Two high-ranking Russian army officers introduced her to him and asked whether he might take her up for a spin as a passenger sometime. Anthony was immediately smitten by the exuberant twenty-four-year-old-singer and revue dancer with her pitch-black hair and dark blue eyes. Even as he shook her hand at the St. Petersburg airfield he was falling in love, head over heels. Moreover, she was an aviatrix!
Although Anthony did not speak a word of Russian, this did not stand between them, as she turned out to be fluent in German and in French. In the Dutch edition of his autobiography, Anthony noted, “I thought…she could not fly well enough, even though she possessed a pilot’s license, and offered her to accompany me to Johannisthal, so that I might ‘teach her how to really steer my plane’ ”—quotation marks for a double meaning. When she came back the next day to make the promised flight, “she looked even lovelier than yesterday. She could talk about airplanes, and airplanes were all the conversation I was capable of, even though I was also in love with her.” “Perhaps,” Anthony wrote exclusively for his Dutch readership, “there was a bit of selfishness in my maintaining that she needed more flying lessons, because I was, honestly speaking, in love with her, just like that, at first sight.” Maybe the flying lessons were truly necessary, because critics mentioned more than once that Anthony’s Spider was not so easy to fly.1 Anthony was on cloud nine when she reappeared the next day for the promised flight: “My method of teaching Ljuba Galantschikoff to fly was a little rough, but effective. She would sit in the plane’s forward seat, with the stick and engine controls within reach….To signal her what to do, I would grab the back of her coat, push her forward, jerk her back, pull and yell at her, and after just a few flights she was ready to land without help.”2
Theirs was a passionate relationship that started at a flying pace. Ljubov Alexandrovna Golantschikova, usually identified as Ljuba Galantschikoff, was born on April 21, 1888, as the daughter of the postmaster of Viljandi in Estonia, Alexander Golantschikov, and his wife of German extraction. In 1909 Ljuba had arrived in St. Petersburg to take a course in bookkeeping, yet office work did not agree with her. The world of the theater, of cabaret, was what appealed most. She had talent as a dancer and soon joined an amateur group. After one performance she was offered an engagement by the manager of the St. Petersburg Folies Bergères, a dance company that showed at lot of leg at the Villa Rodé, a slightly disreputable but popular café chantant with a stage for cabaret, located behind the famous Peter and Paul Fortress. At this club, which catered to the well-to-do, almost anything was possible for the right amount of money. Dancing was exactly what Ljuba wanted, and she readily agreed. She began performing at the Villa Rodé with a singing and dancing act, and her looks and talent created something of a local attraction. Placards soon appeared in the streets with her new stage name: Molly Morée.
Perhaps it had always been her dream to learn to fly, but this rich man’s pastime was far beyond her means. Flying was, above all, as expensive as it was hazardous. The first time Ljuba came in touch with flight was when the First Russian Aviation Week had its kickoff at the Kolomjazhsky race track on April 27, 1910. Much of St. Petersburg society worked itself into a frenzy because of the event, and the fever of flight also touched Ljuba. She managed to get herself introduced to several of the pilots, all young men her own age. Mikhail Efimov, a former electrician and racing cyclist from Odessa, became her favorite. She persuaded him to take her up into the air. After that, flying became her passion. With the money she earned and saved over the winter, she registered for flight training with the First Russian Aviation Society in the spring of 1911.3 A pupil was required to pay a deposit of 600 rubles, on top of which came the actual flight training, which cost another 500 rubles. For a dancing girl, these were more than hefty sums. But Ljuba was lucky in that a drunken admirer, Prince Vladimir Rachevsky, who had more than a soft spot for her, had publicly promised to pay for her tuition. His patronage made her flying adventures quite a bit more affordable.4 Ljuba proved herself a quick and motivated pupil. In the mornings she would travel the twenty-eight miles to the Gatchina airfield south of St. Petersburg, journeying back to the city for her evening stage performances. On September 29, 1911, she became the third woman in Russia to obtain a flying license: number 56, on a Farman biplane.
