CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
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.
The first and most threatening problem would be raising her fuel-heavy Vega off the ground at an altitude of seven thousand feet. G. P. persuaded the chief of the Mexican air force, Roberto Fierro, to have a three-mile-long runway built for her on the bed of Lake Texcoco.‖ Mexican soldiers with picks and shovels did the work while Putnam returned to New York to telephone weather reports back to Amelia and arrange for her arrival at Newark.
Delayed by bad weather, Amelia did not leave until the morning of May 8, when she sent word to fill the tanks of the Vega, which had been moved from the Pan American hangar to the improvised runway. Fears and doubts never kept her awake. She went back to sleep for two hours, ate breakfast at the hotel, and drove to the runway.
Dawn was just breaking when she closed the cockpit cover and waved for takeoff. The three-ton plane was loaded with 472 gallons of high octane fuel, a potential Molotov cocktail if she were to deviate from the course marked by white flags on the runway or fail to gain enough airspeed before the end of it. She did neither. Engines wide open, the Vega roared down the narrow path marked by the white flags and rose slowly up and over the snowcapped mountains enclosing the makeshift field.
The route Amelia chose was as dangerous as the takeoff. To reach New Orleans she could either fly around the Gulf of Mexico or over it. Before she left Los Angeles she told Wiley Post she could save an hour by crossing the Gulf. When Post said, “Don’t do it, it’s too dangerous,” he had made the choice for her. If the great Wiley Post thought it too dangerous, then she would have to prove she could do it. She did, maintaining an altitude of ten thousand feet for most of the twenty-one hundred miles over water, then headed north for the last thousand to Newark.
Gene Vidal was waiting for her at Hoover Airport in Washington.a When she flew over he radioed, “You’ve done a splendid job, so come down.” She answered, “Thanks for the invitation. I’m going through.”
That night at Newark a crowd of three thousand swarmed past police onto the floodlit field as the Vega rolled to a stop. Police cars, sirens blaring, inched through the throng while other officers formed a cordon around the bare-headed, smiling woman emerging from the cockpit. One of two policemen attempting to escort her to safety took her right arm and the second, her left leg, and, she said, “the arm holder started to go one way while he who clasped my leg set out in the opposite direction.” Dragged along by this animated “torture rack” Amelia was met halfway by G. P., who had already lost his temper, shouting that compared to this crowd “the lowliest peons of Mexico were more civilized.” Amelia, who had always loathed the touch of strangers, kept right on smiling.
Eight hours later the “legitimate returns” G. P. sought for Amelia began to pour in. Publicity came first. Photographers were taking her picture while she was still eating breakfast. By midday she had been interviewed by reporters, attended an informal reception at City Hall, and eaten lunch with her friends and fellow directors of National Airways, Paul Collins and Sam Solomon. At the Newark airport where the Vega was parked in a Standard Oil hangar, one thousand persons came to see it before the end of that day.
Vidal sent her an official message praising her “complete knowledge of aircraft operation and cross-country navigation.” He exaggerated. Her courage was far greater than either her knowledge of aircraft or of navigation. Two other friends, Helen and Ogden Reid, sent a personal telegram and ran an editorial in the Herald Tribune stating that Amelia had demonstrated “how closely dignity stems from modesty and courtesy from a warm heart. The country could not have a better ambassador-at-large.”
Amelia was back at the Newark Airport five days later to christen the new Douglas Dolphin amphibian plane (and dowse herself with champagne while the newsreel cameras rolled and Frank Hawks doubled up with laughter). Twenty-four hours later she was in Chicago to receive a medal from the Italian government during a conference of two thousand women’s club presidents and program chairmen—two thousand potential subscribers to an Earhart lecture.
Preaching her gospel of air travel, she made a convert of Helen Reid after both women received honorary degrees at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. Until then Reid had been a frightened passenger who also worried about her amateur-pilot son, Whitelaw. On the way back from Atlanta she sat with Amelia, then wired Whitelaw, a junior at Yale, “Skies fine between Atlanta and New York.… Perfectly competent to do blind flying. Love. Mother.”
