The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever

351 Pages·2008·1.51 MB·English

by  David M. Friedman

THE I MMORTAL I STS
Charles Lindbergh,
Dr. Alexis Carrel,
and
Their Daring Quest
to Live Forever
David M. Friedman
For
Maralin R. Friedman
CONTENTS
1 I Will Show You What I’m Doing Here 1
2 If Man Could Learn to Fly 17
3 A Student Who May Amount to Something 25
4 Isn’t He in the Crib? 41
5 The Chamber of Life 54
6 Every Act of His Is Not a Fluke 75
7 Men of Genius Are Not Tall 86
8 A Tiny Puff of Smoke 95
9 The Most Interesting Place in the
World Today 103
10 The Exploration of This Realm Is
a Great New Adventure 118
11 The Reaction of a Man Would Probably
Be Similar 128
12 Two Men Sitting on Two Rocks 137
13 By Order of the Führer 15 1
14 I’ll Take a Rain Check 15 7
v | contents
15 Not Merely a Schoolboy Hero,
but a Schoolboy 171
16 For We All Know What Awaits Us 177
17 There Is Much I Do Not Like That
Is Happening in the World 186
18 The Tissues, the Blood, and the
Mind of Man 201
19 The World Was Never Clearer 220
20 The Grandeur of His Life 233
21 I Felt the Godlike Power 247
22 Only by Dying 258
23 No, Science Has Abandoned Me 270
epilogue All of Us Are Following 283
acknowledgments 285
notes 287
index 321
about the author
praise
other books by david m. friedman
credits
cover
copyright
about the publisher
c h a p t e r 1
I WILL SHOW YOU WHAT
I’M DOING HERE
C
harles lindbergh’s familiarity with prying gazes
began on May 21, 1927, the day he became the most famous man in the
world. That status was conferred on the unsuspecting twenty-five-year-old,
literally overnight, when he was the first aviator to fly without stopping
from New York to Paris, a feat that many people—even many aviators—had
thought impossible. Making Lindbergh’s triumph all the more newsworthy
was that he flew without a copilot, a radio, or even a front window for
thirty-three and a half hours in a single-engine airplane made from wood,
canvas, and piano wire. The New York Times showed its awe by devoting its
first five pages to the dimple-chinned American’s landing at Le Bourget,
the dusty airfield where 100,000 Frenchmen—nearly all of them chanting
“LAN-BAIRGH! LAN-BAIRGH!”—were so eager to stare at the spent pilot that
they almost trampled him to death after he climbed out of his cockpit.
Maintenance crews swept up a ton of personal items lost or abandoned in
that lovefest, including a sable coat and six sets of false teeth.
In the week that followed, Lindbergh, in new clothes made by a Paris
tailor, was seen by the president and premier of France, the French chamber
of deputies, and a million more Frenchmen who lined a parade route along
the Champs-Élysées. After leaving France he was presented to the king of
2 | david m. friedman
Belgium, the king of England (who asked, “How did you pee?”), and the
prince of Wales (the future duke of Windsor), whom Lindbergh quickly
replaced as the most photographed person on earth. Returning home, he
was gawked at by 300,000 Americans at the Washington Monument, where
President Coolidge pinned the Distinguished Flying Cross on his chest.
Four million New Yorkers showered him with cheers and paper scraps, as
10,000 schoolchildren sang “Hail the Conquering Hero Comes,” in the
largest ticker-tape parade the world had ever seen. Taking a three-month
“victory lap,” Lindbergh flew his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, to every state
in the union; rode in 1,300 miles of motorcades; gave 147 speeches; and was
seen, in the flesh, by 30 million people—one out of every four Americans
then living. Still, none of this prepared Lindbergh for the way he was stared
at on November 28, 1930, the day the world’s most famous man was intro-
duced to the person some considered the world’s smartest.
Ironically, that day began with steps aimed at preventing Lindbergh
from being stared at. Before entering his black Franklin sedan outside his
rented home in Princeton, New Jersey, Lindbergh slipped a pair of lensless
eyeglasses over his famously blue eyes and a fedora hat over his equally fa-
mous blond hair. Much to his pleasure, he’d found this simple disguise was
usually enough to afford him some privacy in public. Privacy was always
important to Lindbergh, but it was crucial this morning because he wanted
to think quietly in his car as he made the two-hour drive into New York,
without interruptions from starstruck toll takers or fellow motorists. What
Lindbergh wanted to think about was the list of questions he planned to ask
the man he was driving to meet, a man whose name he’d only recently heard
for the first time.
He heard it from Dr. Paluel Flagg, the anesthetist who attended Lind-
bergh’s wife, the former Anne Morrow, when she gave birth to the Lind-
berghs’ first child, Charles Jr., on June 22, 1930. Lindbergh had met his wife
in December 1927 when he flew to Mexico City, an event that caused nearly
as much pandemonium as his landing in Paris. Anne, then an introverted
twenty-one-year-old college student, was worried at first that her Christ-
mas holiday with her family at the U.S. embassy—her father, Dwight, was
the American ambassador—would be spoiled by the presence of someone