For Ljuba it was a dream come true, and she did her utmost to obtain contracts for flying demonstrations. In May 1912 this brought her to Riga (Latvia) with two other Russian pilots. There she became the victim of a bizarre accident on May 2: several of the spectators threw sticks at her plane as she came in low overhead to land, hitting the propeller and damaging the controls. The flight ended in a crash. Miraculously, Ljuba survived, although she suffered face, foot, and internal injuries. It took her months to recover her confidence.5 Nonetheless, there was no denying her aviator’s blood. Perhaps the young Dutchman with the high-pitched voice might be persuaded to help her advance? He might even allow her to make a solo flight, she hoped. After several more test flights together, during which he shouted further instructions to her through a piece of metal tubing he had installed between the two cockpits, the amorous Anthony could hardly deny her such a request. He watched her with deep anxiety when she took off to do her first solo rounds on the Spider. To his immense relief, Ljuba skillfully maneuvered the plane down for a safe landing. Yet her bold promise to buy the plane came to naught. Her earlier crash in Riga had robbed her of her income.
Ljuba Galantschikoff: In August 1912 Fokker tried to interest the Russian army in his planes by participating in a flying competition in St. Petersburg. He fell in love with the spirited vaudeville dancer, singer, and pilot Ljuba Galantschikoff. In Berlin she subsequently became one of his most important publicity assets, although her interest in the quirky Dutch aviator soon waned. FOKKER HERITAGE TRUST, HUINS, THE NETHERLANDS
The fact that Anthony and Ljuba had met at all was the result of a fluke. In the spring of 1912 the small band of Fokker employees in Johannisthal had been strengthened by aviator and technician Arthur Friedrich Grünberg. Born in May 1881, Grünberg came from Tallinn in Estonia, then part of Russia. Fokker and he knew each other from Mainz, where they had camped out in the little cottage near the Grossen Sand. Since then Grünberg had worked as a demonstration pilot for one of Fokker’s competitors, Albatros. His arrival at the small Fokker outfit effected a certain eastward reorientation.
Grünberg hoped that Anthony would appoint him as his sales agent in Russia. Interest in the military applications of aviation was on the rise there, pushed by an investigation by the Russian Ministry of War. Something was about to happen in Russia’s aeronautical circles, that much soon became clear, because the Russians launched an ambitious scheme to train a considerable number of pilots. In the summer of 1912 the main conclusions of a report became public, proposing a budget for the purchase of about thirty airplanes for a total of 1.6 million rubles. Rumors had it that an even larger number of purchases was under consideration: it seemed likely that the czarist army might buy as many as 400 planes between 1913 and 1915.6
Meanwhile, a large aeronautical exhibition was organized in St. Petersburg in August and September 1912, along with a five-week competition to select the most suitable planes for the army. Baroness Marcella Leitner, who had kept her faith in Fokker’s plane despite her accident in April, proposed to enter the competition. For each participant 2,000 rubles were available as compensation for transporting a flying machine to St. Petersburg. Anthony was all ears to the proposal, especially since the baroness volunteered to cover all costs.7 It seemed there was hardly anything to lose and much to gain by entering. But rather than send a foreigner, he chose to send his fellow countryman and chief pilot Jan Hilgers and his personal mechanic Hans Schmidt along with Leitner. They were supposed to offer flying demonstrations along the way to Russia, which might bring in one or two extra production orders.
In June 1912 Hilgers and Leitner got on the train with her Spider, which had been repaired since her accident. Hilgers and Leitner flew their first demonstrations in front of the beach pavilion at Pärnu on June 29. Four weeks later, on July 21, they performed in Tallinn. This latter event was so successful that several more flights followed on July 27 and 28, together with Marcella Leitner. To everyone’s horror, the flights ended with yet another accident, which damaged the machine.8
The damage threatened a disaster for the fragile finances of Fokker Aeroplanbau. To have a chance of winning the Russian competition, the Spider of course needed to be in perfect order. Anthony decided to travel to St. Petersburg himself to personally take charge of the situation. The previous month his friend Bernard de Waal had successfully passed the test for his pilot’s license at Goedecker’s in Mainz. He had received his papers on July 15, which meant that Anthony could now leave the flight instruction at Johannisthal to him. Early in August he obtained a visa for Russia and booked passage on the Nord Express from Berlin to St. Petersburg.
