Count Jacques de Lesseps and Claude Grahame-White shook hands and returned to their hangars to make their final preparations for their flights to the Statue of Liberty. The Frenchman embraced his sister, then his brother, and at five minutes past three he set off. He circled the ground once, and a second time, then began to climb higher. The spectators in Belmont Park watched him fly west and pondered his route. In the opinion of the Boston Daily Globe reporter, he appeared to be “headed straight for the tower of the Singer Building on the lower end of Manhattan Island . . . in a general direction along the Long Island railroad.”
Three minutes later Grahame-White was in the air and “was seen to head fully four points of the compass more to the south.” Those spectators high up at the back of the grandstand watched him through their field glasses and told each other confidently he was going away from Brooklyn toward Coney Island. For several minutes seventy-five thousand people stood with their hands over their eyes watching as “the broad wings dwindled into mere patches, then grew smaller and smaller until only the keenest eye could follow and hold them in sight, and then they disappeared.” Now all the crowd could do was wait, and hope, like members of an arctic party left behind at base as their colleagues struck out for the pole.
De Lesseps was flying toward the yellow captive balloon that he could clearly see silhouetted against a golden sky just near the Statue. He was at two thousand feet and already feeling the cold through his blue jean overalls. Down below on the streets of Brooklyn people gazed up through their field glasses and read the number on the underside of the monoplane’s left wing. “Number Six,” they cried, and began flicking through their newspapers to the list, which identified it as “Count de Lesseps.” They resumed their stare, then suddenly they saw the machine fall.
At the controls of his Blériot the Frenchman was unsure what had happened. Everything had been fine, then all at once his world went black. He felt something running down his face—for an awful moment he thought it was blood, until he tasted the oil in his mouth. Wiping his goggles with his gloves, de Lesseps saw that a joint of his oil-feed pipe had ruptured, and oil was spurting over him like blood from a severed artery. He pulled out of the dive at fifteen hundred feet and maintained a steady altitude. For a few minutes he flew with one hand on the wheel and the other clamped over the broken pipe, but as he neared the Statue, he knew he would need both hands on the controls. He released his grip on the pipe and hoped for the best.
A reporter from the New York Sun was in Chinatown when de Lesseps appeared overhead a little before three thirty P.M., and he described the bedlam that ensued as the Chinese poured into the streets in bewilderment. “Some of the men waved their arms in the air and threw back their heads so far that they retained their balance with difficulty. Others rushed to their houses and up the stairs, chattering in what appeared to be terror. Still others raced from one side of a street to the other, gesticulating and trying to tell all within hearing of the great wonder.”
The wide-eyed incredulity was just as great on board the battleships Connecticut and North Dakota, both of which were in the Navy Yard preparing to sail for Europe. Sailors clattered into one another as they ran across the deck looking up in frenzied excitement. Lieutenant Commander Jones, the flag secretary of the fleet, admitted to being “simply fascinated” as he and his fellow officers trailed the two airplanes with their field glasses, telescopes, and even their range finders.
Inside the Statue of Liberty the reporter from the New York Herald observed the progress of the machine that had materialized from the south, having soared along the coastline over Coney Island, Benson-hurst, and Bath Beach. As it got closer, the journalist made out a 10 on the underside of the left wing—Grahame-White’s number—then the airplane vanished from sight, circling around the statue before heading back the way it had come, “like an eagle to its nest.”
De Lesseps followed a couple of minutes later, and everyone within the statue—from the boy with the smoked glass to the girls with the opera glasses—tracked the airplane as it returned “over the housetops of Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, passing a towering church spire here and there, and from a speck in the sky faded into nothingness in the distance.”
