Amelia Earhart (37 page)

For the next five weeks she learned as much as she could about the Electra from McLeod and Mantz. McLeod took her on one
practice run with landings and takeoffs at Mills Field, Alameda Air Base, and Burbank in a single day. Mantz took her on more but not enough to satisfy him that she knew the aircraft as well as she should. When he continued to
press her for more flight time, she decided to enter it in the 1936
Bendix race. The flight from
Los Angeles to Floyd Bennett Field in New York for the start of the race would give the plane a “shakedown cruise” and Amelia some practice before crossing the country again in the race back to the West Coast on September 4. Fortunately, Mantz and McKneely went along because the two 550-horsepower engines leaked oil all the way to Kansas City.

Before leaving California, Amelia told reporters she would fly the race solo, probably to prevent rumors that she could not handle the plane without a man to help her. Once in New York she asked Helen Richey, her friend whose forced resignation Amelia had protested so vigorously a year before, to accompany her. In a race that was disastrous to many of the contestants, Amelia had her share of trouble. Moments after she took off at 2 : 47 in the morning the navigator’s hatch blew open and almost pulled her and Richey out of the cabin. They managed to close it and tie it down with a rag. It was secured when they refueled in Kansas City but soon after leaving there Amelia had trouble with the fuel system. Either it was faulty or she didn’t know enough about it. They came in
fifth and last, one and a half hours after the winners, Louise Thaden and Blanche Noyes.
^§

Amelia stayed in Los Angeles for the remainder of the National Air Races, which her reporter friend Carl Allen of the
Herald Tribune
thought were a fleecing of the public. Allen cited “
too much Hollywood ballyhoo,” primitive sanitary facilities, no food except hot dogs and water at five dollars a glass. When Amelia returned to Burbank, Mantz needed more time to work on the Electra and she needed more flight experience in it, but G. P. had already promised it would be based at
Purdue. Amelia flew it there in late September, taking G. P. and McKneely with her.

For the remainder of the year, while Mantz waited in California for the return of Amelia and the Electra, and while G. P. worked on flight
arrangements, Amelia shuttled ceaselessly by car or train from Purdue to the Midwest and the East Coast. In addition to her
lectures, her other commitments included campaigning for the Roosevelt administration. A few days after she arrived at Purdue she drove to upstate New York, joining a woman’s “caravan” of speakers in cars that stopped in small towns to rally
Democratic voters. Without a microphone Amelia’s vocal cords began to fail, but when she realized her audience in Mechanicsville could not hear her from an open window of a ground-floor office, she asked for a desk to be brought out onto the sidewalk. She gave her speech standing on top of the desk, a performance that gained her and the campaign nationwide news coverage.

Two days later she drove to Syracuse for the state Democratic convention to second the nomination of her friend and neighbor in Rye, Caroline O’Day, the incumbent congresswoman-at-large and the only woman candidate. When Amelia made her
seconding speech the cheers that followed O’Day’s nomination swelled to a roar of approval. Back on a lecture tour of the Midwest, she followed up with an
endorsement of the Roosevelt administration at all twenty-eight of her appearances in October.

No matter how busy she was, Amelia found time to express her beliefs. Both principled and practical, she endorsed Roosevelt because she thought he had done more for women than any other president. At the same time she continued to support the National Women’s Party, sending a contribution and a message to their national convention in New York: “
I am deeply interested in women’s obtaining full equality under the law.… Today women still stand victims of restrictive class legislation and conflicting interpretations of statutes … their rights must be made theirs by definition, that is by Constitutional guarantee.”

The militant feminist also remained an uncompromising pacifist. The first woman to lecture at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1935, she returned in 1936, a few days before Armistice Day, when she told the midshipmen that traditional speeches and parades were “uncivilized,” and what was really needed was “education for peace.” It was an odd place for such a message but she never forgot the wounded in that Toronto hospital.

G. P. was with her for that weekend when both were the guests of the academy’s superintendent, Adm. David Sellers. He was also with her on the Democrats’ “caravan” campaign and for another weekend in South Bend, Indiana, as a guest of
Vincent Bendix, president of Bendix
Aviation Corporation and donor of the Bendix prize. G. P. cultivated all their hosts. Amelia was present, but she did not enjoy these weekends as much as he. In much of the gossip about a pending divorce for the Putnams there were always rumors of another man. If Amelia had left G. P., it would not have been for another man, but to live alone. She was tired of G. P.—of his endless schemes, his demanding schedules, his hot temper, his pursuit of the powerful, and his apparent need to share the public attention she found increasingly distasteful.

One of the first persons to know this was her old friend,
Gene Vidal. Although Vidal maintained friendly relations with G. P., the help he gave to him on the world flight was really for Amelia’s sake. Vidal made a point of seeing her whenever they were in the same city. He was with her at the National Air Races in Los Angeles and he met her when she arrived at Purdue in September. On November 28, a week after she flew the Electra from Purdue to New York for inspection of its radio system, Vidal took her to the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia. He had refused an invitation from the West Point Society of Philadelphia so that he could escort her and his ten-year-old son,
Gore, to the game.

The boy was fascinated by Amelia. He thought her voice was beautiful and her “white” eyelashes very unusual. She wrote poetry and encouraged him to write. He was sure Amelia was in love with his father, who had been divorced for a year, but was even more certain his father’s affection for Amelia was platonic. He was probably right. Among Vidal’s papers at the University of Wyoming is a leather wallet with three passport pictures in it. One is of a motherly looking, white-haired woman, a Mrs. Scovill, manager of a Santa Monica hotel where Vidal lived while working for TAT in 1929 and whose advice he sought later in finding a good summer camp for Gore. A second picture is of Gore, and the third, Amelia. The collection is that of a family man, not a lover.

