Amelia Earhart

by Doris L. Rich

  At her next stop, in Omaha, after a play she went backstage to talk to the stars, Lou Tellegen and Eve Casanova. She asked Casanova how she kept such a beautiful complexion and said hers was so sunburned and weatherbeaten that she was ashamed of it. Although she soon stopped talking about it in public, Amelia did think her skin was unattractive and that her figure was ruined by thighs that were too heavy. Slacks or floor-length evening gowns would hide the latter defect, but flying left her no escape from exposure to sun and wind. Her face was frequently sunburned, freckled, and sometimes peeling.

  In Omaha she gave her only display of temper on the trip, after she discovered that there were no attendants at the airfield, her plane had not been serviced, and someone had folded back the wings the wrong way. Instead of criticizing the airfield attendants, she turned her ire on souvenir hunters. “Why they even cut pieces of the fabric from the wings of your machine,” she complained, “and then ask you to autograph them! Some day a souvenir hound will carry off a vital part and there will be a crash,” she told a reporter.

  The flying vacation ended on October 13 in New York when G. P. presented her with a schedule of future engagements designed to boost sales of her book, Twenty Hours Forty Minutes: Our Flight in the “Friendship,” released a month earlier. In spite of brisk sales and generally flattering reviews, the book was not very interesting. Other than entries from Amelia’s diary, it was a dull summary of the problems of commercial aviation and a plea for more support from the government and the public. The last chapter did show a flair for self-deprecating humor, a talent Amelia was already using to great advantage in speeches and interviews. In one account of her difficulties with photographers, she described a visit to Hyde Park High School where a cameraman, trying to include a group of students in the picture with her, asked her to step forward onto a grand piano that was level with the stage. In a note to her, a friend who saw the picture asked, “How did you get on the piano?” Amelia was certain her friend had pictured her making “scandalizing progress through the west, leaping from piano to piano.”

  Amelia did not complain about the heavy schedule of engagements made for her by G. P. He had financed the Avian for her, her first plane since she was forced to sell the Kinner Airster four years earlier. She had already collected other rewards. For appearing on the NBC broadcast in an auto show at Madison Square Garden, she had been presented with a blue Chrysler roadster. For her endorsement of a fur-lined, leather “Amelia Earhart Flying Suit,” a Fifth Avenue department store gave her one. She had no intention of “wearing it up and down Fifth Avenue,” as the advertisement claimed, but she had learned from G. P. that there could be considerable gain in enduring such foolishness.

  However, G. P. made a mistake in advising her to accept fifteen hundred dollars for endorsing a brand of cigarettes with Stultz and Gordon. McCall’s magazine, which had offered her a job, hastily withdrew the offer after an ominous number of former admirers, who believed that nice women did not smoke, wrote letters of protest. Amelia did not, in fact, smoke but Stultz and Gordon had needed the money and the tobacco company refused to use the advertisement without her name. Amelia countered by giving the entire sum to Byrd’s upcoming South Pole expedition. Soon after, William Randolph Hearst’s magazine, Cosmopolitan, came to her rescue with a job as aviation editor.

  Her first article appeared in the November edition. Entitled “Try Flying,” it was a dull rehash of material from her book. More interesting was the introduction of the magazine’s newest columnist by O. O. McIntyre who called Amelia “a real American girl”—the answer to the problem of decadent, young American women indulging in everything from gin-guzzling to “harlotry.” McIntyre claimed Amelia had already become “a symbol of new womanhood” that would be emulated by thousands of young girls. In time, his effusive accolade would prove to be true.

