses, railroad arrangements, and accommodations because he was convinced he had found as valuable a commodity at Belmont as he had in Central America. How could Americans resist paying to see the most incredible phenomenon of the modern world?

  It turned out that they could.

  The Moisant flying circus left New York on November 20 to great hoopla but John and Alfred had succeeded in booking only three midsized cities, all in the South. (They eventually added three more.) At each of their stops, press coverage was extensive but paying customers were not.

  One of Alfred’s miscalculations was in what would constitute a profitable venue. The large air meets he wished to emulate had been held, if not in out-of-the-way places, at least where an interested spectator could not simply wander over and get as good a view from outside the fence as one who had purchased a ticket. In the cities at which the Moisant flying circus performed, however, that was precisely what local devotees could do. Alfred’s problem, therefore, was not a lack of enthusiasm for his flyers but a lack of people willing to pay for something they could get for free.

  “The Moisant circus is a failure,” Wilbur wrote to Orville in early December. “They are losing money steadily and I think will soon wind up their affairs. They took in $600 for a three day show at Chattanooga and only $200 the first day at Memphis.” Wilbur added, with obvious satisfaction, “Knabenshue has contracted for Brookins, Hoxsey, and Parmalee at San Francisco at $22,500.”5

  Alfred soldiered on, capital draining as if from a siphon. More than a decade of refusing to admit defeat in El Salvador had not given the Moisant family the feel of when to cut its losses.

  With the flying circus occupying so much of his time, the second part of the plan, the Moisant aviation school, didn’t get started until the following year. When it did, however, on “1,600 acres unobstructed by a tree or a house,” the first two students to sign up guaranteed that the venture would receive wide play in the press and help Alfred recoup some of his losses.

  Both were women.

  One of the spectators at the Belmont meet had been a magazine feature writer at Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly named Harriet Quimby. A stunning beauty, tall and sleek, Quimby was described by Matilde Moisant as “the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.” Leslie’s planned to devote an entire issue to aviation and Quimby had prevailed on her editor to send her to Jamaica. She had been interested in flying for some time and was chairman of the Ladies Committee of the Model Aero Club of America.

  Quimby was thirty-five at the time but regularly lopped five years or more off her age and no one was the wiser. She had been born in rural Michigan in May 1875 but her father failed as a farmer and the family moved west to San Francisco when Harriet was six or seven. Her mother later claimed that the family was of proper New England stock, a fiction that Quimby was all too willing to adopt as she made her way in the world.

  Her initial aspiration was the theater—in the census of 1900, Quimby listed herself as an actress—and she pounded the turn-of-the-century pavements with another aspiring actress, Linda Arvidson. Having no luck, Quimby and Arvidson finagled forty dollars to rent a theater to put on a revue, half of which came from San Francisco mayor James Phelan, who fell for a tale of woe from two beautiful young women. Quimby was so striking that a stage photographer shot her for free for the window display and local merchants were persuaded to lend them rugs and furniture. According to Arvidson, they received “good notices, but not enough to put a dent in our careers.”6

  Arvidson continued to try to get work but Quimby abandoned the stage and got herself hired as a feature writer for the San Francisco Call, where she penned such articles as “Behind the Scenes with Bernhardt.” In another feature, “The Chinese Belle of America,” about the arrival of the seventeen-year-old niece of the Chinese consul general, Quimby’s opening line exhibited the grandiloquent manner of the day: “When the smoke from the steamer Gaelic curled up past Alcatraz, spiraled and settled in hieroglyphics as the heavily laden seahorse from the Orient made fast to her dock, there was something more than the usual stir on deck.”7 She also wrote about art and theater, and freelanced for west coast magazines.

  In 1903, Quimby left San Francisco for New York and landed a writing job at Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. For the next seven years, in addition to theater reviews, she wrote on everything from businesses that ply their trade underground to the effects of color on human behavior to alligator nests in Florida to the real meaning of stage kisses to fortune-tellers in Egypt. Her pieces were picked up by newspapers across America.

  Linda Arvidson remained in the West and in 1905 joined the cast of a play called Miss Petticoats, whose company had been stranded in San Francisco. One of the actors was a young man who called himself “Lawrence Griffith,” although his real first name was David. Arvidson was fascinated by Griffith, the son of a Confederate colonel who had fought with Stonewall Jackson. The two began seeing each other, but Griffith advised Arvidson never to marry if she intended to remain onstage. In 1906, Arvidson ignored Griffith’s advice and did get married—not surprisingly to Griffith himself. The next year, Griffith came east to try his hand as a playwright, Arvidson following soon after. Griffith’s playwriting went nowhere and his acting career never took off, either, but he had better luck when he took up film directing. Instead of Lawrence, which Arvidson despised, as a director he used his initials, D.W.

