by Jeremy Scott
These events are behind him, that was Amundsen’s career. Now is different. His situation today is unendurable to a proud and haughty man. Not only is he ruined and oppressed by debt, but discredited – wrongly – by charges of fraud. His honour, which when all else was gone alone sustained him, brutally has been stripped from him. Only courage remains to him, and tenacity. He is fifty-four and old for the rigours of the ice, but his body is fit and hard and his will implacable as ever it has been. He has one expedition still left in him, one final opportunity to recover his fortune and reputation before going down in the shipwreck of his life. One last shot at vindication, win or lose. One flight of Icarus… to the North Pole. That is Amundsen’s plan, to be the first to fly there in one of the primitive aeroplanes or airships of the day. He has come to America to raise the wind.
There were news crews waiting on the crowded pier as Amundsen stepped ashore. Two teams, each of assistant and operator in flat caps cranking the bulky camera on its wooden tripod, and there were photographers and the flare and whiff of flash – but they were not here for him.
All around was welcome and emotion of homecoming as he made his way past reunited couples, families and children to the Customs Shed, whose pitched roof lidded in the heat. His own wardrobe did not run to summer clothing, lecturing in this weather would be an ordeal. Other men waiting for their luggage were dressed in seersucker or linen suits. And they wore trilbies or straw boaters, not bowler hats. The women were in light summer dresses with dropped waists, bright with colour. He was unused to colour if not to the sight of women smoking – though Eskimo women squatted puffing pipes of shag, not cigarettes extracted from gold or silver cases and fitted into long holders by manicured fingers with painted nails. In New York City the natives were a species new to him.
His luggage was cleared. A porter wheeled the cases to a line of waiting cabs, the driver strapped them on the roof. ‘The Waldorf’, Amundsen told him and stepped up into the back. He sat with a straight spine in his tightly buttoned three-piece woollen suit, looking out the open window as they rode cross-town through streets dense with autos, vans, trucks, buses and still a few horse-drawn drays. The air smelt of gasoline and crushed dung. The sidewalks were thronged with people, with clamour and vitality. All were walking with intent. No one strolled. Noise was everywhere, a deafening roar vibrating on the air, you could feel the noise. He travelled through the din and clatter of a city strident with vivid life and voices yelling above the racket. Vendors were selling food from barrows on the sidewalk and the smell of cooking and fume of car exhausts lay trapped between the buildings where empty spaces showed like missing teeth – sites busy with concrete mixers, dump trucks, power shovels, pneumatic drills, and swarming with men stripped to the waist. The economy was booming, on almost every block the old was being done away, new buildings going up. As was the stock market, buying shares had become a recreational sport, like betting. Turning into Fifth Avenue the cab was halted in traffic filtering by a huge hole in the road, fenced off by hurdles. The top plank of each explained: DIG WE MUST FOR GROWING NEW YORK.
As the taxi drew up outside the Waldorf Astoria at 34th Street a uniformed doorman strode from the shade of the awning to open its door, while snapping his fingers to summon a bellboy for the luggage. Paying off the cab, Amundsen crossed the sidewalk and stepped through the hotel’s gilded doors into the muted calm of fully realised opulence. The Waldorf’s founder, William Waldorf Astor, was a connoisseur of hotels. He’d frequented the very best, and when he conceived his dream to build the grandest and finest of them all he demolished his own mansion on Fifth Avenue to ensure its location was the most fashionable in Manhattan. And thereby set a trend, for hotels became a plutocrat’s must-have, a millionaire’s collectible. Engaging in the competitive hobby, William’s cousin John Jacob Astor IV bought and demolished the adjoining city block to put up the Astoria, adding 550 bedrooms and 400 baths to the Waldorf’s 450 (half of which had private bathrooms) and linking the two hotels by a sepia-lit hundred-yard promenade columned and walled in amber marble, the last word in turn-of-the-century elegance. A climate of money enfolded Amundsen in the lobby, which was fragrant with cigar smoke and the scent of expensive perfume. This was the kingdom of the stylish and well-heeled. As he signed the register a note from Lee Keedick was given him, acknowledging if not exactly welcoming him into the domain, hoping he’d had a good crossing, enclosing a schedule, looking forward to a socko tour… and he’d call in the morning. A bellboy took him up to his room and he was alone in five-star luxury.
