6 Alexandra
1On December 12, 1918, shortly after Bucky had returned from France on the Great Northern, Anne gave birth to a daughter whom they named Alexandra. From the moment Bucky first saw her he loved her with an intensity that was part of his deeply emotional character. He marveled at the perfection of her tiny body, her miniature hands and feet, her long-lashed blue eyes. To him she was unique, the ultimate accomplishment of the Great Designer.
2 Anne was living with her family at 80 Columbia Heights and continued to live there and at Martin’s Lane while Bucky was attached to the George Washington. When the ship was decommissioned, Admiral Gleaves asked Bucky, who was now a lieutenant, jg, to rejoin his staff aboard his flagship, the USS Seattle, stationed in New York.
3 What might have been an especially happy time for the young Fullers was shadowed by sickness and sorrow. The great influenza epidemic was raging throughout the world. Alexandra caught it and almost died. In succession she came down with spinal meningitis and finally with polio. How she survived those terrible illnesses, about which so little was then known, was almost a miracle, aided by love and arduous nursing. At times three trained nurses gave her round-the-clock care. There was little money available to pay for them, but both the older Hewletts and Mrs. Fuller helped out. Anne and Bucky were ridden by anxiety for months at a time.
4 Then Admiral Gleaves was ordered to take command of the Asiatic Squadron, and asked Bucky to go with him. Thus he was confronted with a difficult decision. He had intended to remain in the navy for the foreseeable future. He says: “I loved the navy. Having been brought up with boats on Bear Island, my feeling about ships was different from that of most of my shipmates who had been raised inland and regarded them as machines you got on board—just big buildings. But I’d had all those little boats that were fine in calm weather but didn’t work in storms. And suddenly I was in great ships that really worked under all conditions. I was very excited about the whole evolution of the design of ships. And I had been mixed up with the new voice radio, so I was experiencing very advanced technology long before it came to the rest of society. The places I had been in the navy were really the frontier point.”
5 But Bucky realized that Alexandra could not possibly go to Manila, where the Asiatic Squadron was based, and therefore Anne could not go either. He thought, “If I do go I will never see Alexandra again.” Furthermore, he could not remain in the navy because of the peripatetic life of a naval officer; if he were not sent to the Far East, it would be Europe or South America or the Canal Zone. It would not be fair to the two people he loved so much to subject them to that sort of existence. If Alexandra had been strong and healthy, he would not have hesitated. But under the circumstances it was impossible.
6 So, very unhappily, he requested transfer to inactive status, almost tantamount to resigning his commission, and asked Armour and Company for a job. Impressed by his previous work with the company, and his excellent naval record, Armour made him assistant export manager. It was a very responsible position. Bucky was in charge of sales to any corporation engaged in foreign operations with headquarters in New York, and of supplying many big companies with their meat products. The pay was $50 a week, just about what Bucky had been getting as a lieutenant jg without the perquisites that belong to a naval officer.
7 “The years of little Alexandra were a terrific struggle,” Bucky recalls. “We really didn’t have any money.”
8 The Fullers rented a dilapidated little house on Pearsal Place in Lawrence, not far from Martin’s Lane. Bucky did all the physical work of repairs and repainting the house. Anne decorated it beautifully, and Mr. Hewlett, being so sympathetic, gave them some nice pieces of furniture and other household necessities. Still Bucky says: “Those were very painful days and sad. Our expenses with the nurses and medicines were very high. My mother helped us, but it was terribly difficult. It was so typical of the mess that poor young kids sometimes get into even now. Expenses: always more expenses than they are able to produce money to meet.”
9 Of course, it was not all sadness. At times, Alexandra seemed to be getting better. Then Anne and Bucky would go out with some of their old friends. Mr. Hewlett “liked to cheer them up” and occasionally took them on the Bohemian circuit. One night Betty and Toni Salaemi, who had an apartment on Washington Square South next to the Judson Hotel, took them to a tiny restaurant in one of the crooked little streets just south of the Square. It belonged to a gypsy-like woman known as Romany Marie, who already was becoming known to the Greenwich Village people.
