In March H. Gordon Selfridge, Jr., amateur pilot and manager of Selfridge’s Provincial Stores, Ltd., of England, met her in Boston where he interviewed her.a She talked about what really interested her—the value of the National Recovery Act in forcing businessmen to discuss and solve problems affecting the whole community; the need to abolish discrimination against women in transportation; and the need for a secretary of transportation with cabinet rank. Asked what powers the secretary should have, Amelia said that he (even she could not imagine a woman as secretary) should control all commercial transportation to eliminate confusion and loss of efficiency. She denied this would lead to government ownership, insisting the government could supervise without ownership.
She was not always a proponent of sweet reason and graceful tact. Her obsessive commitment to public acceptance of commercial aviation made her intolerant of inefficiency. The day after she talked to Selfridge she gave a cold, insensitive assessment of the Army’s brief and tragic attempt to fly the mails in which a dozen pilots had already been killed or injured.b Although the Army was not fit to fly mail at present, she said, no doubt its pilots would receive instruction in the future in instrument flying. “As a result,” she said, “the next war—and I hope there will be no next war—will not be called off on account of rain as far as the Air Service is concerned.”
Four days later she was in Washington where she testified before a Congressional Post Office committee, asserting that the airmail subsidy system was outmoded. “Airlines,” she claimed, “should stand on their own two feet,” and payment to them for carrying mail should be only slightly more than the actual postage. She again recommended the establishment of a department of transportation, opposing Lindbergh and Rickenbacker, both of whom wanted an independent agency to control air travel, divorced from any supervision over rail or other means of transport.
In July, after she had worked continuously through the spring and early summer, G. P. took her to Carl Dundrud’s Double Dee ranch, sixty-eight miles south of Cody, Wyoming, for a two-week vacation, their longest together since their marriage three and a half years earlier. Dundrud was an old friend of G. P.’s. They had met on a packing trail in 1916 and ten years later G. P. asked Dundrud to accompany him on his expedition to Baffin Island. A man of few words—all of them blunt—Dundrud’s few on Amelia were surprisingly complimentary: “She was just one of the gang in camp and for a woman, let me tell you she’s a great mechanic. If you want to know about things she does you have to ask her. Then she answers what you want to know. She doesn’t try to cut you off or make a long story of it.”
Accompanied by Dundrud, Amelia and G. P. went fly-fishing in mountain streams, rode along steep trails, their gear on pack horses, slept in tents, and cooked over campfires. Over one campfire Amelia anticipated environmentalists’ concerns by forty years, challenging Carl and G. P. to justify the killing of wildlife for sport: “I held out, as always, against killing for killing’s sake. To acquire food, to protect property or livestock, or to provide museums with specimens for scientific purposes seem to me to be the only possible justification for slaughter. Even those … should be controlled … lest animals face extinction.”
While they were at the ranch G. P. and Amelia made plans to build a cabin near the deserted town of Kerwin, seventy miles from a railroad. “We’ll have to pack in the last nine miles,” she told reporters in Cheyenne on her way back, adding with a wide smile, “We’ll even be safe from reporters.” Even there she was not safe from G. P.’s compelling need to use their experiences for profit. She wrote a magazine article on the vacation, published with pictures of her, including one of Dundrud cutting her hair. G. P. took the pictures.
As soon as she returned to New York Amelia resumed her work for the Boston and Maine, more recently the Boston, Maine, and Central Vermont air service. The week the airline celebrated its first anniversary she was the main attraction in a “Woman’s Day” promotion, backed by local chambers of commerce and women’s clubs in the cities of Bangor, Waterville, and Augusta. During three days she accompanied 659 women on sample flights, nine to each flight on one of the company’s ten-passenger Stinsons. She walked the aisle, answered questions, and gave autographs.
She arrived in Bangor on Saturday, August 11, with chief pilot Milton Anderson, railroad publicist Herbert Baldwin, and Sam and Mrs. Solomon, just in time for “Amelia Earhart Night” at the Lucerne-in-Maine, a seaside resort hotel. The next morning state and local police were out in force to control the crowd of ten thousand gathered at Godfrey Airport for a glimpse of Amelia. Two hundred women held free tickets for twenty-seven flights over the city that day. Amelia went on twenty-five of them.