While Amelia was almost universally admired, G. P. was not. To describe him his critics used adjectives like overbearing, snobbish, fast-talking, scheming, and acquisitive. The press homed in on the stamp deal that paid for the flight. Of the 300 stamps remaining after 480 went to the Universal Postal Union, G. P. was said to have purchased 240. Some were on covers. The Gimbels’ department store claimed, “by dint of great effort,” it had secured three of the 35 autographed covers brought from Mexico, priced at $175 each when Byrd’s covers from the South Pole sold for 90 cents. The three covers were sold by Putnam to Jacques Minkus of Gimbel Brothers. Irate stamp collectors wanted to know why Putnam was permitted to control most of the 300.Newsweek magazine claimed that 24 went to six Mexican philatelic associations, 35 to the Mexico City post office, one to President Roosevelt, and the rest were G. P.’s.b
G. P. insisted there was nothing wrong with the stamp deal. Newsweek countered by calling three other of his financing schemes greedy, verging on dishonest: the autogiro tours for Beech-Nut, the rumored financing of the Hawaiian flight in exchange for publicity against sugar quotas, and a radio campaign by the Mexican government to promote tourism that coincided with Amelia’s flight. The magazine claimed that while G. P. was in Mexico he proposed an even more ambitious tourism campaign for a price at which one Mexican official gasped, “There isn’t that much money in Mexico!”
Undaunted by his critics Putnam scheduled a ten-day round of personal appearances for Amelia, starting on May 30 when she became the first woman referee at the Memorial Day race in Indianapolis—the twenty-third “Indy 500.” He also booked her for a lecture in Indianapolis the night before the race and another in Muncie the night after. The next day President Elliott of Purdue announced that Amelia had accepted an appointment at the university as a consultant on careers for women and that same day, June 1,Forum magazine was on the stands with an article by G. P. entitled, “A Flyer’s Husband.”
Forty-eight hours later Amelia made her first parachute jump—off a 115-foot training tower in Propertown, New Jersey. In a note to Gene Vidal, who also jumped, G. P. reported: “In case you missed the Tribune, it was on the front page and first page of the second section. All the papers are correspondingly good. All four newsreels, I think, will carry a yarn.… Publicitywise [sic] it was just about 10 percent success—far better than I dared expect.” In most of the photographs Amelia looks faintly embarrassed.
To conclude the publicity blitz Amelia went to Atchison, Kansas, on June 7, the guest of honor at the Kansas Editorial Association’s convention. The hometown heroine rode in a mile-long parade on a flower-decked airplane float and that night spoke at Memorial Hall where she was introduced by Gov. Alfred M. “Alf” Landon. (Landon was the Republican candidate for president the following year, losing to FDR by a landslide.)
Mary Brashay, who looked after Uncle Theo, reported to Amy that there were twenty-five thousand people watching the parade and hundreds were turned away from the hall after every seat had been taken. She wrote: “Theodore was sure proud of the turnout. I dress [sic] him up and he looked real nice. Amelia came up on Saturday afternoon … to see Theodore. He was so tickled to see her.”
Amelia seemed a veritable goddess to many of her young Atchison admirers. Twelve-year-old Louise Bode, who brought roses for her to the Challises’ home where Amelia was staying, wrote to Amy that “Miss Earhart was so gracious as to shake hands with me.” Luanna Hartsock was too shy to introduce herself but told Amy, “I think she is the most famous, most greatest, most pleasantest, most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
Late Saturday afternoon a family friend, Balie Waggener, took Amelia and G. P. to the Kansas City Airport to catch a plane for St. Louis where she had left the Vega. Although they sat at a table in the back of the airport restaurant, “the kids found her there,” Waggener said. “She treated the children wonderfully and was just as sweet about giving each of them her autograph.” If G. P. was at the table he had learned to be more patient with young fans than Amelia’s friend, Marian Stabler, remembered him at a New Jersey school. There he had shooed them away, saying, “Now, come on children, if you want Miss Earhart’s signature, write to her office.”c
From the West Coast Amelia wrote to Amy that they had rented a house in Hollywood for one year and she would stay there but did not know when G. P. would return from New York where book and picture negotiations were keeping him. “We are still hoping,” she wrote, “to get to Wyoming for July and August.”
