The Flight of the Famous

Courageous, boyishly handsome at just 25, Charles Lindbergh must have seemed literally super heroic when alone he flew — actually flew! — across the Atlantic to land in Paris in 33 hours, 30 minutes and 30 seconds.

And because he landed in a 1927 world newly united by tabloid newspapers, radio, telephones and motion pictures with sound, Lindbergh became one of the first people on the planet to discover the double-edged nature of superstardom, a freshly honed edge that would finally cut him deeply.

Lindbergh actually saw the Era of Celebrity arrive in real time as a crowd of 150,000 surged toward his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, when he landed at Aéroport du Bourget late that May night.

“Without either belittling or aggrandizing the importance of his flight, he considered it part of the continuum of human behavior, and he was, after all, only a man,” observed biographer A. Scott Berg.

“The public saw more than that. Indeed, Harry Crosby felt that the stampede at Le Bourget that night represented nothing less than the start of a new religious movement — ‘as if all the hands in the world are … trying to touch the new Christ and that the new cross is the Plane.’ Universally admired, Charles Lindbergh became the most celebrated living person ever to walk the earth.

“For several years, Lindbergh had lived according to one of the basic laws of aerodynamics — the need to maintain balance. And so, in those figures running toward him, Lindbergh immediately saw inevitable repercussions.

“At first he feared for his physical safety; over the next few months he worried about his soul. He instinctively knew that submitting himself to the idolatry of the public could strip him of his very identity; and that the only preventive he could see was to maintain his privacy. That reluctance to offer himself to the public only increased its desire to possess him — the first of many paradoxes he would encounter in his lifelong effort to restore equilibrium to his world.

“’No man before me had commanded such freedom of movement over earth,’ Lindbergh would write of his historic flight. Ironically, that freedom would be denied him thereafter on land.”

Source: ‘Lindbergh’ by A. Scott Berg

Lindbergh by Granger