Chasing Icarus (19 page)

And then, said Ryan, the crowning indignity, the most astonishing blunder . . . Wilbur Wright barred from entering. Wilbur Wright . . . the man who invented the airplane. If not for him, none of us would be here! Ryan dismissed the Pinkerton chief with a demand that his men show a little bit of discretion, not to mention common sense.

Ryan then walked out of the clubhouse to organize the removal of the canvas screens. He looked up at the blue sky, then across toward the hangars and the flags curled sleepily round their poles. No wind. Perhaps his fortunes were about to turn.

The noon trains that departed Pennsylvania Station on Monday were filled to standing room, and the onboard vendors selling aviation magazines had to force their way through the carriages. Some of the passengers squashed in the center of the carriages swung themselves up to the racks and looked through the ventilators as they neared the grounds in the hope of being first to spot a flying machine.

Streetcars bound for Belmont Park “looked like Broadway cars at rush hour,” and by one P.M. not a parking space was to be had. Every one of the ten thousand spectators who clicked through the turnstiles glanced across at the scoreboard and smiled when they saw the flag was white, indicating “flight probable.” Pinned to the bulletin board was a statement just released by the Belmont Park committee, their response to the official French protest of the previous day. The statement concluded by saying that “Mr. [Cortlandt] Bishop again went over the course and made other suggestions as to improvements. This work will be done tomorrow in order that the course may be ready . . . The small trees and signposts are to be removed and it is suggested that one of the pylons be placed more to the north in order to avoid one or two houses and sheds which are in the way. It is not expected nor is it possible to provide a billiard table for the entire five kilometer course, but every effort will be made to render the course as safe as possible.”

It appeared, too, that the Pinkerton security men had heeded Ryan’s censure, and smiles had replaced snarls on the faces of gray-uniformed guards who patrolled the grounds. They were even allowing friends and family members of the fliers to visit the hangars, provided they were vouched for by an aviator. One of the first to flitter over was the delectable Grace McKenzie, the Canadian girl for whom Jacques de Lesseps had fallen. A “clubhouse rumor” was that an engagement was imminent. Tongues were also wagging about Claude Grahame-White, with a battalion of binoculars in the grandstand trained on hangar No. 14 as the Englishman laughed and joked with Eleonora Sears, who after Sunday’s “severely plain costume” was now wearing what the
New York Sun
’s style guru described as “a navy blue suit with the skirt at least six inches from the ground.” More than one newspaper found it curious that Pauline Chase was nowhere to be seen.

Armstrong Drexel spent a long time chatting with his brother and sister-in-law and generally, as was his nature, “being courteous to all visitors and [he] even allowed his flying toggery to be inspected.” He showed off his helmet to one reporter, explaining that experience had taught him it was invaluable when trying for an altitude prize. Drexel was one of the few aviators to wear a helmet, and his was “leather with several inches of padding . . . The flaps over the ears are perforated so that he can tell how his engine is working.”

As the spectators shopped, lunched, and gossiped, waiting for the program to start at one thirty P.M., great interest was shown in the “moving picture people” who were at Belmont Park for the first time since the meet’s inception, and not everyone approved of their presence.

Since September the
New York World
had been at the forefront of a campaign to clean up the moving-picture industry, citing as its reason a spate of juvenile crimes that had allegedly been inspired by films. A thirteen-year-old adolescent arrested for robbery had told police that he acquired the methods at a moving-picture show, while another boy had “conceived the idea of becoming a criminal and learned to go about it from a scene in a picture show.” The magistrate who convicted him of theft called the picture houses “sinks of iniquity” and demanded they clean up their act before it was too late.

Carl Laemmle, president of the Independent Moving Picture Company, had responded swiftly to the demand, issuing a circular warning scriptwriters that he would refuse to consider any scripts “which are built around murders or suicide or crimes of any kind . . . His company is trying to put the moving picture business on a higher plane and what it wants is preferably good, clean, light comedy.”

