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Landing Gear · Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

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  Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
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  Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
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  Speaker 1: full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
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  Speaker 1: all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
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  Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
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  Speaker 1: of Curiosities. When actors performed together, they become like family.
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  Speaker 1: Spending hours a day for months on set together tends
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  Speaker 1: to bring them closer many experiences they have or shared,
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  Speaker 1: which turn into stories told in interviews and memoirs if
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  Speaker 1: they get to live that long, that is. John Wayne
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  Speaker 1: was known as a tough guy, the king of the
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  Speaker 1: Western who starred in films like Red River, The Searchers,
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  Speaker 1: and True Grit. Throughout his career, he battled outlaws, Nazis,
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  Speaker 1: and Vietnamese soldiers. Off camera, he battled something much worse.
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  Speaker 1: It started in nineteen sixty four with a lung cancer
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  Speaker 1: diagnosis that required his left lung to be removed. Wayne
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  Speaker 1: was known for smoking five packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day,
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  Speaker 1: so it wasn't exactly a surprise when he got the news.
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  Speaker 1: A little over a decade later, though, Wayne contracted stomach
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  Speaker 1: cancer and died a short while later. Another actor of
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  Speaker 1: the time, Susan Hayward, had made a name for herself,
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  Speaker 1: starring in films alongside legendary performers like Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergmann,
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  Speaker 1: and Gregory Peck. She won numerous awards and had a
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  Speaker 1: very successful career spanning over three decades. In March of
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  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, Hayward visited her doctor, where it was
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  Speaker 1: discovered that she had a tumor in her lung. One
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  Speaker 1: year later, she suffered a seizure which revealed the terminal
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  Speaker 1: diagnosis of brain cancer. She died in nineteen seventy five
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  Speaker 1: at only fifty seven years old. In fact, a num
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  Speaker 1: ber of actors, directors, and Hollywood crew members died of
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  Speaker 1: cancer between nineteen sixty and nineteen eighty. Agnes moorehead of
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  Speaker 1: Bewitched fame, passed away at seventy three years old in
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  Speaker 1: April of nineteen seventy four. She had been diagnosed with
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  Speaker 1: uterine cancer. Actor and director Dick Powell died in nineteen
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  Speaker 1: sixty three after battling aggressive form of cancer that had
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  Speaker 1: developed in his neck and chest. He was only fifty eight,
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  Speaker 1: and these weren't random occurrences either. Every person on this
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  Speaker 1: list was connected by one individual. Howard Hughes uses keen
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  Speaker 1: business sense had earned him an incredible wealth, but his
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  Speaker 1: true passion was filmmaking. His early films were flops, yet
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  Speaker 1: he always looked for waste to outdo himself in movies
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  Speaker 1: like Hell's Angels, which used real airplanes and pilots for
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  Speaker 1: the dog fight scenes. In the nineteen fifties, Hughes made
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  Speaker 1: another big budget picture. It was set in thirteenth century
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  Speaker 1: Asia at a time of great unrest. Genghis Khan, the
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  Speaker 1: violent chief of the Mongolian army, had fallen in love
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  Speaker 1: with the daughter of a riot a leader, which would
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  Speaker 1: spark a great war between two sides. It was called
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  Speaker 1: The Conqueror, and Hughes decided to film it at one
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  Speaker 1: area of the midwestern United States. He shot much of
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  Speaker 1: the film in St. George, Utah, using its canyons and
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  Speaker 1: deserts to stand in for the Asian landscape. Hughes spent
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  Speaker 1: weeks there with his cast and crew, even going so
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  Speaker 1: far as to dig up sixty tons of soil from
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  Speaker 1: the filming location to send back to Hollywood. He wanted
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  Speaker 1: things to look as close as possible when it came
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  Speaker 1: time to do reshoots. Except Hughes didn't direct this film
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  Speaker 1: the way he had others. He was merely a producer.
