The Aviators

by Winston Groom

  The bond tour opened in Boston’s Symphony Hall before six thousand people, hosted by the governor of Massachusetts, Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge, whose voice was so thin and irritating, Rickenbacker said, that when it came his own turn to talk it made him feel like he was Daniel Webster.

  The tour, which lasted through May, was generally a success and it introduced Eddie to great numbers of Americans, some of whom were substantial people, such as Orville Wright, whom Eddie met when he spoke in Dayton, Ohio. In his speeches, Eddie made glowing predictions about long-distance air travel in America and abroad, where trips that now took days or even weeks would be reduced to a matter of hours. Airplanes would one day seat hundreds of people and have salons; he said they would travel thousands of miles, and would be safe, with “wireless controlled compasses.”8

  The tour’s schedule was grueling—seven days a week, each day in a different town—and toward the end it began wearing him down. Eddie lost his voice, and became weak and tired, but he emerged from his final performance in Toledo as an accomplished public speaker. At the same time, he reentered the population as a civilian, the army having finished with him after promoting him to major.*

  Likewise, he emerged as one of the nation’s greatest socializers and lodgemen, having been tapped in towns and cities across the land as an honorary member of just about every men’s organization in the country: the Loyal Orders of Lions, Moose, Elk, Owls, and Eagles, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the Sons of Norway, the Knights of Pythias, the Woodmen of the World, the Shriners, the Sons of the Golden West, the Little Men’s Chowder and Marching Society, and so on. Furthermore, he had amassed enough keys to the city to start a respectable collection, but it was more than just the beginning of a long career of speechmaking by Eddie Rickenbacker. It was the start of a new chapter in his eventful life in which he began to understand that he was no longer merely good ole Eddie Rickenbacker, death-defying car driver and army aviator. He had become venerable, a man of substance, and a man to whom people deferred, whose opinion would often be sought on lofty national issues. He had been suddenly pitchforked into popular greatness.

  IT CAME TO HIM IN THE DESERT, he said, the notion of manufacturing a high-end automobile. He had visited the Arizona desert in a get-back-to-nature mood and camped out for days at a stretch. The car would be called the “Rickenbacker,” and feature all the newest innovations. He had a picture of it in his mind, and an idea of where he could get financing. After the bond drive he’d gone to Arizona to clear his senses and get out into the open spaces, he said, which was when the concept of the car began to jell.

  Afterward, Rickenbacker attended the 1919 Indianapolis 500 and sat in the stands despite the AAA’s strenuous attempts to get him back on the racing circuit. There he witnessed a bloody and disquieting afternoon in which two drivers and a mechanic drove to their deaths, alleviating any regrets he might have felt over his retirement from auto racing.

  In the meanwhile, Rickenbacker was continuously besieged by promoters who offered enormous sums of money to endorse their products—“cigarettes, chewing gum, wearing apparel.” Publishers pushed to have their ghostwriters tell his story. Hollywood producers loitered around with fantastic offers, the most brazen of whom, Eddie said, was Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures. Along with his whiz-kid assistant Irving Thalberg, Laemmle shadowed Eddie throughout the bond tour, “booking compartments next to mine on trains and rooms next to mine in hotels,” he said. “On one occasion he [Laemmle] produced a certified check for $100,000 made out to me!” Rickenbacker remembered.

  He turned it all down, of course, unwilling to cash in on his honest fame, which was all the more honorable considering that Eddie was about out of money. Much of what he had accumulated during his racing days had been spent or was given to his mother to raise the family. He wasn’t particularly worried; anybody in the country would buy a meal and a drink for Eddie Rickenbacker, and many opportunities had come his way. But he was savvy enough to know that, whatever he did, his name and reputation would be heavily associated with it.

  He investigated a career in aviation manufacturing but the war had flooded the market with thousands of army surplus Jennys, the Curtiss JN-4 training plane, and other warplanes that were produced but never made it to France. There were in fact enough of these planes at cheap prices to glut the market for years. It became apparent that making a proper living in aviation at that time would be difficult. There was no commercial aspect to speak of yet, and barnstorming or taking up passengers for rides was both iffy and risky. Curtiss offered Rickenbacker a steady job selling airplanes but he didn’t want it; something didn’t seem quite right.

