CHAPTER ELEVEN
On December 19, 1929, Dorothy Putnam divorced G. P. Within hours reporters were calling Amelia, asking if she would be the second Mrs. Putnam. They were given a curt denial. Twenty-five days later, when Dorothy Putnam married again, there were more calls and more denials from Amelia. “There is nothing to the rumor,” she said. “I am not engaged to anyone. Mr. Putnam is my publisher—that’s all.”
When she saw Marian Stabler in New York in January she told her, “Everyone thinks G. P. and I are going to be married.”
“Are you?”
“No.” Amelia replied. “I think the divorce is a shame.… A marriage that’s lasted eighteen years with two children shouldn’t be that easy to break up.”
Amelia did not want to marry G. P. or anyone else. To a friend she wrote: “I am still unsold on marriage. I don’t want anything all of the time.… Do you remember in ‘If Winter Comes,’ how Mabel was always trying to get her husband a ‘den,’ how he hated it? He said he wasn’t a bear. A den is stuffy. I’d rather live in a tree.”
During the next two years G. P. proposed six times but, like Simpkin the cat with whom Amelia compared him—storing up numerous spare mice for other meals—G. P. did not neglect numerous other projects he had planned. One of them was working withByrd’s agent, Hilton Railey, on an upcoming Putnam publication, the explorer’s second book, Little America. G. P. monitored the script, as he had Amelia’s Twenty Hours Forty Minutes, to make sure the book would be in the stores while the author’s name was still in the headlines. He arranged for Byrd to write much of the book before his return from the Pole and for Railey to meet Byrd at the Panama Canal Zone and bring whatever was finished back to New York.
In July G. P. gave a luncheon at the Barbizon-Plaza, ostensibly for Byrd, at which he announced the forthcoming publication of seven books on the expedition to be published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Not long after, Putnam’s friendship with Byrd ended, as well as his own affiliation with G. P. Putnam’s Sons. G. P. said his difference with Byrd arose from his suggestion to the admiral that Byrd offer the contributors to his expedition a rebate from profits he was making on book royalities and lectures. “Dick,” Putnam said, “didn’t see it. He felt that as he took the risks, he was entitled to the rewards.” Putnam’s departure from the firm his grandfather had founded followed the death of its president, his uncle, George Haven Putnam. G. P. sold his shares to his cousin, Palmer C. Putnam.
Already an artists’ representative with offices in the Seymour Hotel at 2 West 45th Street, G. P. joined publishers Brewer and Warren, which soon became Brewer, Warren and Putnam. He also wrote a biography of Salomon August Andre, pioneer arctic balloonist who was lost in 1887 and whose bones were found in 1929 on a desolate arctic island. The book, dedicated to “a favorite aeronaut,” came out on October 27.
Twelve days later a marriage license was issued to George Palmer Putnam and Amelia Earhart. On Saturday, November 8, Amelia was met at the Groton, Connecticut, train station by G. P. and taken to the house of his mother, Frances (Mrs. George Bishop) Putnam, in nearby Noank. The license was issued by Probate Judge Arthur F. Anderson, a friend of G. P.’s who accompanied G. P. and the town clerk, Henry L. Bailey, to Mrs. Putnam’s house for Amelia’s signature. But when Amelia found out that G. P. had alerted the press she left in a huff early the next morning for New York and flew to Washington later that same day.
On Monday the Associated Press reported that Amelia denied she and G. P. were married. Carl B. Allen, aviation reporter for the World (later for the New York World-Telegram), who was a friend of Amelia’s, called G. P.’s mother. Frances Putnam said she did not know if they were married yet but “newspapers up here published all sorts of garbled reports.” G. P. could not be reached at his Sutton Place apartment.
When Allen called Amelia in Washington and asked if a license had been issued, she evaded his question with, “I have not been married.” Did she plan on being married immediately, Allen asked. “Well, not immediately,” she replied. In New York G. P. would answer only two of Allen’s questions. Was he married? “No.” When would he be? He didn’t know.
Allen wrote that the Putnam-Earhart story would be a trilogy. The first volume, covering Amelia’s withdrawal from Noank to Washington, he titled, “Amelia Goes Voyaging.” (David Putnam’s first book for boys had been David Goes Voyaging, written when he was twelve years old, after accompanying an expedition to the Galapagos Islands as the ship’s cabin boy.) The second volume Allen called “G. P. in Baffle Land,” parodying David Goes to Baffin Land. The third, Allen concluded, “may be expected any day now.” He was wrong. Rumors that there would be no marriage were soon circulating.
