"Jesus, how come you got smart so soon and rich so slow? You sound like Bruno Hafher, but you ain't got a pot to piss in." Roget looked pugnacious, triumphant.
"Let's not argue. We've been together a long time, and you've treated me wonderfully well all my life. I'll do anything you want, but for once think about Clarice. Don't you think she's entitled to a little security, a little stability, a few luxuries?"
It was a chance but telling shot. Clarice had subordinated herself to Roget's mad infatuation with airplanes all their married life, complaining all the while, but getting only a grudging enjoyment from the tyranny she exercised over the kitchen and the account books.
"Well, think it over. If you want to get into building airplanes on a production-line basis, you need me. If you don't, you can take the money, dump it in the factory, and then watch some other guy take it over when you can't pay the overhead."
Before he left, wishing to make amends, he said, "Maybe we could put a canopy like that on the Rascal. It would give me maybe two or three more miles per hour anyway."
Bandy left, sick at heart. Their years of nonstop arguing had really been an engineering dialectic. This was the first real fight they'd ever had. It was more distressing because there was a role reversal; in the past, Hadley had done all the ranting and raving, keeping him on the defensive.
It didn't matter. Either Roget came around to agree with him and let the factory give him what he wanted—a chance to build better airplanes than Hafner, Boeing, or anybody else—or he would get out of flying. He wanted that factory. Badly.
***
Chapter 6
Cleveland, Ohio/August 27, 1932
It was obvious that race organizer and aviation evangelist Cliff Henderson had the antidote to the Depression. For eleven months a year, Cleveland was submerged in the industrial malaise gripping the country, worse off than most cities because all the heavy industry was shut down. But a month before the National Air Races started in late August, the town came alive. Henderson's magic way with press and personalities brought everyone on board to share his conviction that racing was the salvation of aviation, and that aviation was the salvation of the economy. It was the only thing that would knock baseball out of the sports-page headlines as the Giants and the Senators continued their battle toward the World Series. The half million people who would pay to see the races would resent the extra million crowding the roads leading to the airport—Riverside Drive and Five Points Road especially—to catch a free glimpse of the carnival that Henderson staged. He couldn't put airplanes under a big tent, and there was a continuous stream of visual excitement—parachutists, autogiros, aerobatics, and military planes. Something was happening all day long, necessary distractions to keep people occupied during the long intervals between the races. The races themselves were hard to follow unless you had grandstand seats, for the tiny airplanes, flying not more than fifty feet off the ground, disappeared from sight as they growled around a ten-mile triangular course with engines screaming, reappearing to flash by on the home stretch. The real thrill, the crowd-gripper, was the speculation about whether they'd all reappear. A crash in front of the grandstand was icing on the cake.
The audience had about the same economic profile as the participants—95 percent were broke or nearly so, and 5 percent were very well off. But there was plenty of cotton candy and millions of neon-pink hot dogs filled with grease from unmentionable parts of long-dead animals, and the kids could beg for toy helium-filled dirigibles and blimps. The spice that made it carnival for individuals in the crowd was their certain knowledge of surviving death while enjoying the vicarious thrill of watching others at risk. One could see the hopes of the audience bulging like a weight lifter's biceps, and sense the Roman-circus anticipation of a bloody crash.
Bandy scanned the front-page headlines of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "Cleveland Socialites Start National Air Race Parties," "Doolittle Lands Wheels Up," "Cliff Henderson Tells Pilots: Put Up or Shut Up."
There was not a single mention of the arrival of the Roget Rascal, itself a miracle owed solely to the sale of rights to the wing to Hafner Aircraft. Charlotte had been a brick, speeding up the payments so they could pay off their debts and buy the rest of the material to finish the racer. He smiled wryly at the irony. Bruno Hafner had kept him out of the race to Paris, but Charlotte Hafner had helped him into the races here. Christ, it was a funny world!