On the train returning to New York, while curious fans peeked in the window of their compartment, Amelia talked with Vidal and his son about the world flight. When the boy asked her what worried her the most, she told him she feared being forced down in an African jungle. He said he thought the Pacific Ocean looked more dangerous. She replied that there were islands in the Pacific and that she would love to live on a desert island. Gene Vidal was not as enthusiastic as Amelia about life on a desert island but he was willing to discuss methods of extracting salt from sea water. He knew Amelia loved to discuss problems of that sort.
Later, Gene told his son that Amelia disliked her husband and that she was tired of the constant attention resulting from his publicizing of her career. By 1936 she had made up her mind to find a figurative, if not a literal, desert island on which to live.

That same November Amelia met a woman who became a second, intimate friend in whom she could confide, perhaps even more than she did in Gene Vidal.
Jacqueline
Cochran Odlum was also an aviator, confident, daring and eager to show the world what a woman pilot could do. Other than that, there was little the two women had in common. Cochran was eight years Amelia’s junior, the founder-owner of a cosmetics company who had recently married one of the country’s wealthiest financiers, Floyd Odlum. A tiny, shapely blonde who ordinarily preferred the company of men, she was intelligent but uneducated, a compulsive talker exuding a nervous, pent-up energy.

Growing up in Atchison, eight-year-old Amelia had played at trapping the neighbors’ chickens; six-year-old Cochran trapped them for food in the camp for itinerant workers where she lived. At eight, this unwanted foster child of ignorant, often cruel guardians went to work in a cotton mill in Columbus, Georgia, on the twelve-hour night shift for six cents an hour. Cochran fled the schoolroom on her third day there, after the teacher hit her and she struck back. Although her formal education was infrequent and intermittent, it did not prevent her from speaking her mind. An oft-repeated, if apocryphal, story about Cochran claimed that when she was shown the
relief tube in a military plane just before she took it up for a test flight, she said, “I never pee when I fly.”

This small, uneducated, and, some said, ruthless woman and tall, well-read, gentle Amelia liked each other from their first meeting. A few days later Amelia invited Cochran to accompany her in the Electra when she took it to the West Coast.

The trip took a week. Held up by weather in St. Louis and Amarillo, the new friends talked. They discussed everything that interested either or both of them—politics, business, science, religion, aviation, and, surprisingly for Amelia, their own lives. The ebullient Cochran proved a sensitive listener. Although she flew for the love of it, she realized that her new friend was seeking in flight an elusive peace, one she had failed to find in college, nursing, social work, or any of her other earlier pursuits.

During the trip Cochran told Amelia she had
psychic powers. These were tested the first night in Indio, California, where Amelia was a guest
at the Odlum ranch. After they heard that a Western Air Express plane was missin
g on a flight from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City,
Amelia, who had always been a respecter of scientific verification, asked Cochran to locate the plane. Cochran gave Amelia a number of clues. Amelia called Paul Mantz in Los Angeles, who found the locality Cochran had indicated on his aerial maps. Amelia drove half the night to Los Angeles, where she took off with Mantz in the Electra on a search for the missing aircraft. They didn’t find it, but when the snows melted the following spring, Cochran claimed it was where she said it would be. On December 27 a United Airlines plane was lost outside of Burbank. Cochran again claimed she told Amelia where to look and Amelia found the plane but in their column on February 16, 1937, it was Amelia whom Drew Pearson and Robert Allen credited with psychic gifts in locating the wreckage as well as that of a second plane lost on January 12. Cochran, who would have been furious at anyone else upstaging her, made no protest.

Cochran had invited Amelia to visit her at the Cochran-Odlum ranch, Indian Palms, as soon as they arrived in California. Before her marriage to Odlum, Cochran had built a small house on twenty acres in Indio. Odlum, a former utilities magnate who was president of Atlas Corporation and later took over Paramount Pictures, purchased another eight hundred adjacent acres and expanded the accommodations to a main house, six guest cottages, a golf course, stables, and a swimming pool. Amelia loved the place. Delighted, Cochran described her guest as “streaking across the desert on horseback with the joy of living mirrored in her face,” or “stretched out full length on the floor before the fireplace, studying maps, talking or … just watching the shooting flames.”

Amelia spent the last few days of 1936 at Indian Palms. This time G. P. and Floyd Odlum were both there, along with Floyd’s thirteen-year-old son by a previous marriage. Amelia, who was fascinated by anything mechanical, charmed young
Bruce Odlum by her interest in a twelve-dollar used car he had managed to put in running condition. She was obviously fond of both Cochran and Odlum who returned her affection. Odlum was cordial to G. P., but Cochran did not like him from the moment she met him after her solo flight in 1932. Always watchful of any woman who might challenge Amelia’s standing as the leader of the pack, G. P. had asked Cochran, “Well, little girl, what is your ambition in flying?” Cochran snapped back, “To put your wife in the shade.”

Years later, she told a friend that Amelia might have been in love
with Putnam early in their marriage but she had become suspicious of his motives and thought he was using her name to further his own ambitions. Both Vidal and Cochran were convinced that Amelia no longer thought that her “reasonable partnership” with G. P. gave her the kind of support she wanted for the most ambitious and dangerous flight of her career. With just ten more weeks left to prepare for it, the Putnams’ duality of control was beginning to falter.