In late December, after a press conference on a proposed flight by Amelia, she telephoned Allen at the World. “I need some advice,” she told him “and I need it today.” She wanted to talk to him and another aviation reporter-friend, Lauren Dwight “Deke” Lyman of the New York Times. Could they come to her apartment? They could.
After receiving their promise of confidentiality, she told the two men that although she had “squelched G. P. in denying reports of the marriage,” and he “sulked about it a while,” he had apologized for alerting the press, “and he still wants to marry me.”
Should she, she asked, marry Putnam? Allen and Lyman were stunned. They had never discussed her personal life with her and did not like being forced by competing newspapers to cover the marriage story. After a long, embarrassing silence, Allen answered. “It seems to me, Amelia, that the question you have just asked Mr. Lyman and me really contains its own answer: either you should be able to make up your own mind or you should put off getting married until you yourself can decide.”
As they were leaving Amelia extended one hand to each of them in a “firm and prolonged triangular leave-taking,” while she told them that just talking it over had helped. In a later recollection of that meeting, Allen wrote that he told Amelia that Putnam loved the reflected public glorification that she received and was certain that he had helped to create it. “It may be,” Allen added, “that you need him as much or more than he needs you—and one of the supposedly solider cornerstones of marriage is mutual need and mutual respect.”
There was nothing in Allen’s assessment of G. P. that Amelia did not know. The charming, erudite editor counted among his friends and acquaintances many who were famous and few who were not. G. P. liked celebrities.* Amelia also knew that G. P. was a hard-bargaining, often penny-pinching, volatile, hot-tempered man who shouted profanities (although not at her) when frustration induced one of his choleric rages. Her cousin, Lucy “Tootie” Challis, who was working as an editor in New York, commented that “keeping an eye on him would apt to make one cross-eyed. Tho I have always been fond of him, he is unpredictable to say the least.”
G. P. admitted to being bossy, saying he “deluged Amelia” with instructions about her clothing, her hats, and her speeches. But years later his fourth wife, a beautiful and intelligent woman who never knew Amelia, said, “He could be arrogant, but only with his equals—not with a brick layer or gardener.… He was a charming man, a great raconteur, who had marvelous manners and a wonderful sense of humor.”
Putnam claimed, “Amelia Earhart knew me better, probably, than anyone else ever can,” adding that their tastes were often the same but their temperaments were not. She was calm. He was not. She hated to hurry. He always did. She wanted to do one thing at a time. He wanted to do many. She remained poised under pressure. He stamped and shouted. He had to be busy. She “was subject to seizures of idleness, times when she was determined not to see anyone and to do absolutely nothing but stay by herself and think.”
In January Amelia made up her mind. If G. P. needed to bask in her limelight, she needed him to maintain that limelight. He had other interests that allowed her the freedom she needed. Her absences in pursuit of her career he would understand. As her manager he would arrange for most of them. He would take care of the “grubby” work.
Her decision to marry was opposed by her mother who said G. P. was “twelve years her senior and a divorced man.” (Actually he was ten years older.) Amelia ignored Amy’s protest and did not tell her when she would be married. Three days before the ceremony she wrote, “I shan’t be home over this weekend.… I’m due in Washington tonight and have a luncheon at Newark today.”†
She married G. P. three days later, on February 7, 1931, at Frances Putnam’s house in Noank. Present for the ceremony were G. P.’s mother, his uncle, Charles Faulkner, Judge Anderson who officiated, the judge’s son, Robert, who was Mrs. Putnam’s lawyer, and twin black cats. Young Anderson, two years out of law school, recalling the day in November when she signed the marriage license, thought that she was “devoted to George” but that she was afraid that changing her name somehow would diminish her stature. He was right. On the eve of the wedding she wrote to G. P.:
There are some things which should be writ before we are married … you must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work which means most to me. I feel the move just now as foolish as anything I could do.
I know there may be compensations but have no heart to look ahead. On our life together, I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. If we can be honest, I think the difficulties which arise may be avoided should you or I become interested deeply or in passing in anyone else.
