Fighting for Space

by Amy Shira Teitel

  Jackie landed in Montreal as something of a heroine. Fellow pilots were amazed that such a newly licensed pilot had managed the trip alone. Even the media took notice; her picture ended up in the Toronto Star above a caption calling her a society pilot. The trip to Montreal taught Jackie two crucial lessons. First, if her picture was going to appear in the newspaper, she’d have to make sure it was a flattering one properly identifying her as an aviatrix, not some flippant woman for whom flying was an amusing lark. Second, she needed to learn to read her instruments properly before she got into real trouble.

  * * *

  By fall, there was no question that flying was Jackie’s life, but a simple private license wasn’t enough. Of the 588 licensed women pilots in the United States by that time, fewer than sixty held advanced licenses. These transport, commercial, and instrument ratings not only qualified pilots to fly larger planes with more powerful engines, it meant they had demonstrated prodigious skill in the cockpit. So Jackie went where the best pilots were trained. She quit Antoine’s, and with Floyd’s full support packed up her car and drove the six days from New York to San Diego to attend the Ryan School of Aeronautics. Founded by T. Claude Ryan, who had built Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the school was one of the best in the country for advanced flight training. But Jackie, the student who learned by doing, was disappointed by the heavy emphasis on classroom lessons and the teachers’ propensity for playing craps in the afternoons. She’d spent most of her savings and uprooted her life to attend a flying school that did no flying. San Diego’s one saving grace turned out to be the navy’s pilot school at North Island, where Jackie found some familiar faces. The ensigns from her Pensacola days were air officers now, among them a former suitor named Ted Marshall. Pleased to see a familiar face, Jackie vented her frustrations to an understanding Ted, who made her an offer: if she could get herself a plane, he and his friends would teach her to fly the navy way. Jackie promptly bought a well-worn Travel Air trainer, hired a math tutor to take over the classroom lessons, and moved to Long Beach where Ted was stationed.

  Flying with the navy boys gave Jackie the impression that she’d crammed ten years of flying lessons into just six months. She learned to fly with one eye on her instruments and the other eye scanning for a stretch of beach or an empty dirt road in case she had to make an emergency landing. It was a valid concern; her used Travel Air trainer’s engine had a nasty tendency to die in the air. In her spare time, she explored the California countryside from the coast all the way inland to the Coachella Valley. That’s where she fell in love. It was like nothing she’d seen before. Sitting below sea level, the Salton Sea had been recreated in 1905 when the Colorado River flooded and breached a dam; in the eighteen months before engineers could stem the flowing water, it had grown into a sizable body of water. The surrounding desert of reddish-brown earth was broken by the grays, greens, and purples of the sage, desert holly, yucca, and ocotillo trees. The area was home to bobcats, pack rats, lizards, and rattlesnakes. Temperatures could reach as high as 130 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. But to Jackie, it felt calm. It was the only place where the buzzing energy that continually propelled her forward was quieted. She bought twenty acres of land and began planning the dream house she would build for herself and Floyd. When she told him about it, he purchased close to 900 adjacent acres.

  * * *

  The Grand Central Air Terminal in Los Angeles was unique. Located in the middle of the city and surrounded by homes and businesses, it was a favorite hangout for locals to spend lazy days watching the airplanes landing and taking off. Jackie hadn’t been planning on an audience when she arrived that day to take her commercial license exam, but the watchers weren’t leaving. Before the gathered crowd, she took off with an instructor crammed into her Travel Air trainer. She hadn’t reached seventy-five feet when her plane’s finicky engine stopped dead. Too low to turn back to the runway, Jackie’s scanning eye found a vacant lot. She glided down slowly to a landing, then forced her nose down to try to slow her speed, but the lot didn’t have as much space as a wide-open empty field. Cursing and cringing, Jackie banged her way through a metal fence, across the highway, and finally came to a stop against an illegally parked car on the opposite side of the street.