10 When Bucky’s party came in there were only two people in that small room in which a few tables were crowded together—Romany Marie and a white-faced, burning-eyed young man, who was introduced as Eugene O’Neill. They spent the whole evening together talking of many things and forgetting their troubles. Though Bucky did not realize at the time, Romany Marie was to become far more important in his career than Eugene O’Neill, who appeared only that once.
11 No matter how bad things were, it was always fun to go over to the Hewletts for a merry evening. They were forever putting on shows to celebrate some birthday or other occasion; with such a large family and innumerable friends they were sure of an audience. Bucky loved to dress up in ridiculous costumes and spout his own verses written for the occasion. He had a genuine gift for light, witty verse that set them all roaring with laughter. That was another paradox—he hated ferociously to be laughed at; but delighted in playing the fool to be laughed with. Of those evenings Roger Hewlett says: “Bucky was always a wellspring of creative things. He would sit and write songs and dialogue and we’d all howl with laughter.
12 “None of this side of Bucky, or the wild things he did, ever gets into the books about him. They make him out to be this great, quiet, sober intelligence who wasn’t appreciated at Harvard because his ideas were so great. Why, he didn’t have an idea when he was in Harvard.
13 “It’s a great pity that the biographies leave all the light, wild things out, because they miss a great deal of what Bucky is. Those things don’t make him any less a remarkable person. His special genius is without question, but it had its foundations in very human fallibilities.”
14 The Fullers only lived at Pearsal Place for about a year. It was, in fact, a miserable little house, very hard to heat in winter. So for Alexandra’s sake, and for Bucky’s, who hated commuting, they rented a tiny apartment in Montague Street, Brooklyn, for the following winter, and came back to Martin’s Lane in the summer of 1921.
15 Alexandra, at two and a half, was still partly paralyzed, but her developing mind was a wonder and a delight to Bucky. He says: “Alexandra was not able to get around like other children, but she had the same curiosity they had about their environment. There was no damage to her beautiful head and so with her lovely little mind she demonstrated the extraordinary compensations that life has.
16 “Today, if we are designing an airplane or going to the moon, we provide alternate circuits for the important electronic functions, so that if the primary one fails there is another to take its place—we call it fail safe. Nature has many of those alternate circuits. If there is something the matter with a person’s eyes, they use their ears or get the information in other ways.
17 “Alexandra acquired her understanding of her environment through people. She was fantastically sensitive to the people around her. Often Anne and I would be about to say something to each other or to the nurse, and before we could get it out of our mouths Alexandra would say the very words we were about to speak. This demonstrated quite clearly to me that there is this thing called telepathy, and that all people really have it, but they don’t use it as Alexandra did because it is a fail safe. I think that everybody has these experiences that can only be explained as telepathy. Alexandra really told me that there was something beyond our ordinary senses going on; something metaphysical. Young people are particularly able to tune in on it.”
18 As winter approached, Bucky and Anne decided that it would be good for Alexandra to get away from the dampness and cold that always seemed to set her back. Through his many foreign connections as Armour’s export manager, Bucky was able to get an inexpensive house in Bermuda for Anne and Alexandra.
19 Like all Hewlett enterprises it became quite a family affair. Anglesea went to Bermuda with them, and Laurence Hewlett, who had recently married Robert Burr, came briefly with her young husband. Later Anglesea’s great friend Gladys Bedford also joined the household.
20 That was a happy winter for Anne. She says, “We had lots of fun. We collected a count—Count Gaedon d’Ivry or something like that. First he rushed Anx; then he switched to Gladdie, and finally gave me quite a bit of attention. We had a fine time.”
21 Best of all, it did Alexandra a great deal of good. She regained the use of her legs and could run around quite normally. When Anne brought her back, Bucky was amazed and delighted by her progress.
22 Meanwhile he had made a business decision that seemed logical, but turned out to be incredibly unlucky. The previous summer, Eddie MacDonald, Bucky’s first commanding officer at Newport News, had rented a house in Hewlett. He was devoted to Bucky and relied on him for advice about his future career in civilian life. During the war he had saved Trubee Davison’s life. Young Davison’s father, Henry P. Davison, a partner in J. P. Morgan and Company, was utterly grateful to MacDonald. He persuaded him to leave the navy, promising him a splendid career in business.
