Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [109]
Further encouragement had come that March with news of the arrival in Paris of a French team from Tehran, a non-stop journey of 3,200 miles, admittedly overland. In April information arrived about some of the other teams attempting the New York-Paris flight. Two of the U.S. teams, a $100,000 Fokker and the Bellanca owned by Charles Levine (who had decided to use his own pilots to make his own bid for the prize), had encountered problems and were waiting for repairs to be completed; a pair of French former flying aces had crashed during their final test flight and been killed; a two-man team sponsored by the American Legion had also crashed, killing both pilots. Lindbergh was shaken by his fellow pilots’ bad luck, but the fact that his rivals’ planes were large, multi-engine craft confirmed his conviction that the Spirit of St Louis was the airplane best fitted to successfully fly the Atlantic.
On 10 May Lindbergh took off from San Diego headed for New York, stopping for a night in St. Louis to consult with his backers about the competition—and casually breaking the records for the fastest times from the Pacific coast to St. Louis, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts. Two days earlier two French flying aces had taken off for New York from Le Bourget airfield outside Paris in their single-engine bi-plane, L’oiseau blanc. By the time Lindbergh landed at Curtiss Field in Long Island on the afternoon of 12 May, hopes of the French team arriving in New York were fading.
The two American planes waiting to make their Atlantic attempts were in nearby hangars, and Lindbergh was surprised to find a spirit of cooperation and shared endeavor among the engineers and aviation companies there. People who had been unwilling to help him when he wanted to find a plane to fly across the Atlantic, or who were attached to one of the other teams waiting to make their attempt, were happily making repairs to Lindbergh’s instruments, checking over his engines, sharing weather information or offering him free use of their runways. Men who had been far-off heroes to Lindbergh—one of those who had developed the Whirlwind engine in his plane, the French flying ace René Fonck, and aircraft manufacturer Anthony Fokker—stopped by his hangar to wish him luck.
Lindbergh’s youth, his good looks and the courage of his decision to fly solo all combined to make him the focus of unrelenting journalistic attention for the first time since he had declared his intention of competing for the Orteig prize. At press conferences he was asked questions like, “Have you got a sweetheart?” and “How do you feel about girls?” Reporters called him the Flyin’ Fool and pushed their way into his bedroom hoping to steal a picture of him shaving in his pajamas; from then on, Lindbergh locked his door. So many journalists crowded the airfield when he landed after one test flight that he broke his tail skid trying to avoid them.
Thirty thousand enthusiasts came out to Curtiss Field on the Sunday before Lindbergh’s flight. He received hundreds of good-luck letters and telegrams from fans, many offering advice or hoping to interest him in business propositions, many more hoping he would post their letters in Paris. Interested grandees like Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Harry Guggenheim wished him well. Lindbergh fended off requests from theatrical agents and Hollywood producers promising to make him a star.
When his mother arrived from Detroit to say goodbye she refused to kiss him for the photographers, protesting that they came “of an undemonstrative Nordic race” (the Lindberghs’ independent, non-conformist Swedish-Scottish bloodlines made them the anti-immigration lobby’s idea of ideal Americans) but a tabloid faked one of them kissing anyway. The usually unperturbed Lindbergh was angry. “They didn’t care how much