  A man got out, hardly thrilled that his day of plane watching had been interrupted by such a close look at one of them. Jackie didn’t see what the fuss was about. The car wasn’t exactly in great shape, and she’d barely hit it hard enough to do any damage, but the man turned out to be a traffic judge angry enough to slap her with a twenty-five dollar10 fine for illegal parking. As Jackie, the judge, and the examiner stood on the street arguing, a small crowd gathered around the wreckage to gawk. Two men pushed their way to the front, offering to tow the plane into a hangar to make the necessary repairs so she could get on her way. They introduced themselves as Al Menasco and Jack Northrop, and Jackie couldn’t contain her excitement. She knew Jack Northrop by reputation. He was revered throughout the aviation world as the designer behind some of the most beautifully streamlined planes in the air. As the two men assessed the damage, Jackie couldn’t hold back her excitement.

  “Someday I’ll be flying one of your planes!” she gushed to Jack.

  “Of course you will,” he replied absently, barely taking his focus from the plane. Then he suggested she contact one of his test pilots for some extra lessons. Jackie couldn’t deny it looked like she needed all the help she could get.

  This embarrassing episode behind her, Jackie eventually earned her commercial license, but it wasn’t enough. She wanted some objective measure of success to prove how good she was, and there was no better way than through air races.

  Air races had the power to turn pilots into celebrities. Victors won trophies and accolades, but more importantly, they often secured records, and record holders were household names. No one personified this phenomenon better than Charles Lindbergh, the unknown pilot who became an instant hero after crossing the Atlantic. For “Jacqueline Cochran” to become a household name, Jackie needed to fly with the best and win. Women’s air races were one option, so-called powder puff derbies that drew a strong crowd excited by the novelty of women flyers. But Jackie had no interest in being the best among women. Jackie wanted to be the best pilot, full stop. She wanted to fly with men in the Bendix, the Cleveland National Air Races, the MacRobertson International Air Race. She wanted to fly across oceans and whole continents, staying aloft for hours at a time before landing amid tens if not hundreds of thousands of cheering spectators at the finish line. These were the races that created stars, so these were the races that she needed to fly. There were just two problems.

  The first was easy enough to solve by upgrading her commercial license to the required transport license. That meant learning to fly by instruments alone. The big air races happened regardless of weather, which meant potentially flying through a storm or dense fog. Start times were also staggered, so it was possible she would have to fly at night. Without visible landmarks, it was easy for a pilot not to realize she was flying in a bank with her wings tilted to one side, or with her nose pointed in the wrong direction. She could unknowingly fly off course and slam into an unseen mountain or end up over water with no land in sight; these kinds of fatalities weren’t uncommon. To avoid getting lost, pilots had what was called “the beam.” The beam was a series of Morse code beeps and dashes sent over a known course between landmarks, almost like a virtual wire strung between beacons. With the plane’s radio tuned to the correct frequency, the pilot would hear a pattern in the signal—“right” if she was north of the wire, “left” if she was south of it, and “on course” if she was right along that line. For the most part, each signal extended far enough that leaving one beacon, she could pick up the next right away, flying along the beam. But there were places where the beam couldn’t go, like along some stretches of sky and over airports. In those instances, a pilot had to rely on instruments, trusting that the needle on the compass, t
he airspeed indicator, and the artificial horizon gave her a true indication of where her plane was in the sky. “Flying” and “blind” were not two words Jackie wanted to put together, but it was the only way to learn to trust instruments. Jackie studied maps, learned to fly on the beam, and flew with her windows covered until she could comfortably fly across the country eating lunch and smoking cigarettes without ever looking out the window.

  The second problem was harder to solve. None of these major air races allowed women to fly.

  * * *

  By the summer of 1935, Jackie and Floyd’s life together was becoming permanent. Hortense had been the one to initiate their divorce filings citing cruelty, and Floyd, working on settling out of court, was living between the large Manhattan apartment he and Jackie shared and their Indio, California, compound where the main house and surrounding guest houses were still taking shape. Among the construction workers was Jackie’s brother Joseph. She brought his whole family out west in a private Pullman car and set them up in a small nearby residence, and though they didn’t stay long, she relished the time with her young nieces and nephews during her trips to California.