Please let us not interfere with the other’s work or play, nor let the world see our private joys or disappointments. I may have to keep some place where I can go to be by myself now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinement of even an attractive cage.
I must exact a cruel promise, and that is that you will let me go in a year if we find no happiness together. I will try to do my best in every way and give you that part of me you know and seem to want.
A.E.
Before the ceremony young Anderson sat with Amelia on a couch in a small sitting room at the back of the house. He thought her much more attractive than depicted in the press, “quite delicate looking, with beautiful color.” She told him about the autogiro, a new type of aircraft she had flown for the first time in December. After her brief exchange of marriage vows with G. P., she returned to the couch and resumed her description to Anderson of the new aircraft!
When Judge Anderson came forward to wish her happiness, calling her “Mrs. Putnam,” she told him she would continue to use her maiden name in her work. A month later the New York Times used “Mrs. George Palmer Putnam (Amelia Earhart)” for the first and last time. After that she was Amelia Earhart Putnam.
Amelia sent a telegram to Muriel asking her to “break the news gently” to Amy who was in Philadelphia, where her sister, Margaret Balis, was dying of cancer. The bride was childless but not without a dependent family. As early as four months before her marriage Amelia had written to Amy about the monthly checks she sent to her: “I know how easy it is for you to give it [the money] away to Pidge and the Balises. However, I am not working to support either.… I don’t know when I shall get over to Philadelphia for a visit. I come over fairly often on business.” She did not visit her mother or her aunt and when Margaret Balis died in January, Amelia did not go to the funeral, claiming the telegram had not reached her until after the services.
Amelia insisted that Amy use her allowance for herself and to regard Muriel’s needs as a separate issue. When Muriel and Albert asked for a loan for the purchase of a house, Amelia wrote to Amy that she might ask her to look at it and give her opinion, but, she added, “If she [Muriel] hasn’t mentioned it to you, don’t say anything.”
Amy redeemed herself momentarily by her public statements regarding Amelia’s marriage. Amelia wrote, thanking her for the interview she had given in Philadelphia and invited her to come and stay in the Putnams’ new apartment at 42 West 58th Street [the Wyndham Hotel] where she had “two canaries,” just as she had always wanted. She also told her mother that she had sent Muriel twenty-five hundred dollars so that she could “move into a decent house,” and had asked Muriel to come to New York “before she becomes too tied down.”
Muriel was about to be “tied down” by a pregnancy of which Amelia disapproved because Muriel’s husband failed to give her an adequate household allowance. Amelia, who had given Muriel a book on birth control, The Doctor’s Manual of Marriage, when she married Albert had hoped Muriel might make use of it.
In April Amelia was still annoyed with her sister, complaining to Amy that Muriel had not sent her a properly drawn second mortgage: “I am not Scrooge to ask that some acknowledgement of a twenty-five hundred loan be given me. I work hard for my money. Whether or not I shall exact repayment is my business.”
While differences over money contributed to a growing gulf between Amelia and her mother and sister, her marriage brought a new and pleasant family relationship as stepmother to seventeen-year-old David Binney Putnam. The woman who had said she had always put off having a child, “for the air races or something else,” proved an interested, understanding friend to David. Young Putnam, who visited his father more frequently than his nine-year-old brother did, had known Amelia since the summer of 1928 when she lived in Rye while writing Twenty Hours Forty Minutes. Her handsome, tall (six feet, three inches) stepson, an aviation enthusiast, admired Amelia’s courage and was fascinated by her boundless curiosity. “She was interested in everything and wanted to know about everything,” he said. He also thought her very attractive, “long-legged and graceful,” with “a lovely head, like a beautiful choirboy’s,” yet very feminine. “She looked like a bag of bones in a bathing suit, she was so thin,” he said, “but she had beautiful clothes and she knew how to wear them. When she was all dressed up, she didn’t look like she had tried to be all dressed up.”
When Amelia wrote to Amy that she worked hard for her money she did not exaggerate. She was back at her desk the Monday morning after her marriage. G. P. thought skipping a honeymoon might reassure her that marriage would not interfere with her career, and she reported to her mother, “I am much happier than I expected I would ever be in this state.… Of course, I go on in the same way as before as far as business is concerned. I haven’t changed at all and will only be busier I suppose.”
