One Summer: America, 1927

that these may not have been Kehoe’s first murders. Years earlier, he may very possibly have murdered his stepmother. This unfortunate woman, his father’s second wife, died in hideous pain when an oil stove she was lighting exploded in her face, covering her in burning oil. Investigations showed that the stove had been tampered with. Andrew Kehoe, still just a boy, was the only person who could have done it, but nothing could be proved and no charges were brought.
    The Bath massacre was the largest and most cold-bloodedslaughter of children in the history of the United States, yet it was quickly forgotten. Within two days, the New York Times had almost completely stopped covering it. Instead, like nearly everyone else in the world, it became consumed with the story of a young man from Minnesota and his heroic flight to Paris. For the next six weeks, on every day but two the lead story in the New York Times was about aviation.

C HAPTER 6
     

     
    ON THE LAST night of his life that he could move about freely in the world, like a normal person, Charles Lindbergh agreed to a suggestion by Richard Blythe, the Wright Corporation PR man, that they go into the city and attend a show.
    It was a great year for play-going – the best ever on Broadway in terms of choice, if not quality. Two hundred and sixty-four productions opened that year, more than at any time before or since. Lindbergh and Blythe had about seventy-five plays, musicals and revues to choose among. They decided on Rio Rita , a musical comedy in two acts – a good choice, since not only was it a smash hit, but it was also in the lavish new Ziegfeld Theatre at Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Fourth Street, which was itself an attraction.
    The theatre had opened in March and was an extravaganza of architectural opulence. Among much else, it boasted the largest oil painting in the world. Depicting great lovers in history, it was larger than the ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel and more agreeable to contemplate, as a reporter for the New Yorker drily remarked, because you didn’t have to lie on your back to enjoy it. The new theatre was so plush, many observers noted, that the seats were upholstered on the backs as well as the fronts.
    The plot of Rio Rita was interestingly improbable. Set inMexico and Texas, it involved an Irish-American singer named Rio Rita, a Texas Ranger travelling incognito while looking for a bandit named Kinkajou (who may or may not have been Rita’s brother), a bigamous soap salesman named Chick Bean, and a character identified only as Montezuma’s Daughter. These characters and some others of equal implausibility engaged in a series of amusing misunderstandings interrupted at intervals by songs that had little or nothing to do with the actions that preceded or followed. A cast of 131 and a full orchestra provided a great deal of happy noise and spectacle, if not always an abundance of sense. fn1
    Plausibility, it seems, was not something that audiences insisted on in the 1920s. Katy Did , which had opened the previous week at Daly’s 63rd Street Theatre, involved a waitress who, according to the plot summary, falls for ‘a dishwasher and part-time bootlegger who turns out to be the exiled King of Suavia’. Stigma , by Dorothy Manley and Donald Duff, concerned a lonely professor’s wife who falls for a handsome boarder (played by Duff), but loses her mind when she discovers that he has impregnated their black maid. Spellbound , by Walter Elwood, centred on a mother who poisons her two sons’ coffee in the curious belief that it will discourage them from drinking alcohol, but with the unfortunate consequence that one son is rendered paraplegic and the other left brain-damaged. The poor mother runs off in despair to do missionary work. Even by the forgiving standards of 1927, that play was so bad that it closed after three days.
    It wasn’t all froth and melodrama, however. Eugene O’Neill produced his longest and densest play in 1927, Strange Interlude , which took five hours to perform and gave audiences an expansive, not to say exhausting, look at insanity, abortion, heartbreak, illegitimacy and death. Audiences watched the first part of the play from 5.15 p.m. to 7 p.m., then had a break for dinner andreturned at 8.30 for a further three and a half hours of punishing gloom.
    In the event, Lindbergh’s party (one or two others from the airfield had joined them) never got to the theatre that evening. As they arrived in