she called “a sort of baseball player.”
But that anxiety vanished when the tall, handsome aviator took the am-
the immortalists | 3
bassador’s middle daughter on her first airplane flight, a thrill that Anne, a
short brunette unsure of her own attractiveness, described in her diary in
near-orgasmic terms. Lindbergh “moved so very little” in the cockpit, “yet
you felt the harmony of it,” she wrote. “It was a complete and intense expe-
rience.” The pilot and his sated passenger were married on May 27, 1929, in
a secret ceremony at Next Day Hill, the Morrow family mansion set on a
verdant fifty-acre estate overlooking the Hudson River in Englewood, New
Jersey. Most of the two dozen guests thought they’d been invited to play
bridge.
When Anne went into labor in the same mansion the next summer, her
husband, waiting in the next room, struck up a conversation with Dr. Flagg.
The topic was Anne’s older sister Elisabeth, whose health had deteriorated
dramatically after a bout of rheumatic fever damaged her heart’s mitral
valve, the valve that regulates the flow of blood from the left atrium into the
left ventricle, the heart’s main pumping chamber.
Lindbergh, who knew a fair bit about valves in machines, was puzzled
that a mere valve in the heart—the body’s engine, as he saw it—could cause
so much trouble in an otherwise vibrant woman in her mid-twenties. He
was similarly vexed to learn that not one of the doctors consulted by Elisa-
beth’s family, several of whom Lindbergh had questioned personally, had
any ideas on how to proceed. Lindbergh had several: remove and replace the
broken valve, as he would do in an airplane engine; replace the entire heart
with a mechanical pump—an “artificial heart,” he called it—just as Lind-
bergh would replace a failed airplane motor; or insert a temporary blood
pump, remove the heart, fix it, then put it back.
Lindbergh spoke to Flagg about Elisabeth Morrow’s situation because
he noticed that the anesthetist had brought with him a machine he invented
to give artificial respiration to newborns, in case a breathing emergency
arose with the Lindberghs’ baby. Fascinated by all things mechanical, Lind-
bergh asked for permission to examine the device, which was made of an
oxygen tank, a pressure regulator, and several feet of rubber tubing.
“Would you show me how it works?” he asked.
“Of course,” Flagg said.
After the demonstration, which filled the room with the sound of rush-
ing gas, Lindbergh thought he’d finally found a doctor who would take his
bioengineering ideas seriously. He was right about that, but Flagg didn’t
4 | david m. friedman
think his own specialized training in anesthesiology gave him the expertise
to address the complex surgical issues raised by Lindbergh’s ideas.
“But I know someone who could,” he said: a Nobel Prize–winning sur-
geon Flagg once served as an intern in New York. The surgeon’s name, he
said, was Alexis Carrel.
When Dr. Carrel won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1912 he was the
first scientist in the United States to win a Nobel and, at thirty-nine, the
youngest person yet chosen for any Nobel Prize. The prize honored his
perfection of vascular anastomosis, the technique that enables a surgeon to
reconnect a blood vessel after it has been cut, patch it if it has been punc-
tured, or attach one vessel to another, without damaging the vessel being
repaired or rerouted. This new ability to cut and sew arteries and veins—and
keep them functioning—made Carrel the father of organ transplantation,
which is unthinkable without vascular anastomosis. Likewise, open heart
surgery, coronary artery bypass grafts, kidney dialysis, and countless other
procedures that have saved millions would be impossible without Carrel’s
pioneering work. In the long history of cutting open the body to heal it,
Carrel’s achievement is perhaps second in importance only to the discovery
of anesthesia.
Lindbergh, who did most of his reading in aviation journals, knew little
of Carrel’s achievements when he parked his car on November 28, 1930,
near York Avenue and East Sixty-Sixth Street, a part of Manhattan where
cows and goats had grazed on a dairy farm only thirty years earlier. Now this
green campus was home to the nation’s premier biological study center—the
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (funded by John D. Rockefeller
of Standard Oil)—and its most celebrated department head, fifty-seven-
year-old Alexis Carrel, whose laboratories and surgery rooms occupied the
entire top floor and attic of a five-story, brick and stone building constructed
in the plain style favored by Mr. Rockefeller, a churchgoing Baptist.
Carrel, a bald barrel-chested man who viewed the world through pince-
nez, was sitting at his desk when Lindbergh arrived for their meeting. Car-
rel’s office, lined with glass-fronted cabinets filled with medical books and
antique surgical instruments, was huge. His desk was situated at the far end,
so any visitor had to walk some distance to meet him. Lindbergh, who’d
been honored in government buildings all over the world, was used to large
rooms, so he simply walked across the polished stone floor, indifferent to the