One Summer: America, 1927

for the time being. Now everyone was pinned down by bad weather anyway. It was all very frustrating.
    Adding to Lindbergh’s personal strain was a growing uneasiness with the press. Reporters persisted in asking him personal questions that had nothing to do with flying – did he have a sweetheart? Did he like dancing? – which he found embarrassing and intrusive, and photographers couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t let them takepictures of him relaxing or horsing around with the other flyers or mechanics. They were just trying to make him look normal, after all. At one point, two of them burst into his room at the Garden City Hotel, hoping to catch him shaving or reading or doing some thing that would suggest a kind of likeable boyish normality.
    On 14 May, Charles’s mother arrived from Detroit to wish him a safe journey. Reluctantly they posed for pictures, standing stiffly side by side like two people who had only just been introduced. Mrs Lindbergh declined all pleas to kiss or embrace her son, explaining that they came from ‘an undemonstrative Nordic race’, which in her case was wholly untrue. Instead, she patted her son lightly on the back and said, ‘Good luck, Charles,’ then added as an ominous afterthought: ‘And goodbye.’ The Evening Graphic , undeterred by their shyness, created a touching composograph for its readers in which Charles’s and his mother’s heads were pasted on to the bodies of more demonstrative models – though no art director could do anything about the strange, flat absence of emotion in mother’s and son’s eyes.
    All three American competitors – Lindbergh in the Spirit of St Louis , Byrd with the America , Chamberlin and Acosta in Bellanca’s Columbia – were reported as ready to go, so it was widely assumed that they would leave together the moment the weather cleared and that the Atlantic crossing would now be an exciting three-way race. In fact, unbeknown to Lindbergh and the rest of the world, things were not going well in the other two camps. Byrd seemed strangely reluctant to commit to the Paris flight. He endlessly tested and retested every system of the plane, to the mystification of his crew and the hair-rending exasperation of Tony Fokker, the plane’s volatile designer. ‘It seemed to me that every possible excuse for delay was seized on,’ Fokker recalled in his autobiography four years later. ‘I began to wonder whether Byrd really wanted to make the transatlantic flight.’ To everyone’s surprise, Byrd set the plane’s formal dedication – with droning speeches and the plane draped in bunting – for Saturday 21 May, which meant that he couldn’t go before the weekend even if the weather allowed.
    In the Columbia camp, matters were even more unhappy, and all because of the odd and truculent nature of Charles A. Levine. The son of a scrap merchant, Levine had made his own fortune after the First World War by buying and selling surplus shell casings, which could be recycled for their brass. After developing an interest in aviation, he became known, all but inevitably, as ‘the Flying Junkman’. By 1927 he claimed to be worth $5 million, though many who had seen his modest frame home in the Belle Harbor section of Rockaway, at the less genteel end of Long Island real estate, suspected that was an exaggeration.
    Levine was bald, pugnacious, stockily built, and about five feet six inches tall. He dressed like a gangster in heavily pinstriped double-breasted suits and broad-brimmed hats. He had the quick mind and alert, roving gaze of a man always on the lookout for an opportunity. His smile was a grimace. He had recently celebrated his thirtieth birthday.
    His two greatest personality faults were a pathological inability to be frank with anyone – Levine seemed sometimes to be lying simply for the sake of it – and an equal difficulty in distinguishing legal activities from illegal ones. He had a fatal tendency to alienate and often cheat his business associates. In consequence he constantly ended up in court. It was legal problems that would prove his undoing now.
    Levine’s immediate difficulty was that he couldn’t stand his chief pilot, Clarence Chamberlin. This was a rather odd sentiment since Chamberlin was a decent, amiable fellow and a first-rate flyer. He just lacked sparkle. The liveliest thing about him was his dress sense. He favoured snappy bowties and intensely patterned Argyle socks paired with capacious knickerbockers,