Explorer: The Life of Richard E. Byrd

Chapter 13 - Stumbling

Chapter 13 Stumbling e was never the same again, though he stayed firmly fixed in the public mind to the end of his days. There were no ticker-tape parades when he returned this time; 1935 America was too impoverished for lavish spectacle. Although his old friend the president greeted him personally at dockside, Richard, always slender, now looked dangerously thin as he tottered down Ruppert’s gangplank at the Washington Navy Yard. Asked by a reporter about his next trip south, the admiral replied, “I won’t talk about going back now. I’ve got enough of it for awhile.”1 His health would remain poor for several years. Some months after his return, he took the family to Latty Cove, and Harry begged his younger brother to either write or ask Marie to do so about “how you are.” Richard replied shortly that he was “making some progress” in getting rest, “but am still harassed with a thousand and one things.”2 But millions still loved him, and he needed both their money and their applause. Barely pausing to recuperate, he let the remorseless tasks of book writing, filmmaking, and lecturing engulf him once more, for the inevitable expedition debts had to be whittled down if not paid off entirely, and there was always the comfortable lifestyle to be maintained. Richard returned to the lecture circuit in September 1935 for a tour that would not end until the following May. At one point, he broke off to participate in the seventy-six-minute film about BAE II that Paramount Pictures rushed to completion. The studio hyped it shamelessly : “This Was a Voyage of Death . . . In All Nature There Was Nothing Like It! The Ice Swallowed the Land . . . But American Courage Returned It to the World . . . Admiral Richard E. Byrd Presents His Thrilling Adventure Film -  as Mighty in Its Glory as America Itself.  Killer Whales the White 384 Nightmare! The       The Devil’s Playground! A Lost World. The Furies! Antarctica!” If Richard was embarrassed by the hoopla, he never let on. Instead, he complained to Harry that “I have had to work much too hard.” He strove “with all that is in me to simplify my living.”3 It was a theme that he would set forth with increasing urgency and poignancy over the coming years, but “simplicity” would always elude him. By early December he had given 120 talks; most went well. “People are apparently as interested as they were in 1930. I am talking to as many people as I did in the boom time.” Richard was pleased that his brother liked Discovery, the hastily compiled account of the recent expedition. “Now that the book and the geographical article are out of the way, I will be able to lead a more normal life.” “I continue to hear the finest possible things about your lecture, your moving pictures and your book,” Harry replied.4 By the end of Richard’s second lecture tour early in 1937, Time magazine reported that “the Admiral, who, while changing trains in his blue uniform has sometimes been mistaken for a porter or stationmaster , will have told 1,250,000 people in 250 cities about the South Pole.5 Richard needed good and reliable friends more than ever, and his appreciation of his informal West Coast agent, Robert Breyer, steadily deepened. “Bonnie” not only kept an eye on former expedition members such as George Noville, who continued to have a drinking problem, but also introduced himself to Lincoln Ellsworth when the explorer came to Los Angeles. “You will remember our conversation with Bernt Balchen at the California Club and Wilkins’ statements abut our expedition not cooperating?” Breyer wrote proprietarily at one point. “Thought there might be some thought of this in Ellsworth’s mind and I want to do everything to dissipate this because I realize your friendship for him.” Richard was delighted with Bonnie’s tactful handling of the situation, but not with Balchen—or June. In early April 1936 he wrote Harry, thanking his brother for acting on behalf of Ashley McKinley who “flew to the pole with me and made all the other flights. I think a lot of him and want to do anything for him that is within my power.” Balchen who also “flew to the pole with me has been quite selfish about things and now June is pretty well off the track.” Normally loyal to his men to a fault, Richard may have discovered June...