On the sixth flight when she asked passenger Sally Miller what she enjoyed most about the flight, “Sally,” who was the local amateur entertainer Ralph Mills, leaped up, pulled off “her” hat and a wig, and shouted, “You cannot keep men away from such attractive women!” During the explosion of laughter from the passengers, Amelia leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. That night she drove to the Lakeside Theater in Skowhegan where Groucho Marx shared the stage with her between the first and second acts of a comedy in which he was the lead. They brought down the house. For two more days she was “a gracious hostess who talks to each and every one” who bought an airline ticket, until she took a train to Washington “to get some sleep” before an airline conference the next day.
On August 4 her friend Frances Harrell Marsalis was killed in an accident at the Women’s National Air Races in Dayton.c Amelia was not there nor was she at the National Air Races in Cleveland a month later, her boycott part of her struggle for the right of women to compete on an equal basis with men. Even after she gained the approval of the NAA contest committee, Cliff Henderson barred women from NAA-sanctioned races in New Orleans early in 1934. Henderson said women pilots failed to enter any except women’s events. The one exception, Florence Klingensmith, was killed in the 1933 races at Chicago. Her death influenced his decision, he admitted. He also eliminated even the women’s events from the National Air Races of 1934. When he asked Amelia to pilot Mary Pickford from Chicago to Cleveland for the opening ceremonies, she refused.
Amelia’s views were aired at length by her old friend Carl Allen in a series of articles he wrote about aviation’s “most dependable reoccurring feud—the row over women participating in air meets.” Allen was by then aviation editor of the Herald Tribune, a job Amelia got for him. When Helen Reid asked Amelia what she thought of the paper’s aviation coverage, Amelia told her that the best aviation reporter in New York was the World-Telegram’s man Carl Allen. Amelia then went to Allen and told him to ask Reid for the position. Early in 1934 he did, and got it.
Amelia continued her defense of women in aviation at the Herald Tribune’s annual two-day forum in September. Reid’s friend, Eleanor Roosevelt, opened the forum and FDR closed it with a broadcast from Washington to the three thousand ticket holders at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Amelia spoke on the lack of opportunities for women in aviation. She said New York University’s School of Aeronautics would not admit qualified women and that in the industry itself women, who were paid less than men for the same work, were outnumbered forty to one. Dr. Edwin C. Elliott, president of Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, who had preceded her as a speaker, was impressed. He invited her and G. P. to lunch with him the next day and asked her to come to Purdue to counsel the five hundred women students there on possible careers. Amelia accepted, rearranging her October lecture tour to include a stop at Purdue.
The prospect of working at Purdue was interesting but the rest of the fall tour was not. Amelia was tired—of lecture tours, of designing clothing, of the politics of feminism, of G. P.’s promotional schemes and, most of all—of being grounded. She wanted to fly. In October when she started west she kept right on going, all the way to the Coast and Burbank, where her Vega had been moved. Telling the press she was on vacation, she rented a house for the winter, a mod
est place but in a fashionable area of North Hollywood, near Toluca Lake.
At four o’clock in the morning of November 27, two days before Thanksgiving, fire broke out at the house in Rye. G. P. had gone to the city on Sunday night. Although he had designed the house himself back in 1925, without Amelia there he no longer liked staying in it, retreating to his suite at the Hotel Seymour or staying with his mother in Connecticut. The houseman, who had been left in charge, forgot to turn off the heater under an empty boiler. In less than an hour one wing of the sixteen-room, six-bath Spanish mission–style structure had been destroyed. The dining room was a shell, the stairway and banister of imported wood blackened, the blue tiling brought back from China by G. P.’s explorer friend Andrews for the front hall cracked and buckling.