The superluxurious express train of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits left from Berlin’s Schlesischer Bahnhof around 7:30 a.m. Via Schneidemühl (Piła) and Königsberg (Kaliningrad) in East Prussia, it covered the 460 miles to the Prussian-Russian border station of Wirballen (Kybartai) in eleven and a half hours. It was a comfortable but expensive journey, because the Nord Express consisted exclusively of first-class carriages. Upon arrival at Wirballen (now in Lithuania), dusk was beginning to set. All passengers had to disembark while their luggage was taken from the baggage compartment to be checked.
The procedure at the border took several hours. Slightly bewildered, Anthony Fokker tried to find his way amid the travelers and baggage porters in the station’s inspection hall. Anthony had arrived at the end of the world as he knew it. Never before had he been so far away from home. The signs on the station were in unintelligible Cyrillic. He had to put his watch an hour forward to Russian time. Even the rail track itself ended here. After customs procedures all passengers changed to a Russian train, its wooden carriages waiting for them across the platform on a different railway gauge. Finally all were aboard, and around eleven o’clock the Nord Express set itself in motion for its nightly journey to St. Petersburg. This took another sixteen hours, as the speed on the Russian part of the itinerary was lower than on the German track. Toward 4 p.m. of the following day the train finally rolled into St. Petersburg’s Vitebsky station.
St. Petersburg was unlike any other city Anthony had visited. Europe’s most unhealthy capital was surrounded by an ever-expanding ring of heavy industry that colored the air with dust and ashes. From the window of his compartment, Anthony saw the landscape change from forests and fields to industrial sites. Metal companies, railway industry, weapons factories, and shipyards proliferated. These industries were surrounded by endless slums where the majority of St. Petersburg’s two million inhabitants lived in squalor.9 It was not a pretty sight. Once the train had finally stopped along Vitebsky’s platform and Anthony had disembarked, the impact of the white modern train station could hardly have been bigger.
Vitebsky was the pride of Russian railway architecture. Finished in 1904, the station was like a jewel in the eye of the beholder. No other station in St. Petersburg was so lavishly decorated. Arriving passengers flocked toward the platform hall, painted and sculpted with Jugendstil art. From there a stairway led down to the main hall, which was even more richly decorated. In the crowd of passengers, porters, coachmen, and taxi drivers, Anthony tried to find his way to the exit, anxious because he did not understand the language or customs of the city. Once on the square in front of the station his adventures started for real.
A carriage brought him to the hotel and restaurant Alt-Riga, a modern middle-class establishment on Novy Pereulok Street in the Admiralty District. This was where Jan Hilgers and Hans Schmidt had checked in after their aborted Baltic adventure with Marcella Leitner. The ride to Alt-Riga highlighted St. Petersburg’s remarkable mixture of old and new: cartwheels and horse-drawn carriages, but also electrical trams and motorcars. Anthony’s first impressions of the city were discomfiting: “Russia was like nothing I had seen. The luxuriant beards, the meaningless jargon, the happy inefficiency of everyone; the Slavic-Oriental architecture, the unaccountable mixture of magnificence and filth, struck me as a nightmare.”10 The rich upper class flaunted a lifestyle of which Anthony could only dream, with exceptionally large houses, city palaces, restaurants, theaters, and cafés. On and around Nevski Prospekt well-to-do citizens showed themselves in their best clothes. This was where the larger banks and luxury shops were located. In the city on the banks of the Neva River, money seemed to flow like water. Anthony soon regarded this conspicuous consumption with a mixture of contempt and regret. After two weeks in St. Petersburg, he wrote to his sister Toos, “Petersburg is a shitty city, if you have money it is another thing, but I am poor….With a ruble [2.16 marks] you can do just as much here, or rather just as little, as with a mark in Berlin, consequence is spending lots of money.”11
