CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Amelia Earhart’s recordbreaking transcontinental flight in July of 1933 was her last until January of 1935. For the next eighteen months she was grounded, back in the center ring of the circus she dreaded, jumping through the hoops held by G. P. At times she rebelled, but not often and not for long. Fellow aviator and publicist Harry Bruno overstated the case when he observed: “She loved flying; wanted to fly all the time she was not after money at all. But George Palmer Putnam was a businessman and he wanted to cash in on it.”
Amelia wanted to make money, but she wanted to make it in aviation. G. P. aimed for the greater profits to be made from maintaining and exploiting her fame. While he was always just a friend of the famous, Amelia was one of them, a natural. Her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt was invaluable to him, leading to one of his finest publicity coups, one involving the president, Eleanor, and the newest conquerors of the Atlantic, Capt. James “Jimmy” Mollison and his wife, Amy Johnson Mollison.*
On July 23 the Mollisons reached the American east coast from London. Weary and heading into darkness, Jimmy Mollison turned back just twenty miles short of New York where ten thousand people were waiting to see the couple land at Roosevelt Field. When he attempted to put down at Bridgeport, Connecticut, he overshot the field and crashed in a swamp bordering the field. Amelia was with G. P. and Helen and Ogden Reid beside the Reids’ swimming pool in Purchase, New York, when she heard the news on the radio. She called the hospital in Bridgeport where both fliers were taken, suffering from bruises and shock. The next morning she drove there, bringing clothing for Amy. The couple were moved the same day to the Hotel Plaza in New York City where they rested until the following Friday when Amelia drove them to the house in Rye.
That weekend the Roosevelts were vacationing at Hyde Park. After announcing on Friday that he would not receive anyone over the weekend, the president changed his mind on Sunday morning and asked the Mollisons, Amelia, and G. P. to lunch. They were the only guests. Franklin’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, who still ruled the family roost at Hyde Park, was the official hostess. Photographs were taken of the Roosevelts, the Mollisons, and Amelia. The English public was delighted, the Mollisons got some of thepublicity they needed if they were to secure backing for a new plane, and Amelia shared in all the press notices.
Never one to leave anything to chance, G. P. had already been at work before the president’s unexpected invitation. He and Amelia brought the couple to their swimming club at Manuring Island where they were photographed on the beach. More pictures were taken at the house in Rye, pictures that appeared in rotogravure sections of newspapers across the country. The day after their official Broadway parade in New York, and while they were still front-page news, the Mollisons were given a second official reception by Atlantic City, New Jersey. G. P. arranged this one with Amelia as official hostess.† He also arranged for guests to be flown there in planes provided by Eastern Air Transport’s president, Thomas B. Doe, the same man who had helped him set up the April flight for Mrs. Roosevelt.
The success of G. P.’s celebrity-wooing, along with Amelia’s considerable charm, was reflected in news comments like this one: “No public luncheon or dinner, no private party, is complete without Miss Earhart. She is the one essential, apparently, for a successful entertainment.”
In addition to the interviews he scheduled for her and the articles he arranged for her to write, G. P. also wrote some of his own. In Paris on a business trip, he gave an article to the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune, on the “49.5 Club,” an invention of his allegedly composed of the husbands of Ninety-Nines. In another of his articles he claimed that it was not so bad being known as “Amelia Earhart’s husband,” and that he was not the only man with a wife more famous than himself. Describing the filming of celebrities Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks with Amelia for a charity fund drive, G. P. wrote:
Mary and Amelia had some shots taken on the lawn. Then Douglas and I barged in.
“I,” said Doug, introducing himself to Miss Earhart, “am Mister Pickford.”
“And I am Mister Earhart,” I said to Mary.
There were times when he crossed the line into territory rightfully Amelia’s. In January of 1933 when he arranged the free ride she took on Northwest Airlines he said she was to “assess the desirability of flying the route in mid-winter,” and report her findings to the postmaster general. The assignment was ridiculous. She may have been less prejudiced but she was certainly not as qualified as the airline’s regular pilots to make such a report. However, Northwest officials had more in mind than Amelia’s opinion and so did G. P. They wanted a government appropriation for airfield improvements along the fifteen-hundred-mile air route, about $1.2 million worth. G. P. wanted a piece of the action.