  Amelia liked answering her mail, but dreaded writing the column, and made at least one attempt to hire a ghostwriter. During a week spent taking membership pledges for the American Red Cross at a table in Arnold Constable’s Fifth Avenue store, Amelia met Ella May Frazer, a young freelance writer who introduced herself after she saw that Amelia sat alone, unrecognized by the shoppers. “She was the most natural woman in the world,” Frazer said, “and didn’t try to draw attention to herself—even as a saleswoman for the Red Cross.” When Frazer returned several times during the week, Amelia told her that she dreaded the program proposed by Cosmopolitan in which she was to fly to a dozen cities in the next twelve months, writing an article on each flight and giving a lecture to a women’s club in each city. She said it was impossible to take notes while flying, and once she landed there was always a group waiting for her, then a speech to make that same day. If Frazer would come with her, Amelia said, to take notes and do the writing, then she could fly and give the lectures. But first she would have to give Frazer a test flight to make certain she liked flying.

  Frazer had not told Amelia that she was four months pregnant, nor had she informed her husband about Amelia’s job offer. When she consulted her obstetrician he told her flying would be too dangerous in her condition and her husband absolutely forbade it. “Telling Amelia was terrible,” she said. “She was very disappointed but she did say that she liked me and felt that we could have been a wonderful pair to do this.” Eventually Amelia persuaded the magazine’s editor to abandon the plan.

  To supplement her income from endorsements, book royalties, and the magazine column, Amelia gave lectures, work that would eventually bring in the greater part of her earnings. G. P. helped her to become an accomplished performer. After assessing her appearance, voice, and personality, he asked for changes where he thought they were needed. He approved of her “natural” hairstyle, so artfully bleached and curled, so carefully disarranged, and of her posture, her expressive hands, and her low-pitched, musical voice. He thought she had excellent taste in clothes but called her hats “a public menace” and told her to wear one only when necessary and then only one with a small brim.

  He taught her how to talk into a microphone, to point at a screen without turning her back to the audience, and to avoid lowering her voice at the end of a sentence. He also advised her on posing for photographers. At first the flare of flashguns had caught her pigeon-toed, her hands frozen at her sides, her wide smile revealing a marked space between her two upper front teeth. G. P. told her to close her lips when she smiled. Although she never liked being photographed, she learned to pose like a professional model.

  After she returned from her cross-country flight, Putnam dispatched her on a round of lectures, including one in New Haven at a college aeronautical club conference hosted by Yale University, and another in Detroit where five hundred members of the Detroit Adcraft and Women’s Advertising clubs packed the dining room of the Detroit-Leland Hotel to hear her speak. She was on her way to becoming a star of the nation’s lecture circuit, the principal means by which celebrities could be seen before the advent of television.

  G. P. continued to notify the press of her every move. In December she attended the International Civil Aeronautics Conference in Washington, which was followed by a celebration at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight. Although she was not an official delegate she was one of two hundred guests invited to go by sea on the steamer, District of Columbia. Three thousand others had to find their own transportation. In a letter to her mother Amelia wrote: “I was considered important enough to be the guest of the government so I am riding and eating free.… It’s the kind of junket you’d like and had I any idea I was going I should have arranged for your coming.”

  Amy was fortunate to have missed it. The celebration was plagued by fog, rain, and transportation breakdowns but when the monument at Kill Devil Hill was unveiled on December 17, Amelia was right where G. P. wanted her to be—standing between Orville Wright and Sen. Hiram Bingham, president of the NAA.

  A week later Amy went to the apartment in G
reenwich House to spend the Christmas holiday of 1928 with her daughter. When Amelia bought two tickets to take her mother on an air tour over the city, her purchase was reported in New York newspapers. Amelia Earhart was still “news.” In six months she had flown across the country and back, visited more than thirty cities, and given at least one hundred speeches and twice as many interviews. For the first time in her life she believed it might be possible to fly and earn a decent living.

  * Her father, Edward Binney, was the manufacturer of Crayola crayons.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Vega

  By January of 1929 Amelia Earhart had become the best-known woman pilot in America. G. P. had made her famous but she never forgot that she had been nothing more than a passenger on the Friendship. Amelia wanted to fly—to go faster, higher, or farther than any woman (and if possible, any man) had ever gone before. She needed a plane designed to do it—a big powerful aircraft. Her choice was the Lockheed Vega. It took her six months to get it but a week before her thirty-second birthday she owned one.