In the meantime Fokker made an effort to cultivate the Russian officers of the selection committee. A substantial sum loomed at the end of the competition: 55,000 rubles for the top three winners.12 Making a good impression, however, was not easy: “Nowhere did one find the accustomed reaction either to thought or deed. It left me confused, and despite my customary optimism, I soon became convinced that Russia and I would not get along.”13 Russian aerodynamic expert Georgiy Botezat decreed that the concept of Fokker’s automatically stable Spider deviated too much from common practice to stand a chance of winning the competition, which also stung. Nonetheless, Anthony made several demonstration flights in rapid succession. He flew from the exercise grounds at St. Petersburg’s Korpusnoy to the Gatchina airfield and back. He also treated the Russian War Minister, Gen. Vladimir Sukhomlinov, to a flight as his passenger.14
The competition, in which nine Russian-built aircraft and four foreign examples participated, was poorly organized. Both the rules and the various parts of the contest were messy. Adverse weather conditions also had a negative effect. Major and minor accidents happened almost every day. The event lasted much longer than Anthony had anticipated, and his finances dwindled by the day. “Soon I learned what was meant by Russian efficiency,” he later recalled. “[They stretched out] the demonstrations, in the expectation that others would arrive to join in. They encouraged us to fly and applauded our skill and experience, but that was all.”15
From its start on August 21, the contest at Korpusnoy dragged on for weeks. At the time, Anthony initially remained optimistic: “In business, I can expect the best here, as my airplane puts all competitors in the shade. I have already finished the various tests. Take-off, climb, gliding down etc., demonstrate, assemble, flying with max. loads, like flying with Hilgers for 1½ hours and show that we can land on bad fields.”16
Anthony believed that Vsevolod Abramovitsj, whom he knew from Johannisthal, was his biggest competitor. Abramovitsj had come up with a remarkable promotional scheme to fly his Berlin-built Wright machine all the way to St. Petersburg, an exceptional feat in those days. He even took a passenger to act as navigator: Karl Hackstetter, a well-known German balloonist. They were followed on their flight by a ground crew in a motorcar that carried gasoline, spare parts, and provisions. What Abramovitsj and Fokker did not know was that it had been decided beforehand that only planes that had been built in Russia would qualify for receiving military orders.17 Therefore the German entries remained outside the competition. It was unfortunate that Anthony, who did his utmost to outclass Abramovitsj in dangerous stunt flying, failed to register the Russians’ built-in bias. The Leipzig-based company Deutsche Flugzeug-Werke (DFW), which had entered two planes, failed to land orders for the same reason. Their machines were disqualified, even though their pilot Heinrich Bier was the first participant to complete all parts of the flying contest.
The main protagonists were therefore all Russian entries, such as the Dux factory from Moscow, which had entered two planes. Their aviator, Adam Haber-Włyński from Poland, was also quick to complete the trials. Ivan Steglau, a successful entrepreneur who had made his fortune providing water and sewer piping, entered one aircraft: a part-metal, welded biplane with cantilever, triplex-clad wings. Fokker showed a lot of interest in the design. But Steglaus’s plane lost its propeller in flight and crash landed. Bad luck also chased the Russian Vasily Hioni, whose machine ended in a ditch. The St. Petersburg engineering professor Yakov Gakkel was present with two machines. Initially his planes were considered favorites to win the contest. But his aircraft were plagued by all sorts of engine malfunctions, and Gakkel was unable to complete the tests in time. (Years later evidence would come to light that Haber-Włyński had bribed Gakkel’s mechanic to pour acid in the engines.) Thus the laurels went to Igor Sikorsky, who had his workshop in St. Petersburg. Sikorsky, who badly needed to win, took no chances and remained on the airfield to sleep in his plane’s transportation crate, so that he could report to the officers of the selection committee first thing the next morning and take to the air as soon as possible. To give him every opportunity to meet the requirements, the duration of the competition was extended. This was, of course, much to the dislike of Anthony Fokker, who could hardly afford to remain in St. Petersburg to await the final decision. Not surprisingly, Sikorsky cashed first prize for his achievements: 30,000 rubles.18