They did not. Exhausted by three long-distance flights and three lecture tours in six months Amelia was hospitalized with a severe sinus infection. On June 25, the day after her last lecture, she entered Cedars of Lebanon Hospital for surgery. She told her mother she was “tired of being beaten up with washings out” (in which a syringe was used to pump a solution into the atrium to flush out the debris of suppurating tissue which then drained from the patient’s mouth. The alternative was surgery to enlarge or correct blocked nasal passages for normal drainage).
From the hospital she went to the Oceanside ranch of G. P.’s friends, the Louis Lightons, to recuperate. She was bedridden there when a backache she assumed was caused by a strained muscle was actually pleurisy. When G. P. arrived on the Fourth of July she was still in bed with her ribs strapped, but her nose was healing.
Illness did not prevent her from giving more advice than her mother wanted about where Amy should spend her vacation. Amelia had already sent $250 for a three-week stay at a resort—“not a cheap hotel,” and Amy was not to go any place where she had to do housework. Amy went where she pleased, to an inexpensive place in Rockport, Massachusetts, taking Muriel and the children with her. Amelia gave up and sent more money for another week after Amy said they planned to leave on July 15.
While they were at the Lightons, G. P. persuaded the editor of the Oceanside paper to print extra copies with an article he had written on the front page:
Mrs. George Palmer Putnam (nee Amelia Earhart) … has announced her retirement from cross-country riding. “I used to think parachutes were hard to sit on,” was her only comment. The horse had nothing to say.
Among the guests are Mr. Putnam who lately has often (about every six months) been seen with Miss Earhart; Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell and Paul Mantz who is taking flying lessons from Mr. Putnam and Mrs. Mantz who is taking lessons from Mr. Mantz.
G. P. was in high spirits. Amelia was on the mend and he had just received news of the birth of his first grandchild on July 6, a daughter born to his son David and wife Nilla. However Putnam’s announcement to the press said more about Amelia than it did about Baby Binney, starting with “Amelia Earhart is now a grandmother.” He noted that the twenty-one-year-old father was a dispatcher for the Boston and Maine Airways of which Amelia was a vice-president, and that Amelia would soon begin work on her third book.
Three weeks after her operation, Amelia was photographed with three other Lockheed owners at the Lockheed plant. Her Vega was being remodeled nearby at the Union Air Terminal into a pleasure craft by Paul Mantz.d A reporter who saw her go to a corner of the hangar between photo sessions took a picture of her “sitting on a pile of rags … permitting her tired eyes a few minutes rest.”
She looked terrible but nothing could keep her away from the Union Air Terminal after she decided to lease the Vega to Mantz. She would receive 50 percent of the profits from it until the first two thousand dollars for its repairs was paid. After that, revenue from it would go into a corporation that would include Mantz’s maintenance and movie stunt services, his fleet of planes for charter and a new Earhart-Mantz Flying School. They also wanted to stage an air circus in September. The restless Putnam was soon drawn into their plans and bought a house in the Lake Toluca district on July 28, minutes before he boarded a plane for New York.f There he prepared news releases and advertising copy for the most recent Earhart franchise, Amelia Earhart luggage.g
G. P. also sent a contract to Mantz for the incorporation of United Air Services, Ltd., which gave Mantz a controlling interest of 51 percent of the stock to be issued, but made Amelia the other principal shareholder and a member of the board of directors. Along with a payment of ninety-five hundred dollars Amelia’s chief contribution was the use of her name. The agreement required that both Amelia and Mantz put part of their stock in escrow along with written instructions so that in case either died the deposited stock would go to the survivor or survivor’s heirs.