  During the first half of that year she made paid public appearances in twelve cities. Whatever her fees for these visits, she certainly earned them. For a typical one in Rochester, New York, in January her schedule included breakfast with the committee meeting the train at eight o’clock; an inspection of the airport and two airplane plants before noon; a luncheon and speech for the Advertising Club; a trip to nearby LeRoy, New York, where Donald W. Woodward who had purchased the Friendship had put the plane on display; tea with a LeRoy couple and dinner with members of the Rochester Automobile Dealers Association. Her speech at dinner was followed by an auto show at which she was cornered by a pushing, shoving crowd until she was rescued by two policemen and four association members who escorted her from the building. She returned to New York on the ten o’clock train after fourteen hours of continuous public scrutiny.

  Her lectures were a great success, although her audiences were more interested in her than in what she said. Amelia was the message. If anyone came expecting a coarse or odd person, perhaps even a lesbian (what sort of woman would challenge an ocean and suggest that other women become aviators?), they were disappointed. A woman who saw her in Detroit remembered her fifty years later as “a slender figure in grey chiffon with coral beads. Her smile and her gracious femininity were unforgettable, but what she said I don’t recall.”

  Although audiences were more impressed by her presence than her message, Amelia was soon expounding her beliefs in the future of aviation, including jobs for women, mechanical training for girls as well as boys, world peace, and social and economic justice for everyone.

  She continued to deny she was a feminist but insisted women had been handicapped as pilots by their lack of training, which men were given in the armed forces. “Not,” she added, “that I am advocating our entrance into the army.” She resented the lack of cost-free training but her pacifist convictions were as strong as ever. Before accepting an offer to speak to the Ohio Federation of Women’s Clubs in April, she wrote to an NAA official asking that he check a rumor that one of the speakers was going to give an anti-pacifist address. He answered that the woman objected only to claims that the airplane was a deadly weapon, intended to incite hostilities. He also reminded Amelia that she would be speaking in support of civil aviation to the representatives of one hundred thousand women. She spoke.

  Amelia’s enthusiastic advocacy brought her a job offer from transportation czar Clement M. Keyes. Keyes, who was creating a transcontinental air-mail service with the Pennsylvania and Santa Fe railroads, hired Amelia as assistant to the general traffic manager of the new line. He also hired Lindbergh as chief technical adviser and began to refer to his newly created Transcontinental Air Transport as “the Lindbergh line.” Amelia’s job was to promote flying on TAT to women who were afraid to fly and discouraged their husbands from doing so. It was ideal for her. Headquarters were in New York, travel with the line was free, and she could continue to lecture and write, using the material she gathered along the way. Lindbergh and Amelia shared the spotlight during inaugural ceremonies on July 7—he in Glendale, California, and she in New York City, where she commissioned the TAT’s flagship, the City of New York, then boarded the train with the passengers for TAT’s first flight west.

  The trip, which cost as much as one on the Concorde does now, was not an easy one. Because night travel by air was still very dangerous, the travelers were taken by train from New York to Columbus, Ohio, before boarding their first plane the next morning. The aircraft stopped at Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Wichita, and Waynoka, Oklahoma. At Waynoka, passengers again took a night train, this time to Clovis, New Mexico. On the second morning of their journey, they boarded a second plane at Clovis, which stopped at Albuquerque, Winslow, and Kingman, Arizona, and finally, forty-nine hours later, at Glendale. The west-to-east flight followed this itinerary in reverse.

  Lindbergh flew the first TAT plane east from Glendale as far as Winslow. At Winslow, he and his bride of six weeks, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, waited for Amelia’s plane to arrive. From there the Lindberghs accompanied Amelia back to Glendale. Anne met Amelia for the first time in Winslow. Ten years Amelia’s junior, the daughter of the ambassador to Mexico, Dwight W. Morrow, and the wife of the most famous man in America, Anne Lindbergh was even more reserved than Amelia and far more distressed by the relentless pursuit of newsmen and curious crowds. Anne liked Amelia. In a letter to her parents a few days later, when all three were houseguests of one of the future founders of TWA, Jack Maddux, she wrote that Amelia was “very likeable and very intelligent and nice and amusing.”