23 Very coincidentally, Mr. Davison made MacDonald president of the Canada Connecticut Cotton Mills, for which Bucky had worked in the winter of 1914. This became a further bond between them, for Bucky was able to give MacDonald a great deal of technical information about the Sherbrooke Mills, which was enormously helpful to the young executive who naturally did not know very much about the textile business.
24 Then, in the spring of 1922, Mr. Davison made MacDonald president of the Kelly-Springfield Truck Company, a subsidiary of Kelly-Springfield Tires. MacDonald offered Bucky the job of National Account Sales Manager of Kelly-Springfield Trucks at a considerable increase in salary. Mrs. Fuller, with acute intuition, tried to persuade Bucky not to change jobs; but to him it looked like a twenty-karat-gold opportunity. What neither he nor MacDonald knew was that Morgan and Company proposed to phase out Kelly Trucks, which had been a principal supplier of trucks to the Canadian Army, but was now suffering from the competition of such industrial giants as Mack Trucks, White, and Pierce-Arrow.
25 For three months Bucky worked demoniacally at his new job, using all his foreign connections as well as his American contacts to get orders. He rolled in an impressive amount of new business, but the decision had already been made in that low, white marble building at 14 Wall Street from which the power lines extended to so much of American industry.
26 In the very flush of success, Bucky learned incredulously that Kelly Trucks was shutting down. He was out of a job, with no chance to have saved any money.
27 This shattering, unmerited blow indubitably had much to do with forming Bucky’s low opinion of the masters of industry—later he was to call them “the great pirates.” It also shook his confidence in himself, and sent him into a cycle of depression about his future. During his work for Armour and Company and Kelly-Springfield Trucks he had not been drinking at all. Now he began to drink rather heavily. He was quite literally penniless.
28 Fortunately, his many friends in the navy temporarily rescued him by having him restored to active duty in command of Eagle Boat Number 15, which was to be used as a training ship for the naval reserve during the summer.
29 When Anne and Alexandra had come home from Bermuda, the Fullers had rented a house on the East Rockaway Road in Hewlett with the Bobby Burrs. The joint Burr-Fuller household was a dismal failure. Bucky says: “Everything seemed to go wrong. First Kelly Trucks was liquidated; I was broke. Now Bobby Burr seemed to share the opinion of a lot of other people that I was a ne’er-do-well. I was not paying my share. It was a mess. The only good thing was that Alexandra seemed to be prospering.”
30 But if Bucky was miserable ashore, he was, as usual, very happy at sea. His Eagle Boat was the biggest ship he had commanded—a sort of hybrid between a destroyer escort and a PT Boat. Mass-produced by Henry Ford during the war for antisubmarine service, the Eagles were flat-bottomed, slab-sided, with square sterns and sharp bows which made them cranky in a seaway. But they were fast, and the quarters were comfortable. Not much use in war, they were ideal for summer training work. Though Bucky was completely aware of the Eagle Boats’ shortcomings, the fact that Henry Ford had been able to build them by assembly-line methods excited him. In fact, Ford became one of the very few industrialists Bucky admired for his imaginative solutions of production problems and his excellent labor relations.
31 On Eagle Boat 15 Bucky had a skeleton crew of regular navy ratings, and a shipload of reservists. He also had a delightful companion. Young Vincent Astor, who had inherited approximately $70,000,000 on his twenty-first birthday, was as ardent a sailorman as Bucky. After serving in the navy during the war, Astor had joined the naval reserve in order to maintain his naval affiliations. Because of his reserve rank Astor was given command of the Eagle Boat squadron in the metropolitan area. He chose Eagle Boat 15 as his flagship.
32 Thrown into such close quarters with his commanding officer, Bucky was sure to either hate him or love him. Astor was an enthusiastic officer, knowledgeable in the ways of the sea with none of the boardstiff formality of the old-school types. He was a year younger than Bucky—twenty-six—tall and thin and keen. He took his duties seriously, but he was ready for a frolic any time it did not interfere with them. In that the two young men were very much alike. Furthermore, Astor took an immediate liking to Bucky. As always, Bucky responded with eager affection and loyalty.
