Amelia Earhart (10 page)

Nevertheless, even G. P. could not create a “Lady Lindy” out of whole cloth. He could only direct attention to an attractive woman with a distinctive style, a slim figure, a beautiful smile, and a unique hair style. Colleagues who later grumbled that G. P. even invented the haircut that would soon cause instant recognition by millions of admirers were wrong. Bernard Wiesman noticed her hair the first time he met her in Boston two years before the flight. It was bobbed, dark blonde, curly, and unruly.

The departure of the
Friendship
was far more perilous than it appeared to the spectators. Just before the takeoff, the latch on the cabin door had broken and
Amelia held it closed until Gordon left the copilot’s seat and tied the handle to a heavy gasoline tin with a rope. When the big plane rose, the door, forced open by the wind, dragged the can across the deck. Amelia leapt on the tin and held it, rolling toward the open door and shouting for Gordon. He jumped up from his seat and dragged her back with the tin, then teetered on the door ledge, reaching out for the handle of the door. The plane banked, throwing him back into the cabin and slamming the door behind him. This time he tied it securely to a leather thong on the door frame. They were on their way at last, at 6:30 in the morning, heading up the New England coast, into a brilliant sun. Amelia sat on a gasoline tin keeping a log in a
stenographer’s notebook.

The heavily laden
Friendship
lumbered along at an average speed of
114 miles an hour, crossing over Fear Island near Nova Scotia by 8:55
A.M
. The haze of the sun was swallowed up by grey clouds and fog so thick that thirty miles past
Halifax, Stultz turned back and circled until, through a hole in the fog, he saw the Halifax Naval Air Station in Halifax Harbor. He landed there, moored near the station, and went ashore with Gordon for weather reports, leaving Amelia aboard the plane. Returning at 1:30
P.M
. when the fog appeared to lift, Stultz took off again, but halfway to Trepassey he was forced to turn back to Halifax again.

They checked into a hotel in Dartmouth, where Stultz and Gordon again left Amelia while they went to a Chinese restaurant. There two reporters and a photographer found them sitting at a counter. Stultz said that, weather permitting, he would go on to Trepassey the next morning, take on more fuel, and leave immediately for Ireland. Back at the hotel Amelia refused to be interviewed. While reporters dogged Amelia’s footsteps in Newfoundland and besieged Amy and Muriel Earhart in Boston, they were pleasing G. P. in New York. The
New York Times
four-column, front-page headline read, “
Boston Girl Starts Atlantic Hop, Reaches Halifax, May Go On Today.” The following day she shared another four-column, first-page headline with Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith and his crew on the
Southern Cross
who had just completed the
longest nonstop flight ever made, from Honolulu to Fiji.

On Monday morning, twenty-four hours after the
Friendship
left Boston, Stultz took off from Halifax for Trepassey, reaching it at two in the afternoon. By this time the flight was worldwide news. Once ashore, Amelia again dodged reporters, walking to a nearby Roman Catholic convent where she visited with the nuns, while Stultz and Gordon returned to the ship to pump
gas until sundown. Stultz said they would spend the night at the house of a local family and take off for Ireland at noon.

When reporters could not talk to Amelia they described her: “
Miss Earhart’s slightness of build was accentuated by the tight-fitting brown knickers [sic] and high-laced boots she wore when she stepped from the plane here.… Her close-cut, light hair was tousled by the wind, for she wore no hat.” In New York G. P. gave the press the cable he had received from her: “
Good trip from Halifax. Average speed 111 miles per hour. Motors running beautifully. Trepassey harbor very rough.… Everybody comfortably housed and happy.”

It was the last time the crew of the
Friendship
would be comfortable
or happy for the next thirteen days. During those days
Amelia kept in constant touch with G. P. In Boston where she had seen him frequently, along with Railey and Byrd at the latter’s house, she realized that the flight was only one of a dozen projects Putnam managed at any given moment. She could not resist teasing him about this, telling him a child’s story about a shrewd cat named Simpkin who caught a mouse and because he was not hungry at the moment stored it under a teacup. Having a mouse available whenever he wanted one seemed such a good idea he thought it even better to catch and store more. Amelia told G. P. he was a “Simpkin” and it was to “Simpkin” she sent her messages. When he suggested she “turn in and have your laundering done” she answered, “
No laundry because underwear all worn out and shirt lost to Slim at gin rummy.”