One of her projects, the new Ludington airline, which was launched three months before her marriage as the nation sank into a deepening financial depression, continued to demand time and effort. Bedridden the previous October with a severe throat infection, Amelia was on the road again for the airline by the first of November and at Thanksgiving reported to the newspapers that seats had been sold out for all stops for the two previous days. By January, business was not that good and manager Eugene Vidal, who had appointed her vice-president in charge of traffic, switched her back to public relations, asking her to meet with the publicity staff once a week in Philadelphia and to handle all complaints and general contacts with the public. She did so and whatever else she could to generate free newspaper publicity for the airline. She took an eye test at the top of the Empire State Building and commented on the impracticality of parachutes for airline passengers after Will Rogers suggested it in his newspaper column. With little or nothing coming in from the airline she gave lectures to earn money, continued to write her column for Cosmopolitan, and was paid to endorse the Franklin automobile, along with Lindbergh, Frank Hawks, and Donald Douglas.
In April she was elected vice-president of the NAA, the first woman to become a national officer. However, there were by then 453 licensed women pilots, 39 of them with transport licenses, and at least a half dozen better pilots than Amelia. In January, Bobbi Trout and Edna May Cooper set a new women’s endurance-refueling record of 122 hours, 50 minutes. Already holder of two previous solo records, Trout had asked Amelia after the 1929 derby if she would like to partner an attempt at an endurance record that fall. Amelia said she would like to but was “just too busy.” Trout, who was certain she could fly any plane made, credited Putnam for keeping Amelia busy. “If I had a promoter like Putnam,” she declared, “I could have done the things Amelia did.”
Amelia had other rivals. Laura Ingalls, a licensed transport pilot and record-holding aerial acrobat, set a transcontinental speed record of 25 hours, 35 minutes in 1930. Twenty-year-old Elinor Smith had set a women’s altitude record of 24,418 feet at Valley Stream, Long Island, in March of 1930 and narrowly escaped death (but not headlines) a year later when she tried again, losing consciousness and diving five miles before recovering in time to land.
Amelia’s most formidable rival was her friend and neighbor in Rye, handsome socialite Ruth Nichols. After Nichols bettered Smith’s altitude record on March 6, 1931, ascending to 28,743 feet, she broke Amelia’s speed record a month later in Detroit, flying 210.683 miles per hour. That spring both Nichols and Ingalls were planning solo transatlantic flights. Amelia needed something to keep herself in the news. She found it in an odd new aircraft—the autogiro.
Amelia was eager to fly this new ship, which could take off and land without a runway. Its Spanish inventor, Juan de la Cierva, claimed that if it were mass-produced it would bring flying safely to the suburbanite at a price no higher than that of an average car. When his American partner, Harold F. Pitcairn, needed to create a market for this predecessor of the helicopter, it was G. P. who saw the opportunity for Amelia to demonstrate this spectacular oddity. The autogiro differed from the modern helicopter in that the four rotor blades over the pilot’s head were not motor-powered but turned when the aircraft moved forward, powered by a conventional motor-driven propeller at the front of the fuselage.
James G. Ray, Pitcairn’s chief test pilot, gave Amelia her first and only lesson at Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, at the company field in December, 1930. He flew her around the field for fifteen or twenty minutes, made two landings, and then climbed out. “Now,” he said, “you take it up.” She did, but she said later, “I began to feel exactly as I had when I made my first solo in any airplane eleven years ago.” She was not certain “whether I flew it or it flew me.”
A week after their marriage, G. P. ordered one for her. There was a waiting line of corporate buyers who saw the publicity value of the plane, among them the Detroit News, Coca-Cola, four oil companies, and the Beech-Nut Packing Company, producers of tinned foods and chewing gum.
While Amelia waited for her own plane, she flew for a few hours in the fourth aircraft made by the Pitcairn-Cierva Autogiro Company of America, Model PCA-2. By April she was ready to try for an altitude record, which she insisted was only an attempt to “determine the aircraft’s ceiling.” Nevertheless, she arranged for NAA official Luke Christopher to bring a sealed barograph from Washington and G. P. invited Movietone News, the wire services, and New York newsmen to cover it.