33 They had great fun with the flotilla. At one point they made the New York Police Commissioner an honorary officer in the naval reserve, in return for which he made all the captains honorary police officers. Bucky became an honorary captain in the aviation division of the New York City Police with a big gold badge. His duties consisted of serving one day a year. During the World Series Bucky put on a uniform and stood in the nonsmoking section of the stadium making people put out their cigarettes.
34 Since Bucky liked to drive very fast, the gold badge came in very handy. He would be boiling down a thirty-mile highway at sixty, when a motorcycle cop would haul him in. The cop would come up in a state of justified outrage. Bucky would simply show him the badge; the cop would salute, and go away in furious frustration. Bucky kept the badge until the whole Tammany Hall-Jimmy Walker era ended in an odoriferous burst of scandal and Fiorello La Guardia took all the honorary badges away.
35 In Bucky’s Chronofile, there is a good deal of publicity dating from that summer. The newspapers were interested in the naval training program; and with two such colorful characters as Astor and Fuller involved in it there was plenty to write about. Astor managed to get orders for a training cruise to Newport, Rhode Island. His little fleet dropped anchor in the harbor at the height of the season. Newport was Astor’s home territory; his grandmother had been the regal ruler of Society, with a capital S. In a city of millionaires, he was the golden boy; as rich or richer than any of them. And young! The chatelaines of the turreted mansions, Italian palazzos, and gargantuan Grecian villas along Belleview Avenue invited—no, entreated—him and his senior captain to come to their elaborate dinners and balls. The newspapers played it up in headlines. Bucky loved it all.
36 In return, Bucky took Astor to his home territory. Anne’s uncle, James Crosby Brown, owned an island in Buzzard’s Bay. Young Roger Hewlett, who was staying there, vividly recalls the day that what looked to him like the whole United States Navy suddenly sailed into the little harbor. Anchors splashed into blue water, bo’suns’ pipes shrilled, and launches put off from the ships. Laughing young officers in dress whites strolled down the dock, and Roger ran breathlessly to greet his dashing brother-in-law.
37 Uncle Crosby laid on a fine clambake New England style with barrels of steamers, and lobsters baked in seaweed. It was memorable.
38 On another occasion Bucky proposed that he and Astor visit his friends the Saltonstalls in West Chop. Astor sent for his private plane, and they flew over for another series of informal parties which delighted the golden boy.
39 In September the flotilla was disbanded and Bucky was on the beach again. But the friendship continued. Astor took the Fullers to a number of elaborate parties. To repay him Bucky took him to Romany Marie’s where he met many of the emerging young artists. Bucky also persuaded the Salaemis to stage a Greenwich Village party for Astor. The Bohemians rallied around. There was Chianti in straw-covered flasks—Prohibition never bothered the Village. The splendid pianist was a girl called Pitot, who later went on to work with Gershwin and Richard Rodgers and other famous popular musicians.
40 It was after this party that Astor said to Bucky: “I have to go to Paris on family business for a few weeks. My plane will just be sitting in Port Washington doing nothing. It’s all paid for through the month of October; pilot, insurance, everything. It costs me a packet. I would like very much if you would just take the plane and use it. The more you fly it the better.”
41 Bucky accepted, his eyes gleaming with anticipation.
42 Astor’s plane was one of two * designed and built by Grover Loening, who later became famous for designing the first really successful amphibian. It was a monoplane flying boat capable of carrying four passengers and a pilot, powered by a 400 hp Victory engine with six in-line cylinders, water-cooled. The engine was mounted above and behind the cockpit with a four-bladed pusher propellor. If you planned to fly above 10,000 feet you had to put lags in the radiator to prevent it from freezing up. The plane was the first designed for private use which embodied all the new technology discovered during the war. Capable of 120 mph, it was the most modern private vehicle in the air.
43 Anne and Bucky had a marvelous time in it. Since Alexandra seemed very well, they had no hesitation about leaving her with her nurse and * The other was owned by William K. Vanderbilt.
44 her devoted slaves, Hope and Hester, at Martin’s Lane. So they flew off, with Astor’s pilot Clifford Webster at the controls, to weddings on Long Island and Newport and Boston. Many of Bucky’s friends happened to be getting married that autumn; he was best man here, an usher there. Everywhere they arrived with enormous eclat. The New York Times and the Tribune followed them almost breathlessly, to Bucky’s great delight; he has always loved publicity, favorable if possible.
