One Summer: America, 1927

the world was fully caught up in the joyous mania of that achievement. But the movie was sufficiently bad that it probably wouldn’t have found a following anyway. All this was a particular shame for Ms Nilsson, who is forgotten now but was once so popular that she received 30,000 fan letters a week. In 1925, she was seriously injured in a fall from a horse, and spent a year immobilized while convalescing. Babe Comes Home was intended to be her comeback movie, but it died quietly, unmourned by anyone but its male lead.
     
    Also easing his way into obscurity by this time was the increasingly hapless and marginalized Francesco de Pinedo. Pinedo and his two loyal crewmen had managed to get to Newfoundland ahead of Lindbergh, but then were pinned down by rough seas – one of the common and inescapable drawbacks of seaplanes. Lindbergh had actually flown straight over them on 20 May. Pinedo was able to get away three days later, but engine troubles brought him down in the sea 360 miles short of the Azores and he had to be towed into the port of Fayal by a passing Portuguese fishing boat. By the time his arrival was reported, Lindbergh was the world’s hero, and nobody was interested in an Italian who reached his destination at the end of a tow rope.
    Still Pinedo pressed on, but the final stages of his journey became small paragraphs tacked on to other aviation stories. On11 June, he reached Lisbon. On 15 June, a small report in the New York Times noted that while flying to Barcelona Pinedo had been forced down by bad weather near Madrid and had had to complete his journey by train. When at last he made it back to the Bay of Ostia, near Rome, the wider world hardly noticed.
     
    With Lindbergh at sea and out of touch but for a daily ghostwritten (or at least ghost-assisted) dispatch to the New York Times , which was nearly always agonizingly dull, the world craved some fresh excitement. Happily, things were beginning to stir again at Roosevelt Field. After Lindbergh’s successful flight, no one was sure what would become of the two remaining teams – whether they would just pack up and go away or try flights of their own. Charles Levine, the injunction against him lifted, now abruptly made clear that he still intended his plane to fly.
    Early on the morning of 4 June, the Columbia was wheeled on to the grassy runway and Clarence Chamberlin, dressed in a leather jacket, knickerbocker breeches and patterned stockings that could be seen from half a mile away, emerged from the hangar, waved to the crowd and climbed alone into the cockpit. Levine’s belief seemed to be that if he couldn’t get to Europe sooner than Lindbergh, he could at least get there more strangely. Nearly everything about the production was a little odd. For one thing, he and Chamberlin refused to say where the plane was headed. Nor would either say why Chamberlin was unaccompanied when the cockpit had a second seat for a navigator and co-pilot.
    Then something even more unexpected happened. As Chamberlin brought the plane round to its takeoff position, he slowed for a moment and a bald, stocky man in a business suit bolted from the sidelines and climbed hurriedly on board. To everyone’s astonishment, it was Charles Levine.
    Levine’s wife, in evident confusion, cried out in dismay: ‘Oh-h-h! He’s not going? He’s not going!’ When she saw that indeed he was going, she swooned and fell into the arms of the manstanding behind her. Clarence Chamberlin later confided to a reporter, however, that Mrs Levine had actually known all along that her husband was going, so the theatrics, it appears, were for the sake of the press.
    Minutes later, the Columbia was airborne, and the second flight of the summer to Europe was under way – though where exactly it was bound not even the two men aboard knew. Their tentative plan was to try for Berlin, but in truth they would be happy to land almost anywhere.
    Levine quickly proved himself almost totally useless. He had no navigational skills at all and in the one moment that Chamberlin let him try to fly he almost immediately put the plane in a dangerous spin. His only real contribution was to reach for things behind the seat and help keep Chamberlin awake. Quickly they realized that navigating a route to Europe was not as easy as Lindbergh had made it look. By the time they reached Newport, Rhode Island, barely an hour into the flight, they were four miles off course and their earth inductor compass was