The assumption that a partner might die was not unusual for pilots at the time. A few days later in Washington where Amelia was in the Capitol building with Sam Solomon they heard that Wiley Post and Will Rogers had just been killed in a crash at Point Barrow, Alaska.h Amelia was visibly shaken. “There was something in her reaction,” Solomon said, “that made me feel she had a premonition of her own end.”
Just eleven days before his death Rogers had written a column for his 40 million readers in which he said, “This Amelia, she would be great in any business.… The thing I like about her is that she always has a fine word to say about all other aviators.”i
Amelia liked Rogers but her feelings for Post were much deeper. Although she had always avoided discussing the death of colleagues in accidents, she wrote an obituary for Post in the Forum and Century that was both sensitive and sentimental. In it she said:
I met him first when he was a test pilot for Lockheed in 1929.… Six years is a long time for pilots doing the kind of flying Wiley did for us to know each other.…
Lost to the world are his ability, his humor, his conquering spirit. Lost to his friends are his tales of adventure, told while he denied he had had any.
Back in California by the end of August Amelia decided to fly the Bendix air race before her nine-month lecture tour. She wired G. P. in New York, “Paul and I in Bendix entered for fun since ship only stock model.”
Mantz thought she could place fifth in her aging plane for a prize of five hundred dollars, which would pay expenses. Amelia flew most of the way while mechanic Al Menasco and Mantz sat in the back playing gin rummy and sharing a pint of whiskey. “Amelia couldn’t smell it back there,” said Mantz. They came in fifth, as Mantz had predicted. The next day police had to be summoned to protect her from autograph hunters who stormed the grandstand where she sat.
On the return trip G. P. joined her, Mantz, and Menasco. While Paul flew the Vega, Amelia noted in her private log that men liked to have a male confederate fly. “It is my ship, …” she wrote, “but when principal is not at stake, I let them have their way.”
The fall lecture tour began a month later. In 1935 Amelia was on stage 135 times, before audiences totaling more than eighty thousand. At three hundred dollars a performance, the lectures not only provided her principal income but also gave her the chance to air her convictions about commercial aviation, equal rights for women, and pacifism. On stage she entertained with stories of her own flights, then closed with a pitch for commercial air travel.
Her insistence that it was safe and convenient was justified. But air travel was far from comfortable. Planes flew at less than two hundred miles an hour in altitudes under ten thousand feet, their closed cabins occupied by passengers who were frequently airsick. However, Amelia predicted a great future for aviation, with stratospheric flights “bringing nations to the physical status of neighbors.” At one time she criticized the lack of coordination of transportation in the United States, saying that Russia—“the new, young Russia—is already ahead of us in some ways as far as aviation is concerned.” But Amelia changed her tune at Senate hearings in August on a bill putting airlines under the control of the Interstate Commerce Commission, giving the ICC power to require certificates of convenience and necessity for scheduled airlines. This was going too far. She recommended competition, “and let the best survive.” The admirer of “the new Russia” was not ready for state control.
Offstage, through newspaper and magazine interviews she aired her other views. She continued to advocate the military draft for women, combining pacifism with feminism as she declared, “To kill, to suffer, to be maimed, wasted, paralyzed, impoverished … to die ‘gloriously.’ There is no logic in disqualifying women from such privileges.” If women were strong enough to scrub offices, stand at washtubs, and work fields, she said, then they were strong enough to fight. She planned to go to jail along with traitors, cowards, and other conscientious objectors.
At Chatauqua she told an audience of five thousand that a woman was flying a regular airmail schedule. The pilot was her friend, Helen Richey, who flew for Central Airlines, the only woman of 72 with transport licenses piloting for a scheduled airline carrying mail. That was in August. Three months later Richey resigned. Although she said she left in “a very friendly spirit,” Amelia claimed otherwise, accusing the all-male airline pilots’ union of ignoring Richey’s application for membership, which she needed to keep her job. The Department of Commerce did not permit a nonunion member to fly passengers in bad weather. Richey confirmed Amelia’s statements.
