Being back at Trump Management full time demoralized Freddy. Between that, the stress of seeing his angry and disdainful father every day, and having two children under the age of three at home, he needed a reprieve. The summer after I turned one, my parents rented a cottage in Montauk. They planned to have Mom, Fritz, and me stay out there from Memorial Day until Labor Day, while Dad, stuck in Brooklyn Monday through Friday, would fly his Piper Cherokee out to the landing strip across from the cottage to join us on the weekends.
The weekdays were long and lonely for both of them, but Freddy, especially, lived for the weekends, which often included invitations for friends to join him on the flight out. Billy and Annamaria, now married, were their most frequent guests.
During the long summer days of 1966, they would take the boat out for a day of deep-sea fishing and grill their catch in the backyard in the evening, or have clambakes on the beach with steamers and cherrystones they bought at a seafood market and shucked themselves. After dark, Freddy set up a portable movie screen and projector, and Freddy and Billy watched W. C. Fields movies while their wives chatted quietly in the dark.
Sometimes it seemed just like old times; except, of course, it wasn’t. As the summer wore on, Linda noticed that Freddy was drinking earlier in the day, especially when they took the boat out for long trips.
In June, Linda’s parents, Mike and Mary, set out on a long road trip in a van my grandfather had fitted out to accommodate my grandmother’s wheelchair. After stopping to see us in Montauk, they planned to visit the rest of the family in Michigan, Minnesota, and Colorado. Nobody said it out loud, but Mary Clapp didn’t think she had long to live and imagined this might be her last opportunity to see her far-flung family.
They stayed in Montauk for two weeks. My grandmother was in a great deal of pain and Freddy did everything he could to cheer her up. Just before my grandparents left, he told his mother-in-law that when she came back to visit the next year, he’d have her out on the tennis court.
Mike and Mary Clapp adored their son-in-law. Mike shared his love of flying, and he’d been in awe of Freddy as soon as he and Linda arrived in Fort Lauderdale in Freddy’s Piper Cherokee. That awe approached something akin to hero worship when Freddy started flying 707s for TWA.
Mary appreciated how sweet and solicitous Freddy could be, and he treated her with great gentleness.
His in-laws’ love made Freddy feel valued in a way his own parents, especially his father, never did. But he never felt that he could unburden himself to them or rely on them for emotional support. Their admiration blinded them to Freddy’s struggles and the alarming disintegration of their daughter’s marriage.
Toward the end of that first summer, Freddy often flew back from Montauk to New York on Sunday evenings after a long day of drinking, without waiting to sober up before getting behind the controls. He flew intoxicated even when he had guests with him. Whenever Linda expressed concern, he waved her off, insulted that she doubted his skill, which only intensified the tension between them.
One Sunday he’d been drinking so much that Linda felt she needed to stop him. “Freddy, you cannot fly like this. You’re going to get yourself or somebody else killed.”
He reminded her he was an excellent pilot.
“It doesn’t matter how good you are,” she said. “You’re drunk.”
Freddy got close to her and through clenched teeth hissed, “It’s none of your goddamn business.”
He started throwing his gear into his flight bag while she pleaded with him to wait until the morning to fly back to New York. When he continued to ignore her, she threw her drink in his face. Stunned and angry, he left without saying another word and flew home anyway.
Freddy was an excellent pilot, but it wasn’t the first time he’d flown when he shouldn’t have. He sometimes skipped the preflight inspection. Only a couple of years earlier, he and Linda had had plans to spend the weekend in Bimini. Freddy had leased a plane at Teterboro Airport, a commuter airport in New Jersey, to fly to Norfolk, Virginia, where Taylor Johnson and his wife, Jimbo, would join them, and then the four of them would continue on to the island. The morning of the trip, however, the weather wasn’t good.
As they sat in the apartment waiting to get the all clear from the control tower, which took several hours, Freddy drank steadily to pass the time. Despite Linda’s misgivings, Freddy drove them the forty-five minutes to the airport. When they arrived, they were well behind schedule, so in order to make up some time, Freddy skipped the preflight check. He was usually meticulous, and his lapse in judgment was, at least as far as Linda knew, unheard of—the pilot or flight engineer always checks the plane, and on a plane that small, the preflight inspection falls to the pilot, especially if the plane doesn’t belong to him.
The takeoff and flight went smoothly, but when they approached the Norfolk airport, an air traffic controller waved them off. The plane had a flat tire, and they were told to circle the airport a few times while an emergency truck sprayed foam on the runway in case the plane’s engines caught fire during the crash landing (there is no other way to land a plane without landing gear). It’s possible that the wheel had been damaged during the flight, but it was also possible that Freddy might have detected the problem if he’d done the preflight check, a fact that didn’t escape either of them.
As they made their approach, Linda’s stewardess training kicked in: she took the pens out of Freddy’s shirt pocket and stowed them so they didn’t impale anybody. Freddy landed the plane without incident, and as they waited for the emergency crew to give the all clear, Freddy saluted her. “Good job,” Linda said, and then they shook hands. But before meeting the Johnsons, they agreed to fly commercial the rest of the way to Bimini.
Linda was alarmed at the increasing frequency of these types of incidents, and by the end of the summer of ’66, she was exhausted from entertaining, taking care of two small children almost single-handedly, and worrying about her husband’s drinking and erratic behavior.
It was a relief to be back in Jamaica that autumn. Freddy, however, already had his sights set on going to Montauk again the following year.