Two weeks after FDR’s inauguration, Col. Lewis H. Brittin, vice-president of Northwest and its representative in Washington, wrote to company president Croyl Hunter: “Amelia Earhart had lunch last week at the White House and I think it is quite possible a meeting can be arranged where we would have an opportunity to lay our problem … directly before the new Administration.… Apparently Eugene Vidal is slated for the Department of Commerce job, [director of the Bureau of Air Commerce] although it has not yet been officially confirmed.”
G. P. wrote to Hunter in June, looking for a “mutually advantageous” deal. He told Hunter it was time to push for the new route and to work toward recapturing “some of the airline’s stock.” He also implied that he and Amelia were responsible for the appointment of Vidal, by then a certainty although not official.
Vidal’s son Gore later claimed that Amelia and Eleanor Roosevelt did some “backstage maneuvering” for the appointment. Certainly Amelia thought Vidal ideal for the job. Soon after it was confirmed in September she sent him a photograph of herself inscribed, “To Eugene Vidal whose greatest fault in aviation is thinking too far ahead of the industry.” Gore thought Amelia was in love with his father who shared her belief in the boundless future of commercial aviation. Always a romantic, Amelia could have loved him for that shared faith but there is no evidence that she shared his bed, then or later.
In 1932 Amelia, Vidal, and Paul Collins, their friend and fellow employee in Ludington Airlines, had invested in a salt-water swimming pool at the Washington-Hoover Airport. It was a losing proposition when Amelia met Washington real estate man Sam Solomon who offered to bail them out. A handsome ex-Army officer and amateur basketball star, Solomon sold their lease to a New York man, taking his first airplane ride to close the deal. Sam liked the ride and he liked all three aviators. Amelia, Vidal, and Collins then asked him to find them another investment.
In the summer of 1933 when they met at Amelia’s house in Rye, she said, “Let’s start an airline.”‡ Vidal and Collins agreed immediately, but Solomon said he didn’t know anything about airlines. Collins, who had already been approached by officials of the Boston and Maine Railroad about starting an air service operation, said Solomon’s financial skills were what they needed. He knew operations and Vidal was both salesman and administrator. Amelia could handle public relations.
Solomon was convinced. “Count me in,” he said, “and I want to be a vice-president.” Each of the partners contributed twenty-five hundred dollars for a total capitalization of ten thousand dollars, enough for two used airplanes and a few month’s operating expenses. They named their new company National Airways.
When Boston and Maine officials asked Collins how he knew the line would cover all the proposed stops with safety, he said he didn’t know yet, but he and Amelia would find out. If they were given a car and driver at Portland, Maine, they would have an answer at a meeting in Boston by two o’clock the next afternoon. The designated stops were at Portland, Rockland, Bangor, and either Waterville or Augusta. Collins said, “We met the driver and car as planned at the Portland station, drove to Rockland where we walked over the field in darkness, studying the length, width, approaches and surface. There was not a runway or aid to navigation as we know them now north of Boston.” Working all night Collins and Amelia stopped at all five fields, inspecting each before driving back to Portland where they caught the train to Boston and met the railroad officials promptly at 2 P.M.
They got their contract, signed on August 6, an agreement to start five days later with at least two round trips a day for which the railroad would pay National Airways forty cents a mile. Tickets would be sold by the railroad at its stations and by the airline at the airports. To the public the airline would be known as the Boston and Maine Airways, with a railroad official, Phillip F. Payson, as president.
G. P. deserted Northwest for the Boston and Maine, announcing to the press that Collins and Amelia would operate the new line. To Putnam’s statement one newspaper added that Mr. Putnam “was said to be one of the principal stockholders.” It is possible that Amelia’s twenty-five hundred dollars was actually G. P.’s.
