One Summer: America, 1927

Shipwreck Kelly’s brief career. He sat on many more flagpoles – once for up to forty-nine days – through blizzards, lightning storms and other meteorological perils, but gradually the world lost interest in him and flagpole work dried up. Kelly dropped from sight and didn’t appear again until August 1941, when he was briefly jailed for drunken driving in Connecticut. He died of a heart attack on a New York street in 1952, by which time he was living in poverty. At his death, he was carrying a scrapbook of newspaper clippings of his old exploits. His age was given variously as fifty-nine to sixty-seven years old.
    Even now, in 1927 in Newark, newspaper interest in Kelly dwindled after the first few days since there was never anything to report other than that he was still up there. By the time he came down and kissed his bride of six months, exactly twelve days and twelve hours after ascending, the public was little moved and the press barely noticed.
    Besides, a much, much bigger story had captured everyone’s attention. Charles Lindbergh was home.
     
    fn1 Coincidentally, just down the road from Kamenz, home town of Bruno Hauptmann, the kidnapper of Lindbergh’s baby in 1932.

C HAPTER 11
     

     
    THE MORE FAMOUS her son became, the more evident it grew that Evangeline Lodge Lindbergh was a little odd. Invited east for Charles’s homecoming, she ignored an invitation to stay with President and Mrs Coolidge, and instead quietly checked into a Baltimore hotel.
    Since White House officials had no idea what had become of Mrs Lindbergh, they were naturally alarmed. It would hardly do to lose the mother of the nation’s greatest hero on the eve of his return. Luckily, a newspaper article disclosed her whereabouts and officials were able to send a car to bring her, however reluctantly, back to Washington.
    The Coolidges were not living in the White House at this time. They had been moved out in March – the president, it was said, all but wriggling in indignation – so that urgent repairs could be made to the roof and third floor. They resided instead in what was being called the ‘temporary White House’, a mansion at 15 Dupont Circle lent to them by one Cissy Patterson, a member of the Chicago Tribune–New York Daily News newspaper clan.
    One other house guest was present when Mrs Lindbergh arrived – ‘a gnomelike little man of fifty-four’, the increasingly ubiquitous Dwight Morrow. Mrs Lindbergh seemed to enjoy andrelax in Morrow’s company – he was famously gracious – which was just as well because in under two years they would be bound by the marriage of her son to his daughter.
    Morrow had become almost absurdly rich as a banker with J. P. Morgan & Co. The Morrow family had a house with thirty-two servants in Englewood, New Jersey, and that was mostly just for weekends. During the week they lived in a grand apartment in Manhattan. Stories of Morrow’s absent-mindedness were legion and reported with relish in such places as the New Yorker ’s Talk of the Town section. The most oft-repeated Morrow story concerned the time he climbed into his bath while still dressed. On another occasion, he was reported to have used a visitor’s bald head to knock the ashes from his pipe. Once a friend encountered Morrow at Grand Central Station looking perplexed and feeling helplessly in his pockets. ‘Lost your ticket?’ asked the friend. ‘No, worse than that,’ Morrow replied disconsolately. ‘I can’t remember where I was going.’
    His celebrated inability to keep himself satisfactorily dressed led Morgan Bank to post an attendant in the men’s room whose exclusive role was to make sure Morrow always returned to the world in a presentable state. In fact, in all these instances Morrow was not so much absent-minded as incapacitated by drink. He was, it appears, a hopeless souse. Yet his mind was so sharp that even the most copious infusions of alcohol couldn’t truly dull it. He was for years one of J. P. Morgan & Co.’s most trusted senior partners. Both Yale and the University of Chicago wanted him for their president.
    Morrow and Coolidge had been friends since they were classmates at Amherst. Morrow seems to have been one of the few people of that era who thought that Calvin Coolidge had the makings of greatness. In 1920, he formed a committee to promote Coolidge, who was then governor of Massachusetts, for president. In the event, the Republican Party chose the more charismatic Warren G.