Watched by five hundred spectators on April 8 she ascended to 18,000 feet but she was not satisfied. “I’m going to try again,” she said. After most of the crowd had gone home she made a second, three-hour attempt, returning at dusk. The NAA barograph showed 18,415 feet, an autogiro record for men and women. Actually, no one had tried it before. For Pitcairn’s benefit she told reporters that the plane was a “standard job,” with a regulation three hundred-horsepower Wright Whirlwind engine, an aircraft identical to the one she had ordered.
Soon after, she cancelled her order when Beech-Nut offered her theirs (serial number B-12) for a transcontinental flight. Although she was hospitalized for a tonsillectomy in late April and wrote to Amy that she was “almost inarticulate,” with “knees a bit wobbly,” she started the flight on May 29 from Newark. She was accompanied by a mechanic, Eddie de Vaught. At the helm of this giant and fragile grasshopper leaping its way across the country, she needed to take off and land as often as ten times a day. Every time she did she reinforced her identity as America’s “Lady Lindy” by the best means possible—the personal appearance.
At that time none of the media could match a personal appearance. Radio coverage was still poor and newsreels so primitive that even the president of the United States had to be asked to repeat his lines for retakes. At every stop Amelia acquired more admirers, as she lifted up children to see the cockpit, shook hands with spectators, and gave interviews to local reporters.
When she stopped in Zanesville, Ohio, for fuel the interview was given beside the bright green plane. Sitting on the grass she fashioned a ring from a daisy for a little girl while she answered the questions of a reporter who asked if she had always been so thin. She said she had, that she weighed 119 pounds and was trying to gain after a tonsillectomy. Although her face was raw from sunburn and her nose peeling, she was described as small-boned, delicate, and very feminine. Her voice, the reporter wrote, was musical, her manners, “quiet and refined.” About her marriage she said, “I have stopped off once in marriage and I intend to live always with him for I think one husband is enough. I will never leave him.”
Since writing her prenuptial views for G. P., she had either tempered them or knew what Zanesville’s citizens wanted to hear. When she landed there again on her return flight she reinforced local opinion that she was a genuine American heroine—brave, intelligent, well-mannered, modest, cheerful, and interested in Zanesville. Ralph Lane and his wife and three children who lived near the field offered her and mechanic de Vaught lunch while they waited for a fuel delivery. In a house without a bathroom Amelia washed her hands in a basin and, after the meal, helped with the dirty dishes. She also gave the children a carton of gum.
Not all of the stops were in small towns. On June 3 thousands of admirers jammed the streets of Denver to see her fly over the city. She arrived at eight in the morning from Cheyenne, where she had left de Vaught with tools and luggage, so that the passenger seat would be available for guest rides. Her schedule, arranged by the Women’s Aero Association, included a quick breakfast at the Brown Palace Hotel before returning to the airport where she took off and landed four times, “a sandy-haired goddess” whose ship “jumped from the ground like a scared rabbit … over the heads of the awe-stricken crowd.”
She knew how to “work a crowd.” A year later her mother received a letter from Denverite Fannie Kaley who wrote: “One of the happiest moments of my life was when I met your wonderful daughter in Denver and shook hands with her, the time she came in her autogiro.”
Amelia crossed the continent in nine days, arriving on June 6 in Oakland, where fans broke through the barriers to see her. She had not set a record. Professional pilot John Miller had been first to cross the country two weeks before her. For a record she would have to make a round trip, which she did, returning by a southern route.
On the way back Amelia had her first accident in the autogiro, at Abilene, Texas, on June 12. When she failed to rise quickly enough on takeoff the plane dropped thirty feet, hitting two cars and damaging its rotor and propeller. “The air just went out from in under me,” she said. “Spectators say a whirlwind hit me. I made for the only open space available.” Ever mindful of the plane’s builder, who dispatched a second giro to her immediately, she added, “With any other type of plane the accident would have been more serious.”
That was probably true but the autogiro was neither a safe nor easy-to-fly plane. Amelia’s friend, Blanche Noyes, who was hired to fly one for an oil company, scoffed at Pitcairn’s claim that “a ten-year-old boy” could fly it. Blanche said that the trial ship was called the Black Maria by pilots because almost all of them cracked up in it. “I think ten hours was the longest any pilot flew it without cracking it up,” she said.