Amelia’s cheery cables disguised her growing anxiety. Within forty-eight hours of their landing at Trepassey she realized
Stultz was an alcoholic. The only member of the crew competent enough to pilot the trimotored Fokker and navigate the Atlantic, the restless, nervous Stultz began to drink. While Amelia played cards with Slim Gordon in the drafty, primitive house where they stayed, or went hiking with him whenever the gale-force winds abated, Stultz found solace in the bottle. He left it only to make dangerous and futile attempts to get the
Friendship
airborne.

Stultz made three attempts on June 6 and eight on June 12, four of them
after discarding the movie camera, film, a large thermos, and all their extra clothing. He tried again the next day, dumping 135 gallons of gasoline to lighten the
plane but he could not lift it off the choppy waves of the harbor. After this failure he decided to overhaul all three engines with Gordon but he beached the plane on a sand ledge and could not get it off until midnight when the tide rose. That same day Mabel Boll sent Amelia an
invitation from Harbor Grace, another port in Newfoundland, where she had already arrived in the
Columbia
, suggesting that the
Friendship
return to Harbor Grace where smoother waters would make it easier to take off. Boll was inviting Amelia to a race with the
Columbia
, a plane Stultz knew was faster than the
Friendship
. The message provided yet another excuse for him to drink himself into a stupor.

On the night of June 16 Amelia took command of the flight. She was already legally the captain, authorized in writing “to have control of the plane … and of all its employees as if she were the owner.”
The agreement had been written by lawyer Layman who
cabled her on June 13: “Please send Putnam confidential report what goes on. Are you satisfied there? Can we help more here or there? Do you see his [
Stultz’s] messages?”

Amelia realized something would have to be done. She told
Gordon her decision while she sat with him at the dining-room table, listening to Stultz up in his room, drunk and feverish with a cold, cursing as he paced up and down. If Gordon was willing, Amelia wanted to leave the next morning. The good-natured Gordon was willing. Stultz had so exasperated him that he was ready to take the next boat back to Boston unless Amelia took over.

They both knew the risks were appalling. Stultz had yet to lift the big plane
off the bay waters. To do so he would have to cut back fuel to a dangerous minimum. Doc Kimball’s latest message from New York warned of unstable
weather conditions. But at seven the next morning, a Sunday, Amelia pounded on the door of the room shared by Gordon and Stultz. When Gordon opened the door she saw Stultz sprawled on the bed, snoring. Gordon pushed him under a cold shower, dressed him, and brought him back to Amelia, who forced him to drink cup after cup of hot coffee. An hour later he was downstairs, sober enough to eat breakfast. Amelia left the table long enough to send a cable to G. P. It read, “Violet. Cheerio! A.E.” Violet was the code word for takeoff. When she returned she told reporters, “We are going today in spite of everything.”

They left the boarding house with Amelia and Gordon steadying Stultz between them, walking him down the steep path to the wharf. Amelia helped load more gasoline into tanks while Gordon put Stultz and four extra tins of fuel aboard. An hour later, when Gordon climbed down onto a pontoon to start the engines the surly Stultz left him barely enough time to scramble back into the cabin before gunning the engines and taxiing out onto the harbor. Three times Stultz tried and failed to raise the heavy craft. Twice they dumped auxiliary fuel tins overboard. On the fourth attempt, the Fokker plowed through the water for two miles, rose slowly, dipped, steadied, and rose again, wobbling up through the fog, one water-drenched engine sputtering. They were on their way.

The captain of the
Friendship
retired amidships where she started the log with the time of departure—11:40
A.M
. Not long after she spied a whiskey bottle lodged between a rib of the fuselage and Gordon’s tool kit. Her impulse was to open the hatch and throw it out just as she had
once poured her father’s hidden supply down the sink, but she left the bottle where it was. Stultz might need it later.

Three hundred miles out of Trepassey the plane was enveloped by fog. Searching for a clearing, Stultz climbed into a snow squall. Without de-icing equipment, he was forced to take the ship down again, so quickly that Amelia slid across the deck and into the oil drums stored behind the seat. Regaining her place amidships Amelia watched him struggle to stay awake for the next one hundred miles until the weather cleared when he signaled for
Gordon to take over, then fell asleep in his seat.

