“Lawnchair” Larry Walters (left) with TV host Alan King on America’s Funniest Foul-Ups in 1984
By Ian Youngs
Entertainment & arts reporter
In 1982, a truck driver made headlines when he tied 42 helium balloons to a garden chair and flew over part of Los Angeles. A new stage musical reclaims him as a hero, although questions remain over his story’s tragic ending.
In the aftermath of his unconventional voyage, Larry Walters assured the American public he wasn’t actually a crackpot who had risked life and limb with a hare-brained scheme that was dreamed up on a whim.
No – taking flight had been a lifelong ambition, he told interviewers afterwards.
But he had been rejected by the US Air Force because of bad eyesight, so carried out years of careful research to make his dream come true in his own peculiarly homespun way.
When he came back down to Earth – somehow unscathed after floating in the chair across the approach to LAX airport and landing in power lines – Walters’ escapade caused a minor sensation.
In an interview on David Letterman’s TV show, he tried to explain how serious his plan had been – but his references to his “craft” and “ground crew” failed to quell the laughter from the audience.
The craft was an ordinary piece of garden furniture, and the ground crew were a few friends and his fiancée in her small back yard.
Image source, Josh Bird
Charlie McCullagh and Evelyn Hoskins play Larry and fiancée Carol in 42 Balloons
“When people were laughing at him, he said, ‘I knew what I was doing’,” says Jack Godfrey, who has written the musical about the man nicknamed Lawnchair Larry.
“He says multiple times in the interview, which is something that really sticks with me and is in the show, ‘I knew what I was doing’.
“Even though he does acknowledge the absurdity of some of the things, I think he’s saying, it might have seemed ridiculous, but if you really look at every step of the plan, everything was organised and carefully arranged and it wasn’t just a careless thing.
“He was a pilot, not just a guy sitting in a chair. He was actually a pilot – in his head.”
Indeed, Walters did have everything planned out. He had calculated how many balloons he needed, attached 13 plastic jugs of water to his chair as ballast, and took an air pistol to burst the balloons to control his descent.
However, not everything went according to plan.
Aircraft sightings
Larry ended up soaring much higher than expected, losing a pair of glasses overboard as he shot up to 16,000ft (4,880m). Two commercial aircraft reported sightings to air traffic control.
After shooting out seven balloons, he accidentally dropped the gun before the remaining balloons started to deflate and he landed unharmed after about 45 minutes.
Larry’s initial fame may not have lasted much longer than his flight, but his exploits have continued to hold an unlikely fascination for four decades.
He has inspired numerous cluster ballooning copycats and a 2003 film starring Rhys Ifans, while the balloon idea was taken to new heights in Pixar’s 2009 movie Up.
He has now made it across the Atlantic thanks to the musical 42 Balloons, which opens at the Lowry theatre in Salford, Greater Manchester, on Thursday.
“There’s something about the story that I really connected with,” its writer and composer says.
Seeing someone achieve an apparently far-fetched life goal is inspiring, Godfrey explains. The 31-year-old wrote the show while working part-time as a teacher and harbouring his own more sedate ambition.
Image source, Getty Images
The story may sound familiar to those who have seen Pixar’s movie Up (premiere picture from 2009)
“I had just moved to London and I had this big dream of becoming a writer and I had people in my life who were doubting me – in a way that is quite natural. My family and friends are all supportive, but I don’t come from a theatre background.
“So when I discovered the story about this guy who had a dream and people doubted him or he had obstacles in his way… I thought, that’s such an inspirational story of someone who is going to overcome the odds and make his dream come true by whatever means necessary.
“[It’s] a real underdog story that I really connected with at the time because I thought, this guy’s just like me. There’s something about it that really inspired me.
“And I thought, maybe this is something that other people will connect with. It feels like a universal story, the idea of having a dream.”
By writing about Larry’s dream, Godfrey has gone some way to achieving his own, and is now a rising star of musical theatre.
42 Balloons, his first professional show, has had notable backing. Producers Andy and Wendy Barnes also discovered hit show Six, while the Lowry gave early support to Operation Mincemeat – which has just won the Olivier Award for best new musical.
Godfrey is also preparing for his second professional show, called Babies, which will open at London’s Other Palace theatre at the end of May.
Image source, The Lowry
The cast in rehearsals for 42 Balloons
Meanwhile, someone else to have been inspired by Lawnchair Larry is Mark Barry, who started investigating the story and eventually came to act as his family’s spokesman.
He set out to correct some of the misconceptions about Larry.
“I really felt like people thought he was a kind of a lunatic, and I wanted to let people know that this was not Larry,” he says. “This guy was us. The only difference was he pursued his dream.
“He was a dreamer who fulfilled his dreams, unlike most of us, who just sit in our chair. He actually pursued it.”
Barry, a pilot and simulator engineer from Arizona, tracked down the actual lawnchair, which Larry had given to a child from the neighbourhood where he landed. The chair is now in the US National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
Barry isn’t involved in the musical, although the chair’s rediscovery is part of the plot. As is Larry’s death at the age of 44 in 1993, 11 years after his flight.
At the time, his mother told US media that he shot himself in the heart after hiking to his favourite spot in the Angeles National Forest. It was widely accepted to have been a suicide. That’s the storyline in the show.
New evidence?
However, his mother later told the New Yorker there were suspicious circumstances. There were drug smugglers in the area, and Larry was found with the gun in his right hand, whereas he was left-handed, she said. In the same article, Larry’s sister dismissed the suggestion of foul play.
Barry now claims to have uncovered evidence that Larry’s death was not suicide – but doesn’t want to give further details until he’s finished writing a book about Larry’s life and death.
So, part of Larry’s story may still be left to told.
Whatever the truth, he seems destined to go down in history as a heroic maverick of everyday American life.
Larry told the LA Times: “I didn’t think that by fulfilling my goal in life, my dream, that would create such a stir – and make people laugh.”
42 Balloons is at The Lowry in Salford until 19 May.