Aviation offered picture houses the chance to redeem themselves by showing wholesome entertainment, and one of the most popular films of the early autumn had been footage from the 1909 International Aviation Cup race in France. Now the camera operators were at Belmont Park to record the action from America’s biggest-ever aviation tournament. They began by setting up outside the Wright hangar and using an entire roll of film to capture Wilbur inspecting his airplane. His brother, Orville, had arrived from Dayton late on Sunday evening, but he was busy inside the hangar making final adjustments to their new machine. Next the cameraman tried to get some footage of the crowd moving around the course. This caused a few difficulties, much to the amusement of the
New York
Sun
’s correspondent. What was so funny, he wrote, “was that many seemed to think that they had to walk as fast as they had seen figures move on the screen to get the right effect.”

The moving-picture people couldn’t have chosen a better day to visit Belmont Park. It was, in the opinion of the
New York Herald
, the greatest flying exhibition the world had ever known. It started with Arch Hoxsey and Ralph Johnstone performing a selection of their aerial stunts for the masses, including Johnstone’s heart-stopping loop-the-loop one thousand feet from the ground, during which, as he momentarily hung upside down, he could hear “the struts straining and . . . the singing of the winds through the wires shrilling higher in key.” Then came the extraordinary sight of “ten airplanes in simultaneous flight” competing in the day’s first discipline, the Hourly Distance contests. Up went the Frenchman Emile Aubrun, then Hubert Latham in his Antoinette monoplane; Armstrong Drexel slipped on his flying helmet, shook hands with his brother, and shot off in his Blériot. The debonair Englishman Grahame-White, reported the
World
, “with a bow and a smile, cut off an animated conversation with Miss Eleonora Sears, that dashing young sportswoman, and took to the air in his Farman biplane.” Then out of the hangar came the machines of Jacques de Lesseps; Eugene Ely and John McCurdy of the Curtiss team; and finally Walter Brookins, not in the Wright racer, but in another new model that had been brought to New York from Dayton by Orville Wright. No flier remained aloft for the full hour but Drexel circled the two-and-a-half-kilometer course twenty-seven times in fifty-four minutes, Aubrun twenty-six times, Johnstone twenty-one, and Hoxsey and Grahame-White finished even on eighteen laps.

That was the end of the day’s flying for Grahame-White, who returned his borrowed machine to Clifford Harmon. Grahame-White had no interest in the next event, the hourly altitude contest; that wasn’t his forte. The Farman biplane
*
wasn’t the right airplane in which to go climbing to the heavens, and anyway Grahame-White preferred distance to height. He alone had already qualified for Thursday’s Statue of Liberty race, and with the International Aviation Cup two days later, he was loath to run any further risks similar to the one he had taken on Sunday. John Moisant, meanwhile, was grounded after the wreck of his machines, and his hopes were pinned on the Lovelace-Thompson Company, which had taken charge of his Blériot with a promise to have it repaired by Wednesday.

Walter Brookins took off and made a couple of slow laps, increasing his height as he began to deviate from the course. He was flying a Baby Wright, a machine similar in design and dimensions to the Baby Grand—the plane introduced to the press by Wilbur Wright on Saturday—although the Baby Wright had inferior power.

The spectators in the grandstand began moving down to the front lawns to get a better view as Brookins started to climb. They craned their necks, the men clamping a hand on their straw boaters and looking over their starched collars, the women using their programs to shield the sun from their eyes as he rose higher, leaving behind Emile Aubrun and James Radley, one of the British fliers, who had started out on the second Hourly Distance competition. That event had suddenly become humdrum, compared to the sight of Walter Brookins’s small Wright biplane disappearing into the sky. Then someone gave a shout and pointed to the southeast. Look, over there, isn’t that another machine? For several minutes the identity of the mysterious biplane was unknown. Press and public searched the hangars with their field glasses to see who was missing. “It was Count de Lesseps,” wrote the correspondent from the
New York Sun
, “who to get room to circle wide in and also to give Brookins some air acres of his own for maneuvering had gone off toward Meadow Brook and Hempstead to take his running jump at the sky.”