Although Amelia disliked the East Coast—Boston with its dark, cold winters and its staid conservatism, and New York with its frantic adulation for money and fame—she loved the house at Rye. She liked the full book shelves in every room, the half-dozen bedrooms for houseguests, the living room where she often stood gazing out the round view window at one end or curled up on a long, low bench at the other, reading poetry in front of the open hearth with its blazing logs. She liked the garden where she dug and weeded, often helped by G. P., away from the din of New York and her desk piled high with drafts of unfinished magazine articles and unanswered fan letters. After her 1932 flight she had written to a friend that her life had resumed some sense of the normalcy she needed, offering as an example, “I dug in the garden yesterday and uncovered crocuses.”
Damage was estimated at thirty thousand dollars in addition to irreplaceable articles including early paintings by Norman Rockwell and Amelia’s aeronautical memorabilia. Saved was a case filled with her awards and medals that G. P. had seen her open only once, for a fourteen-year-old boy who asked to see them. “The old lady shows her medals!” she hooted.
For Amelia the greatest loss was her papers and a small wooden box in which she kept a score of poems written over her lifetime. When G. P. called to tell her, she took a plane for New York the next day, but missed her connection in Chicago because of the winter’s first snowstorm. With four lectures scheduled for Friday and Saturday in Minneapolis, she could not get back to Rye. On Sunday she took another plane to Los Angeles, to the refurbished Vega and her preparations for a new venture, a gamble for even higher stakes than she had ever played before. The house at Rye would be restored and Amelia would return to it now and then but neither was the same again.
* Amelia had met the Mollisons in London a year earlier, just before Jimmy made a solo Atlantic flight, east to west, August 18–21, 1932. Amy set a record of her own in 1931 when she took a patched-up DeHavilland Moth biplane from London to Australia. Twenty-six years old, with less than one hundred hours of flight time, she flew eleven thousand five hundred miles in twenty days, landing in Darwin on May 24.
† The guests included artist Howard Chandler Christy, woman explorer Blair Niles, set designer Norman Bel Geddes, boxer Gene Tunney, novelist Fannie Hurst, fliers Eugene Vidal, Eddie Rickenbacker, and Clarence Chamberlin, and journalists Lauren Dwight “Deke” Lyman, Margaret Bourke-White, Carl B. Allen, and Ralph Ingersoll.
‡ The failure of Ludington Airlines to gain a government airmail contract had forced its sale to Eastern Air Transport.
§ The firms were J.J. Rueben-Rachael Holsten Company, David Crystal, Inc., M. Cowen and Son Apparel Corporation, and Schnaiman Sportswear Company. Hats were by John B. Stetson Company.
‖ The plane went to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 in a sale engineered by Ralph Barnaby, curator of the Franklin Institute.
a Amelia wore a watch given her by the senior Selfridge when she was in England after her Atlantic flight in 1932. The watch had been given DeHane Seagrave, champion outboard motorboat racer. When he was killed his widow gave it back to Selfridge. Amelia was wearing it when she disappeared in 1937.
b On February 9, 1934, all airmail contracts had been cancelled by Postmaster General James A. Farley who charged the commercial airline contractors with collusion to bilk the government of $47 million. When the Army Air Service took over, five pilots were killed and six critically injured during the first week. By March 30, the total killed reached twelve. On April 20, Farley announced he would accept bids again for airmail contracts.
c Marsalis was killed when the wingtip of her plane struck the ground after she dived to avoid a collision. A year before, when Marsalis, who divorced her husband William, reported to Amelia that she was “broke,” Amelia sent her a box of clothing. “Honey,” she wrote to Amelia, “the suit fits. I’ll put many hours in it.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Across the Pacific
She lived on the west coast and he lived on the east. He couldn’t manage her so he married her and then he couldn’t manage her.” When Amelia Earhart rented a house in California in the fall of 1934 this comment by a colleague was not entirely off the mark. The move indicated the end of one phase in Amelia’s partnership with George Palmer Putnam. The young woman G. P. had both managed and manipulated back in 1928—with her knowledge and consent—had needed him more than he needed her. During the six years that followed, more than three of which she was married to him, Amelia had changed. The Boston social worker Putnam made a celebrity was now more skillful than he in handling the press and certainly more popular. Reporters were frequently irritated by him, a manager who seemed to promote himself as much as his client. They called him “the lens louse,” because he wanted to be in every photograph taken of Amelia. But they seldom found fault with her.
