Amelia Earhart (27 page)

In her letter to Bingham she said their viewpoints were “
too dissimilar” but she had only the friendliest personal feelings toward him. He was not as charitable, claiming that she apparently wanted the NAA to do nothing except sanction
air meets, but he urged her to keep her
honorary membership.

However, she did side with Bingham when he threatened to suspend all NAA-FAI license holders for one to three years if they took part in “unsanctioned” (by the NAA) air meets. His threat was aimed at the
Chicago Tribune
—sponsored American Air Races, scheduled for July 1 through 4, the same dates as the NAA-sanctioned National Air Races to be held in Los Angeles. Pilots protested that Bingham’s ukase banning them from participation in the Chicago races would cause them to lose potential prize money but Amelia supported Bingham’s efforts to sustain what she thought the most basic function of the NAA, the sanctioning of air meets. The day before she resigned as vice-president she protested the use of her name as a member of the Chicago meet’s pilots’ committee, saying she had no connection with the meet because it was scheduled in direct opposition to the National Air Races.

Back from Washington after her resignation, Amelia stayed home for most of May and June. In May her mother came for her first visit in the house in Rye since Amelia’s marriage more than two years before. The mother-daughter relationship reflected in their letters had evolved into one in which Amelia,
Amy’s primary source of support, sounded like the parent, and Amy, the child. Amelia sent checks, advice, and packages, including a bottle of “tooth wash,” a “scientific solvent,” recommended by her dentist. Amelia’s customary admonishments regarding money and
Muriel continued. “Enclosed is a check. Please don’t give it all away if the giving means fostering dependence and lack of responsibility.” When Muriel asked Amelia for a second mortgage on the Morrisseys’ house, Amelia tried to find out from Amy how much help Amy was giving the couple from her allowance. Amelia doubted the Morrisseys could hold on to the house under any circumstances, but she sent the necessary documents to Muriel.

Amy’s visit to Rye in May was followed by a series of letters concerning where and with whom Amy would spend the month of August. Amy suggested Maine. Amelia countered with Stonington, Connecticut, where her friend from college days, Elise von R. Owen, and her mother had converted their pre-depression home into a guest house. Amy then changed to Marblehead and wanted to take both her grandchildren with her. Amelia said she could have one, part of the time, but not both. “I will not permit it under any circumstances,” she wrote, threatening to withhold Amy’s monthly check if she took them. In the end Amy went to Marblehead where Amelia urged her to stay through autumn. There was no mention of how many grandchildren went with her in subsequent letters.

That summer Amelia, as president of the
Ninety-Nines, stepped up her efforts on behalf of her colleagues, a strong-willed and unconventional lot, sometimes contentious and always competitive. Determined to increase the membership, she opposed Gladys O’Donnell’s suggestion that there be a special women’s committee for the National Air Races, affiliated with but separate from the Ninety-Nines. Amelia warned O’Donnell that there were already complaints that the organization was run by and for professionals who comprised only a small number of the six hundred women licensees in the United States.

Amelia also used her own fame to gain publicity for the Ninety-Nines. She made arrangements to model an inexpensive flying suit for
Vogue
magazine—one she thought might make an optional Ninety-Nines uniform—but she could not get an agreement from the regional directors in time to meet the magazine’s deadline and the picture was used without mention of the organization. To publicize an
all-woman air race staged by Annette Gipson, a beautiful young aviatrix, at Roosevelt Field on June 4, Amelia took all the participants to lunch before the race, then waved the starting flag while thirty thousand spectators watched, many standing on the roofs of their parked cars.

In a
letter to Margaret Cooper, the woman she wanted to succeed her as president, Amelia revealed managerial talent and political acumen. Bylaws were needed; so was new stationery, but the old should be sold to “patriotic” members, she said following the Earhart rule of putting style first, with frugality close on its heels. She also warned Cooper that she should consider the hazards of a lawsuit before attempting to eject an undesirable member.

Amelia wrote to Cooper because she was not certain she would arrive in time for the annual meeting and election of officers in Los Angeles on July 3. She had just entered the Bendix, the transcontinental race sponsored by Vincent Bendix, with Ruth Nichols. “Racing,” Amelia wrote to Cooper, “is not the most reliable way to travel.… The schedule calls for our leaving July 1, but it’s along [sic] way from here to there.”

It
was
a long way. The two women were given only two weeks notice that women would be eligible, with a special prize of twenty-five hundred dollars for the winner. Nichols, who had cracked up her Vega at Newfoundland while attempting an Atlantic crossing a year before, had borrowed a Lockheed Orion that her friend Clarence Chamberlin was trying to overhaul in a few days. Amelia’s sole “test flight” for her rebuilt Vega was to Chicago for a three-day visit to the World’s Fair with G. P., his twelve-year-old son, George, Jr., and a Rye neighbor, Betty Chester. If she had known she would be flying in the Bendix she might have put it through more rigorous testing.