  Amelia was an enthusiastic, sometimes brazen salesperson for the new line. She told the crowd that met the plane at Glendale that transcontinental travel had become “a matter of a weekend.” Four days later, she invited the mayor of Los Angeles to take an airplane ride with her. When he declined, she asked if his wife would like to ride. He replied that his wife was in bed as the result of an automobile accident. Amelia suggested that if his wife had ridden in a plane she might not have been injured. The mayor must have been annoyed but the press gave Amelia more free publicity for TAT.

  Amelia’s boss, traffic manager H. B. Clement, said that her job was to advise the line on comforts for women traveling by air, a task that required “the mind of a woman.” The feminist who loathed the concept of “the mind of a woman” and who longed to see “the sex line washed out of aviation” was working for a blatantly sexist organization. Why? Too many years of near poverty? An aging mother in need of additional support? No other jobs in aviation? The chance to become a colleague of the men who financed, built, and flew the best airplanes in the world? Amelia did it for all these reasons and one more—the money to buy a battered, secondhand Lockheed Vega. The plane was in the hangar of Air Associates, Incorporated, the eastern distributors for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. With its two-hundred-horsepower Wright Whirlwind engine, the Lockheed Vega was built for speed and distance and considered a difficult plane to handle. But during the previous six months, Amelia had been preparing for this as best she could.

  In February of 1929 she took lessons in a Ford trimotor at Newark Municipal Airport from Colonial Transport pilot Edward Weatherdon. On March 3 she nosed over her Avian on a muddy field in New York, but just five days later she took and passed her tests for a commercial transport license in Brownsville, Texas. At least one reporter filed a story on the accident in New York, but none noticed what she did in Brownsville. That day all eyes were on Lindbergh, who was making an inaugural flight from Mexico City through Brownsville to New York. When thirty thousand fans stormed fences and broke through police lines, Lindbergh refused to leave his plane or to permit his passengers to do so until the crowd backed off. Eventually, his face flushed with anger, he was taken from the plane to a waiting car. It was not surprising that the only notice taken of Amelia was by one reporter who wrote that “she took a few flights around the field.”
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  On March 27, the Aviation Bureau of the Department of Commerce wired her that her papers from the Brownsville examiner had not been received but that she had passed all tests. Her license was issued the next day. The number was 5716. Amelia became the fourth woman to hold a transport license after Phoebe Omlie, Ruth Nichols, and Lady Mary Heath.

  No matter what her commitments she was always eager to fly. Most of the time she used the only plane she had, the Avian, although she had had two forced landings before the end of March. The first was en route from New York to Washington when engine failure brought her down at Philadelphia. The second occurred when hail during a violent thunderstorm threatened to split the propeller. She landed in a cornfield near Utica, New York, waded through the mud to a farmhouse and telephoned for a truck to haul the plane to town, then invited Muriel who was teaching in Utica to have dinner with her.

  Whenever she was offered another airplane to fly, she accepted. After being “manhandled” by fans at an air show in Buffalo the night of March 26, she flew for most of the next day in several airplanes that were new to her, among them a new trainer intended for the army by its maker, Maj. R. H. Fleet, head of Consolidated Aircraft. She was accompanied by Fleet’s test pilot, Leigh Wade, veteran World War aviator and later a major general in the Air Force. Wade had been pilot of the Boston, one of the three Army Air Service planes in the first round-the-world flight in 1924. The trainer he was demonstrating for Fleet was designed with “neutral stability,” to respond to any change on the controls, good or bad, on the part of the student pilot. When Amelia took off into a strong southwest wind, Wade braced himself to take over quickly in case she made a mistake. She did not. “She was a born flier,” he said, “with a delicate touch on the stick.”