In Abilene Amelia stayed with Mr. and Mrs. D. H. Oldham, Jr., who received a belated thank you note in which she referred to the accident as “nothing, really,” and added, “You might be interested to know that five or six hours [her emphasis] after I turned the second giro over to the regular pilot he cracked it on landing.” The second giro had been rushed to Oklahoma City where Amelia told members of the Lions Club that the accident was not a “crash.” “I came down where I could do as little damage as possible,” she said.
The Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce‡ did not agree with her. It issued a formal reprimand for “carelessness and poor judgment.” R. W. Delaney, their inspector at Abilene, made the report. Amelia, who was in Tulsa when the story broke, insisted that she had to land where she did to avoid hitting spectators and claimed the inspector had never flown an autogiro or even seen one in flight.
She did not mention the accident in a magazine article published in mid-July but did admit the trip was tiring. The crowds, she wrote, came to see the plane, not the pilot, but the autogiro could not talk, eat chicken, make radio speeches, or be interviewed. She had flown nineteen days out of twenty-one, was airborne an average of five hours each day, and gave exhibition flights along the way.
She was tired but she needed the money, so when Beech-Nut offered it, G. P. booked her for two more tours, the first of them to begin on August 12. “Here I am,” she wrote to a friend, “jumping through hoops just like the little white horse in the circus!”
Young Jim Weissenberger, who was attending a school picnic in Toledo, watched the autogiro descend in a nearby field. He was wide-eyed when Amelia climbed out, her white silk scarf blowing in the wind. Pointing to the interurban tracks she asked, “Young man, do these tracks go to Cleveland?” He assured her they did, then watched the plane until it disappeared over the horizon before he ran back to tell his classmates he had actually seen Amelia Earhart.
The third time she stopped at Zanesville she took reporter Clair Stebbins for a ride. Before they took off, he was asked to sign away his rights to sue in the event of an accident. “If any death warrants are to be signed,” Stebbins wrote, “they couldn’t be issued under more desireable circumstances.”
Amelia cracked up the autogiro a second time at the Michigan State Fair in Detroit on September 12. She was attempting a slow landing near the grandstand when she failed to level off soon enough and dropped twenty feet to the ground, not unlike the slammer she made in a glider at the 1929 air races, also in front of the grandstand. The aircraft went into a ground-loop before coming to rest in a cloud of dust. Amelia emerged smiling, but G. P., who had accompanied her on this second tour and who sprinted toward the scene, tripped over a guy wire, crushing his ribs and spraining his ankle. While he was hospitalized in Detroit she went on to another county fair in Saginaw.
Amelia wrote to Amy that the second crash was a freak accident in which the landing gear gave way from a defect: “G. P. fell over a wire running to pick me up and as he limped up I said, ‘It was all my fault,’ meaning he was hurt. The papers got it that I said the crack was mine which isn’t accurate.” With the exception of her crash in the Vega at Norfolk Amelia had yet to admit that any crackup was her fault.
On a third tour through the South, in November, she spent two to four days in each of almost a dozen cities. Between these tours Amelia worked on other projects—lectures (from which she derived most of her income), magazine articles, and her job with Ludington which was now only part-time after the airline failed to win an airmail contract. After her re-election as vice-president of the NAA on July 23, she dashed to New York to meet aviation enthusiast King Prajadhipok of Siam (now Thailand) at Yankee Stadium, a typical Putnam arrangement. Back in Washington the next day, she was photographed with President Hoover and NAA president Hiram Bingham, who had pleaded her cause to the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce after officials threatened to ground her for ninety days for the Abilene crash. He won the lesser penalty, a formal reprimand.
Amelia was never too busy to help her colleagues find work in aviation. In September of 1931 she was elected president of the Ninety-Nines, which continued to lack both structure and enough members. She recruited new members, wrote to old members, started work on a constitution, bargained for optional coverall uniforms and membership pins, and contributed to the newsletter.
Never a joiner, she accepted membership in only two other women’s organizations, Zonta International, and the Society of Woman Geographers, an adventurous, learned group whose members were called “my gang” by anthropologist Margaret Mead. Society president Harriet Chalmers Adams, welcoming Amelia in a letter wrote: “Tell Mr. Putnam that the book I was writing … was sidetracked when I broke my back in 1926. As soon as I got up, after two and a half years, I went to Arabia and Libia [sic] for the National Geographic; and to Ethiopia last year … [A]s soon as I ‘get over’ being President … I hope to get to work on the belated record of my adventures.”