Amelia once said that she never took a man along on a recordbreaking flight because even if he slept all the way, when he crawled out of the plane he would be credited for the flight. But she soon reverted to less militant speech regarding Richey. In thanking Clarence Chamberlin for defending Richey, she said that her initial statement was “premature” and she had intended to wait for a ruling from the Air Line Pilots Association as to admission of woman pilots before commenting. Convinced that the carrot was more effective than the stick, she advised Mabel Britton, president of the Ninety-Nines, to include stories in the newsletter about individuals and companies giving opportunities to women. There was no need to be “terribly feministic,” only to “show a little character.”
As a career counselor at Purdue, Amelia distributed a questionnaire that anticipated present-day problems of career women. If the woman student intended to work and her husband agreed to become the home-maker, would she consider his work the financial equivalent of hers? Amelia favored shared housework for working couples but had doubts about careers for mothers of young children. When she told Muriel “there was never enough time” to have a child, she did not mean the pregnancy itself but the need of the child for full-time mothering. With this exception she assured her students they could be physicians instead of nurses, business executives instead of secretaries. At the same time she warned them that they would have to face discrimination, legal and traditional.
She also warned them that sexual attraction was often mistaken for love and was not enough to preserve an incompatible marriage. “Surely we must have something more to contribute to marriage than our bodies,” she said. “We must earn true respect and equal rights from men by accepting responsibility.”
At Purdue she lived in a women’s dormitory, where she often sat after dinner, elbows on the table, chin resting in cupped hands, listening intently to the students. When they began to imitate her, the dean of women, Dorothy C. Stratton, told them to sit up and get their elbows off the table. “If Miss Earhart can do it,” one asked, “why can’t we?”
“You can,” Stratton answered, “as soon as you fly the Atlantic.”
The townspeople of Lafayette were not as impressed as students with this woman who was the first to wear slacks “downtown.”j Her defenders replied that she was glamorous, chic, and very feminine.
One of the students, nineteen-year-old Frances Merrit, said she was afraid of the tall, slim women in impeccably tailored slacks and mink coat until Amelia spoke to her. “She talks right into your eyes and you forget who she is,” Merrit said, “… and when she goes by in that car of hers and waves I feel like somebody.”
Another student, Marian Frazier, whose room was next to Amelia’s, thought their mentor did not get enough sleep. “I hear her typewriter clear up to midnight.” Frazier was right. By April of 1936 Amelia had worked and traveled at a frantic pace for eighteen months. Amy, who was living in the new Hollywood house, said that after each lecture and question-and-answer period “thoughtless” people would hold a reception for her. “She came home dead tired, saying to me, ‘No talkee, Mother. My cocoa and good night’ … One look at her face was enough.”
Amy understood Amelia’s need for rest and privacy but Muriel did not. She wanted to give a dinner in a restaurant for friends in Boston while Amelia was in the area. Amelia wrote that she and G. P. would be glad to eat at Muriel’s house “with just the family,” and if Muriel would let her pay, to hire a maid to help. G. P. told Amy that “for self-protection she simply has to be hard-boiled about getting away … this is a problem repeated two and three times every day for the last few months.”
Amelia seldom showed her fatigue to the public or press. After a lecture in Zanesville where the high school auditorium was so noisy she had to shout until the audience settled down, she was uncharacteristically short with a reporter who asked a question when she had left the stage. “Why didn’t you ask me that during the lecture?” Amelia snapped. When the reporter reminded her of her promise to give an interview, Amelia apologized and talked with her interviewer until after midnight, then left at four o’clock to drive to Buffalo for a lecture there that night.