Seven hours out Amelia wrote in the log, “I am … kneeling here at the [chart] table gulping beauty. Radio contact.
Rexmore
, Britisher bound for New York.” It was the
last radio contact. Amelia dozed off after midnight until she was awakened by Gordon’s voice calling for ships to “come in.” None did. The radio was dead. They would have to depend on Stultz’s navigational skills. They had been flying for sixteen hours and had four, possibly five, hours of fuel left.

At dawn Stultz came down through the clouds searching the cold, grey waters for a ship. At 6:30 they sighted the S.S.
America
, which Stultz circled while Amelia tied a message to two oranges and dropped it. She missed. Now on the emergency tank with about one hour’s fuel remaining, Stultz sighted a fleet of fishing boats. Minutes later Amelia saw land, then a smokestack less than a mile off. Stultz circled what seemed to be a factory town on the coast and brought the ship in for a perfect landing. The
Friendship
’s
flight across the international time zones of the Atlantic ended at Burry Port, Wales, where it was one o’clock in the afternoon of June 18, twenty hours and forty minutes after their departure from Trepassey. Its crew was 3,000 miles from Boston and 140 miles from Southhampton, where a vast crowd had gathered to see the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane.

O
ne hour after the
Friendship
landed off the Welsh coast, Norman Fisher, the High Sheriff of Carmanthenshire, pulled his small dinghy alongside the big plane.

“Do ye be wanting something?” he asked the young woman in the fur-lined coverall who leaned out from the open hatch.

“We’ve come from America,” she said. “Where are we?”

“Have ye now?” Fisher said. “Well, I’m sure we wish you welcome to
Burry Port, Wales. I’ll go see about getting ye mooring space for the flying machine and getting ye ashore.”

Until the sheriff rowed out to them, no one in Burry Port seemed overly curious about the flying machine. Amelia had waved at a group of longshoremen loading coal on a freighter by the quay but, after waving back, they went back to work. The exhausted, short-tempered Stultz was threatening to run the
Friendship
right into the quay when Fisher arrived and offered to take one of the crew back to shore. Stultz went, leaving Amelia and Gordon on the plane.

From Burry Port, Stultz telephoned Hilton Railey in Southampton where he had been standing by for two weeks. Stultz called at 2:45. Three hours later Railey and Allen Raymond of the
New York Times
arrived in Burry Port. By then two thousand people—almost the entire population of the town—had heard about “the girl flyer” and were waiting on the
dock to see Amelia. When she stepped ashore she was literally assaulted by “
men, women, and children who tried to touch her flying suit, shake her hand or get her autograph.” Railey and Raymond, along with three policemen and the sheriff, locked arms to form a circle around her and fought their way for one hundred yards to the nearest shelter, the office of the Fricker Metal Company.

Amelia was stunned. “
The accident of sex,” she said, had made her the star of “our particular sideshow.” An hour later she was forced to run the gauntlet again surrounded by additional police mustered to escort her to a local hotel. She was angered and frightened by the shoving, clutching, grasping strangers and the reporter’s questions about her personal life. At the hotel, Stultz and Gordon ate dinner and went to their rooms to sleep. Amelia, who was too upset to eat, still had to write the first of four stories on the flight that Putnam had promised to the
Times
.

An hour later, when Hilton Railey went to her room to collect the story along with messages for Amy, Muriel, and Marion Perkins, he was shocked to see how ill she looked. Her hands shook, her face was blotched and grey, and when he reached out to pat her shoulder, she flinched like a caged animal.

“Aren’t you
excited?” he asked.

“Excited? No,” she said. “It was a grand experience but … Bill did all the flying—had to. I was just baggage.”

In the story she gave to Railey she praised Stultz and Gordon but protested that she had
never touched the controls of the
Friendship
, even though she had had five hundred hours of solo flying.

When Railey saw her the next morning after she had had six hours of sleep and her first hot bath since leaving Boston, she appeared to have forgotten her grievances of the previous night. On the brief flight from Burry Port to Southampton, she flew the
Friendship
at last, after Stultz invited her to take over the controls. At Southampton, where thousands waited to see her, she was met first by two women who could have been the subjects of her feminist scrapbook clippings of the previous decade. They were Mrs. Guest, who had bought the
Friendship
so that a woman could make the transatlantic flight, and Mrs. Foster Welch, the Lord Mayor of Southampton and first female sheriff of England.