One Summer: America, 1927

for Fruit Industries Limited, a California company that grew grapes and was well known for helping people to make wine at home. This made Willebrandt look like a hypocrite (which indeed she was), and helped in a small but psychologically significant way to expedite the end of Prohibition.
    A motion to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment came before Congress in early 1933. The House debated the bill for just forty minutes. In the Senate, as Daniel Okrent notes in his history of Prohibition, ‘Of the twenty-two members who had voted for the Eighteenth Amendment sixteen years earlier and were still senators, seventeen voted to undo their earlier work.’ In December 1933, Prohibition officially ended.
     
    Also coming back into the news in 1933 was the all-but-forgotten aviator Francesco de Pinedo . After his return to Italy in 1927, Pinedo had resumed his career in Italy’s air force, the Regia Aeronautica, and there imprudently plotted to depose the air minister, Italo Balbo. Learning of this, Balbo posted Pinedo to the furthest and most pointless outpost it was in his power to send him – Buenos Aires. Pinedo languished in obscurity until September 1933 when he turned up unexpectedly at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn with a plan to fly solo to Baghdad, a distance of 6,300 miles.
    Although this would be the furthest that anyone had ever flown, on the day of departure Pinedo arrived at the airfield dressed as if going out for a little light shopping – in blue serge suit, grey fedora hat and a light sweater. On his feet, it was noticed, he wore carpet slippers. The entire enterprise was patently misguided, but no one tried to stop him. As Pinedo’s plane hurtled down the runway, it began to weave from side to side, then veered towards an administration building where a small crowd had gathered. It missed the crowd, but clipped a wing on some obstruction, tipped up on its nose and crashed into a parked car. Pinedo was thrown clear. According to some accounts, he rose from the tarmac and tried to get back into the plane – presumably in a state of confusion. Other witnesses said he remained motionless on the ground. At all events, before anyone could get to him the plane exploded. Pinedo perished in a giant fireball. What was going through his mind that morning and why he didn’t abandon the takeoff when it was so clearly going wrong are questions that can now never be answered.
     
    For the film industry, the transition from silent to talking pictures was faster than anyone ever thought possible. In June 1929, barely a year and a half after the debut of The Jazz Singer , of the seventeen cinemas on Broadway, just three were still showing silents. The Great Depression, however, hit the industry hard. By 1933, nearly one third of cinemas in America were shut and many of the studioswere in trouble. Paramount was bankrupt; RKO and Universal were nearly so. Fox was struggling to reorganize and eventually would have to be rescued by a much smaller studio, Twentieth Century.
    In New York in 1932, Roxy Rothafel opened Radio City Music Hall at the Rockefeller Center. (The famous Rockettes were originally the Roxyettes.) But his time was running out, too. In May, the Roxy Theatre went into receivership. Two years later, Rothafel was put in charge of the failing Mastbaum Theatre in Philadelphia. He reportedly spent $200,000 in ten weeks, but to no avail. The heyday of the great picture palaces was at an end. Rothafel died of a heart attack in a New York hotel in 1936. He was fifty-three years old. The Roxy Theatre was torn down in 1960.
    Clara Bow , star of Wings , retired from acting in 1933 and became increasingly reclusive. She died in 1965, aged sixty. William Wellman , the director, made another sixty-five films before retiring in 1958. Many of his films were turkeys, but some were notable, among them The Public Enemy (1931), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and The High and the Mighty (1954). He died in 1975 aged seventy-nine. John Monk Saunders , the writer who conceived of Wings , didn’t fare so well. He married the actress Fay Wray, but the marriage failed and his career went downhill because of drinking and drugs. He hanged himself in Florida in 1940.
     
    Jerome Kern never had another hit on Broadway after Show Boat , though he tried several times. Eventually, like so many others, he moved to Hollywood. He died in 1945. Oscar Hammerstein II also seemed to have come to the end of his road with Show Boat . He went a dozen