In three days Collins hired his staff and bought two Stinson ten-seater airplanes from Eastern Air Transport—the same planes he had flown for Ludington, now secondhand and cheaper. On August 9, Amelia joined him in Boston as a passenger on one of the planes, which was moved to Portland’s airport at Scarboro. Along with all hands on both planes, she helped to unload equipment for the home office, a tiny room in the hangar, headquarters of what may have been the world’s most underfinanced airline. The next day they took off from Portland for Rockford where a crowd of one thousand had been waiting for more than two hours to see Amelia. The pilot circled the field several times, a move he soon regretted as eager admirers overran it, forcing him to land at the very edge. This time Amelia, who ordinarily disliked these mass demonstrations, was delighted. “You will see me often,” she told the crowd, “for I shall be down here to sell tickets to all of you.”
She meant it. When she believed in any cause she was inexhaustible, possessed by the same exuberant energy manifested in the fragile young Columbia student who sat up all night translating French poetry and then rose, as if from the dead, after a twenty-minute nap. This energy fascinated Helen Weber’s eight-year-old daughter, Marcia-Marie. One day while the child played in the living room at Rye and Amelia paced up and down, explaining to Helen her hopes and plans for the new airline, Marcia-Marie saw Amelia leap up on the sofa, laughing, her head thrown back and arms extended, still talking to Helen. “I thought she wanted to be high in the sky,” Marcia-Marie told her mother.
Amelia sought help for the new airline wherever she could find it. When Jimmy Mollison sailed to England with the remnants of his aircraft Amelia asked Amy, staying on at Rye as a houseguest, to lend a hand. The two women flew and drove through New England, giving talks on the women’s club and tea circuit. Amelia also cabled her stepson, David, who was a member of a team exploring British Guiana and Northern Brazil, to come home. She had a job for him as dispatcher at the Augusta airport.
On August 21, the day after David returned, Amelia called a press conference, combining David’s latest adventure with a boost for the airline. The tall, moustached explorer, not yet twenty-one years old, exhibited a dead tarantula, which he placed on Amelia’s hand for photographers, then told a few stories of odd behavior in animals facing death. Amelia added a story of her own. It concerned a Ludington Airline pilot who encountered a flock of pigeons during flight and, after landing, found one of the birds alive, sitting between cylinder heads. It had passed through the propeller blades moving at fifteen hundred revolutions per minute, she said. When reporters hooted, she said, “Now you tell me one.” After everyone did, they elected her president of the Monday afternoon Exaggerated Narrative Club. For a cause she espoused, Amelia could run rings around G. P. gaining press coverage.
After an impressive start, the operation of the infant airline became a nightmare. During a cold fall and subzero winter, snow often blocked the roads into airports for an entire day before it could be cleared. Mechanics worked in unheated hangars. With only limited use of city snow plows, Collins had to put snow chains on the airplanes’ tires to get sufficient traction for landings made in cross winds. To raise enough money for operating costs and salaries, he completed flights from Boston to Portland and back on which there were no passengers at all, so that he could collect the subsidy paid by the railroad for each completed flight.
Amelia, who received a check for one dollar, marked “salary,” from National Airways, Inc., on December 30, helped whenever she could. Between one lecture tour for six weeks, starting in October, and a second one in the southwest in December, she traveled the line, selling tickets, talking with passengers, and posing for photographs with them, wrapped in her sable coat, a hat pulled over her ears to prevent frostbite. On the lecture circuit she never failed to mention her affiliation with the airline.
After Vidal left the line in September to become chief of the Bureau of Air Commerce, Amelia represented it in Washington. At congressional hearings on the National Recovery Act’s code for pilots she protested a section of the code stating that “members of the code agree not to initiate service between cities already served by another member over an identical route.” She claimed the rule would create monopolies and prevent establishment of new airlines.
If Harry Bruno was wrong about Amelia’s total lack of interest in money, he was not about G. P.’s efforts to “cash in” on her name. Since 1928 G. P. had arranged for the most direct method—product endorsement—with Amelia testifying to the excellence of a certain spark plug, airplane engine, automobile, gasoline, or oil. In April of 1933 she did the text for a two-page magazine advertisement extolling Kodak cameras and film, entitled “Part of the Fun of It.” It was a clever pitch merging Kodak’s products with her latest book in the disguise of an illustrated magazine article.