  Arvidson and Quimby rekindled their friendship and in 1909, Quimby appeared in a short film directed by Griffith called Lines of
White on a Sullen Sea. Quimby had a small part as a “fishermaiden”; two of her fellow bit players were Mack Sennett and Mary Pickford.

  Quimby did not appear in any more films but did write screenplays for shorts, five of which were filmed by Griffith and produced by the Biograph Company in 1911. Quimby gave her efforts such exotic titles as The Blind Princess and the Poet, Sunshine Through the Dark, and His Mother’s Scarf.

  At Belmont, Quimby became friends with both John and Matilde Moisant. When she announced her desire to learn to fly, John encouraged her to do just that. When the school opened, Quimby prevailed on her editor to pay the $750 fee, promising them a rousing story. When Quimby signed up, so did Matilde.

  Harriet Quimby might turn out to be the most glamorous aviatrix, but she wouldn’t be the first. Glenn Curtiss had also trained a woman pilot, Blanche Stuart Scott. Scott had made news in July 1910 by driving an automobile cross-country and in September, at Jerome Fanciulli’s suggestion, she began lessons at Hammondsport. Curtiss tried to restrict her to low, “grass cutting” and training flights, but Scott would not be held back and by November she was flying for Curtiss in exhibitions.

  Scott’s inclusion on the exhibition circuit was part of a general upgrade also instigated by Fanciulli. Curtiss finally set a more formal structure, with an official roster and terms of pay. Charles Willard and Bud Mars had already been touring unofficially and Curtiss added J. A. D. McCurdy from the AEA. The three were competent enough flyers but no threat to Hoxsey, Johnstone, and Brookins. Without Hamilton, the team had no star power. Then, at an exhibition in Minneapolis in June, Curtiss met a freelance exhibition flyer who might change all that.

  Eugene Ely was a farm boy from Iowa who had left at age eighteen for San Francisco. He was fascinated with automobiles and worked at various times as a mechanic, a salesman, and a chauffeur, eventually taking to race-car driving, at which he excelled. As a twenty-year-old, Ely had been acclaimed during the great earthquake for three times driving through fire to ferry patients at Waldeck Hospital to safety. The next year, he married a high school principal’s daughter and moved to Oregon, where he discovered that flying was even more appealing and more lucrative than driving. He bought and then repaired an old, wrecked four-cylinder Curtiss machine, taught himself to fly, and with his wife, Mabel, as his manager, hit the circuit. Curtiss signed him up.

  Curtiss had a different arrangement with his aviators than the Wrights. “He started us out with twenty-five percent of the take and we paid all our personal expenses,” said Beckwith Havens, who joined the team the following year. “We had a minimum charge of $500 for thirty minutes, and if it was a weekend or a holiday, it would be maybe $1,200 or $1,500 for thirty minutes.”

  Ely didn’t actually fly for Curtiss until a meet in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn in late August—a big moneymaker for Curtiss—and he fared poorly at Belmont, winning only $100. But two weeks later, he justified Curtiss’s decision in a milestone flight.

  Curtiss had never lost his fascination for airplanes and water. From the early days of the Loon, he had envisioned a true hydroplane. “A new line of thought—or to express it more accurately, the following out of a very old one—was taking my interest and a great part of my time. The experiments I had in mind involved the problem of flying from the water and alighting on the water … it was only a question of development, not of pioneering. It was suggested to me by the New York World to launch an aeroplane from the deck of a ship at sea and have it fly back to shore carrying messages.”8

  The Hamburg–American Line offered one of their ocean liners for the test. “The ship was fitted with a large platform, erected on the stern, a platform sloping downward, and wide enough to allow an aeroplane set up on it to run down so that it could gather headway for its flight. The plan was to take McCurdy and the aeroplane fifty miles out to sea on the outward voyage from New York, and then launch them from the platform.”

  But the plan had to be scuttled, first because of bad weather and then when an oil can that had been carelessly left on one of the wings was knocked into the whirling propeller, cracking it. The ship was forced to sail before repairs could be completed.

  But a navy captain named Washington Irving Chambers had been at Belmont and he and Curtiss had discussed the potential for naval aviation. Chambers persuaded the navy to offer the cruiser Birmingham for the test. Curtiss went to Hampton Roads, Virginia, where the Birmingham was docked, and supervised the construction of a fifty-seven-foot, downward-sloping platform over the bow. Eugene Ely was flying in a meet in Baltimore and Curtiss instructed him to take the Hudson Flyer to Norfolk.

