Amelia Earhart (25 page)

Amelia gave him his first aeronautical textbook and later, his first automobile, in what she called a “trade.” In exchange for the Essex Terraplane she had received in Detroit, she took his raccoon coat, a wardrobe staple for Ivy League students. In spite of her heavy lecture schedule that fall, she found time to accompany G. P. to Providence to see David play on the Brown University freshman football team.

While her relationship with her stepson grew closer, she became increasingly estranged from her mother. Before the solo Atlantic flight there had been disagreement over
Amy’s expenditure of her allowance on Muriel and other members of the family. In September Amelia suggested that Amy accompany her on at least part of one lecture tour. “It might be just one hotel after another,” she warned but if Amy didn’t want to tour then she might like to spend a week in Rye that month or the first part of October. She had not yet been to the house in Rye.

This letter was followed by one on September 18 in which Amelia asked her mother to come to Rye for “a day or two” to work out the
details for accompanying her on a tour. With the invitation she enclosed only half of Amy’s allowance explaining that “if I sent the whole you would spend it on someone else and not have anything left for yourself by the first of the month.” The someone else was Muriel.

The invitations to Amy were not renewed. On November 4 Amelia wrote that she had finished her first tour and that G. P. would go with her on the next to New England. When Amy suggested she come along, Amelia replied, “I don’t know what to say about your coming.… You said maybe it was just as well that you didn’t go so there would be no chance of your disgracing me or words to that effect.”

She followed this with a halfhearted promise to try to work something out if Amy really did want to come along “for a few days” but nothing came of it. On Christmas Eve Amelia wrote Amy a long letter describing her visit to Thiel College on December 11. If Amy were jealous of Amelia’s affection for Edwin the letter would have done nothing to placate her. The devoted daughter who had never stopped loving her father wrote:

She could not extend to Amy the childlike love she felt for Edwin. As a youngster she had expected and received affection and guidance from her mother. As as adolescent she had followed Amy’s example in withdrawing from an alcoholic Edwin and turned to her mother for the money for college fees and her first airplane. But from the time she became a self-supporting adult she romanticized her father while assuming a caretaker’s role toward her mother.

Neither Amelia’s gratitude for past support nor her voluntary assumption of financial responsibility for Amy could overcome other differences—in personality, values, and generational perceptions. The mother whom the child Amelia had thought intelligent and determined seemed to have become opinionated and stubborn. Amelia disagreed with Amy’s focus on the extended family as the center of life. To the older woman, anyone within the family, no matter how inept or even dishonest, deserved her consideration and, often, assistance. After a miserable adolescence
caused by a father she refused to condemn, Amelia was a confirmed loner, no longer tied to the family, reserved even with friends.

On the surface, the conflict between mother and daughter centered on money. Amelia had had so little until after she was thirty that she spent it carefully and invested wisely. Never stingy, she enjoyed giving it to her mother as well as to a number of friends in need but, having given it, she was angered by Amy’s use of it. Her mother lived in an ill-kept, often cold house with Muriel and the husband Amelia despised. Amy was co-housekeeper, cooking, sewing, cleaning, and baby-tending. When she was not giving her money and labor to the Morrisseys, she went to Philadelphia to tend her dying sister, Margaret Balis, a woman who had borrowed and spent the life savings of their retarded brother without a hope of repaying him.

In addition to withholding half of Amy’s allowance and banking it for her, Amelia bought her clothing and asked that doctor bills be sent directly to her, because either Amy did not have the money to pay them or, worse, would not see a physician when she really needed one. If Amelia’s letters seemed domineering and insensitive they were in response to a determined and evasive mother who pretended acquiescence and then did as she pleased. Nevertheless, Amelia wrote frequently, more than to any other person, remaining a concerned, dutiful, and frequently exasperated daughter.

Amelia’s relationship with G. P. also changed. He remained her publisher and agent as well as her husband, but she was no longer his student or prodigy. He himself affirmed this when he first heard she had landed in Ireland, telling a reporter, “
This is her stunt. She’s doing it under her own name, Amelia Earhart. That’s the name she made for herself.”