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  Speaker 1: He hired Dick Powell to direct for him instead. For
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  Speaker 1: his leading lady, he cast Susan Hayward, and alongside her
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  Speaker 1: Agnes Moorehead Genghis Khan was played by none other than
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  Speaker 1: John Wayne himself. But unlike other Hollywood tragedies, their deaths
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  Speaker 1: were not due to a curse or a strange coincidence.
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  Speaker 1: You see, Howard Hughes had made a grave mistake when
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  Speaker 1: scouting for locations. St. George, Utah, was only one thirty
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  Speaker 1: seven miles downwind of the Neve at a national security site,
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  Speaker 1: a nuclear testing area used heavily. During nineteen three, a
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  Speaker 1: few years before filming started, eleven nuclear weapons were detonated
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  Speaker 1: at that site. The fallout traveled all the way to St. George,
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  Speaker 1: where it sat for years. Out of the two d
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  Speaker 1: and twenty people Hughes had hired to work on the
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  Speaker 1: film eventually contracted some type of cancer. Of them, forty
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  Speaker 1: six passed away. Hughes was so upset about what he
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  Speaker 1: had done he spent twelve million dollars, buying up every
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  Speaker 1: copy of the film and storing it in his vault.
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  Speaker 1: Toward the end of his life, when he locked himself
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  Speaker 1: in his home theater and grown his hair and fingernails
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  Speaker 1: two epic proportions. Hughes allegedly watched only two films the
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  Speaker 1: entire time I stationed Zebra and the Conqueror. For most
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  Speaker 1: of the people involved, the real conqueror of the film
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  Speaker 1: wasn't John Wayne's grossly miscast Genghis Khan. It was an
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  Speaker 1: invisible threat, more deadly and more fearsome than they could
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  Speaker 1: ever I've imagined one that didn't go away when the
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  Speaker 1: director yelled cut. Ask any child what superpower they'd love
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  Speaker 1: to have, and most will probably give you the same answer.
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  Speaker 1: Flight to soar above the trees and then come to
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  Speaker 1: a safe landing is the dream of comic book fans
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  Speaker 1: and aspiring heroes everywhere. One man also had that dream,
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  Speaker 1: and he came very close to achieving it, And even
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  Speaker 1: though he didn't quite succeed, he certainly left his mark
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  Speaker 1: on this world. France was born in Austria but spent
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  Speaker 1: most of his life in Paris, France. He was a tailor,
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  Speaker 1: by trade and opened a successful dressmaking shop in the city.
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  Speaker 1: He spent over a decade catering to wealthy tourists from
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  Speaker 1: his homeland, watching the world change around him. Over in
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  Speaker 1: the at It states, something miraculous was happening. Franz wanted
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  Speaker 1: to be a part of it too. Some years earlier,
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  Speaker 1: two brothers had taken their motorized airplane on its first
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  Speaker 1: successful flight in North Carolina. From that point forward, Man's
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  Speaker 1: goal would be to fly higher and farther than he
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  Speaker 1: ever had before. Unfortunately, the dawn of the aviation age
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  Speaker 1: also brought with it numerous accidents and fatalities. The parachutes
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  Speaker 1: that had been developed worked only under specific circumstances. No
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  Speaker 1: one had built one that could be deployed after the
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  Speaker 1: person had already jumped out of the plane, especially at
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  Speaker 1: lower altitudes. But France had an idea. Rather than a
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  Speaker 1: big balloon light canopy that opened overhead, he would make
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  Speaker 1: a suit. It would have an ample amount of silk
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  Speaker 1: fabrics sewn around the person, like a kind of webbing.