Higher and higher the two aircraft climbed, sometimes vanishing momentarily behind the few cotton clouds in the warm blue sky, watched all the while by ten thousand astonished people, but not by Viola Justin, the society correspondent for New York’s
Evening Mail
. This was her first visit to the aviation show, though she had watched many a horse race at Belmont Park, and as she observed the wealthy onlookers standing on the tips of their patent leather shoes, a thought struck her. How best to describe it? She mused in print, “The Four Hundred had at last discovered a new sensation and a new expression . . . a human thrilled look of intense, absorbing interest . . . faces that have become so hardened from years of immobility that they look like plaster casts relaxed and wrinkled.” While New York’s high society scanned the sky, Justin stood on the lawn scanning them with their “straining lines of necks and double chins . . . faces so foreshortened and out of perspective that only the tips of teeth were visible to those directly under the boxes.” It was, she told her readers, “a strange new angle of society.” The “airplane stare” had been born. But even Miss Justin lifted her mordant eyes when the hordes began to puff and blow and point to the heavens. Brookins and de Lesseps, their aircraft resembling what the
Sun
called “elongated postage stamps,” appeared to be heading directly toward each other thousands of feet above the ground. Men gave a strangled cry and women’s hands went to their mouths as it seemed the inevitable was sure to occur. The correspondent from the
World
wasn’t fooled, however; he knew that “the crowd watched fascinated and motionless for the meeting which might—which might, you know—mean a collision. And then the two specks merged until the specks were patterned one upon the other and had become just one speck. They separated in a moment and for minutes afterwards the discussions about the ‘collision’ took eyes off the specks which necessitated a refocusing of the eyes.”

Now the planes were circling each other with de Lesseps’s machine above the square biplane of Brookins. How close do you think they are to one another? children asked their fathers with a mix of fear and excitement. The airplanes dived and rose and drifted for what seemed like hours to the crowd. Necks began to stiffen and heads began to throb as spectators concentrated on the drama high above their heads.

Over at hangar row Orville Wright was standing with his brother and their sister, Katharine, watching the show. “Well, Brooky seems to have caught him,” said Orville to Wilbur, fully aware that the two machines were hundreds of feet apart. Nearby the correspondent from the
New York
Herald
laughed at a rare Orville quip, then resumed his stare. Brookins suddenly broke off and began to dive. The onlookers applauded the aviator’s audacity, but the Wrights knew at once that something had gone wrong. The
New York Herald
reporter saw that “the softly moving lips of Wilbur Wright were framing a silent prayer for the boy who was taking such desperate chances.”

Walter Brookins’s engine had cut out without a warning, and now he sat at the controls—without a seat belt—gliding back down to earth in wide spirals. At two thousand feet he knew the wind wasn’t going to take him close to Belmont Park, so he singled out some fields two miles to the north as the best chance for a safe landing.

Brookins had previously suffered engine failure thousands of feet up in the air. During an air show in Indianapolis the previous June, he had reached forty-two hundred feet when he heard a tearing noise from the engine behind him and the motor died. Unable to turn around to investigate the cause of the sound, Brookins started to drop out of the sky. At least he had broken the world’s altitude record, he told reporters later, “and if my luck held, I’d break the gliding record, too. If it didn’t, I’d probably break my neck.”

He had landed without trouble on that occasion, and now as he glimpsed Belmont Park away to his left, the twenty-two-year-old calmly slid out of the sky. Passengers waiting for a train at the station one stop before Belmont Park jumped down onto the line and tracked the machine’s descent. The Wright brothers commandeered an automobile and told the driver to “follow that airplane.”

They found Brookins in a field. The biplane had its nose in the mud, like a pig with its snout in a trough, but the aviator was unharmed. Dressed in a two-piece, green tweed suit and brown boots, he might have passed for one of the bystanders who had reached the downed machine from the railroad station, were it not for the patina of black grease on his young face.

Upon landing, Count de Lesseps unfastened the small aneroid barometer from his wrist and handed it to an officer from the Signal Corps. Its reading of 5,615 feet was impressive, provided it was corroborated by the official barograph now being removed from the Frenchman’s plane. A corpsman passed both instruments to an official, who handed them to the judges’ box. The glass lid on the barograph was lifted and a strip of paper peeled from the cylinder on which was a frenetic scribble of red lines, each one indicating approximately 165 feet in height. It took the official several minutes to count and recount the lines, but at the end he was satisfied that Count de Lesseps had climbed to 5,615 feet.