Nevertheless, G. P. remained her manager and she continued, for the most part, to follow the agenda he set for her, signing the contracts and making the appearances he wanted, working at the frenzied pace he set. She refused only those propositions and schemes she considered too impractical, tawdry, or insulting to the public and press.
On October 3, 1934, while she was still living at Rye, two conflicting reports of her plans for another long-distance flight appeared in the press. The first claimed she would attempt a solo flight across the South Atlantic from Natal, Brazil to the African coast. The second said she would fly from San Francisco to Honolulu for a prize of ten thousand dollars offered by a group of Hawaiian business men. She denied both stories after a ten-day cross-country drive alone. When she arrived in Los Angeles on November 6, she told reporters her plane had been sent on ahead but when they asked which flight she would attempt she said, “Neither.” She was “on vacation” for a month.
In one sense she was. She was back in the place she loved, the land of hot sun and blue skies that had first enchanted her as a determined, impetuous, and often foolhardy twenty-four-year-old student pilot. At thirty-six, she checked her fuel gauge before a flight and resisted the impulse to fly between high voltage wires just to shorten a landing. But, if less impetuous, she was even more determined to make a flight no person had ever made before—not a woman’s record but a world record. Her denial to the press of either plan was truthful. She intended to reverse one of the predicted courses, flying from Honolulu to San Francisco, because, she told G. P., it was “easier to hit a continent than an island.”
The plan suited them both. He could make commitments for advertising endorsements, lectures, and articles and be certain of an initial ten thousand dollars to finance the flight. She could attempt to become the first person, man or woman, to fly alone over the twenty-four hundred miles of open water in a single-engine plane. The night she arrived in Los Angeles she went to a dinner given for Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, who had crossed the Pacific in 1928 while she was waiting at Trepassey for the flight of the Friendship to London, and who had just flown from Sydney to Los Angeles. She would be repeating the Honolulu leg of his flight but he had been accompanied by a navigator and she would make it alone. She told no one at the dinner of her plans.
The next day she was at Burbank, ready to work with Paul Mantz, the man she had chose
n to overhaul her Vega at United Airport in Burbank, now the Glendale-Pasadena-Burbank Airport. Stunt pilot, engineer, businessman, speed-record contender, and president of the Motion Picture Pilots’ Association, Mantz was six years younger and no taller than Amelia, a dapper, well-built, compact man with a pencil-line moustache and hair slicked back from a high forehead. Assertive and articulate, he enjoyed telling stories about the motion picture celebrities he flew on his charter service, United Services, Ltd. Mantz owned six planes, two of them Lockheeds, and was a pioneer in filming combat scenes in the air. On one occasion he cut a hole in the side of a plane and mounted a camera there to photograph simulated combat from close range. He was as meticulous as he was imaginative in his preparations. “I am not a stunt pilot,” he told a business partner. “I am a precision flier.”
In spite of the business-like image he cherished, the thirty-one-year old flier was not as staid as he claimed. He was cashiered from the Army’s Air Service the day before graduation for “buzzing” a train. A month before he started work on Amelia’s Vega he was cited by the Bureau of Air Commerce for diving within a few feet of the rooftops of Redwood City, in a salute to his bedridden mother. Soon after, while testflying Amelia’s Vega, Mantz buzzed the ranch of Western screen star William S. Hart. He “damned near shook the bricks out of the chimney,” Hart complained. The Department of Commerce traced the plane to Amelia, who went with Mantz to apologize.
Nevertheless, Mantz could be a perfectionist and a hard taskmaster. One associate said, “He wanted someone to back him up, not second-guess him. Too many pilots … assert their ideas, telling other pilots how to fly. You didn’t do that with Paul.”* Amelia didn’t. She was an eager, attentive pupil. Although six years Mantz’s senior, she had not learned to fly until she was twenty-three. All of her training was haphazard, taken between jobs and, later, between public appearances. Mantz, who learned at sixteen, had flown for fifteen years. Amelia gave him the respect he demanded.
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