The moment that the two machines had circled the balloon, the wireless operator on Bedloe’s Island telegraphed the news to the New York Herald’s offices in Manhattan, which relayed the message by telephone to the newspaper’s aviation correspondent sitting in the judges’ box at Belmont Park, who opened the door and passed it on to Peter Prunty, the final link in the chain. He picked up the megaphone and announced that de Lesseps and Grahame-White had both successfully completed the first leg of the race. A mighty cheer went up, said the Boston Globe reporter, but still “nobody was quite prepared for it when a man looked up over the edge of the grandstand and shouted, ‘There he is! Somebody’s coming back!’ ” It was Grahame-White, buzzing homeward at a terrific rate. He touched down in a total time of thirty-five minutes and twenty-one seconds, and de Lesseps followed in a time six minutes slower. Belmont Park became a maelstrom of hats, newspapers, programs, and champagne corks as the crowd celebrated the historic achievement. For the first time in aviation a race had been held over a city; what’s more, without mishap, and once again Grahame-White had demonstrated the superiority of the airplane over all other forms of aeronautics in covering the distance in more than a mile a minute. Grahame-White and de Lesseps shook hands, the latter’s blue overalls soaked black with oil.
They were collected by a tournament automobile and driven toward the grandstand as Peter Prunty bawled into the megaphone, “He might be an Englishman, but you’ve got to hand it to him!” The band of the Seventh Regiment began to play “God Save the King,” and Grahame-White was called upon to make a speech. He looked almost bashful as he stood on the steps of the judges’ box “in his brown aviation suit, grasping in his hand the famous to-be-worn-backward cap that has gone through all his flights in this country.” Grahame-White declined to make a speech, but motioned for de Lesseps to join him, and as the two stood side by side, the band struck up the “Marseillaise,” and soon the feet of the great crowd banged to the beat of the anthem. The acclaim of the spectators was still ringing in Grahame-White’s ears a couple of minutes later, at six minutes past four, when he heard another noise, the sound of a Blériot motor. He watched the plane take off and turn west, toward the Statue of Liberty. Its number wasn’t clear—it looked as if it had been painted over another— but it appeared to be 21, John Moisant’s.
Not long after Moisant had crashed into the parked biplane of Clifford Harmon, his brother Alfred appeared. He was a little taller, a little older, and a little darker than John, and around his neck he liked to wear “a gold nugget as big as an egg and a long string of gold nuggets as big as filberts for a watch chain.” First he checked his brother was all right, then he told him he would get him another plane. Alfred ran down hangar row to No. 8, Le Blanc’s shed. Inside were the twisted remnants of his machine, and another Blériot monoplane, a fifty-horsepower model that was about to be disassembled, crated, and shipped back to France. “I am now the own-er of that machine,” Alfred advised Le Blanc’s mechanics in perfect French. “Put it together as fast as you can and there’ll be extra dollars in it for you.”
Then he demanded to see Le Blanc. The mechanics shook their heads and told him their boss was back at the Knickerbocker Hotel, sulking. The two Moisants drove to the club house, and from there they put through a call to the Frenchman at his hotel. “I want to buy your craft,” Alfred barked down the receiver. Le Blanc might have taken a nasty bang on his head twenty-four hours earlier, but he’d lost none of his faculties. “It will cost you ten thousand dollars,” he said of a machine whose true worth was about $2,000. Moisant could feel a “but” coming. “But you know,” added the Frenchman, “it was admitted without duty [into America] merely for exhibition purposes. If you want to keep it in this country, you’ll have to pay the duty. That’s five t
housand dollars more.”
You’ve got yourself a deal, Moisant told him. Now it was his turn to pull the strings. “Be so good as to come to Belmont Park and assist in fixing up the machine,” he said to Le Blanc, “and I’ll have a check waiting you—and a bonus, too, if we win.”
Le Blanc arrived at three thirty P.M., his head still swathed in band-ages. First he inspected, then pocketed, his check for $15,000, then he gave Moisant a crash course in flying his Blériot. Moisant didn’t require much tuition; after all, he’d flown across the Channel in a similar model, and all he had to do was “adjust the levers to his own size and height or learn the peculiarities which are a part of every machine.”
He was still going through his final preparations as Grahame-White and de Lesseps returned. Making a note of the time he had to beat, Moisant set his compass at his feet and shouted out to the mechanics, “Roll her out, boys!” The New York Herald’s reporter watched as Moisant signaled he was ready. He turned and shouted good-bye to his brother and his two sisters, both of whom ran alongside the airplane for a few yards. Then they stopped, linked arms, and watched as their brother’s Blériot “rolled only twenty yards and then almost stood on its tail as it swept straight into the air.”