However, her principal source of income was from lectures, which both enhanced her fame and made it pay. Within a year of her Atlantic flight the word “aviatrix” brought an automatic response of “Earhart” from the average American. On the road again in October, she had a schedule of thirty-nine lectures, extending into the first week of the new year. With winter weather too uncertain to fly she drove her twelve-cylinder Franklin, often leaving at midnight for the next town on her schedule. Checking into a hotel at dawn, she frequently gave newsmen an interview while she ate breakfast, then caught a few hours of sleep before the next lecture.
On the October tour Amelia brought Amy as far as Chicago where she left her with friends. From there Amelia made seven stops in the Midwest before spending a weekend in Atchison with Lucy Challis’s parents, Jim and Rilla. In a letter to Amy, who was still in Chicago, Amelia wrote, “Everyone is very cordial and it seems ‘Millie’ [Amelia] hasn’t changed at all—heaven help her.”
In many respects she had not. She found time in her tight schedule to visit her Uncle Theo, Amy’s brother, and Mary Brashay, the woman who had looked after him (and Amelia, when she was a child) for thirty years. Theo hauled freight with a horse and wagon. Later, when the horse died, Amelia bought him another, and she sent a monthly check regularly as part of his support after relatives had lost what little capital he possessed.
While Amelia was with the Challises, Rilla also wrote to Amy: “I tried to forget she was a celebrity and treat her as just Millie Earhart, for she looked a bit tired and I know she needed relaxation. She seems to stand up under her strenuous program, but I really wanted to put her to bed for a day.”
Tired or not, Amelia kept to her schedule, drawing record crowds—fourteen hundred in Mason City, Iowa, and two thousand in Kansas City. After working her way back through the Middle West to Toledo, Lansing, and Detroit, she had a day of rest at home, then left for Wheeling and Huntington, West Virginia. She drove back from Huntington to Rye, stopped there for two days, and left again by car with G. P. for lectures in Watertown, New York, and Ottawa. She traveled more than seven thousand miles by car, much of it alone, in six weeks, giving at least one newspaper interview as well as a lecture at each stop.
In Alton, Illinois, a reporter who couldn’t find her after the lecture waited in the hotel lobby until he saw her return, then called her room. “All right,” she sighed. “If you can stand it, I can.” In Toledo the duration of the press conference was “one omelet, six pieces of toast, a canteloupe and a pot of hot chocolate” in a hotel suite after an all-night drive from South Bend. She spoke at eleven o’clock that morning, then left for an evening lecture in Lansing, Michigan.
At the end of the tour she was near the breaking point when Huntington reporter Mary Yvonne Scales walked into her dressing room and saw her sitting in a chair, her hand over her eyes. No one had told Scales that Amelia always asked for five minutes alone before going on stage. However, Scales was forgiven and told to wait in the dressing room until after the lecture. After her talk Amelia was mobbed by men, women, and children who rushed the stage, some crowding behind the curtain to stare at her. “Oh,” one woman shouted, “I got a good look at her that time!” as if Amelia were an exotic animal. Fighting her way back to the dressing room, Amelia saw Scales waiting there. “Oh, yes,” she said. “There’s still you.” But Scales got her story before Amelia left at midnight for Pittsburgh.
She left again in early December for the Southwest. In Fort Worth she borrowed a car from a friend and drove to Amarillo, Wichita Falls, then Lubbock. On December 8 while she was in Lubbock a magazine of that date published an article on “Mrs. and ‘Mr.’ Earhart” in which G. P. was described as: “a fellow who will get an idea at the dinner table, drop his fork and begin calling San Francisco, Chicago, Denver and all points.… The whole project may fizzle out before the coffee is cold, or it may net him a hundred thousand dollars in a week.”
G. P.’s newest project for Amelia would not net one hundred thousand dollars in a week. Amelia was to be a fashion designer. He may have had the idea for a year, ever since they entertained Elsa Schiaparelli, world-renowned designer, at a Sunday lunch the previous February. Already known as one of the best-dressed women in America, Amelia talked with Elsa about functional clothing for what she defined as “active living.”