Amelia and Nichols were scheduled to take off a little after midnight on July 1 from Floyd Bennett Field, six hours before the men, who had faster ships. The crowd of two thousand that gathered at the airport to see them leave dwindled to two hundred after Nichols’s plane developed motor trouble and the fog rolled in from the sea, followed by a severe thunderstorm. Amelia found a bed in one of the airport offices and slept for three hours while mechanics worked on Nichols’s plane and G. P. studied weather reports from the west. At 3:30
A.M
. it was obvious that Nichols’s Orion needed more work. Amelia took off twenty minutes later after telling reporters she would insist that her rival not be penalized for the delay in starting.

The delay was only the first in a series of mishaps that plagued both women. After refueling at St. Louis, Amelia almost lost consciousness from gas fumes in the cockpit before landing at Wichita. Shortly after she left there the hatch cover of her Vega blew open, “blanketing” the tail and
threatening her control of the aircraft. She spent an hour and a half at Winslow, Arizona, while mechanics made repairs. Soon after she left Winslow, motor trouble forced her to return to Wichita where she stayed overnight. On July 2 she reached her destination, the Los Angeles Municipal Airport, but was forced by ground rules to circle over the field for more than a half hour until the fifty-mile free-for-all race was over.
Amelia was the last of the three remaining contestants out of six to finish the B
endix. Russell
Boardman, who crashed at takeoff from Indianapolis, died on July 3. Harry Thaw dropped out after his plane was badly damaged on takeoff, also at Indianapolis, and Ruth
Nichols withdrew at Wichita.

Last in the Bendix and entering no other event, yet mobbed by admirers at the grandstand, Amelia stayed on through the last day, July 4. For the grand finale, manager Cliff Henderson had arranged for Mary
Pickford to arrive on a trimotored Fokker, escorted by six Boeing pursuit planes. Amid the blare of trumpets, Amelia greeted her, along with Col. H. H. “Hap” Arnold, who would become one of the great air commanders of World War II. Pickford, who had announced the breakup of her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks two days earlier, smiled bravely for the photographers when Amelia shook her hand. The syndicated photographs of “America’s Sweetheart” and the “Queen of the Air” appeared in hundreds of newspapers across the country.

In spite of her poor showing in the Bendix Amelia had lost nothing by entering. Along with the national news coverage G. P. wanted for her she had given the reconditioned Vega a shakedown it needed for another try at breaking her own transcontinental speed record for women.

Late on the night of July 7 she taxied the heavily laden plane, its red and silver paint glistening in the moonlight, down the runway of the Los Angeles Municipal Airport and took off for Newark. Three hours later the lock on the
hatch cover broke again. The first time the rigid sheet of metal had blown off, narrowly missing the rudder. This time it fluttered in the propeller’s wake, again threatening to shear the rudder. With one hand on the controls, Amelia reached up and caught the edge of the cover, then held it for the next seventy-five miles as she headed toward Amarillo. She knew she would have to use both hands to land. Arm bruised and numb, she released the hatch, pulled back the throttle to slow the ship and grasped the wheel for a landing. The latch held.

After a two and a half hour delay while the lock was repaired, she left Amarillo but was soon involved in a
new battle for survival when carbon monoxide gas again drifted into the cockpit. Nauseated and faint, she held out until Columbus where she had to land for fuel. While waiting there she walked up and down the field to restore her circulation. Her knees kept buckling, but the fresh air revived her. From Columbus she fought a heavy rain squall over the Pennsylvania mountains before approaching Newark at 8:19
P.M
. on Saturday, July 8. The field was still lit by a summer sunset as she came to a halt on the runway. She had beaten her old record by almost two hours; the new time, seventeen hours, seven minutes, and thirty seconds.

A crowd of three hundred fans, most of them women, rushed the plane as soon as she pushed back the hatch cover and looked out, grinning and running her hand through wind-matted hair. G. P. was waiting for her when she jumped down from the plane, her grimy overalls spattered with oil and grease. “Well,” she said to him, “I’m back and nice and dirty as usual.” After seventeen hours of constant tension and nausea she took G. P.’s arm, walked with him to the car, got in on the driver’s side, and drove off toward Rye. The “Queen of the Air” had reasserted her right to the throne. The record was won, the routine had gone full circle. It was time to make some money again.

A
melia 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 the
publicity 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.