Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [114]
Lindbergh’s achievement brought him fame, riches and a wife (Anne, the daughter of Dwight Morrow, a J. P. Morgan banker and the U.S. ambassador to Mexico; as a modern 1920s woman, she learned to navigate so that she could work alongside her husband), but it also brought him tragedy. On 1 March 1932, Charles and Anne’s baby son was kidnapped. After ten agonizing weeks his corpse was found nearby. The publicity surrounding the disappearance of the “Lindbergh baby” and the trial of his abductor was too much to bear. In 1935 the Lindberghs left the United States and spent the next few years in Europe. They returned home in 1939 when war broke out, but Lindbergh’s association with the Third Reich (he received the same award as Henry Ford, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, in 1938) and his arguments for non-intervention in the Second World War tarnished his public image. In the years before his death in 1974 he was an ardent conservationist, seeking the balance between nature and technology he had meditated upon during his epic transatlantic flight.
In 1927, only the worldly-wise writers at the New Yorker, while expending as many column inches on Lindbergh as any other publication of the day, expressed the hope that he would be able to readjust to being a man after becoming a god. Detailing his potential earnings, they advised him to be restrained about capitalizing on his achievements and congratulated him rather backhandedly. Simple admiration for the old-fashioned values of courage, strength and modesty that Lindbergh represented seemed to sit uneasily with their hard-won metropolitan sophistication.
Jack Dempsey being given a massage by his trainer, 1925. Although he had been World Heavyweight Champion in six years, at this point he was more focused on his Hollywood career than on defending his title.
Dempsey coming towards the fallen Gene Tunney during the Long Count in Chicage, 1927. The box office take was $2.5 million.
13
THE BIG FIGHT
ALTHOUGH HE PROTESTED AGAINST BEING TURNED INTO A “TIN saint,” Charles Lindbergh was an image of moral perfection to most 1920s Americans. Other heroes were more fallible, beloved for their vulnerabilities and complexities as much as for their achievements. Charlie Chaplin was one such flawed idol; the salty, sulky baseball star Babe Ruth another. But the greatest sportsman of the 1920s, in terms of drawing power and personal celebrity, was the untamed boxer Jack Dempsey. The total gate receipts for his five big fights between 1921 and 1927 were almost nine million dollars, sums unequalled until the advent of Mohammed Ali forty years later.
Born in 1895, Dempsey came from the small town of Manassa, Colorado, the ninth of thirteen children of poor, itinerant parents of largely Irish stock with a splash of Cherokee blood. He left school after eighth grade and found work as a miner, saying later that his two career options had been mining and cattle-working. Dempsey’s adolescence was a rough one, lived in the mines and the hobo “jungles” where he and other impoverished workers and outlaws camped between catching dangerous but free rides on the undercarriages of cross-country trains.
Soon he found that he had another talent: fighting. Encouraged by his elder brother, who had made a name for himself as a bar-room brawler, Dempsey began taking on all-comers in local saloons. “I can’t sing and I can’t dance,” he’d say, in his incongruously girlish voice, “but I can kick any man’s ass.” He chewed pine tar to strengthen his jaw and soaked his fists in brine to toughen them against cuts. By the early 1910s he was touring the bars of the Southwest looking for fights, and at twenty he hired a manager and went professional. Although his real