In a year during which Amelia succeeded with most of her projects, she still could not resolve Amy and Muriel’s financial problems. She strongly disapproved of Muriel’s having a second child in a marriage she considered to be miserable. After her advice on birth control was ignored, she referred to Muriel’s pregnancy as the “second coming,” and hoped, she told Amy, that Muriel would have learned enough about anatomy to prevent “further trials for a while.” She wrote to Amy: “Why don’t you suggest to her that Albert go to Dr. Rock and get a little information? Surely if Pidge can’t manage things it is important for him to do so.… I think he should share the mechanics of being a husband.”
Amelia was also annoyed with her mother, who continued to give most of her allowance to Muriel. “I am not working to help Albert, nor Pidge, much as I care for her. If they had not had that money [given them by Amy] perhaps they would have found means to economize before.” Amelia’s solution was to send Amy half of her allowance of one hundred dollars a month (the equivalent of fifteen hundred dollars today). She banked the other half in Amy’s name. Amy countered with the suggestion that she pay the Morrisseys for her room and board, but Amelia said this was “unthinkable” when Amy did all the housekeeping.
Amelia was not heartless. Theodore, or “Theo,” Amy’s brother who was retarded, had been bilked twice—once by his brother, Mark, who had also lost some of Amy’s inheritance, and again by Margaret Balis who borrowed Theo’s life savings of two thousand dollars and died leaving nothing in her estate to repay him. Amelia was disgusted. “No enemies could have treated him worse than his own family,” she wrote. She would send him a check every month until Margaret’s son, Mark Ed Balis, “a good boy,” sorted out matters.
The grim caretaker of family finances was a different person in the company of colleagues, an uninhibited, often exuberant companion. Early in 1931 she met with two of her closest friends and rivals, Ruth Nichols and Louise Thaden, at Nichols’s house in Rye to draw up a constitution for the Ninety-Nines. All three women were in their thirties. Thaden, married to aeronautical designer Herbert von Thaden, was her husband’s business partner. Nichols, ex-banker, airplane salesperson, and organizer of the Long Island Aviation Country Club, was already planning a solo transatlantic flight. But when they finished their work on the constitution they had a wrestling match, described by Nichols: “Probably as the result of the strain of our labors, we three had a grand rough house in my room and on the beds to see who was the strongest physically. As I recall, Louise was able to pin both Amelia and myself down. It certainly was a circus.”
Sir Harry Brittain, English balloonist and visiting representative of the British Chamber of Commerce on Air Transport, met with Amelia in 1931. She invited him to tea at the Putnam apartment in the Wyndham Hotel, where the telephone rang constantly while she was trying to make the tea. Seeing she had to take the calls in the adjoining room, Sir Harry offered to do it for her:
She agreed. The bell rang again. Sitting on the bed I picked up the receiver and called out, “Miss Amelia Earhart’s secretary speaking. Who is that?”
“Her husband,” came the reply.
I need only say that Miss Earhart was roaring with laughter. She was a great lass.
For the “great lass” 1931 had been a good year, the best part of it still a secret. She was planning the most important project of her life—a solo transatlantic flight.
* Among those he saw regularly were humorists Will Rogers, Robert Benchley, and Don Marquis, critic Alexander Woollcott, cartoonist Percy Hammond, and novelists Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Louis Bromfield. He had given artist Rockwell Kent financial backing. His cronies at the Explorers Club were Martin Johnson, William Beebe, Roy Chapman Andrews, and Sir Hubert Wilkins. His banker was Edward Streeter, a vice-president of the Fifth Avenue Bank but also author of a bestseller, Father of the Bride, later a successful film. G. P. listed as some of the best conversationalists in America, all of whom he knew well, conductor Leopold Stokowski; editors Clifton Fadiman, Frank Crowninshield and Clare Booth (not yet Mrs. Henry Luce) and Helen Rogers Reid, who took over as editor-publisher of the New York Herald Tribune after the death of her husband, Ogden; historian Hendrik Willem Van Loon, and Hollywood dress designer Gilbert Adrian.
† That night in Washington she received a record-affirming certificate from the NAA stating that she had flown more than 181 miles per hour for a new women’s speed record.
‡ Renamed, in 1934, the Bureau of Air Commerce.