If he slipped back into his previously domineering role, she did not hesitate to correct him. During a press conference aboard the
Riverside
a reporter noted that when G. P. continually interrupted her she turned to him and said, quietly but firmly, “Just a minute, dear,” then continued to give her account of the Atlantic crossing. Later, when G. P. again interrupted to say, “
Tell them about your lunch with the king and queen of Belgium,” she ignored him, describing instead how admirably the British press had treated her. She was confident but not angry with him. Two hours later, speaking to the Flag Association, she said that much of the
credit for her flight belonged to her husband. “
It was much harder for him to stay than it was for me to go,” she said.

She repeated this praise in a magazine article, written with G. P., entitled “My Wife—My Husband,” reminding the reader that her husband was a publisher, writer, and explorer, who was not accustomed to stand on the sidelines while others played the game. Yet he had cancelled an important business engagement when she called and asked him to come to England and help her with appointments and correspondence. For his part, G. P. wrote that they had from their “bargain of partnership” mutual independence of action. When she told him the
chances of getting across the Atlantic were one in ten, he was not happy about it but it was her show, he said, and if the engine held out she would.

They could hardly be critical of one another in a magazine article but their claims of compatibility were confirmed by friends. Amelia’s confidante of college days, Marian Stabler, was not so sure at first. She disliked G. P. intensely, calling him a “lion hunter” who discouraged Amelia’s friendship with anyone except the famous. Marian had also heard a story about them soon after their marriage, told her by a friend who worked in an automobile agency. The friend said that Amelia had come to the salesroom before G. P. and accepted a demonstration ride. While she was gone, he arrived and “fussed and fumed, walking up and down like a caged lion.” When Amelia returned, “he took her to task in a very humiliating way in front of the two salespeople … for not waiting for him.”

Marian was certain that G. P. was responsible for the infrequency with which she saw her old friend. On one of the rare occasions she dined with them, Marian said that Amelia’s warm cordiality was not enough to compensate for her host’s rude, patronizing manner. Yet in spite of her dislike of him, Marian said, “That night I was there, after dinner they settled down together and I could see that she cared for him and he cared for her. I’m quite sure they were in love.”

If G. P. was as rude to Amelia as the car story indicated, her calm manner and growing assertiveness put a stop to such scenes soon after. In commenting on G. P.’s unrestrained profanity during one of his frequent temper tantrums, Bradford Washburn, a young author who was sitting in the office one day during a typical outburst, later remarked, “
Putnam would never speak like that in front of Amelia.”

Whether she was in love or not, the marriage Amelia had told Marian was one of “convenience and necessity” proved very convenient and not nearly as confining as she had anticipated. Much of their limited time together was spent at the house in Rye where they shared an avid interest in gardening. Helen Weber looked out the window one day when she was working as Amelia’s secretary and saw G. P. giving Amelia a ride in the
wheelbarrow, racing up and down, tipping and tilting the vehicle while his passenger alternately squealed in delight and roared with laughter.

Another shared interest, a new one to Amelia, was
entertaining. Cousin Lucy Challis, who resented news stories that she thought “masculinized” Amelia, said that Amelia managed the Rye house perfectly and liked entertaining. Although she was reluctant to “make conversation,” she found no need to do so when entertaining with G. P. The guests, friends of G. P.’s as well as some she had met on her own, all had careers or professions that interested her.

At the close of 1932, on the night before New Year’s Eve, Amelia and G. P. entertained at a gathering that G. P.’s columnist friend Walter Trumbull called “one of those famous parties given by George Palmer Putnam and Amelia Earhart.” The fifty or more guests included Roy Chapman Andrews, the naturalist just back from an expedition to Central Asia, Arctic explorers Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Sir Hubert Wilkins, African adventurers Martin and Osa Johnson, novelist Fannie Hurst, aviators Hilton Railey, Eugene Vidal, and Paul Collins, and the Elliott Roosevelts, Bernard Gimbels, and Ogden Reids.

Their hostess was as famous as any of her guests. In a single year she had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, crosses of the Belgian Order of Leopold and French Legion of Honor, the Rumanian Order of Virtutea Aviation Medal, National Geographic medal and medals from the Comite France-Amerique, Le Lyceum Societé des Femmes de France at New York, the Columbia Broadcasting System, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the cities of Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. She also received awards from the Aero Club of France and the Aero Club Royal de Belgique.

