One Summer: America, 1927

ahead, and they returned by ship to a hero’s welcome. The trip took more out of them than they seem to have realized. At a banquet in Detroit upon his return, Schlee got up to speak, read the first five words of his speech and collapsed as the events of recent weeks caught up with and overwhelmed him.
    Things did not get better for Schlee after that. In the summer of 1929 he was nearly killed when he was hit by a spinning propeller, which struck his head and amputated his right arm at the shoulder, leaving him much diminished. Just three months after that, he lost everything in the Wall Street crash. In 1931, his plane, Pride of Detroit , was auctioned by order of the sheriff’s department as part of a debt judgement. It was bought by a man named Floyd M. Phinney for just $700. Schlee died in 1969 ‘in obscure poverty’. Brock, too, did not fare well. He died of cancer in 1932.
    And still people kept flying. In Britain, an unlikely 62-year-old woman, Princess Löwenstein-Wertheim, stepped forward as yet another figure to attempt the first east-to-west crossing. The daughter of the Earl of Mexborough, she had grown up in London as Lady Anne Savile, but had married, at the rather advanced age of thirty-one, Prince Ludwig Karl zu Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg of Germany. Widowed after just two years, the princess used her considerable inheritance to indulge a passion for aviation. In 1912 she became the first woman to cross the English Channel by air – albeit as a passenger. Soon after, again as a passenger, she flew from Egypt to France. When, in 1927, a dashing captain named Leslie Hamilton expressed a desire to cross the Atlantic from east to west, she funded the flight on theunderstanding that she would accompany them. With Lt Col. Frederick Minchin as co-pilot, they took off from an airfield near Salisbury in Wiltshire. The princess wore a stylish hat and an ocelot coat, as if they were off for cocktails at the Savoy. They were sighted over Ireland and again from a ship about halfway across the Atlantic, but they never reached America and no trace of them was ever found.
    At about the same time, a plane called Old Glory , owned by William Randolph Hearst, took off from Old Orchard Beach in Maine – the beach where Lindbergh had made his recent unscheduled landing in the Spirit of St Louis – heading for Rome. Old Glory was piloted by Lloyd Bertaud, the man who had taken out an injunction against Charles Levine in May after Levine failed to provide contracts and insurance as promised. Accompanying Bertaud as co-pilot was James DeWitt Hill and along for the ride as a passenger was Philip A. Payne, editor of Hearst’s Daily Mirror . Just three and a half hours after takeoff they issued an urgent, unexplained SOS. They were never seen again. A few hours later, two Canadian airmen, Capt. Terrence Tully and Lt James Medcalf, took off from Newfoundland, bound for London in a plane called the Sir John Carling . They were never heard from again either.

C HAPTER 23
     

     
    H. L. MENCKEN CALLED it ‘the one authentic rectum of civilization’, but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic. In 1927, the iconic ‘ HOLLYWOOD ’ sign on the hillside above the city actually said ‘ HOLLYWOODLAND ’. It had been erected in 1923 to advertise a property development and had nothing to do with motion pictures. The letters, each over forty feet high, were in those days also traced out with electric lights. (The ‘ LAND ’ was removed in 1949.)
    Los Angeles in 1927 was America’s fastest growing city, and its richest when measured per capita. The population of greater Los Angeles, including the unincorporated communities of Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, had more than doubled in a decade to almost 2.5 million, and those lucky citizens were 60 per cent better off than the average American elsewhere. And what accounted for much of that was southern California’s most celebrated industry: motion pictures.
    By 1927, Hollywood was producing some 800 feature films a year, 80 per cent of the world’s total output, plus some 20,000 short features. Movies were America’s fourth largest industry, employing more people than Ford and General Motors put together, and generating over $750 million for the economy – four times morethan was earned by all sports and live entertainments combined. Twenty thousand cinemas sold 100 million tickets a week. On any given day, one sixth of all Americans were at the pictures.
    It