Amelia Earhart (32 page)

It was 1:31 in the afternoon when she landed at Oakland, two hours behind schedule because she had throttled down to save gas. The crowd at the field had grown to ten thousand, many in it waiting for hours. She surprised her admirers, coming straight in without circling the field for a perfect landing two hundred feet from its center. A roar swept over the rain-sodden field, a mix of cheers, shouts, whistles, and automobile horns, as the crowd broke through police lines and reached the Vega just as the propeller stopped turning. One unfortunate eighteen-year-old freshman from the University of California at Berkeley was knocked down and trampled, suffering a broken elbow and a broken leg. As police succeeded in pushing the crowd back, the isinglass cockpit cover opened and Amelia pushed herself up where the crowd could see her. She smiled and waved, leaning down to take a huge bouquet of roses before airport attendants, fearing she would be manhandled and the aircraft damaged, pushed the Vega backward into a hangar. Inside the hangar her first words were, “I’m tired,” but when someone offered her
a chair, she said, “I don’t want to sit down. I’ve been sitting down a long time.”

“Are you going on to Chicago or Washington?” a reporter asked. She shrugged. “I’ll have to check the weather,” she replied. A few moments later when a mechanic asked her about refueling, she said, “No, not yet,” and moved toward the exit where a police escort waited to accompany her to a hotel. There she again refused to sit down while she answered reporters’ questions. She was swaying with fatigue. At the airport she had said she was so dirty that, given a choice between a bath or sleep, she would take the bath. But as the reporters were leaving she said, “
I want to sleep more than anything.”

There remained one more task, to write her own account of the trip for the North American Newspaper Alliance.
^c
A doctor who arrived to examine her declared she was exhausted and her eyeball was bruised but her general physical condition was excellent. Always airsick from gasoline fumes, she had eaten only one hardboiled egg during the previous twenty-four hours. In her room she had a bowl of chicken broth, muffins, and a glass of buttermilk, wrote the NANA story, and went to bed.

By ten o’clock the next day she was at the field checking the weather. She was out of luck. Storms covered the Midwest. Still determined to prove that a flight from Honolulu to Washington could be made with only a one-night stop, she decided to fly to Los Angeles and check weather conditions over Arizona and New Mexico. When she tried to take off from Oakland the wheels of the Vega bogged down in mud over the hubcaps and a tractor had to be used to haul it to another runway. She made it to Los Angeles but there was a blizzard raging over Arizona. Still hoping to make the flight, she gave instructions to mechanics to tune up the motor and fill the tanks, then left the field. Reporters assumed she would go to the
house on Valley Spring Road where Amy was waiting but she did not, not at least for the next few hours. No one knew where she went. Amy may have been deeply hurt, although it is possible she realized Amelia was trying to conserve her energy for the next flight and reporters were besieging the house. There was no onward flight. Storms continued all across the country and by the next morning she was home with Amy telling newsmen that it would be foolish of her to continue the
flight because the stopover had already been too long to demonstrate “
how easy and little fatiguing such a trip would be … to link the Hawaiian capital with the national capital.”

The national capital was waiting for her. Eleanor Roosevelt cabled the day after the flight that she was “so relieved to have you back safely.” A second cable invited Amelia, and G. P. if he were with her, to stay at the White House when she arrived in Washington. The First Lady’s interest filtered down. Rex Martin, acting director of the Bureau of Air Commerce, asked her to advise him if she did decide to come to Washington so that official arrangements could be made for her reception. The bureau’s man at Los Angeles was instructed to send word when she took off and to report her bearings all during the flight. Delayed in California, Amelia was feted a week after her flight at a
dinner in Oakland. At the speakers’ table were former president Herbert Hoover and Mrs. Hoover, California governor Frank Merriman and Stanford University president Lyman Wilbur. After dinner, a
letter from FDR was read, lauding Amelia for proving that “aviation is a science which cannot be limited to men only.” He called her a trailblazer like those pioneers who opened the West, women who “marched step in step with men.”

Praise like FDR’s was not universal. When
Kingsford-Smith was asked for a comment he said it was “wonderful” but followed immediately with, “at the same time a man is a fool to fly an ocean in a single engine plane.” Presumably a woman would be, too. He said he had done it the preceding November because he was broke and trying to sell his Lockheed Altair, the
Lady
Southern Cross
. It was the only way he could get to the States and find a buyer, but he took a navigator along.
^d

A week after the flight
Newsweek
magazine commented, “Every so often Miss Earhart, like other prominent flyers, pulls a spectacular stunt to hit the front pages. This enhances a flyer’s value as a cigarette endorser, helps finance new planes, sometimes publicizes a book.”

The Nation
magazine proved the fiercest critic, expanding on previous accusations of Amelia’s working for Hawaiian sugar interests. An article entitled “
Flier in Sugar,” written by a “well-known author” under the pseudonym, Leslie Ford, claimed a campaign against a sugar tariff
was being waged by a public relations firm, Bowman, Deute, Cummings, Inc., which in turn created the Pan Pacific Press Bureau. Its clients included the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association, the Matson Line, the Hawaii Tourist Bureau, and the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. “A transoceanic flight,” Ford wrote, “especially by our foremost woman aviator, is front-page news. From it flow publicity releases, personal interviews, signed stories, lectures, radio broadcasts—and in this case a possible motion picture featuring Miss Earhart and built around her flight by her husband, George Palmer Putnam of Paramount.”

Although all these were legitimate byproducts of the flight, the propaganda for the sugar interests that ran through them was not. Ford wrote that although Amelia was unquestionably more interested in aviation than in sugar, she mentioned more than once the leit-motif of “Hawaii as an integral part of the U.S.” and in her NANA story on the flight she called Hawaii “the alluring southwest corner of the United States.”

Ford claimed that the reason the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
and the
San Francisco News
had urged her to abandon the trip was because they knew it was a publicity stunt. The most nervous persons during the eighteen-hour flight, he wrote, had to be publicist Bowman and husband Putnam who made the arrangements for it. “Luck,” Ford said, “was with them. The newspapers, knowing the truth, had been kind enough not to mention it in their stories on the flight.”

How much of Ford’s criticism was warranted and by whom is impossible to assess. Amelia certainly did not think of the trip as a stunt but she had to know that G. P. was not getting all those flattering press releases put out by Pan Pacific without giving something in return. And she did refer to Hawaii as part of the U.S. on several occasions.

The British weekly,
The Aeroplane
, which had bitterly criticized her two Atlantic flights, called this one “
A Useless Adventure.” “She is thirty-six years old and ought to know better,” the writer claimed. Why didn’t she? Certainly not because she was an unattractive woman seeking fame or notoriety, he wrote. She was attractive and had already proven her courage and ability. The answer, he claimed, lay in “boredom—a dangerous feature of modern life.”

In a sense he was right. Amelia revealed in her poem “Courage” her fear of a life squandered on “little things,” lived in “dull, grey ugliness.” Loving life intensely, she was willing to risk it in order to enhance it. In her pursuit of that state of ecstasy she called “peace,” the romantic poet
of the previous decade had imagined paying for it with “vivid loneliness” and “bitter joy.” These she experienced, but they were not enough. The ultimate price was as mundane as the world she tried to escape—the need for money.

By January of 1935 she had become the first person to fly solo between Honolulu and California, in either direction. She was also the first person to cross the Atlantic twice in an airplane, the first woman to fly it solo, and the first woman to fly an autogiro, the first to make a solo crossing of the continent, the first to cross it nonstop. To reach out for the unknown again she needed cash. She was in hot pursuit of it within days of her Pacific flight, on a course laid out by that master of promotion, George Palmer Putnam.

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.