Time, economics, and intuition had dictated that they build a virtually new airplane as a simple design with a tiny seventeen-foot-span slab wing and a long nose that Hadley had buttoned tightly around an Army-surplus Curtiss D-12 engine. Bandy had looked at the list of entrants, and he was the only pilot still behind a liquid-cooled power plant. There were a couple of in-line air-cooled Menascos, but the rest were flying air-cooled radials.
On the next page was a four-column photospread on Charlotte Hafner. The main picture showed her in her now-classic pose, standing half in, half out of her Gee Bee's cockpit, helmet in one hand, lips glistening, hair blowing back in the slipstream of the idling engine, the tugging of the white scarf revealing her rounded bosom.
A photo of any woman aviator brought back painful thoughts of Millie. He always wondered what they would be doing now had she lived, and he castigated himself for the thousandth time for failing to keep her from going. As always, he suffered the last angry thoughts, the ones he had to shake away, thoughts of how she must have felt during the last few moments of her life, when she knew it was ending.
The story focused on the new Hafner Cup being awarded for a transcontinental derby for stock commercial aircraft. First prize was the cup—Bandy thought it looked like a floral wreath for a gangster's funeral—$5,000 and an Auburn roadster; second prize was $3,000 and a Pontiac coupe; third was $1,000 and a Model A sedan. It was a handicap race, with contestants taking off from their hometowns, sponsored by the local car dealers. The racers were rated on an elaborate system that considered distance, time en route, and horsepower. It was smart advertising for Hafner and the car companies, well worth the cost of the prizes. Charlotte naturally was not competing for the cup her company had sponsored, but announced that she hoped to win the Katherine Stinson Trophy race.
He folded the paper and looked off into the distance. Charlotte was apparently immune to aging; she was as beautiful as he remembered her. He wondered what she was really like. The stories about her sexual prowess and her flying skills were legion, but most of that was probably bullshit.
At the bottom of the page a squib said, "Foreign Pilots Arrive." Poland's George Kossowski had brought his gullwing fighter, a P.Z.L.6; the German ace Hans Westoff was demonstrating the Udet Flamingo sportplane; and Stephan Dompnier was going to fly a Caudron racer.
He passed his time in the maintenance pits with the various crews, trying to learn as much as he could. Bandy needed race experience. Flying a fighter was one thing, whipping a racer around a tight measured course was another. He had flown in pickup events around the country, pushing a Laird Speed Wing around the pylons, but Cleveland was distinctly a notch up. He planned to enter as many races as he could, but to fly in only one, the Standard Mystery Derby. The multiple entries meant he could do some practice flying every day during the time trials, trying to pick up all the racing savvy he could.
He had selected the Standard Mystery Derby because it carried a $15,000 first prize, and was generally considered to be the second-most-important event of the closed-course races. More important, the big guns like Roscoe Turner and Jimmy Doolittle weren't going to enter it, preferring to save their engines for the Thompson Trophy race.
The racing crowd was a friendly fraternity off the course, sharing possessions and effort easily. Once the starting flag was dropped, however, it was every man for himself. The various race teams worked on the ramp in 102 bays arranged in sixteen rows. He wandered through them all, lending a hand here and there, using his back as a sawhorse while a wheel was changed, or holding down on the horizontal stabilizer while an eng
ine was run up. In the process, he got to know everybody and examine everything from Benny Howard's sleek white Menasco-powered Pete to a workaday Monocoupe. The time he had free from tweaking his own racer he spent with Howard Hughes and the Gee Bee bunch.
Hughes, now as good a mechanic as he was a pilot, had taken a job with TWA as Charles Howard. He had then immediately asked for leave to work with the Granvilles. No one else could have gotten away with it, but Hughes did, for by now practically everyone in aviation knew about his ruse. Hughes was hoping to get a chance to fly one of the smaller Sportsters, and he brought Bandy up to speed on the behind-the-scenes activities.
"Are you going to Charlotte Hafner's big party at the country club tonight?"
"No, I didn't get an invitation."
"Man, there are no invitations. Everybody that's racing is going to be there. I wouldn't miss it for the world."