  Eddie had important contacts through the racing world, and he tapped an auto man named Harry Cunningham, who persuaded three investors to put up $200,000 for development of the Rickenbacker automobile. Soon several models were on the drawing boards at the Rickenbacker Motor Company in a factory building in Detroit and a prototype was in the works.

  The new company was aiming at a car in the $1,500 to $2,000 bracket, well beyond the $500 Ford Model T, but not quite so pricey as a Packard or Cadillac. According to Eddie, it would be tailored to the “white collar worker, junior executive, the fairly prosperous farmer and the woman of taste.” Eddie wanted an innovative car with brakes on all four wheels, instead of the usual two, which Eddie considered safer,† a high compression motor, a low center of gravity, and a crankshaft with flywheels at both ends to reduce vibration. Somebody came up with a splendid slogan: “A Car Worthy of Its Name.”

  Meantime, in Detroit, Eddie oversaw production and test-drove the Rickenbacker prototypes, and in the autumn of 1921 Rickenbacker Motors made an initial public stock offering that sold $5 million worth of shares, which the company used to buy the factory building and begin production.‡ Eddie and his partners retained 25 percent of the business.

  There were three models, initially: a coupe, a touring car, and a sedan. These were on gleaming display at the 1921 New York Automobile Show, a huge event attended by dealers nationwide. Adorning the polished chrome radiator of each Rickenbacker car was the insignia of the Hat in the Ring squadron. Orders “flooded in.”9

  As it happened, the floral arrangements for the Rickenbacker display on the third floor of the Grand Central Palace on Lexington Avenue had been done by an acquaintance of Eddie’s, the beautiful and graceful Adelaide Durant, who had married, and recently divorced, a wealthy sometime race car driver who was the ne’er-do-well son of the founder of General Motors. Eddie had known the couple in California and was delighted to renew the friendship with Adelaide, who had left an indelible impression on him when they first met several years before the war.

  Rickenbacker had generally steered clear of women since he got back to the States. But his handsome photograph was plastered in all the newspapers with rows of ribbons, high, polished boots, and the Sam Browne belt and he became, for better or worse, the object of constant approaches by females, ranging from the higher classes to those of indifferent virtue, many of whom sent him mash notes, called him on the phone, and even lay in wait for him outside hotels when it was announced he was in town. But Eddie understood, almost to the point of being self-conscious, that he now represented not just the army flying service, or even the U.S. Army itself, but the entire United States before the world, and had thus best put up a proper front.

  He had a brief fling with a girl named Dorothy Bill, the daughter of a well-to-do Connecticut family, whom he had met on a lengthy train ride through Canada. But as a romance it slowly fizzled out. He also had a rapport with a popular actress and entertainer named Elsie Janis, whom he had met on his way home in London, where she was raising the morale of U.S. soldiers in a hit show called Hello America. He renewed the relationship five months later, on June 3, 1919, by escorting Elsie to the elegant Farewell Dinner of the 94th Aero Pursuit Squadron at the Commodore Hotel in New York City. Rumors soon abounded of their impending marriage, but the relationship went nowh
ere when she turned out to be a lesbian.10

  Adelaide Frost was raised in comfortable circumstances in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the daughter of a wholesale grocer. She was noticed by Cliff Durant while singing in a cabaret, and they married in 1911. The couple lived on a luxurious estate near San Francisco with the finest of everything, but Durant was “a heavy drinker and womanizer … [and] Adelaide’s life with him was marred by physical abuse and his extramarital affairs.” She was said to have had a number of miscarriages and ultimately a hysterectomy to avoid the chance of having children with a man such as her husband.11

  A divorce decree was granted in 1921, on grounds of “extreme cruelty.” She moved around with a girlfriend for a while and took a lengthy tour of Europe and North Africa courtesy of $250,000 worth of gifts and trust funds lavished upon her by her former father-in-law, William C. Durant, the General Motors magnate, in gratitude, he said, “for doing her best in a lost cause.”12