  Jackie sold her little Travel Air trainer in favor of a bigger, higher performance plane in which she traveled between New York and California overseeing the house’s construction. She was a more proficient pilot for all the practice, too, adding a better understanding of weather patterns and flight conditions to her repertoire. With Floyd’s financial help, she even finagled her way into a few traditionally male air races. She entered the MacRobertson England-to-Australia international race but was forced out of contention in Bucharest when her Gee Bee Q.E.D. succumbed to mechanical problems. Jackie didn’t spend time worrying about the loss. Instead, she focused on her next big goal.

  At the same time, Jackie had begun conquering the business world; she hadn’t lost interest in starting her own cosmetics company. Whether out on the town or up in the air above it, she still valued her femininity. With Floyd’s continued support, she hired a cosmetic chemist and a perfume consultant with the goal of creating better products than anything on the market. She wanted a non-greasy hydrating face cream, something she knew had to be possible from working with lubricants on her planes. The result was Flowing Velvet, a moisturizer that promised to give women a natural-looking soft, dewy complexion. For beauty on the go, her team developed the Perk-Up cylinder, a three-and-a-half-inch stick with six compartments containing a cleansing cream, foundation, eye shadow, clear red rouge, solid perfume, and a sifter to fill with the face powder of the user’s choice. It was a staple Jackie touted as something every woman should have in her handbag or flight bag, as the case may be. Jackie had the products tested at a salon in Chicago whose customers’ feedback helped shape the line. To run the business, she hired Antoine’s former office manager and leased office space on the thirty-fifth floor at 630 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan near Rockefeller Center, which offered a stunning view of the city. Next, she ordered letterhead for the Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics Company featuring the slogan “Wings to Beauty.”

  Jackie personally took samples out to department stores and found that flying actually helped her in business. She might not have been a household name, but distributors knew the novelty of a female flyer’s cosmetics line would attract customers. Pogue’s in Cincinnati and Halle Brothers in Cleveland became her first two accounts. B. Foreman’s in Rochester followed, then J. W. Robinson’s in California, where she was sold alongside Elizabeth Arden; the two brands were billed as the only luxury lines in the upscale department store. Jackie’s cosmetics empire was born.

  Between continued flying time and running a burgeoning business, Jackie still maintained an active social life. She was in her New York apartment one day when the phone rang.

  “I’ve got quite a treat for you.” Her friend Paul Hammond was on the line inviting her to dinner.

  “Having dinner with you is always a treat, Paul.”

  “But this time I have a real treat, Jackie. There is someone I want you to meet who will be here, too. Amelia Earhart.”

  Jackie walked into the Hammonds’ dining room that evening to meet the woman whose fame she so desperately envied. Amelia had become the unquestioned queen of the air after flying across the Atlantic Ocean in 1928, though by her own admission she had been a passenger on that particular flight and about as useful as a sack of potatoes. Nevertheless, fame followed thanks to the publisher George Palmer Putnam. His aggressive promotion turned Amelia into a business, establishing her as a “Lady Lindbergh.” He promoted her flights, organized her mid-route checkpoints, booked her speaking tours and appearances, published her books, and in 1931 became her husband.

  Tall, slim, good-looking, and formally educated, Amelia was a stark contrast to Jackie, who was nine years younger, stood just five foot three inches, had a slightly fuller figure, and was still self-conscious that her schooling had stopped after the second grade. Naturally quiet Amelia preferred addressing crowds from behind a podium while Jackie craved being at the center of that kind of attention. Differences aside, both Jackie and Amelia quickly realized that they were very like-minded women. They were the emancipated daughters of the suffragettes, women for whom having a career and having a husband weren’t mutually exclusive. They had freedoms their mothers had never known, and with that came a feeling that the whole world was open to them. Both were involved with successful businessmen who, far from resenting their partners’ success, loved them for their independent streaks and strong wills. Both were successful in the male-dominated world of flying, often eschewing dresses for slacks while each still embodied her femininity in her unique ways. The two pilots immediately became fast friends.