Unpacking, he hung up and put away his clothes. He could have done with a drink but his room, and all America, was dry. Just now a drink would be appropriate; New World, new adventure, new goal etc. But same problem, same problem as had dogged all his expeditions, every damned one of them. But this time it was worse. He was here to find the money to fly to the North Pole… and he was bankrupt. He didn’t have a cent to his name, he was busted wide.
The opulence surrounding him was unfamiliar, an alien environment. He was used to alien environments, he could mould his will and his hard old body to endure anything, he could surmount the perils of the Arctic, but here was different. Planning had been the key to his explorations, meticulous attention to every single detail that could be worked out before the adventure started, and from that had come the habit of trusting no one to pack for him. Preparation was all. He knew nobody in Manhattan well enough to telephone, but to remain in his hotel room was idle and profitless when he could reconnoitre the territory where he had come to score. Taking the elevator down to the lobby he stepped out into the stifling heat of the afternoon and started up Fifth Avenue on foot. An old man in a city that bounced with youth, he was Rip van Wrinkle stumbling from his long sleep into a world that had become unrecognisable. It didn’t even look like any place he knew.
Something unprecedented had happened at the start of the Twenties, something wondrous and magical which transformed everything. Autos, jazz, movies and radio – mass communication – reinvented America. A generation came into being which was nothing like its parents, neither in the way it looked or how it acted or what it expected out of life. It expected fun. It expected things: possessions, music, dancing, opportunities and stylish clothes. And suddenly for the first time in the history of the world all of these were available and to hand. The Fifth Avenue Amundsen walked up that sunny afternoon had been transfigured in appearance by plate glass. Store windows displayed a dazzling extravagance, within their interiors the fussiness of the Belle Époque had been replaced by the elegant swirls of Art Deco; style had become commodity. This was the glorious dawn of consumer culture and powering it was that other force which impelled the era: advertising. As Woolcott Gibbs wrote in the New Yorker (launched early that same decade): ‘Advertising was the new giant loudspeaker of American free enterprise, the full-throated blaring horn telling millions what to eat, what to drink, what to wear.’
Amundsen made his way up the sidewalk through a bustle of pedestrians, straw hats, sunshades, summer dresses, bright colours. People looked different to the way they had before – especially women. They plucked their eyebrows and cropped their hair short as a boy’s. The truly fashionable appeared to be without breasts or waist, to have neither thighs, hips nor buttocks. They painted their faces with lipstick and rouge. There were 1,500 brands of face cream and 2,500 perfumes available; a woman bought on average a pound’s weight of powder every year. Girls drank cocktails, manhattans, sidecars, martinis and white ladies; before the First World War no one drank anything except sherry before dinner. They necked, petted, put out and thumbed their noses at propriety; according to a magazine survey of the period one in ten carried a contraceptive in her handbag.
Social as well as sexual behaviour altered. Instead of entertaining at home people went to restaurants and night clubs. High society no longer set the tone. Showbiz and gilded youth fused into a new milieu in which ‘social position is more a matter of presence than p
restige’, as Walter Winchell put it. His rival columnist Cholly Knickerbocker, brooding on a barstool in the Ritz at the very start of the decade, named the swanky coterie ‘café society’ – and the name stuck. Breeding and background were relegated to dullsville, publicity and celebrity became the values of the age.
This was the America to which Amundsen had come; the streets of Manhattan he walked crackled with vitality, optimism and zip. To picture the scene, the cast, and the quick-stepping bustle of the sidewalk as a grind-organ fills the street with music, call to mind the movie Some Like It Hot, set in that same era. But it was Scott Fitzgerald who, better than anyone, defined the time and place where the veteran explorer had landed: ‘America was going on the greatest, grandest spending spree in history … the whole golden boom was in the air.’ The future had become the present, and Amundsen in his tight old-fashioned suit had stepped right into it with nothing in his pocket.