45 Then Anne and Bucky took off for Maine, stopping briefly in Newport and in Boston to refuel; thence to Bar Harbor. Bucky’s delight in speed, his belief in speed as part of the solution of mankind’s problems, made him ecstatic. He carefully noted the distances and elapsed times—4% hours flying time from Port Washington to Bar Harbor—a record. Inevitably, they went to Bear Island—they had taken Alexandra there earlier in the summer. The plane landed in the lee of the island and taxied through the narrow harbor entrance, to be moored under the enclosing cliffs, which sheltered her fragile wings. It made an ideal base.
46 Even Anne enjoyed Bear Island that time. In October Maine is fantastically beautiful, the air cold and crystalline, sky and sea and earth sharply seen to the farthest horizon. Bucky made short flights every day—to Camden, Wiscasset, Bar Harbor, getting new perspectives on the channels and shoals so familiar to him from water level. He exultantly noted the flying times—Rockland ten minutes, Wiscasset twenty-five minutes, Eagle Island, to which he had so laboriously rowed, three minutes. He often took the local lobstermen up with him to show them their fishing grounds and spot new reefs on which to anchor their pots.
47 His was the first plane ever to base on Penobscot Bay. Everywhere they landed, crowds turned out to see the wonder of modern transportation that they had heretofore only read about. The local papers ran headlines and pictures; the Times and the Tribune followed their progress there also.
48 Then October was over and Bucky returned to earth with a thud. As he said: “It had been a preposterous sort of thing. There we were without a cent to our names, deeply in debt; living like super-millionaires.”
49 But what fun it had been! And, though he did not know it, the last splendor of carefree youth.
50 Back in Lawrence, Bucky sank into deep despondency. He could not seem to find a job and considered working for his father-in-law, who had invented a new kind of building block. The whole prospect seemed so dismal that in a recrudescence of his old irresponsibility he decided to go to the Yale-Harvard football game to try to shake himself out of it.
51 On a fine autumn day Anne and Alexandra walked down to the Lawrence station with him. The measure of her recovery was the fact that it was a good two miles there and back to Martin’s Lane. Bucky was using a snappy cane, partly because of his wonky knee, and partly because canes were the thing that year. He chatted gaily with Alexandra, telling her all about the picturesque spectacle of a Harvard-Yale game—the football heroes who became famous in an afternoon, the clash of the teams in sweat and mud, the chanted cheers and the songs the fans sang to encourage their teams in that traditional rivalry; the great stadium filled to its topmost ring by frantic rooters waving the crimson or blue pennants attached to little canes which the hawkers sold at the gates.
52 Alexandra looked up at him and said, “Daddy, will you bring me a cane?”
53 Bucky promised that he would.
54 There was a Harvard victory. Bucky celebrated through the night with his college friends, suddenly become more dear than they had ever been, drinking and laughing, singing and cheering and toasting the heroes of the day, drinking and forgetting his troubles, drinking and forgetting everything.
55 He took the one o’clock to New York the next day and telephoned Anne from the Pennsylvania Station. Her voice was strained and full of tears as she said: “Alexandra is very sick. She has pneumonia. She is in a coma.”
56 “I’m coming on the next train,” said Bucky.
57 When he reached Martin’s Lane Alexandra was still unconscious, lying very small and forlorn, her face flushed with fever, her breathing harsh, eyes closed. Bucky and Anne stood beside her bed, helpless and desperate, for he never knew how long, while the doctor and nurses bustled about doing what they could. Sometime in the night Alexandra opened her eyes and looked at Bucky, knowing him, smiling a little. “Daddy,” she said, “Did you bring me my cane?”
58 No physical pang could ever equal the agony that pierced Bucky’s soul; the shame that forced him to turn his eyes away. He had forgotten.