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  Speaker 1: As the pilot leapt from a tall enough height, the
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  Speaker 1: wind would catch within the fabric and allow the pilot
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  Speaker 1: to glide safely to Earth, so France got to work
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  Speaker 1: on a prototype, testing it on dummies by tying the
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  Speaker 1: one five pound massive silk around and then launching them
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  Speaker 1: from the fifth floor of his apartment building. In his
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  Speaker 1: initial experiments, his homemade parachutes worked well, floating the dummies
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  Speaker 1: softly to the ground. He then took his design to
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  Speaker 1: the local Aero Club, a precursor to a regulated commercial
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  Speaker 1: flight organization. If France's parachute suit didn't pass their sniff test,
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  Speaker 1: it wouldn't be allowed in any airplane. Sadly, they told
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  Speaker 1: him it wasn't strong enough to support a full grown
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  Speaker 1: adult and encouraged him to go back to what he
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  Speaker 1: did best, making dresses. Undeterred, France continued to work on
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  Speaker 1: his suit by strengthening the canopy and conducting more tests
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  Speaker 1: with his dummies, but none of those tests proved fruitful.
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  Speaker 1: His big chance to prove himself would come the following year,
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  Speaker 1: when the Aero Club would announce a competition to develop
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  Speaker 1: a workable parachute for pilots. The only rule they had
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  Speaker 1: was that it had to be light, no more than
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  Speaker 1: fifty five pounds, so France went back to work. He
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  Speaker 1: cut much of the weight of his original design while
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  Speaker 1: stretching it out to be wider, thus collecting more air
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  Speaker 1: on the way down. It still didn't work, though, whenever
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  Speaker 1: he launched a dummy into his building's courtyard, it would
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  Speaker 1: plummet to the ground with a thud. He even tried
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  Speaker 1: testing it himself, jumping from a height of ten feet
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  Speaker 1: into a pile of straw below. Good thing he'd placed
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  Speaker 1: the straw there too, as his parachute suit was of
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  Speaker 1: no use. Afterward, he thought maybe the problem was that
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  Speaker 1: he hadn't climbed high enough for the parachute to expand.
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  Speaker 1: He took a few dummies to the first level of
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  Speaker 1: the Eiffel Tower and gave them a push, but it
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  Speaker 1: still wasn't good enough. In order to test the viability
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  Speaker 1: of his invention, he would have to test it from
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  Speaker 1: the top of the tower. He received permission from Paris
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  Speaker 1: authorities in late nineteen eleven, and by February of nineteen
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  Speaker 1: twelve he was finally ready. He showed up at the
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  Speaker 1: tower on the morning of February four with his suit,
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  Speaker 1: which looked very much like mechanics overalls with a large
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  Speaker 1: hump on the back. It was much cleaner than his
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  Speaker 1: original design and weighed only twenty pounds, well within the
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  Speaker 1: competition's guidelines. Cinematographers had also come to film the attempt.
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  Speaker 1: One remained on the ground, while another followed France up
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  Speaker 1: to the top of the tower. In the film, it's
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  Speaker 1: clear that the inventor is hesitant as he wavers at
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  Speaker 1: the edge, debating his decision. In the end, though, he
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  Speaker 1: chose to pour every ounce of faith into his parachute,
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  Speaker 1: much to the surprise of French police, who had no
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  Speaker 1: idea that he would be performing the jump himself. They
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  Speaker 1: had only authorized the test on the grounds that he
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  Speaker 1: would be using dummies, and perhaps he should have. France
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  Speaker 1: Raquelt jumped off the top of the Eiffel Tower and
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  Speaker 1: extended his arms. His parachute, though didn't work the way
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  Speaker 1: he had expected, rather than open up behind him, wrapped
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  Speaker 1: itself around his body as he plummeted to the earth below.
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  Speaker 1: He was declared dead at the scene, and ever since
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  Speaker 1: his story has served as a cautionary tale for other
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  Speaker 1: amateur inventors, reminding them to test their creations thoroughly and
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  Speaker 1: not to fly too close to the sun. I hope
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  Speaker 1: you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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  Speaker 1: Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
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  Speaker 1: the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
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  Speaker 1: was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how
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  Speaker 1: Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
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  Speaker 1: which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
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  Speaker 1: you can learn all about it over at the World
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  Speaker 1: of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.