Reluctantly, Bandfield let himself be persuaded. He wanted to learn as much as he could, and the party was a good place. Besides, it might be interesting to talk to Charlotte again. It would be worthwhile to get some insight on Bruno's plans for Hafner Aircraft. He could never like the German ace, but it was impossible not to admire his success in a tough field. All over the country, aviation companies were folding, but Bruno managed to keep his firm profitable. Maybe he could learn the secret of his success from Charlotte.
Hughes always insisted on doing the driving. They were in the Chevrolet sedan he'd purchased on arrival. The experience had been worth the whole trip for Bandfield. They had walked into the showroom, and Hughes had pointed to the car and said, "I'll take that one." The bemused salesman almost seemed cheated when Hughes counted out the full price of $650 in cash, with no haggling. It was just another of Hughes's many contradictions.
Bandfield had long since learned about the source of Hughes's funds, the oil-well-drilling-tool companies, but he was always amazed that Howard, as rich as he was, was quite indifferent to money—as long as he had enough to do exactly what he wanted. It didn't bother Hughes to eat in the same rotten little airport restaurants that the rest of them did, and he wore the same sort of nondescript oil-stained clothes day in and day out. He took turns when it came to picking up the tab, but he was never flamboyant about his wealth. The car was a good example.
"This is a nice car, Howard, but with all your money, why don't you buy a Packard or a Cadillac? A Pierce-Arrow, maybe?"
"Too conspicuous. The last thing I need is anybody looking at me. And if you take a broad out in a Cadillac, a lot of them put on the dog, play hard to get. They act natural in a Chevy, and you can get right to them." It was a typically pragmatic Hughes viewpoint.
The drive to the country club took them along the edge of a run-down factory area. The plants, long idle, were odd geometries of corrugated sheet iron, broken by the sharp angles of elongated windows designed to admit light on hustling assembly lines. Some were coated in a red oxide that gave off a ruddy sunset glow, but the rest were slumped under coats of rust and grime. A few of the buildings were well maintained by firms that had some faint hope of resuming operation, hope that the Depression would end sometime, but most were coming apart, the windows broken, with weeds and even trees growing up between the ties of the railroad spurs that once had served them. For no reason that he could identify, the most poignant were the construction yards, where conveyor belts still stood extended above the piles of sand and gravel, like starving primitive cranes in the act of feeding their young.
In a neat arrangement, calculated long ago by the employers as a means to get people to work on time, the factories were bordered with houses as identical as checkers. Bandfield knew them well, having lived in one in Monterey the year his dad worked at a cannery. They were called straightbacks, with a fifteen-foot-wide living room running across the front which led straight back to a tiny bedroom and kitchen. He couldn't tell, but he thought most would have an indoor bathroom—toilet, claw-leg tub used regularly every Saturday, and a pedestal sink. A tiny coal stove that would glow red-hot in the winter would be set just at the end of the living room, so that its warmth would drift into the bedroom. The kitchen and bathroom would make do with heat from the coal-fired range.
Judging by the number of people who sat slumped on the slanting steps of the wooden porches, most of the living rooms would have folding cots set up, to handle the children or adults who had moved in to share the tiny rent.
The one dominating feature was the lack of color. Everything was gray, houses, clothing, and faces. Even the leaves of the trees had grown gray with the tired dust of the Depression.
At a stop sign, a little boy and girl were standing, dressed in overalls of ragged gray ticking. The girl had a doll tucked under her arms, head in, legs flopping down. She lifted her hand and flexed her fingers in a little wave.
Hughes had missed it all, saying not a word until he turned a jog in the road and came on a brightly lighted little commercial center. A crowd had gathered in front of the doughnut shop to watch the cascade of dough rings splash into the hot grease, frizzle, then automatically be flipped to get a squirt of liquid sugar. The hot, greasy sweet smell mixed with the sudsy odor of a saloon. Next door to the tavern, convenient for dropping the kids off while Dad had a beer, the incandescent bulbs of the theater marquee chased themselves in sequential blackouts. Black letters on the back-lit marquee announced the film: Sky Devils, starring Spencer Tracy. Hughes punched him and said, "That's mine, Bandy. I made it with out-takes from Hell's Angels. Cost me less than half a million to put it in the can, and it's made that back already."