Anthony had remained optimistic about his chances of success right up to the last. As one of the first to complete all required parts of the contest, he believed the prize should have been his. In the German aeronautical press and in Dutch newspapers, reports mentioned a pending Russian order of ten Spiders. Anthony even dreamed of opening a subsidiary in St. Petersburg. He thought the good news for him was only “a matter of time and form.”19 His entry had never stood a chance, but he was about the last person to arrive at this conclusion. He lacked the means to pay bribes to the czarist bureaucracy. If Fokker’s was a fine plane and its pilot well versed in the art of keeping it aloft, that did not mean he could convince the selection committee that was to choose the winning entry. Later he angrily noted in his autobiography that St. Petersburg was rife with corruption: “Before you could see an official in his office, it was necessary to send in your visiting card wrapped in a ten-ruble note, otherwise your card got no further than the porter….The secretary of the department expected…a larger banknote to rouse him from lethargy. Then if you wanted to talk to the General himself, you had to see the executive officer with a really important bribe, and finally the General would only sign a contract if there were enough banknotes folded in it.”20 Of the three aircraft types that were eventually ordered, only that of the winner, Igor Sikorsky, was truly developed in Russia. The other two were Russian variations on French Nieuport and Farman designs. The criticism in the Russian press at the official end of the competition on September 7 was severe: the participating planes were designs that already existed and that contributed nothing to the development of military aviation in Russia. None of them could genuinely be considered a military design. What Russia needed first and foremost, if it wished to count in aviation, was to set up its own aviation industry.21
From a business perspective, the Russian adventure had ended for Fokker in a deception. The weeks in St. Petersburg had been expensive and had not produced any sales. In the end Anthony had to leave because his money ran out. For the time being he left the Spider in the care of Jan Hilgers and Hans Schmidt. Nonetheless, when he boarded the Nord Express for his return trip to Germany on September 19, his head was in the clouds because Ljuba had, after some persuasion, agreed to accompany him to Berlin. Anthony could not have been happier. For him the train journey was like a romantic dream.
Once back in Berlin a peculiar triangular relationship developed between Anthony, his airplane, and Ljuba. On September 30 they made a momentous flight together. Around four o’clock they took off, rounded the Johannisthal airfield to excite the public, and then disappeared into the sky. They flew right across Berlin. Then Anthony decided to show Ljuba what his machine could do and climbed all the way to an altitude of 6,500 feet. From there they made a high-speed descent, coming in for a hair-raising landing just in front of the grandstand. Both made sure Anthony’s new pilot got noticed. In the weeks after her arrival she proved herself to be a rapid pupil, although she never managed to accumulate enough money to be able to buy a Spider for herself. Before the month was out, she had made fifteen flights on Fokker’s planes, remaining in the air for forty-eight minutes. The following month she was registered to take off no less than fifty times, with a total flight time of three hours, eleven minutes.22 Very conscious of the publicity value of a young, attractive female aviatrix in his outfit—the Berlin papers described her as “picture pretty”—Anthony hired Ljuba as a demonstration pilot. It also enabled him to spend more time with her. Before long Ljuba became known as “the Pushka” (Russian for “cannon,” a customary designation for successful pilots in those days).