  She had only recently returned and was staying in New York, where it was said that her “money, charm, and beauty, made her a much sought after figure in the social circles.” Rickenbacker ran into her while she was on a shopping spree in Manhattan and invited her to dinner. After they’d renewed their acquaintance, and she agreed to do the flowers for the automobile exhibition, a courting period began. Eddie was living in Detroit and working closely with Rickenbacker Motors now, but he used every possible opportunity to travel to New York. He began sending her a dozen red roses in advance of his visits and soon started buying her jewelry. After they had spent the 1921 New Year’s Eve together, he told her, “I can’t keep making excuses for coming to New York on business … so you’d better marry me or come to Detroit,” he said.13

  Adelaide agreed to do both, but soon an “avalanche” of unseemly and mean-spirited gossip in the newspapers staggered them. Like Lindbergh, Rickenbacker was learning the downside of being famous. The couple couldn’t be married until Adelaide’s divorce was final, which occurred in July 1922. They were married privately on September 16 of that year, in an Episcopal church in Greenwich, Connecticut, with only a handful of witnesses. Assisting the Episcopal priest at the wedding was the Lutheran minister Jacob Pister, who had baptized and confirmed Eddie back in Columbus. Immediately after the ceremony they went aboard the White Star liner Majestic for an extensive European honeymoon. Rickenbacker, who was thirty-one years old and beginning to go bald, later described it as the happiest day of his life.

  Aboard ship during the six-day voyage, Eddie was able to relax for the first time in his memory. He and Adelaide were, in his words, “the laziest people on board,” sleeping late in the morning and lounging in deck chairs or strolling the decks, nodding and smiling at the other passengers, who gawked at them as if they were royalty or movie stars.

  Paris became their home base. From there they visited the battlefields of the Argonne Forest, above which Eddie had prevailed in so many deadly encounters. The war was four years past but the haunting desolation of the battlefields was a stark reminder of the tragedy. At Verdun everything was still in ruins and the Rickenbackers saw horrifying piles of skulls and bones that were destined for the new marble and granite ossuary at Fort Douaumont. This enormous tower contains the skeletal remains of at least 130,000 soldiers whose bones were picked up on the battlefield after the war but whose identities remain unknown.

  They drove to Toul to pay their respects at the little cemetery on the hill where Lufbery and a dozen other friends were buried, only to find the caskets had been removed and the place turned into a rifle range for the French army. This put Rickenbacker in a wrathful mood, and that night he raged against “statesmen” and governments, who start wars where other people suffer but who never suffer themselves. “The fallacy of war is livid,” he wrote, “and I am certain though I may never live to see the day, when instead of people being the victims of government, statesmen and government will be their victims.”

  They took a night sleeper train to Berlin on October 2 after Eddie had balked at paying 500 francs for airfare, but it was cold and uncomfortable and the customs agents kept waking them up at all hours. In the morning they arose to find themselves in Germany, passing through a region of neat, autumnal farm fields and houses, which looked prosperous and undisturbed because the war had never reached that far into Germany. But the impression was illusory.

  As they exchanged their American dollars for German marks they discovered that the horrendous hyperinflation they had heard about was far worse than they’d imagined. Their large suite in a luxury hotel cost 14,000 marks—about $8.50 when, before the war, a mark had been roughly on par with the dollar. At dinner, Eddie tipped the waiters what he thought was about $3 apiece but, after recalculating the ever changing exchange rate, it turned out to be only six cents. He rectified the mistake, and later wrote that the Germans themselves were in complete shock and disbelief at what was happening to them.

  The Weimar government, set up at the insistence of the Allies, seemed helpless and hapless against the financial onslaught. The war had prostrated Germany, and Eddie remarked on the numbers of undernourished children in rags and without soles on their shoes. In the end, people were actually burning German banknotes in their stoves to keep warm because the money was so nearly valueless. Ultimately it was this economic tragedy that created the atmosphere into which Hitler emerged with his peculiar friends and ideas.