This newest project was pursued by G. P. with his customary vigor. Three days after the article on “Mr. Earhart” appeared Macy’s department store announced the presentation of a new line of women’s clothing designed by Amelia Earhart and to be sold exclusively by Macy’s in the New York area. Amelia, the announcement stated, was lecturing in Texas but she had already completed fifty outfits for outdoor, sports, travel, and spectator wear. The clothing would be sold under franchise by only one store in each metropolitan area, with thirty stores already under contract. Manufacturing rights were sold by G. P. to four New York firms, with hats to be made by a fifth.§
This first announcement opened a country-wide sales blitz. With Amelia on tour much of the winter G. P. had already closed the house in Rye and moved into their suite at the Hotel Seymour on 45th Street. Between lectures Amelia worked on the clothing in the living room where one corner was occupied by a fitting dummy and a seamstress who worked at a sewing machine. G. P. issued an open invitation to the press to drop in and interview Amelia about her new career.
Associated Press feature writer Sigrid Arne was one of several who wrote just what G. P. wanted. The neophyte designer “uncurled from an armchair” to greet Arne, fastening the needle she held in the collar of her tailored lounging pajamas. The other chairs in the room were draped with dresses and the sewing machine hummed in the corner. Her desk was piled high with swatches of silk and fan letters. Why, asked Arne, this new career? “I just don’t like shopping very much,” Amelia told her. The sewing machine, she added, was hers at Ogontz where she made most of her clothing. (There was never any mention of this in her letters to her mother.) Of course, she added, she would like to fly again. Her plane was parked only an hour’s drive from the hotel room but “some other girl should be breaking my records,” she added wistfully. “I don’t have the equipment and planes don’t grow on bushes.”
If bushes wouldn’t produce airplanes Amelia was willing to cultivate other sources created by G. P. During the first four months of 1934 articles with photographs of Amelia modeling clothing she had designed received nationwide news coverage. Her concept of style for function was emphasized, the clothing made of wrinkle-proof, washable materials with simple lines, broad shoulders, ample sleeves, and natural waistlines. Several of her ideas were revolutionary for 1934. One was making matching “separates” in which sizes could be “scrambled” so that a woman could buy a size 12 blouse and a size 14 skirt or slacks. Another was a coat of Harris Tweed with a zip-in, washable lining.
G. P.’s clothing sales campaign got off to a good start by mid-December when a United Press dispatch affirmed Amelia’s title as “Queen of the Air” for another year. Four days later, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk flight, she gave the dedication speech at the opening of the new aviation hall at the Franklin Institute Museum in Philadelphia. The red Vega she had sold, without its motor, to the Institute was also unveiled.‖
A perfect example of the publicity G. P. sought appeared in a Boston newspaper announcing she would be the principal speaker at a Rotary Club luncheon January 24. The picture was of Amelia modeling one of her suits, the caption stating she had designed a whole new line of clothing. The story said she was a vice-president of the Boston and Maine’s National Airways and that her talk on modern aviation would be broadcast by NBC. Here he had a combination of Amelia’s interests as leading aviator, airline official, lecturer, and clothing designer.
Nevertheless, Amelia was not willing to do everything G. P. asked. On a day she lunched at the Biltmore with him and Hilton Railey, he displayed a hat he had ordered, a cheap article with a silk band bearing a facsimile of her signature. She took it from him and examined it, eyes narrowing in disapproval. It would not do, she said. They were already being made up, he told her. “Tell them to unmake them. Now,” she said, pointing to a telephone at the table. He held out until she threatened to sue him.
The phenomenal endurance she displayed in pursuit of a flight record or a cause she believed in gave out selling clothing. By the end of January she was bedridden with laryngitis and forced to postpone a lecture tour. Her mother claimed that designing and promoting the clothing was “one of the hardest strains she ever went through, because she was doing so much at the time.”
Amy was probably right, but after a few days in bed Amelia was off again, driving alone to Atlanta. Arriving on a Saturday, she gave a long interview to the press, flew a Bellanca monoplane for its owner and his guests, and met four members of the Ninety-Nines’ Georgia chapter at Candler Field so that they could get their picture in the papers along with a description of the organization. On Sunday she gave her lecture. From Atlanta she drove to Rome to visit a school for handicapped children, then to Tuscaloosa and Birmingham for more lectures before returning home via Chattanooga and Washington. She did it all in one week.
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 attractivewomen!” 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 modest 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.”