On November 12 she made an attempt to better the altitude record for women, then held by the German pilot Melli Beese, one of Fokker’s competitors at Johannisthal. She managed to climb to 2,400 feet, but was then forced to land. For the time being Beese’s record of 2,800 feet held, but Anthony was impressed. That evening he wrote to his friend Tom Reinhold that she made her turns better than Hilgers or Cremer, and had descended in a long circular glide that he described as tadellos (impeccable).23 Ten days later, in the mid-afternoon of November 21, Ljuba finally did break the women’s altitude record—and by a wide margin too. Her flight in a specially prepared Spider up to 6,600 feet was a daring feat, as pilots’ lore had it that flights above 4,500 feet were exceptionally dangerous and could lead to hallucinations, heart palpitations, headache, and sleepiness. In a thirty-minute climb Ljuba managed to set her record. She enjoyed the view and afterward relished the memory of the flight, although she would later complain that the cold so high in the air had made her legs and arms numb.24 Luckily for her, the descent went considerably quicker: she spiraled down in six and a half minutes and landed her plane safely. A group of admirers, Anthony in the lead, awaited her by the Fokker hangar with enthusiasm, laurels, and admiration. Ljuba hardly managed to answer the many questions put to her; the cold had numbed her facial muscles, something that sips of an alcoholic beverage during her descent had not been able to avert.25
Business, on the other hand, remained problematic. Although Anthony had enough commercial spirit to apply for patents for his automatically stable Spider and for a range of minor inventions related to aeronautical construction, he was still scraping the bottom of the revenue barrel. In mid-September 1912 he had to conclude that he had sold no more than five aircraft and that the net result of his trip to St. Petersburg was that his father’s entire loan of 50,000 guilders was now exhausted. Providing more flying lessons brought no quick solution either, although Anthony believed they still held earning potential. One reason was that Heinrich von Preussen, the brother of Emperor Wilhelm II, had launched an aviation appeal in April 1912. His massive campaign, the Nationale Flugspende (National Air Subscription), aimed to expand the number of aviators from which the German army could draw in times of crisis. Twenty manufacturers were selected to give flight training, to be reimbursed by public funds of 7 million marks. Despite his status as a foreigner, Fokker qualified as one of them.26
Being selected for the Nationale Flugspende did not alter the fact that too little money was coming in. Fokker now had twenty-four people on his staff to pay.27 Costs were spiraling. To Anthony’s panic, his father chose this moment to pull the plug. Anthony’s repeated pleas and warnings that if his father withdrew he stood to lose his complete investment remained unheeded. Herman Fokker refused to bankroll his son any longer. To him, the 50,000 guilders he had provided represented the full amount he was willing to risk in his son’s career:
If you understood anything about business you would know that all businesses can go wrong. If I would now be so stupid to keep furnishing you until I would have invested, for example, half or three-quarters of my estate in your venture, and your business went belly-up, then I would not only be forced to go hungry or find myself a job in my old age, but I also have a wife and daughter who would be dragged down in the demise. I would act like a criminal if I were to risk their future for your pleasure….Perhaps I would have risked more than 50,000 guilders if I would have received proper monthly accounts of the capital used, which it was your duty to provide, but now I have been forced to set a maximum….Now I have received notice from the bank that you have used up that maximum, from which obviously follows that the 50,000 guilders have been used up and that the bank will not provide any more money. And neither will I, of course. This is what I meant when I stated before that you never seem to understand what the word “maximum” means.28
To make matters worse, Anthony’s love life was on a downhill slope as well. In and around Johannisthal, he paraded “his” Ljuba as “my Russian girlfriend from St. Petersburg,” but her interest in the monomaniacal Dutchman, with his strange behavior and shrill voice, was waning quickly. Ever since returning to Berlin, Anthony was preoccupied by his business troubles. Partly out of uncertainty when facing Ljuba, his conversation with her was reduced to a single topic: flying. On the other hand, Ljuba was only too happy to relish the attention of Johannisthal’s other young airmen, and soon she attracted a small crowd of male admirers. When on the ground, Anthony was defenseless against the competition: “I worked hard and was then often so tired that when I visited her that I dropped asleep instead of telling her what a lovely babe she really was. And if I happened to be awake, flying was, for lack of a better one, the only topic of conversation every time.”29
To raise more cash, Anthony had to fly as often as possible. He took up where he had left off as a demonstration pilot. In the Autumn Aviation Week that started on October 5, he made sure people noticed him by finishing first in the altitude competition, leveling out at 9,300 feet. His Spider did not feature at the head of the field in comparative speed trials for monoplanes or in takeoff run tests. But he managed to finish third in trials to drop an object on a target from the air. The next day he got his name in the papers by flying a passenger all the way to Hamburg.30