Six weeks later he was back in Manhattan.
My depression reached its climax upon my return from the lecture tour. The tour was practically a financial failure. My newspaper articles had produced but little revenue. As I sat in my room in the Waldorf-Astoria, it seemed to me as if the future had closed solidly against me, and that my career as an explorer had come to an inglorious end. Courage, will power, indomitable faith – these qualities had carried me through many dangers and to many achievements. Now even their merits seemed of no avail. I was nearer to black despair than ever before in my fifty-four years of life. As I sat in my room, musing in this way, the telephone rang…
It was the front desk to say that there was a gentleman to see him, a Mr Lincoln Ellsworth.
The stranger explained himself by saying he’d met Amundsen in France during the war, and Amundsen’s first instinct was to snub the man at once. He was used to people claiming to have met him and wanting to chatter, timewasters all of them. And of late worse; he’d had a lot of trouble recently with unwelcome strangers come to serve summons or dun him for debts. ‘Your business sir?’ he demanded gruffly.
In a pleasant soft-spoken voice Ellsworth explained himself. He’d read of Amundsen’s visit and lecture tour in the New York Herald Tribune, as he had his recent articles in the same paper. He’d also read Amundsen’s books and was familiar with his adventures. He was, in short, a fan. But that alone did not account for his presumption in coming here, he went on to say. He had some experience of exploring himself, in fact had recently returned from a mapping survey in the Andes. But perhaps of greater relevance was the fact that he was a native of New York. This was his hometown, he knew his way around the city and would be happy, indeed honoured, to be of service during Amundsen’s visit. If he happened not to be engaged this evening it would be his pleasure to invite him to dinner.
They ate at a restaurant chosen by Ellsworth where liquor could be had. He was a man in his early forties with crew-cut hair, open face, easy smile and laid-back manner – though he was, as he wrote later, ‘shaken and excited’ by this meeting with his hero. And, for Amundsen, to dine with an admirer well read in his exploits was congenial. During bankruptcy and his recent ignominies respect was something he’d become unused to.
Was what he had read in the newspaper true, Ellsworth wanted to know. Was it the case that he was planning to fly to the North Pole? Over the meal Amundsen explained the expedition he had planned. He had won the South Pole for Norway thirteen years ago, won it the hard way on foot with sledges and dogs. Now he would achieve the North in the ultimate of modern technology, an aeroplane. To be the first to fly there meant glory to his country, reward and worldwide fame. To fail, once in the air, meant almost certain death. No rescue could reach you in that frozen desolation and there was no way out. But it was Amundsen’s intention to try for it and his plans were formed. He would take off from Kings Bay in Spitsbergen, the nearest practicable point to his objective. The round trip to the Pole and back was 1,600 miles.
Ellsworth listened closely to what Amundsen was saying. That non-stop distance required a large fuel load, and it necessitated a big plane to make it, he observed. He had some knowledge of aircraft; he’d trained to fly during the war. He knew that Ford was working on a tri-motor capable of carrying eighteen passengers, not that passengers were wanted on this flight but load capacity was essential and the Ford could be fitted with skis…
No, Amundsen informed him, he was mistaken; the surface over which he would be flying was broken up, a jumbled mass of pack ice. An aircraft with skis could not land on it, an amphibian was needed. An amphibian could take off and land on both water and snow, even ice if it was smooth. He’d already selected the plane he wanted. More than that, he’d identified and lined up the other components of the expedition: the ship, the base, and key members of his support crew. The attempt on the North Pole was – on paper – prepared. Only one essential thing was lacking: money.
What, Ellsworth enquired, was all this going to cost? It had been a good dinner, an agreeable evening, but the question sounded a warning to Amundsen. What was this fellow’s interest? Did he see something in it for himself? Was he – in the phrase of the day – trying to cash in on his racket? Amundsen’s relationship with business managers had proved disastrous. His last, with a conman in Seattle, had resulted in his bankruptcy. Yet there was something disarming about Ellsworth, he came over as straightforward and genuine, a square shooter.