The New York Herald reporter was still on the grass when Moisant was spotted “high in the air and coming like a shooting star” out of the red sun. The newsman glanced at his watch—four thirty-five P.M. The American aviator had been out for twenty-nine minutes. Near the reporter a group of men, more used to cheering on race horses, began to work their hands like whips, growling, “Come on, you, Moisant, oh, come on now, boy!” A woman was crying in excitement and her “lace handkerchief was being ripped into strips by her nervous fingers.” Outside the Moisant hangar, his mechanics were pumping their fists, screaming, “Go on, John!” and the aviators’ two sisters “were running around in circles, looking over the shoulders of those who held stop watches.” One of the timers yelled, “He’s got two minutes to beat Grahame-White!” and the sisters implored their brother, “Hurry up.”
A lavender mist was beginning to roll across the course as the Blériot got closer and closer. Two men tipped a barrel of gasoline onto the grass and set it aflame. In the judges’ box the reporter from the World noticed that the “hands of the men holding stopwatches began to shake. They were reading the signs from the little gold encased dials of the possibility of an American victory.”
Grahame-White was with Eleonora Sears outside his hangar, his face impassive under his back-to-front cap, as he drew on a cigarette. He said nothing as he watched Moisant descend in a spectacular swoop. The American crossed the line, and then, for what seemed like an eternity, the scoreboard remained a mute witness to all the drama. Then the numbers flashed up, beacons in the gloom: ELAPSED TIME: 34 MINUTES, 38 SECONDS. A barely coherent Peter Prunty roared out the result: “John Moisant wins by forty-three seconds,” and suddenly the grandstand “seemed filled with mad people, who tossed their arms about each other and shouted the name of Moisant again and again.”
“It isn’t true,” stammered Eleonora Sears, “it can’t be true! The figures are not official.” In the Wright hangar the brothers were showing a couple of reporters the wreck of the Baby Grand when they heard the announcement. The correspondent from the New York Telegram got the fright of his life as Wilbur “gave a yell like a Comanche Indian, jumping at least three feet from the ground and waving his hands in the air. Then he recovered his composure somewhat and, smiling at the reporters, said, ‘That’s my opinion, boys!’ ”
A couple of hundred yards away Alfred Moisant was equally euphoric, dancing a jig with a mechanic, while his two sisters hugged anyone and everyone. Then the three of them started to run across the grass toward their brother, who had been hoisted out of his machine, stiff with cold, red and raw, but beaming from ear to ear. As the triumphant aviator was brought back in an automobile, “the crowd made a rush toward him that nearly swept the official timing house from its moorings.”
For many minutes Moisant stood in front of the multitude “with his brown eyes dancing and his white teeth flashing in happiness . . . [and] he bowed and bowed and kindly showed his own great plea sure in his triumph.” Pinkerton security men battled with spectators as a great chant of “Moisant, Moisant” resounded around Belmont Park. Only a concerted counterattack by the guards cleared a path from the judges’ box to the club house, so that Moisant could be carried inside on the shoulders of two race officials, an American flag draped over his shoulders and the band playing yet another rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” After a hot drink to thaw the frozen marrow of his bones, Moisant was reunited with his family and eventually driven back to his hangar.
The New York Herald reporter was getting the story of the flight when a knock came on the hangar door and Grahame-White appeared. He entered with a smile and a handshake. “Really very well done, old chap,” he said without a trace of malice. “Accept congratulations.” The two men shook hands, but before Moisant could say anything, Grahame-White looked down at his adversary and added, “But I’m going out after the statue prize again tomorrow, and I’ll surely beat you.” The English-man turned on his heel and left, leaving Moisant a “rankled soul.” “How can he beat me when I have already won the prize?” he spluttered to the Herald reporter. The newsman chased after Grahame-White to find out. “Are you going to attempt the flight again tomorrow?” the reporter demanded. The Englishman laughed. “You bet! I’ll not lay down under a beating like that. If I did, I’d be a Dutchman.” Then he reminded the reporter of the rules, or at least the new rules, as promulgated in the bulletin issued by the committee three days earlier: the race was open to any flier for the duration of the tournament, and because of last Sunday’s inclement weather, the tournament had been extended for a day, which meant he had until Monday evening. Oh, and another thing, added Grahame-White, nothing in the rules allowed only one attempt. A flier could try for the prize as many times as he liked, and that’s what he intended to do.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
My Disgust at This Betrayal
Monday, October 31, 1910
The staff of the plaza hotel at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South had been busy all day, decorating the gold-trimmed ballroom so that the evening’s guests would feel at home. It hadn’t been easy—with one or two tumbles from chairs and the odd wobbling ladder—but it was done, and the magnificence of the setting now took one’s breath away. Hanging from the ceiling among the chandeliers was a replica of the America II, with Alan Hawley and Augustus Post visible in the basket, as well as a model of Walter Wellman’s airship, America, almost as inert as the real thing had been. Around the two cumbersome shapes swarmed a flock of model monoplanes and biplanes, suspended by invisible strands, diving and climbing and swooping.
