“Are you going on to Chicago or Washington?” a reporter asked. She shrugged. “I’ll have to check the weather,” she replied. A few moments later when a mechanic asked her about refueling, she said, “No, not yet,” and moved toward the exit where a police escort waited to accompany her to a hotel. There she again refused to sit down while she answered reporters’ questions. She was swaying with fatigue. At the airport she had said she was so dirty that, given a choice between a bath or sleep, she would take the bath. But as the reporters were leaving she said, “I want to sleep more than anything.”
There remained one more task, to write her own account of the trip for the North American Newspaper Alliance.c A doctor who arrived to examine her declared she was exhausted and her eyeball was bruised but her general physical condition was excellent. Always airsick from gasoline fumes, she had eaten only one hardboiled egg during the previous twenty-four hours. In her room she had a bowl of chicken broth, muffins, and a glass of buttermilk, wrote the NANA story, and went to bed.
By ten o’clock the next day she was at the field checking the weather. She was out of luck. Storms covered the Midwest. Still determined to prove that a flight from Honolulu to Washington could be made with only a one-night stop, she decided to fly to Los Angeles and check weather conditions over Arizona and New Mexico. When she tried to take off from Oakland the wheels of the Vega bogged down in mud over the hubcaps and a tractor had to be used to haul it to another runway. She made it to Los Angeles but there was a blizzard raging over Arizona. Still hoping to make the flight, she gave instructions to mechanics to tune up the motor and fill the tanks, then left the field. Reporters assumed she would go to the house on Valley Spring Road where Amy was waiting but she did not, not at least for the next few hours. No one knew where she went. Amy may have been deeply hurt, although it is possible she realized Amelia was trying to conserve her energy for the next flight and reporters were besieging the house. There was no onward flight. Storms continued all across the country and by the next morning she was home with Amy telling newsmen that it would be foolish of her to continue the flight because the stopover had already been too long to demonstrate “how easy and little fatiguing such a trip would be … to link the Hawaiian capital with the national capital.”
The national capital was waiting for her. Eleanor Roosevelt cabled the day after the flight that she was “so relieved to have you back safely.” A second cable invited Amelia, and G. P. if he were with her, to stay at the White House when she arrived in Washington. The First Lady’s interest filtered down. Rex Martin, acting director of the Bureau of Air Commerce, asked her to advise him if she did decide to come to Washington so that official arrangements could be made for her reception. The bureau’s man at Los Angeles was instructed to send word when she took off and to report her bearings all during the flight. Delayed in California, Amelia was feted a week after her flight at a dinner in Oakland. At the speakers’ table were former president Herbert Hoover and Mrs. Hoover, California governor Frank Merriman and Stanford University president Lyman Wilbur. After dinner, a letter from FDR was read, lauding Amelia for proving that “aviation is a science which cannot be limited to men only.” He called her a trailblazer like those pioneers who opened the West, women who “marched step in step with men.”
Praise like FDR’s was not universal. When Kingsford-Smith was asked for a comment he said it was “wonderful” but followed immediately with, “at the same time a man is a fool to fly an ocean in a single engine plane.” Presumably a woman would be, too. He said he had done it the preceding November because he was broke and trying to sell his Lockheed Altair, the Lady Southern Cross. It was the only way he could get to the States and find a buyer, but he took a navigator along.d
A week after the flight Newsweek magazine commented, “Every so often Miss Earhart, like other prominent flyers, pulls a spectacular stunt to hit the front pages. This enhances a flyer’s value as a cigarette endorser, helps finance new planes, sometimes publicizes a book.”
The Nation magazine proved the fiercest critic, expanding on previous accusations of Amelia’s working for Hawaiian sugar interests. An article entitled “Flier in Sugar,” written by a “well-known author” under the pseudonym, Leslie Ford, claimed a campaign against a sugar tariff was being waged by a public relations firm, Bowman, Deute, Cummings, Inc., which in turn created the Pan Pacific Press Bureau. Its clients included the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association, the Matson Line, the Hawaii Tourist Bureau, and the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. “A transoceanic flight,” Ford wrote, “especially by our foremost woman aviator, is front-page news. From it flow publicity releases, personal interviews, signed stories, lectures, radio broadcasts—and in this case a possible motion picture featuring Miss Earhart and built around her flight by her husband, George Palmer Putnam of Paramount.”
Although all these were legitimate byproducts of the flight, the propaganda for the sugar interests that ran through them was not. Ford wrote that although Amelia was unquestionably more interested in aviation than in sugar, she mentioned more than once the leit-motif of “Hawaii as an integral part of the U.S.” and in her NANA story on the flight she called Hawaii “the alluring southwest corner of the United States.”
Ford claimed that the reason the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the San Francisco News had urged her to abandon the trip was because they knew it was a publicity stunt. The most nervous persons during the eighteen-hour flight, he wrote, had to be publicist Bowman and husband Putnam who made the arrangements for it. “Luck,” Ford said, “was with them. The newspapers, knowing the truth, had been kind enough not to mention it in their stories on the flight.”