At private parties Amelia showed no interest in purely social conversation. One hostess who thought her a disappointing guest was Dorothy Fleet, whose husband, Reuben, was the founder of Consolidated Aircraft. Mrs. Fleet described Amelia as “a tall, thin-faced woman whose obsession for aviation dominated the conversation.… she spoke of engines and fuel mixtures and flight patterns until I knew I was under no obligation to lighten the dinner-table chatter with any feminine observations.”
Amelia may have been a disappointing guest but she was a loyal, generous friend. At a dinner party given by the Lotus Club of New York the night before she left for a Florida vacation, she was forced to listen to the principal speaker, New York socialite Mrs. Preston Davis, assail the Roosevelt administration as “neither honest nor honorable.” In Florida the next day Amelia said she was unaware politics were to be discussed and was embarrassed by the attack on the administration that she thought had done far more than any of its predecessors to recognize the rights of women. She agreed with Mrs. Davis’s contention that women should take an active part in politics but added, “with nearly everything else she said, I disagree.”
She had defended Helen Richey as much out of friendship as feminist convictions. When Frances Marsalis was divorced and penniless, Amelia wrote to her frequently and sent her clothing. She hired Helen Weber when Weber was ill and unemployed. She backed Clara Trenckman Studer as editor of Airwoman because Clara needed the job. She wrote the foreword to a children’s book by Estonian pilot Elzy Kalep and lent her money to set up a business.
Soon after Blanche Noyes’s husband, Dewey, was killed in a plane crash in December of 1935, Amelia asked Blanche to join her and G. P. on a trip to the West Coast. Amelia still had eight more lectures to give along the way but she and G. P. stopped frequently so that Blanche could sightsee or have dinner in a good restaurant. They also stopped, Blanche said, whenever Amelia saw an injured animal beside the road. “She’d either take the animal to the next town or find someone to take care of it.”
A few months later Amelia asked Gene Vidal if there might be a job for Blanche in the Air Commerce department. If there were, she wrote, she would pay Blanche’s fare to Washington for an interview (although he was not to tell Blanche). Vidal gave Blanche a job marking air routes.
Although no close friend ever betrayed Amelia, Paul Mantz’s wife, Myrtle, named Amelia a co-respondent in a bitter divorce suit she brought against her husband. Myrtle told a crowded courtroom that when she left on a trip to Texas Paul had promised to ask Amelia, who was staying in their house, to leave. But he did not. A witness testified that Myrtle was angry when Mantz flew to Cleveland with Amelia for the Bendix.
In New York, G. P. said that both he and his wife had stayed with the Mantzes in Hollywood on several occasions and the Mantzes had been the Putnams’ guests in Rye as well as on the trip to Honolulu a year ago. It was his idea, G. P. claimed, for Miss Earhart to bring Mantz and Menasco along on the Bendix race. G. P. did not mention that Amelia wired him first, but he obviously had no doubts about her conduct.
Mantz told the court Amelia stayed at his place while waiting to move into a new house and said he was never alone with her, “not even for a meal.” Several of the Mantzes’ friends testified that the red-haired, freckle-faced Myrtle was insanely jealous and emotionally unstable. On one occasion she had stood outside a bedroom window and pointed a gun at her husband who was reading in bed. After she fired, but missed, Mantz said, “I ran outside … took the gun away and slapped her face.”
Although the divorce trial generated rumors of a love affair between Amelia and Mantz and predictions of divorce for the Putnams, Amelia made light of the whole affair. To Amy she wrote, “Poor old Myrtle Mantz had to get nasty at the trial.… I cannot but feel she will eventually do something so disgraceful the whole world will know what she is.… I really have been fortunate, for anyone who has a name in the paper is a target for all sorts of things.”
At that time Amelia wrote frequently to Amy who was back in Medford with Muriel. She confided in her that she had paid three thousand in back taxes on Edwin Earhart’s house, along with a purchase of half lots nearby, and that she would try to help Muriel and Albert financially after they lost their house in Medford. She also reported that she and G. P. had finished renovation plans for their new Hollywood house. But like most daughters writing to their mothers, Amelia skipped the bad news. In February she was in an automobile accident in Los Angeles; a driver “reading a newspaper” crossed her path at the intersection of Hollywood Way and Burbank Boulevard. Her car overturned but she was not injured. Soon after she wrote to Amy from Dallas that she had come by air, “leaving my ship and auto and husband in L.A.” She did not mention why she left the car there.