Bandfield noticed that there was a quiet, well-mannered line waiting for the box office to open. Maybe Hughes knew what he was doing. Maybe he'd find a way to make money with airplanes as well.
And maybe his father, old George Bandfield, knew what he was talking about too! What the hell was wrong with a country that would let buildings like this go idle and people starve? The odd thing was that he was part of the problem, building useless things like racing planes when there were hungry people around.
"Did you see those little kids back there, Howard?"
"No, I learned a long time ago never to look at anybody on the streets. First thing you know, they want a handout."
Bandfield shook his head as Cleveland fell away behind them into well-ordered fields. Something must be wrong with the system, and he wasn't helping. There should be something he could do. He was still musing three miles later when they turned into the country club's driveway. It was long and rolling, bordered by painted white stones and trees whitewashed a neat four feet up their trunks. Beyond the symmetry of the trees were the well-watered fairways and the pool-table greens.
"No gray allowed," he said out loud. Hughes looked at him, bushy eyebrows arched. Bandfield remembered that his father always used to complain about golfers wasting their time, turning good land idle.
"Golfs a stupid game, Howard. Did you ever play?"
"Christ, Bandy, I'm an expert. I'm going to win the Open someday—didn't you know that?"
Bandfield didn't reply. He might have known that Hughes would be as ambitious—and as capable—in golf as he was in flying, films, and girl chasing.
He wet his finger with saliva and scrubbed at a spot on his lapel. Since the palmy days on Long Island, when Jack Winter's valet had showered him with clothes, Bandfield had gradually reverted to the usual pilot's wardrobe of a scruffy suit, a few shirts, and a couple of pairs of pants. This morning he'd placed his suit pants under the mattress in his hotel room in the wan hope that some of the wrinkles would be pressed away.
As they got out he felt his usual remorse about any social function, wishing he were back in the hangar with the airplanes. Hadley had been smart, refusing to come along and commenting, "I'm not going to dress up and go in and stand around talking to a bunch of guys I was talking to all day."
At least Bruno wouldn't be there; he was supposed to be back East somewhere working yet another Hafner deal. Charlotte had
planned far enough ahead to have the country club at her disposal, and taken the care to have half of Cleveland's best-looking debutantes on hand. There was plenty to drink, and the food was laid out in a lavish display that would have fed the American Expeditionary Force for a week.
Hughes disappeared as soon as they entered, and Bandfield went straight to the buffet, where a smiling Negro in a brilliant white jacket was dispensing platter-sized plates. Bandy moved through the line, concentrating on the peeled boiled shrimp and the thin slices of roast beef piled on miniature slices of bread. There was a big bowl of mixed olives, green and black. He put a dozen on his plate, and realized that it looked greedy. He picked up a slice of rye bread, covered the olives, then added six more to the top. Six was reasonable.
Submerging in the fronds of a potted palm, he devoted himself to eating and people-watching. Like any good instrument pilot, he kept a scan going across the three most important parts. First there were the good-looking girls, so plentiful that it was difficult to concentrate. Then the race pilots, constantly grouping and regrouping, getting louder as the party wore on, as the drinks went down. Finally, there was Charlotte, circling constantly, working the crowd, steering important people to each other, helping out when she saw someone cornered by a bore, making sure that the trays of drinks were circulating fast enough.
Bandy watched how the most famous names in racing kidded each other. There was a definite pecking order, with Turner and Doolittle at the top, and the others ranking themselves down almost as they had finished in last year's races.
Hughes came by, and Bandy tried to get him to talk about Hollywood. "I'm tired of talking shop, Howard. Tell me about making pictures and living high with the starlets. Did you ever date Jean Harlow?"
The veneer of Hughes's friendship went transparent and the real Howard Hughes loomed large behind the familiar figure of Charles Howard. Even his voice was different as he said, "Bandfield, the only thing I ever talk is shop, and only with the experts. That's why I've spent so much time with you and Roget."
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