  Weeks later, the pair flew Amelia’s brand-new Lockheed Electra from New York to California together. The trip was beset by weather delays that more than doubled the time to cross the country, but far from breeding tensions, Jackie and Amelia’s time together revealed a magical rapport. Their conversation ran the gamut from politics to religion to science to personal matters. Their flying strengths were different, with Amelia favoring distance records and Jackie pursuing speed flights, so any competition between them was a friendly one. They even discovered a shared fascination with extrasensory perception, something Jackie believed she possessed. They would read about air crashes and Jackie, focusing on the plane and its last reported position, would try to “see” with her mind’s eye where the wreckage might be. Whatever she saw—telephone lines or a mountain pass by a highway—she and Amelia compared those visions with maps, then called local rescue services with tips.

  Their cross-country adventure didn’t end when they reached California. Instead, Jackie brought Amelia out to see the house in Indio, which was just about finished. The flight cemented what both women knew would be a very close, lifelong friendship, and Jackie now had an ally with whom to take on the all-male air races.

  * * *

  A thick fog rolled over the Burbank airport just after midnight on the second of September 1935, but the thousands of spectators standing along the runway didn’t leave. They would stay out all night just to watch the planes taking off for the start of the Bendix Transcontinental Speed Race. Established by automotive and aviation pioneer Vincent Bendix as a chance for manufacturers to test new developments, it was akin to the Kentucky Derby for pilots. The starting line was in Burbank, California, and the finish line in Cleveland, Ohio. Between those two points, pilots could fly whatever race plane they chose along any route; the winner was the pilot with the shortest time measured from wheels up to wheels down. Because speed was of the utmost importance, the planes in the Bendix were often the newest, cutting-edge designs and their pilots the most skilled at pushing those planes to their limits in the hope of saving even a few minutes in the air. Between planes, training, and everything in between, the $30,00011 prize money that came with the first place trophy barely offset the winner’s cost of competing, but no one flew the Bendix for the money. Pilots
flew the Bendix to prove they were the best of the best, and tonight, Jackie was finally going to be flying right alongside them.

  Jackie and Amelia had worked together to change the rules governing the Bendix. Two years earlier, the race had been open to women with the understanding that they were competing against each other, not against their male peers. Angry over this continued inequality, women who might have flown the Bendix the following year boycotted in protest. Jackie had picked up the fight this year to secure her own entrance into the coveted race, lobbying for women’s inclusion in the Bendix without restrictions. Race officials had finally consented. Jackie and Amelia, the two women interested in the 1935 race, were permitted to fly on the condition that they procure signed waivers from all the male entrants confirming they had no problems with female competitors. With that, the Bendix became a mixed race.

  Securing her participation had been the easy part for Jackie. Preparing her plane and herself for the demanding race had been the bigger challenge; her goal, after all, was to win, not just fly. With Floyd’s financial support she bought a Northrop Gamma—she’d made good on her promise to Jack Northrop after that embarrassing crash and was finally flying one of his planes—and fitted it with an experimental air-cooled Pratt & Whitney engine that could push the plane to winning speeds. But the plane had gone through some growing pains. She’d had it for a year, and in that time it had had four different engines and weathered one crash that had demanded significant repairs. For whatever reason, the rebuilt plane had developed a bad vibration that engineers hadn’t been able to correct. The engine, too, had a tendency to overheat when pushed to its limit, sending vibrations through the whole plane that risked causing structural damage. If she flew conservatively, she would be fine, but this was the Bendix, and conservative flying wasn’t a path to victory. Knowing she’d push the plane and fearing the worst, both Northrop and Pratt & Whitney had begged her to withdraw from the race, but she’d refused. If they weren’t going to publicly admit it was their technical faults that were forcing her to withdraw, she wasn’t going to give the impression that she wasn’t up for the challenge of the race. Their stalemate kept her in contention for the Bendix.