How much of Ford’s criticism was warranted and by whom is impossible to assess. Amelia certainly did not think of the trip as a stunt but she had to know that G. P. was not getting all those flattering press releases put out by Pan Pacific without giving something in return. And she did refer to Hawaii as part of the U.S. on several occasions.
The British weekly, The Aeroplane, which had bitterly criticized her two Atlantic flights, called this one “A Useless Adventure.” “She is thirty-six years old and ought to know better,” the writer claimed. Why didn’t she? Certainly not because she was an unattractive woman seeking fame or notoriety, he wrote. She was attractive and had already proven her courage and ability. The answer, he claimed, lay in “boredom—a dangerous feature of modern life.”
In a sense he was right. Amelia revealed in her poem “Courage” her fear of a life squandered on “little things,” lived in “dull, grey ugliness.” Loving life intensely, she was willing to risk it in order to enhance it. In her pursuit of that state of ecstasy she called “peace,” the romantic poet of the previous decade had imagined paying for it with “vivid loneliness” and “bitter joy.” These she experienced, but they were not enough. The ultimate price was as mundane as the world she tried to escape—the need for money.
By January of 1935 she had become the first person to fly solo between Honolulu and California, in either direction. She was also the first person to cross the Atlantic twice in an airplane, the first woman to fly it solo, and the first woman to fly an autogiro, the first to make a solo crossing of the continent, the first to cross it nonstop. To reach out for the unknown again she needed cash. She was in hot pursuit of it within days of her Pacific flight, on a course laid out by that master of promotion, George Palmer Putnam.
* Mantz died in a crash, on July 8, 1965, flying a makeshift stuntplane as a double for actor James Stewart.
† Ulm, one of Kingsford-Smith’s crew in the 1928 Pacific flight, had also accompanied three other men in 1933 on a flight from England to Australia.
‡ On December 20 Amelia was named one of the ten best-dressed women in America by the Fashion Designers of America. Others were First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, film star Kay Frances, society matron Mrs. Robert H. McAdoo, hostess Elsa Maxwell, stage actress Ina Claire, sportswoman Mrs. John Hay Whitney, singer Gladys Swarthout, a
rtist Georgia O’Keeffe, and author Fannie Hurst.
§ Hawaii did not become a state until 1959.
‖ Stephens was to regret it later, writing to Mantz that the U.S. Weather Bureau in San Francisco “raised hell” about his forecast, claiming the Navy was meddling. He wanted a letter from Amelia to Admiral Yarnell citing the forecast as satisfactory.
a Later she insisted she had been misunderstood; she had actually said “I am getting tired of the fog.”
b After she told her friend Eugene Vidal the story he said, “I knew she felt it unbelievable that a hole should open in the clouds directly over a ship just when she was becoming anxious.”
c Her complete account appeared in National Geographic 67, no. 5 (May 1935).
d Two months later Kingsford-Smith attempted to fly from England to Australia after he failed to sell the Altair. Accompanied by a navigator, he was lost somewhere between the Burma and Australian coasts.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Flying Preacher
A month after her Pacific flight in January of 1935 Amelia Earhart sent her husband a telegram she had received at a Chicago hotel: “WELCOMING GRAND LADY OF THE AIR CROWNING GLORY OF EARTH’S WOMANHOOD.…” Across the bottom she had penciled, “For G. P., so he may appreciate me.”
He did. Amelia set the records and charmed the public. G. P. wrote the scenario for each flight, publicizing preflight preparations, arranging for services and fuel, choreographing postflight celebrations. He also found sponsors and advertisers, supervised her lecture schedules and radio broadcasts, and contracted for her magazine and newspaper articles.
In a letter to Paul Mantz he wrote, “After all, record flying is terribly expensive and we have to accept legitimate returns where we can get them.” To get them Amelia lectured. To fill the lecture halls G. P. wrested free advertising through newspaper stories in which Amelia did something unusual.
During the two weeks before a lecture tour starting February 11 she went to Washington for breakfast at the White House, gave a lunch for the Ninety-Nines in New York, and attended a party given by G. P.’s plane designer friend, Paul Hammond. Six days later she was in Neenah, Wisconsin, for her first lecture of the tour.
While she was away, G. P. took care of the mail and called her almost daily. He sent Amy, who was still in the house in Hollywood, a check for the rent and another for expenses but told her to withhold a monthly payment of fifteen dollars for the board and lodging of the house owner’s dog. The dog, he said, must be sent back to its owner. G. P. must have called Amelia the same day because she sent a wire to Amy from Neenah telling her to ignore Putnam’s instructions regarding the dog. Amelia was thrifty but not stingy and she was not certain about the dog agreement.
She finished the Midwestern tour on February 24, arriving in Washington the following Friday for a speech to the National Geographic Society.*
Again a guest at the White House, Amelia was pressed by Eleanor Roosevelt to stay until the following Tuesday so that she could accompany Eleanor and the president’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, to the Woman’s National Press Club dinner at the Willard Hotel. The next day the wire services ran pictures of Eleanor, her stern old mother-in-law, and Amelia whom the old lady liked.