59 A few hours later Alexandra died in his arms.
60 Alexandra’s death literally devastated Bucky’s life. He blamed himself, crazily, beyond all reason; blamed himself for not being able to provide her with better living conditions, more luxuries, more things that in his distraught mind might have made the difference. All the money he had spent on foolish extravagances and self-gratification haunted him; and the fact that he had failed to make money as other men had, exacerbated his sense of personal inadequacy, of failure. Later, he was able to rationalize some of this self-blame away. He came to believe that part of the onus lay with the builders of housing who, through stupidly or willfully ignoring the modern techniques available to them, had failed to provide adequately healthful living conditions. To some extent this alleviated his sense of guilt while it became the powerful motivating force in his lifelong crusade to improve the shelter of all mankind by forcing the whole world to accept his imaginative use of a new technology, much of which he invented himself.
61 But the thing he could not forgive himself, the thing that irrationally haunted his thoughts for more than forty years and was a scar upon his soul, was that forgotten cane. Even now, when at last he has gained absolution, he weeps when he tells of it.
62 The manner of his absolving is a strange story. To understand it one must always remember that Bucky is not only at the spearhead of scientific design planning, and believes in technology as the salvation of the human race; but he is one of the great mystics of our world. His Universe consists of the physical and metaphysical and to him the latter is infinitely more important. The man who could describe himself as “A self-balancing, twenty-eight joined, adapter base biped; an electrochemical reduction plant, integrated with segregated stowages and thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic pumps with motors attached, 62,000 miles of capillaries, millions of warning signals…guided with exquisite precision from a turret in which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and recording range-finders…,” also has written that a human being is “basically a pattern in integrity” that is indestructible…“you and I are essential functions of the universe…I’ll be seeing you. Forever!”1
63 In 1967, on his way around the world, Bucky stopped on the island of Bali. “These were really quite beautiful circumstances,” he said, “being there with all these Balinese who do everything as a single family. They go out, the whole colony, in single file to the rice fields, then they come back bringing things in. They all go into painting; they all do music; they do dancing. The whole community does all these things beautifully together.”
64 Thus Bucky immediately felt great empathy with the Balinese. One day he was asked to go with some fine Balinese artists up into the hills to look at an unusual house and meet the artist who lived in it. They climbed a high volcanic mountain. Torrential rains had scored deep ravines in the volcanic ash that became raging rivers when the clouds opened, as they did almost daily. It was very difficult going for Bucky with his weak knee, crossing the ravines, climbing up steep slopes.
65 His Balinese guide was “a beautiful man,” sympathetic and helpful. Even while struggling over the rough terrain Bucky was questioning him about the language, as he does wherever he goes, finding common origins of words in all the tongues men speak, and trying to get at the fundamental similarity of languages and through that the common heritage of peoples. The guide was very good at thinking of words that were almost the same in English and Balinese.
66 Inevitably they were caught in a sudden violent downpour and took refuge in a little hut made of split bamboo. Bucky was extremely interested in its construction. “I’ve studied a great deal about bamboo splitting,” he says. “How you do it to make either thatching for a roof or supports for a big structure, fractionate it for whatever purpose. These men had fantastic expertise with their machetes. After the rain, one narrow gorge had become a torrent, so they went to work with those heavy, sword-like tools and built a bridge across it.”
67 Bucky asked them to slice some more bamboo in a certain way, and with some string he built a small tensegrity sphere for them. They were fascinated by the fact that the compression members did not touch each other and there was just tension between them. So he actually delivered an impromptu scientific lecture which “they understood beautifully.”
68 Coming down the hills was even more difficult for Bucky than going up. One of the Balinese cut a fine, long bamboo staff for him which he could put down in front of him and lower himself a step at a time down the declivities. He used it all the way home.
69 When they reached the car Bucky’s guide put the staff in back and rode into town with him. At the hotel the guide said, “I would like very much to have your staff.” Of course Bucky gave it to him.
70 The following morning the guide came to him and said: “All of us, we Balinese, are saying that you are not a stranger. You were here long, long ago and you have just come back to us.” And Bucky felt that this was true.
71 Then the guide continued, “So I have set aside a room in my house and put your staff in it.” And he said, “Nobody will ever go into that room again because your cane is in there.”
72 Suddenly Bucky felt an enormous sense of relief. “I said to myself, ‘This is a very mysterious thing. All those years and all those things that have happened since little Alexandra died. Now somehow I feel intuitively that this is a kind of message. That she has her cane at last.’ ”