  Curtiss and Ely waited for good weather, but storms set in and persisted for days. Finally, on November 14, Ely insisted on making the try. He waited for sleet to clear and then in rain, wind, and fog, “conditions little short of prohibitory,” Ely took off from the Birmingham’s deck. The airplane dropped after it cleared the end of the platform, touching the water thirty-seven feet below and sending up a spray that damaged the propeller and drenched Ely, covering his goggles. Ely regained some altitude but found himself enshrouded in fog, unsure of his location or bearing. He first headed out to sea, where he would surely have died—Ely could not swim—but he noticed his error and turned back. When he reached the beach, the fog cleared briefly, just enough for Ely to land “within a few yards of the Hampton Roads Yacht Club house.” He had flown five miles in five minutes. Captain Chambers, who had gotten himself appointed as chairman of a board for aeronautical navigation, declared the test even a greater success than he had anticipated and that Ely and Curtiss had proved the feasibility of shipborne aircraft. For his flight, Ely won a prize of $5,000 offered by the Ryan family for the first flight of at least one mile from a ship to land, money Ely got to keep.

  It was after the success at Hampton Roads that Curtiss changed his mind about making a deal with Wilbur Wright. He had come up with a better idea. “On November 29, 1910, I sent letters to both Secretary [Jacob] Dickinson of the War Department and to Secretary [George von Lengerke] Meyer of the Navy Department, inviting them to send one or more officers of their respective departments … where I would undertake to instruct them in aviation. I made no conditions. I asked for and received no remuneration whatsoever for this service. I consider it an honour to be able to tender my services in this connection.”9 With the honor would come the support of the United States military, heretofore the exclusive province of the Wrights.

  With the navy as a tentative ally, there was no thought of delaying until Hammondsport thawed out in the spring. To give himself a warm-weather winter facility and perhaps to get as far as possible away from Herring and the Wrights, Curtiss decided to establish a research base in California. He eventually settled on North Island, a scrubby, two-by-four-mile barrier isle off San Diego. The navy assigned a young lieutenant, Theodore “Spuds” Ellyson, to Curtiss to participate in the development of naval aircraft. Before Ellyson began, Captain Chambers wrote to him. “If I read Mr. Curtiss correctly, he is not too conservative to adopt a good improvement regardless of who owns the patent.”10

  With the splitting off of the exhibition corporation and the promise of support from the navy, Curtiss had at least stabilized his business. His exhibition team would now officially compete with that of the Wrights, whose antagonism became only more pronounced. As Frank Coffyn observed, “We were taught by the Wrights that the Curtiss crowd was just no good at all and we turned up our noses at them. But we found out later on by flying at meets where they were that they were a pretty nice bunch of fellows.” While the Wrights’ hatred for Curtiss was doubtless reciprocated, there is no record of Curtiss himself ever expressing the same sentiments toward either the Wrights or the men who flew for them.

  The Wrights were equally disdainful of the Curtiss aircraft. “They always inferred or hinted,” Frank Coffyn said, “that they didn’t think the Curtiss planes were any good … that they were dangerous to fly.”

  Then on November 16, at an a
ir show in Denver, Ralph Johnstone was killed.

  The headline read, “Johnstone Loses Gamble with Death.”11 Engaged in a stunt called the “spiral glide,” in which he began a circular descent, steadily increasing the angle to the ground, “like the swoop of a hawk,” a wing tip of the Flyer crumbled, and the craft dropped like a stone from five hundred feet. Johnstone had completed one full revolution from eight hundred feet and was beginning his second when “the middle spur which braces the left side of the lower plane gave way and the wing tips of both upper and lower planes doubled up as if they had been hinged.” Johnstone attempted to control the crippled craft “by warping the other wing tip. Then the horrified spectators saw the plane swerve and plunge straight toward the earth.” Johnstone still wasn’t finished. Although he was “thrown from the seat as the nose of the plane swung downward, he caught one of the wire stays and grasped one of the wood braces of the upper plane with both hands. Then, working with hands and feet, he tried by main strength to warp the planes so that their surfaces might catch the air and check his descent.”12 It appeared for a moment that Johnstone might succeed, but the aircraft turned over and plunged to the ground. Johnstone was buried in the wreckage and when his body was finally extricated, “nearly every bone broken” and carried from the field, the band played ragtime music.

  Before that ceremony, however, a more grisly ritual had occurred.

  Scarcely had Johnstone hit the ground before morbid men and women swarmed over the wreckage fighting with each other for souvenirs. One of the wooden stays had gone almost through Johnstone’s body. Before doctors or police could reach the scene, one man had torn this splinter from the body and ran away, carrying his trophy, with the aviator’s blood still dripping from its ends. The crowd tore away the canvas from over the body and even fought for the gloves that had protected Johnstone’s hands from the cold.13