One Summer: America, 1927

presenting Bertaud and Chamberlin with contracts to sign. For weeks he had been promising to give them half of all earnings from the flight and to provide them withgenerous life insurance cover for the security of their wives should they lose their lives in the crossing attempt, but the document he now presented mentioned neither. Instead it declared that Levine would receive all monies earned and that for a period of one year following the flight they would cede to him total management of their lives. Levine alone would decide on endorsements, film roles, vaudeville tours and any other professional commitments. From these earnings, Levine would pay them each $150 a week, to which he would add unspecified ‘bonuses’ from time to time as seemed to him appropriate. When pressed about the insurance, Levine said he would consider it once Bertaud and Chamberlin had signed the contracts. Having just told Bertaud and Chamberlin that he was taking everything they earned, Levine informed reporters that ‘every nickel of the prize money goes to the Columbia ’s pilots’.
    Bertaud, exasperated beyond forbearance at Levine’s endless duplicity, found a lawyer named Clarence Nutt, who took out an injunction enjoining Levine from sending the plane anywhere until the matter of insurance and a fair contract was resolved. A court hearing was scheduled for 20 May – a date that would prove to be fateful for all concerned. In a demonstration that there was almost no limit to his unpredictability, Levine now said that he would pay Lindbergh $25,000 to accompany him to Paris. Lindbergh politely pointed out that his plane didn’t have room for a passenger.
    The upshot was that Lindbergh suddenly had the running all to himself, at least until the weekend, if only the weather would permit. He was beginning at last to win converts, too. After working with Lindbergh for a week, Edward Mulligan, one of the mechanics assigned to help him, rushed up to a colleague and, in a mixture of excitement and wonder, cried: ‘I tell you, Joe, this boy is going to make it! He is!’
     
    fn1 The field was named after Quentin Roosevelt, son of Theodore Roosevelt, who had died in aerial combat in the First World War. Lindbergh had known him, at least slightly. They had been students at the same time at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, though Roosevelt was five years older.
    fn2 In addition to Wanamaker, Byrd was supported by John D. Rockefeller, the National Geographic Society and, interestingly, Dwight Morrow, Charles Lindbergh’s future father-in-law.

C HAPTER 5
     

     
    THE WEATHER REMAINED terrible, not just in New York but everywhere. In Washington, DC, on 14 May, a tornado fifty feet across at the base touched down at Prospect Hill Cemetery and proceeded in an erratic fashion up Rhode Island Avenue, uprooting trees and causing consternation among onlookers before harmlessly dematerializing a minute or so after forming. Further west, unseasonably late blizzards caught much of the country by surprise. In Detroit, a Tigers–Yankees game was postponed because of snow – the latest snow-out of a major league baseball game ever recorded. Rains continued to pound the beleaguered central and lower Mississippi Valley.
    In Chicago, Francesco de Pinedo, having resumed his tour of America, arrived more than five hours late from Memphis because of bad weather. His tour had become increasingly embarrassing to his hosts because his rallies were more and more overtly political and increasingly ended in violence, while Pinedo himself had a tendency to say strangely inappropriate things. ‘I think New York is the best Fascist city in the whole world,’ he declared generously but bewilderingly after meeting with Mayor Jimmy Walker. Two days later when Pinedo addressed a fascist rally at an Italian Legion post on Second Avenue, two thousand anti-fascist demonstratorsmarched on the hall. Bricks were thrown through windows, and most of those inside rushed outside and began fighting with the demonstrators. By the time police arrived in force a crowd estimated at ten thousand had gathered. Police restored order by wading through the crowd and clubbing people robustly with truncheons. Pinedo, meanwhile, continued giving his talk, seemingly unaware that he was addressing an almost entirely empty hall. The number of injured was not recorded.
    Chicago was the last of Pinedo’s forty-four stops in the United States before he headed back to Europe by way