  Eddie visited German automobile showrooms, which seemed shoddy, and the cars were “too high and heavy,” old-fashioned and uninspired. Adelaide was bored because there was no place worth shopping. They had been there only a day, and were intending to leave, when Eddie had a surprising visitor.

  It was Ernst Udet, the German Ace of Aces, who had learned that Rickenbacker was in town and sought him out with an invitation to dinner with a group of German fighter pilots, among whom were Hermann Göring and Erhard Milch who, along with Udet, would one day rise to the very top of the Nazi regime. “Naturally I accepted,” Rickenbacker said.

  Dinner was in a secret room under a small café. Eddie was introduced to about a dozen of the German airmen but only Udet, Göring, and Milch spoke English. Milch “was on the slender side; he was dignified and well educated.”§ Udet, according to Eddie, was “short, stocky and jovial.” Göring, who had commanded the Flying Circus after the death of von Richthofen, was conspicuously in charge. “He was then a fine figure of a man, positive and dedicated to the rebirth of the fatherland,” Eddie would write.

  Göring became expansive as the wine and the evening wore on and they reminisced about the war. Then, surprisingly, Göring laid out a chilling blueprint for the resurrection of a rearmed imperial Germany.

  “Our whole future is in the air,” Göring said, as Rickenbacker recalled, in his harsh, guttural accent. “It is by airpower that we are going to recapture the German Empire. To accomplish this, we will do three things. First, we will teach gliding as a sport to all our young men. Then we will build up a fleet of commercial planes, each easily converted to military operation. Finally we will create the skeleton of a military air force. When the time comes, we will put all three together—and the German Empire will be reborn. We must win through the air.”

  As astounding as this information was, the conversation ended on a cordial note, as Udet and Milch each weighed in on the need to save Germany from its current plight.

  Next day Eddie and Adelaide returned to Paris for a breath of fresh air at the horse track at Longchamp with Mr. and Mrs. Harry Crosby. Crosby was an alcoholic pervert and scapegrace son of a Boston Brahmin family, but in the meantime he was also a brilliant editor, poet, and founder, along with his wife, of the notable Black Sun Press, which published among others James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound.‖ Heaven knows how the Rickenbackers got mixed up with that outlandish couple—history doesn’t tell us—but the Crosbys must have been on their better behavior that day because Eddie found the encounter pleasant. Next day they went out to Le Bourget, which Eddie
described as the “finest airport he had ever seen.”14 It was just then under construction and Eddie was stunned by the size and concept of the project, with its capacious runways and row after row of enormous hangars, interspersed by offices, warehouses, baggage rooms, and a plush new hotel for passengers arriving on commercial airliners from Amsterdam, Brussels, and London. There was nothing remotely like it in the United States.

  Toward the end of October the Rickenbackers embarked on the remainder of the Grand Tour, hitting Nice, Monaco, Rome, and Naples in a chauffeured Packard, and returning by Florence, Venice, Turin, Avignon, and Lyon. Adelaide did so much shopping it was said that their excess baggage amounted to well over a thousand pounds on the flight from Paris to London. In Naples they had a glimpse of the future when thousands of armed Blackshirts began to assemble for Mussolini’s victorious “March on Rome.”

  In London, on November 11, 1922, the celebration of the fourth anniversary of Armistice Day included a splendid formal dinner and dance at the Savoy, where the Rickenbackers were staying. Eddie never did learn to dance very well, though he had taken lessons in New York at a dance studio for several months after his return from the war. “He knew the two-step,” Adelaide said, “and then one step back. That was about it.” Eddie was reminded of the time he stayed at the Savoy in 1916, and he stood at the window watching squadron after squadron of British warplanes flying over the Thames.

  During their last days in Paris there were auto and air shows to attend and at last, on November 22, the Rickenbackers boarded the Majestic for the seven-day voyage home, with Hermann Göring’s threatening concept of a rearmed Germany still ringing in Eddie’s ears. During the voyage he sketched out a design he thought of as the Rickenbacker Plan for World Peace, which he took to Washington at the first opportunity and gave to various politicians he had met after the war and on his speaking tour.