One Summer: America, 1927

Nungesser’s pal the boxer Georges Carpentier and the singer Maurice Chevalier, with his mistress, a celebrated chanteuse and film actress who went by the single sultry name of Mistinguett.
    Nungesser and Coli were war heroes, and normally sauntered about with the smooth and cocky air of men at ease with danger, but today was a little different. Coli, at forty-six, was a venerable figure: not many airmen were still alive and flying at forty-six. He wore a rakish black monocle over a missing right eye, one of five wounds he had sustained in combat. This was nothing compared with Nungesser’s extravagant affinity for injury, however. No one in the war was injured more; or at least got up again afterwards. Nungesser had so many injuries that after the war he listed them all on his business card. They included: six jaw fractures (four upper, two lower); fractured skull and palate; bullet wounds to mouth and ear; dislocations of wrist, clavicle, ankle and knees; loss of teeth; shrapnel wound to upper body; multiple concussions; multiple legfractures; multiple internal injuries; and contusions ‘too numerous to list’. He was also gravely injured in a car crash in which a companion died. Often he was so banged up that he had to be carried to his plane by crew members and gently inserted into the cockpit. Despite his injuries, Nungesser shot down forty-four planes (he claimed many more), a number exceeded among French aviators only by René Fonck, and received so many medals that he all but clanked when he walked. He listed those on his business card, too.
    As with so many airmen, armistice left him at something of a loss. He worked for a time as a gaucho in Argentina, gave flying demonstrations in America with his friend the Marquis de Charette and starred in a movie called The Sky-Raiders , filmed at Roosevelt Field in New York, where the Orteig Prize competitors were gathering now.
    With his Gallic charm and chestful of medals, Nungesser proved irresistible to women, and in the spring of 1923 after a whirlwind romance he became engaged to a young New York socialite with the unimprovably glorious name of Consuelo Hatmaker. Miss Hatmaker, who was just nineteen, came from a long line of lively women. Her mother, the former Nellie Sands, was a celebrated beauty who proved too great a handful for three husbands, including the eponymous Mr Hatmaker, whom she discarded in a divorce in 1921. This bewildered but well-meaning gentleman opposed his daughter’s marriage to Captain Nungesser on the grounds – not unreasonable on the face of it – that Nungesser was destitute, broken-bodied, something of a bounder, unemployable except in time of war, and French. In this, however, Mr Hatmaker was un-supported by his former wife, who not only endorsed the marriage, but announced that she would at the same time marry her own latest paramour, Captain William Waters, an American of amiable anonymity who seems to have aroused the passing interest of the world just twice in his life: once when he married Mrs Hatmaker and once when they divorced a few years later. So mother and daughter were wed in a joint ceremony in Dinard, in Brittany, notfar from where Charles Nungesser would get his last glimpse of his native soil, in the spring of 1927.
    Consuelo and Charles’s marriage was not a success. She declared at the outset that she would not live in France, while he disdained to live anywhere else. They parted swiftly and were divorced in 1926. But Nungesser clearly had second thoughts because he now mused aloud to friends that a heroic gesture might help to reunite him with the luscious Consuelo and her no less luscious fortune. Nungesser was aided in his ambitions by the misfortunes of Fonck, whose crash the previous autumn had helped Nungesser persuade Pierre Levasseur, an aircraft manufacturer, to provide him with a plane, as a restorative to French pride. A prize endowed by a Frenchman and won by French flyers in a French machine would obviously be a boost to French prestige. Coli gladly joined the enterprise as navigator. They called their plane L’Oiseau Blanc – the White Bird – and painted it white so that it would be easier to find if it came down in the sea.
    Starting in Paris was a piece of patriotic vanity that many were certain would prove their undoing. It would mean flying into prevailing winds that would slow their speed and cut their fuel efficiency dramatically. The engine was a water-cooled Lorraine-Dietrich, the