Amelia sat beside Eleanor during her morning press conferences and on one occasion persuaded her hostess to ride in the Dymaxion auto, a three-wheeled speedster designed by futurist Buckminster Fuller.† Fuller drove them down Executive Avenue, then onto the drive under the White House portico where he spun the car around on its third wheel while photographers recorded the event. In her next weekly radio broadcast the president’s wife called Amelia one of the friends she considered sources of inspiration.‡ Not even G. P. could have arranged better publicity.
While she was a guest at the White House Amelia telephoned Sam Solomon late one morning and asked him to take her to lunch. Sam, who took a taxi but forgot to ask the driver to wait, walked her in the pouring rain to a nearby restaurant where the thoroughly drenched couple ate an enormous lunch. She thought this so funny that she told a friend. The day after she left the White House a Boston newspaper quoted her as saying she was hungry all the time she was there.
Eleanor sent her a telegram asking, “Amelia, why didn’t you raid the icebox? I do.” The Victorian-raised, Ogontz-educated Amelia was very upset. She wired back that she had never said any such thing, only that she hadn’t been able to eat any meal except breakfast at the White House because of previous engagements, probably a white lie because Eleanor herself later recalled that she “fed everyone for a time on the same menus that had been worked out for people on relief during the depression.”
On the road again, Amelia did a second lecture tour, in New England. After her speech to the Vermont legislature a woman who heard her wrote to Amy, “We all thought Lindbergh was a marvel but our ‘Amelia’ has shown the world what a woman can do.” The writer, like most American women at the time, could identify with a woman who combined the stuff of dreams with the demands of reality. The comely, daring adventurer was also a married woman and “a perfect lady.”
Never one to let Amelia rest on previous laurels, G. P. was already making arrangements for another long-distance flight. This time Amelia would fly nonstop from Mexico City to Newark. A week after the plans were announced (on a Saturday for the Sunday newspapers), William Lear, the inventor of a radio homing compass, announced (also on a Saturday) that Amelia would test his compass on her Mexican flight. In return for “testing” the device, Amelia was hired as one of FDR’s “dollar-a-year experts” by her old friend, Air Commerce director Gene Vidal.
To raise money for the flight Putnam persuaded Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas to approve the overprinting in Spanish on a Mexican twenty-cent airmail stamp the message, “Amelia Earhart Good-Will Flight Mexico, 1935.”§ Of the 780 overprinted, 480 would go to the Universal Postal Union. Amelia, G. P. said, would carry fifty autographed covers, cancelled first in Los Angeles, then again in Mexico City. At Mexico City she would take on thirty-five more, also autographed, and at Newark all eighty-five would be cancelled.
Amelia had carried cacheted mail before. In 1929 when she was copilot of the first amphibian passenger-service flight from Detroit to Cleveland, the mail was cacheted in Cleveland with “Amelia Earhart Special Pilot.” On both her Atlantic and Pacific solo flights she had carried fifty covers, autographed and numbered.
In Los Angeles, where the Vega was fitted with extra fuel tanks, Clarence Williams charted a course for Amelia, using Rand McNally maps of the United States and Mexico for an overview and transferring intermediate positions to state maps of both countries. Amelia was supposed to calculate her position along the way from compass readings and time elapsed with the aid of tables Williams made, showing distances covered at various speeds. She also had a two-way radio-telephone but frequently complained about the inconvenience of the trailing antenna, which she had to let out after takeoff from a reel under the pilot’s seat and rewind again before landing. It was her principal aid to navigation because she did not know how to use a telegraph-radio, nor how to take sightings for celestial navigation. The Lear homing compass worked only within the borders of the United States, so for much of the way she would have to depend on the radio-telephone or dead-reckoning with Williams’s charts, the least reliable of all means of navigation.
She took off from Burbank on April 19, a Friday night, at 9:55. G. P.’s plan was for her to reach Mexico City on a Saturday afternoon in time for a story in the Easter Sunday papers. He had already done this for three of Amelia’s previous long-distance flights, all of which began on Friday and appeared in Sunday papers—the 1932 Atlantic flight, her 1933 transcontinental crossing, and her 1935 Honolulu-Oakland flight.
Amelia discarded Williams’s flight plan just before takeoff when adverse weather conditions were reported on the route. Instead she decided to fly south along the coast until she was parallel to Mexico City, then turn east to her destination. It was
almost noon of the following day before she turned inland and she knew at once that she was off-course. “I suddenly realized there was a railroad beneath me,” she wrote, “which had no business being where it was if I were where I ought to be.”
She was already using a hand pump to restore failing gasoline pressure when “an insect, or probably some infinitesimal speck of dirt, lodged” in her eye. Forced to land, she brought the Vega down on an empty lake bed outside Nopala, sixty miles from Mexico City and one hundred miles off her course. Villagers, “and at least fifty cowboys” who gathered around the plane knew who she was and pointed her in the right direction. A half hour later she took off again, arriving in Mexico City where G. P. was waiting at the field with the foreign minister, Portes Gil, and a dozen other notables.
Her arrival was like that in Oakland with ten thousand spectators breaking through a cordon of soldiers and rushing toward the plane, but she managed to cut the engine before anyone was injured. The tumultuous welcome was followed by eight days of nonstop festivities in her honor while she tried to prepare for the flight to Newark.
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