Amundsen had calculated the attempt would cost $50–60,000, at least. He’d expected to raise the cash from lecturing and private subscriptions, and also out of a book and newspaper contracts, though these were valueless until he’d succeeded to the Pole. And he’d hoped that money might come from product endorsement in the US. Ellsworth pointed out this would become much easier to obtain if the expedition were American not Norwegian.
No, there was no question of that, Amundsen told him firmly. None. This was a Norwegian expedition, it had to be so. Norway had been an independent country for only twenty years and he, like all his countrymen, was fired by patriotic pride. He’d made a promise to his King that the attempt would be made under the Norwegian flag. To Amundsen, national and personal glory had become the same. He was in the deepest and most desperate of holes and unless he succeeded in this mission he was dead, nevertheless he was undertaking it for Norway. And one thing was for sure – if he didn’t achieve it quickly someone else would.
Ellsworth considered, and then he came out with something wonderful for Amundsen to hear. Pure music. He said, ‘I am an amateur interested in exploration, and I might be able to supply some money for the expedition.’ For Amundsen it was an extraordinary moment, the sun came out. Back in his hotel room after dinner they agreed the deal. Ellsworth would put up $85,000 on condition that he became part of the attempt and make the North Pole flight with Amundsen. But, Ellsworth went on to confess, there was one further problem: Father.
3.
THE BACKER
Byrd and Amundsen, the main characters in this drama, have now both made their appearance on stage and identified themselves to you. Each has stated his intention and specified his goal: to be the first to fly to the North Pole. The two men confront each other in the classic role of rivals. But no contest is simply fought one versus one, without consequences to others. Inevitably a tragedy spills over to involve an additional cast, affecting their lives and sometimes even causing their death.
The first of these is Lincoln Ellsworth. Three months have passed since his meeting with Amundsen and he is seated in his room drafting a cable to his partner in this enterprise, who is now in Italy. Wording the text tactfully, so as not to upset the old explorer, is causing him some difficulty.
Ellsworth’s bedroom, on the third floor of the family mansion on Park Avenue, also serves as its owner’s study. The furniture is heavy, of varnished wood, traditional in style; there’s no hint of Art Deco anywhere. Geographical prints and framed maps hang on the walls, the few books on display look like works of reference. The room is masculine in appear
ance, no woman has had a hand in its decoration. Even without the clue provided by the high single bed with its mahogany headboard, we know its occupant to be a bachelor.
It is 11 a.m. on a cold winter day and normally Ellsworth would have written this cable downstairs in the morning room or library, but in those areas of the house there is the constant possibility of running into his father. Usually Ellsworth does not mind doing so, he can give as good as he gets, but just now he is feeling slightly… he doesn’t admit to it in his memoir where he is reticent about his feelings generally, but the only word for it is vulnerable. He is beginning to suspect that some of his father’s views on Amundsen just possibly may be correct. It is a most disquieting thought.
Fly to the North Pole? A hundred thousand dollars? Over my dead body! had been his parent’s outraged reaction when he’d first approached him. But years of exasperation and practice had taught Ellsworth how to handle the old man. It took days, patience, tact and the propitious moment to win him round. Yet, having done so, he knew his father so well he insisted they sign the agreement for $85,000 with a lawyer present.
Being the son of a rich man is not an easy business. If he is over-indulgent it is damaging to his offspring’s character, if stingy it is at times frustrating. And Ellsworth senior, who spent vast sums of money on paintings, furniture, books and a castle in Switzerland, was a real tightwad toward his son. But the youth had left home and made his own way regardless of Father and a sometime inheritance. He’d qualified as a surveyor and engineer, worked in the chilly wilds of Canada, served in the war. But now he was forty-four and looked for a nobler future, to achieve something big while something big still existed to achieve.