As Anthony’s funds grew tighter, his plans to promote business got wilder. Early in October Jan Hilgers, freshly arrived from St. Petersburg, took a train for Holland to approach Anthony’s wealthy uncles in Haarlem with a proposal to invest in an expedition to the Dutch East Indies and sell planes there. He failed to raise the money but proceeded with the plan regardless—to the intense anger of Anthony, who had been so careless as to suggest he would contribute financially.31 Hilgers forced Anthony to sign an agreement on December 20, 1912, in which Fokker supplied two planes for the venture, plus spare parts. Hilgers’s part of the deal was to fund the sea transportation to Java, organize a demonstration tour, and pay the deposit of 2,000 marks for the two planes. Eight days later, he and his tour manager Peter Klingenspoor boarded the steamer Suevia of the Hamburg-America Line’s East Asian Freight Steamer Service, destined for Surabaya. On its stern the ship carried two Spiders in their transportation crates, plus another crate with spare parts. The plan was to provide aerial displays in the Dutch East Indies, Siam, and Australia.32 Hilgers and Fokker had agreed to split the proceeds on a fifty–fifty basis. At the end of January 1913, Hilgers arrived on Java, where he was able to produce a letter of recommendation signed by the Dutch Minister for Colonial Affairs, Jan de Waal Malefijt. The initial results of the endeavor were hopeful. In Surabaya the community raised 18,000 guilders to stage an aviation week with flying displays in February. A month later, however, disaster struck. One of the two Spiders was lost in a crash at Semarang. A second crash followed on April 2. Hilgers tried to repair and reduce the weight of the aircraft, but without success. The scheme eventually cost Anthony Fokker another 40,000 guilders.33
Meanwhile, Anthony continued singing praises of his beloved Ljuba’s flying displays in letters home.34 Thanks to her altitude record, she was now one of the star performers at Johannisthal, and with her theater background and her liberated attitude, she was like a magnet to the young fliers in Café Senftleben. One of her admirers there later wrote, “When she dances the Krakowiak in her red Russian leather boots, there is not a pilot who will think of airplanes or engines.”35 Anthony saw how the Berlin aviator Gustav Adolf Michaelis—in his own words, “a good-looking guy who owned a 100 hp motorcar and knew how to handle women”—was taking his place in Ljuba’s arms. Toward the end of 1912 Michaelis and Ljuba had embarked on a passionate love affair, a development that Anthony seemed helpless to prevent. He sent his mother a photo card of himself with a slightly pathetic message: “The following image represents…Tony at Joh[annisthal]. Skinny from worries and hunger. Post[card] received. Adio—regards to Dad and Toos.”36
The love between Ljuba and Gustav was not fated to last. On May 27, 1913, Michaelis’s plane crashed. The badly wounded pilot was taken to hospital, where he died of his injuries five days later. Ljuba was heartbroken, but Anthony could not bring himself to overcome his wounded pride and comfort her: “I was angry, I was jealous, and I was too proud to show my feelings. When a woman looked at another man I would do anything, rather than admit that I was still interested in her. Even if I felt miserable, I would not show it to her.”37 However, Johannisthal was full of other young aviators who were all too eager to comfort Ljuba, and it was not long before she found herself in the arms of the Frenchman Léon Letort. Letort had arrived on Johannisthal after a direct flight from Paris on July 14. With that morning’s Parisian newspaper under his arm and a bag full of prize money, he walked into Café Senftleben and into Ljuba’s life. At 4:30 a.m. on July 27, he and Ljuba took off in his fast Morane-Saulnier monoplane, in an attempt to win the 10,000 marks available for the fliers who would be the first to cover the distance between the German and French capitals. Fokker escorted them part of the way in his own plane and then sadly watched them fly off into the distance. It would be thirteen years before he and Ljuba next met. As it turned out, the Berlin-Paris record was not broken. Rains along the route forced Léon and Ljuba down near Hannover, and in Cologne they remained grounded for two full days.
In an effort to drown his sorrows, Anthony plunged into Berlin’s night life and had himself photographed with several cheerful young ladies in an apparently very bright mood. He noted in his autobiography in 1931 that “for six weeks I totally lost my head and participated in the unruly life of the other aviators; I went out with them in Berlin at night looking for traditional pleasures….For the first time in my life I learned something about women. I visited nightclubs and met the kind of women there that I didn’t know existed. I found them enchanting, merry and ravishing. It was impossible for me to treat them in the fashion that the other aviators did, so casual, without recourse to their true feelings. I liked hearing them speak about their life and I studied their character. More than once I helped a girl whom I admired to find a different, less unworthy source of income.”38