The flags of America, Britain, France, Switzerland, and Germany festooned the walls and the balcony; the International Aviation Cup and the International Balloon Cup were on prominent display, along with two or three other aeronautic cups; and on the menu cards—written in French, and including such delights as foiegras, filet de boeuf, and mousse aux marrons glacés—were caricatures of every aviator who had taken part in the Belmont Park tournament.
The guests began to arrive a few minutes before seven thirty P.M., each in evening wear with the heels of their polished leather shoes clicking as they walked across the Plaza’s marble-floored lobby toward the ballroom. They were welcomed by a member of the Aero Club of America and offered a glass of Moët & Chandon champagne—Imperial Crown Brut.
Walter Wellman came from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, looking none the worse after his recent adventure on the high seas. He shook hands with the Belmont Park committee and recognized one or two faces among those already present. Walther de Mumm was in animated conversation with Alfred Le Blanc and Jacques Faure, perhaps discussing the quality of the champagne, while Samuel Perkins and Arch Hoxsey were admiring the decorations. A trio of German balloo
nists—Hugo Von Abercron, August Blanckertz, and Leopold Vogt—were comparing notes on their experiences. Wellman knew James Radley and Alec Ogilvie only from their photographs in the newspapers, and the same for René Simon and Roland Garros, the French aviators. Wellman spotted Alan Hawley and Augustus Post, and went over to offer his congratulations; the pair thanked him and inquired after his health. At eight P.M. Cortlandt Bishop, president of the Aero Club of America, asked the guests to take their seats for dinner.
As guests of honor, the winning balloonists were steered toward the top table. Post sat on the flank but Hawley was in the center, between Bishop and General Nelson Miles.
Also present were August Belmont, Colonel Theodore Schaeck—the Swiss balloonist—and John Moisant. Between Schaeck and Augustus Post, however, there was a gap, a hole, what appeared to be a vacant seat. Post could see the name on the place setting: CLAUDE GRAHAME-WHITE. He looked around the ballroom and saw other empty chairs among the three hundred guests. How many? One, two, three . . . at least a dozen. He began to search for faces. Where for instance was his good friend Clifford Harmon? And Armstrong Drexel? And what about Count de Lesseps and Hubert Latham? No Charles Hamilton, no Glenn Curtiss, no Charles Willard. What was going on?
August Belmont rose and thanked everyone for their attendance. He gave a small cough, said the reporter from the New York Times, and drew the guests’ attention to the number of empty seats. Unfortunately, Belmont told his audience, “there had been so many accidents to the airplanes at the meet that many of the aviators who had to get away before tomorrow had been compelled to stay late at the field, but would come as soon as they possibly could.”
By eight P.M. the party at Louis Sherry’s restaurant on Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street was in full swing. It was an intimate affair, thirteen in total, but the guests felt a kinship with one another that produced a conversation rich in laughter. Armstrong Drexel was the host, sitting between his brother, Anthony, and Claude Grahame-White. Farther down the table the de Lesseps brothers, Jacques and Bertrand, had a joke translated into French by Hubert Latham, while Charles Hamilton was wreathed in cigarette smoke. Sydney McDonald waved his empty crystal glass and called for more wine, and Charles Willard tried to suppress a giggle as Clifford Harmon retold the story of how John Moisant had come to grief outside his hangar.
Chasing Icarus Page 28
