My personal Pan Am photos are in the above trailer.
At dawn on May 20, 1927, the 25 year old Lindbergh took off from New York in his single engine plane. Tension had kept him up the night before, so he hadn't slept for 23 hours when he took off, barely missing telephone wires and disappearing into the fog heading for the Eiffel Tower. Thirty-three and a half hours later he landed safely in Paris, the first to fly that 3,600 distance non-stop.
In my research of Lindbergh, I was surprised to find two things most people don't know about that legendary flight. One was that years later, Lindbergh himself said:
"After 17 hours into the flight, ghosts of my ancestors, transparent, mist-like, with semi-human form, seemed to drift in and out of the fabric walls encouraging me on."
Lindbergh did not include that story in his 1953 giant bestselling book, The Spirit of St. Louis. He talked about those ghosts in a later interview. His book sold to Hollywood for more than a million dollars.
The second surprising thing I found out was from an interview by the movie’s director Billy Wilder. He was also the director of such classics as Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Lost Weekend. In the 1998 interview Wilder said;
"I was only allowed by Lindbergh to make the story about his flight over the Atlantic, nothing else. But I heard a story from the newspapermen that were in New York before he took off. They told me; 'We figured Lindbergh didn't have a chance of making it and would die. So we went to this young and pretty waitress and told her that this Lindbergh kid was going to be flying a coffin full of gas over the Atlantic and would not make it, and that he was very tense, couldn’t sleep and had never been with a woman, so that night she knocked on his door.'
“If I could have put that in the movie and later cut to this unknown waitress standing in the crowd of Lindbergh’s ticker-tape parade, when he became an international hero, waving to him and he doesn’t see her, it would have given the movie have real meaning. But I couldn’t have suggested that to Lindbergh."
Those stories are in my book I was a Pan Am Princess of the Sky. Now in Kindle.‘Look Inside’ by clicking the link below, see my Pan Am photos.