Amelia also told Amy that if she heard a rumor about her making a world flight in June, it was just “applesauce.” She was going to have a new “airyplane” to play with by then but, “it would take months to prepare such a trip—maybe a year.”
It would take eleven months. The “airyplane” had been ordered from Lockheed on March 20, 1936, a powerful, two-motored monoplane, the Electra 10E. Winner of a second Harmon trophy for her Honolulu-Oakland flight in 1935, Amelia was ready to try for another record. She would fly around the world at its equator. No woman—or man—had ever tried it.
* In twelve days she had lectured one or more times in Neenah, Battle Creek (Michigan), South Bend and Indianapolis (Indiana), Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, Rockford (Illinois), and Detroit.
† Amelia was fascinated by the Dymaxion, which could go more than one hundred miles an hour. She had already driven it from Rye to Ophir Farm to demonstrate it to Helen and Ogden Reid.
‡ Amelia was in distinguished company with Nobel Prize winner Jane Addams, feminist Carrie Chapman Catt, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, and novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
§ “Amelia Earhart Vuelo de Buena Voluntad Mexico 1935.”
‖ Fierro and his mechanic, Arnulfo Cortes, had flown from New York City to Mexico City in 1930, in 16 hours and 33 minutes.
a She reached Washington in thirteen hours and six minutes, besting Lindbergh’s 1932 record in the slower Spirit of St. Louis by fourteen hours.
b Walter Curley, librarian at the Cardinal Spellman Philatelic Museum, Regis College, in Weston, Massachusetts, wrote that Putnam kept 250, not 240, 83.3 percent of the 300.
c Putnam’s children and grandchildren said he was a wonderful companion who liked all small children. He may have been trying to meet a tight schedule that night in New Jersey.
d The others were Laura Ingalls, Roscoe Turner, and Amelia’s old friend, Wiley Post. Ingalls had broken the women’s cross-continental speed record the week before. Turner, holder of the Distinguished Flying Cross and winner of both the Harmon and Thompson trophies, wore a natty pseudomilitary uniform and flew accompanied by a four-hundred-pound lion named Gilmore. Gilmore had once chased a terrified Lockheed employee up several flights of stairs but Amelia was not afraid of him. Post, who had flown around the world twice—once solo in 1933—disliked stunts and the publicity required to earn a living as a pilot. The one-eyed oil field roustabout claimed that the only aviator who ever made any “real money” was Lindbergh.
f Amelia updated her will so that the house, which was in her name, would go to G. P. in trust for Amy Earhart during the latter’s lifetime with any income from it going to her.
g Amelia Earhart luggage is still being sold. She helped to design the first line of lightweight, waterproofed, canvas-covered plywood. The original franchise was held by the Real Aeroplane Luggage Company, a division of the Orenstein Trunk Corporation of Newark.
h Post did not want to make the flight but he had to, he told his friend, Harry Bruno, because he was broke. The crash occurred moments after takeoff when the plane stalled at three hundred feet. Bruno claimed Post turned downwind trying to reach deeper water, a choice most pilots avoided. Lockheed aeronautical engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson thought the plane was nose-heavy with an engine too large for the mixed construction of Orion body, Sirius wings, and floats instead of wheels.
i Rogers was an enthusiastic booster of commercial air travel who had flown 300,000 miles even though he was airsick much of the time. Gene Vidal said that by the end of 1934 Rogers was using only one airsickness bag for every five hundred miles, compared to one for every fifty miles ten years earlier.
j Earhart and film stars Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich were primarily responsible for the acceptance of women’s slacks as suitable streetwear by the close of the 1940s.