An article in
U.S. Air Services
magazine claimed that her solo crossing of the Atlantic had carried “
Amelia Earhart Putnam … into the
PLAN
to
RAYM
volume of the next and all succeeding editions of the
Encyclopedia
Britannica
.” As predicted, she was in succeeding editions of the Britannica, but not under “P” with the three Putnams—G. P., his grandfather George Palmer Putnam, and his uncle George Haven Putnam. Amelia was listed under “E” for “Earhart, Amelia, U.S. aviation pioneer,” a title she would both justify and exploit in the coming year.

I
t’s a routine now, Bert. I make a record and then I lecture on it. That’s where the money comes from. Until it’s time to make another record.” Pilot Winfield Kinner, Jr., stood near the runway at Burbank, listening to Amelia and his father, Bert, on a February day in 1933. The two men had just left a plane to be inspected and licensed when Amelia saw them and stopped to talk. Twelve years before that day, back at Kinner Field, schoolboy “Win” Kinner had marveled at Amelia’s skill as a contortionist but thought she “was inclined to make sloppy landings.” The last time he had seen her was in 1929 when his mother cooked pork chops for her the night before she flew back east in the little Avro Avian she bought from Lady Heath.

The “Queen of the Air” was reminiscing with Bert as if she were still twenty-three years old instead of thirty-five. Her grin was the same but her blue-grey eyes were older and the fair, smooth complexion Win recalled was tanned and marked with fine lines from sun and wind. Amelia wasn’t really complaining to Bert as much as explaining. In 1921, the rules of the game had been “No work, no pay. No pay, no fly.” The game was bigger now but the rules were the same.

Amelia told Bert she had just sold her Vega and bought another. She was at Burbank to talk about the overhaul of her purchase made in January.
^*

To buy the Vega she had to sell her “little red bug.” Except for the motor installed by Balchen and Gorski for the Atlantic flight, the plane was worth very little, unless it were bought as memorabilia, like Lindbergh’s
Spirit of St. Louis
which the Smithsonian Institution had acquired. Amelia’s Philadelphia friend,
Dorothy Leh, suggested the
Franklin Institute’s museum might buy it. Amelia’s former employers, the Ludington brothers, had given one hundred thousand dollars to the Institute for a Hall of Aviation in 1930.

Amelia followed Leh’s advice. “
After some bickering,” she wrote Leh, “the Franklin Institute finally bought my plane.… Do I owe you a commission? I’m serious about this.” “No, darling,” Leh answered, “no commission,” adding her thanks for a free ride Amelia had given her to Cleveland.

However, seventy-five hundred dollars was not enough to pay for and update the Vega from 5B to the newer, faster 5C that Amelia needed if she were to break any records. While Lockheed worked on the plane, she would have to return to lecturing and cultivating the publicity that brought more bookings and bigger audiences.

There were no holidays for Amelia. Even before she left for the West Coast and a lecture tour on January 27 she was working eighteen-hour days. In the first two weeks of 1933 she bought the new plane, received four medals (two in a single day) all requiring acceptance speeches, and wrote two dozen or more letters on behalf of the Ninety-Nines. She also gave a long interview to the Sarah Lawrence College newspaper and attended the opening of the new Roxy Theater in the Radio City complex. There she sat for Edward Steichen who photographed her in the women’s lounge before an engraved glass mural depicting her Atlantic flight.
Vogue
ran it with the caption, “
The First Lady of the Sky.”

On January 16 she went to Washington to testify before the Senate on the development of a Washington municipal airport. Three days before she had received a medal from the Rumanians, along with Charles Lindbergh. In her diary
Anne Lindbergh wrote, “Amelia Earhart, a shaft
of white coming out of a blue room.” About G. P. she added, “Amelia Earhart’s husband hovering.” G. P. hovered with a purpose. He was planning a
dinner in honor of Auguste Piccard, the Belgian who had ascended in a balloon to a record height in the stratosphere. Before leaving Belgium for the United States, Piccard, an acknowledged authority on cosmic rays and radiation and currently studying stratospheric rocketry, told reporters that Earhart and Lindbergh were his American heroes. G. P. intended inviting a dozen or more aeronautical celebrities, including Lindbergh. Lindbergh refused the invitation. G. P. then suggested a small, private dinner at the house in Rye and Lindbergh accepted.