Then the footage ended and the lights came up and there she was, no longer an image flickering on a screen, but a sweetly pretty young woman seated primly on stage, in the armchair near the Iowa state flag. Hands folded in her lap, like a schoolgirl, only the faintest smile acknowledging the immediate, ringing applause that filled the hall, she did not rise. Perhaps because she was seated, and her willowy height was not yet apparent, the impression she gave was of an improbably slight figure, for a woman of such accomplishment; in a gray chiffon frock of her own design, coral beads at the curve of her long, lovely neck, she was perfection, with only the studiously tangled mop of dark blond hair to hint at the daredevil within.
In bow tie and tweeds, the bunny-nosed Coliseum director was at the lectern, smiling prissily, as if all that applause had been for him. He informed the crowd of Miss Earhart’s graciousness and friendly manner, how she put on none of the airs the famous frequently brought with them; and he spoke, rather eloquently, of her bravery, and her devotion to the cause of equality for women.
Through all this, Amelia gave no sign that she was being spoken of, or stared at; neither proud nor embarrassed, she gave no clue that experiences like these were far more frightening to her than flying across an ocean.
“Gertrude Stein has called us a lost generation,” the Coliseum director said.
I didn’t know how to break it to him, but I didn’t think Gertrude Stein had Des Moines in mind.
“But,” he continued, “no generation that could produce our speaker could ever be considered ‘lost.’ She displays better than any other young woman of her generation the pioneer spirit and courageous skill of our Midwestern forefathers…and need I remind you that she is a Des Moines girl, come home to share her story with us tonight…. Ladies and gentlemen, the Queen of the Air, Lady Lindy—Miss Amelia Earhart!”
She winced, just barely, at that “Lady Lindy” sobriquet, which followed her everywhere, and annoyed her no end. And as the most resounding applause of the night followed her introduction, she rose with easy grace, moving fluidly to the microphone, where she thanked the director and patted the air with one hand, gently, till the applause abated.
“It’s true,” she said, in that low, rich, yet very feminine voice, “that I saw my first airplane here in Iowa, at the State Fair. It was six years after the Wright Brothers made their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, and it was their celebrated plane on display, behind a fence…. My father told me it was a flying machine. To me, it was a funny-looking crate of rusty wire and wood. I was much more interested in the merry-go-round at the time.”
Laughter rippled through the hall.
“In his generous introduction, Mr. Cornelison mentioned our courageous pioneer forefathers,” she said solemnly, “and I realized suddenly what a terrible mistake I’d made…”
The grave timbre of her voice quelled the laughter.
“…being born a woman,” she said, her voice now mischievously lilting, “and not a man.”
Laughter almost exploded from the women in the hall, their menfolk smiling nervously.
“When heavier-than-air craft were first invented,” she said, “women followed just a few years behind in flying them. Today women hold various records, and I’m lucky enough to hold a few of those myself…though one recent article in the French press concluded, ‘But can she bake a cake?’”
Gentle laughter, now.
“More important in my view than record-setting is the everyday flying done by five hundred cake-baking women in this country, on missions of business and pleasure. How many of you have flown? Show of hands.”
Around the hall, perhaps twenty men raised a hand, and only four women.
“Please keep in mind that the flights I have made were simply for the fun of it…”
This reference to her book was contributed by Putnam, I would bet.
“…and have really added nothing to the progress of aviation. The time will soon come when what Colonel Lindbergh and I and a few others have done will seem quaint. Safe, regularly scheduled transoceanic flights will take place in our lifetime.”
This exciting news caused a mild wave of whispering to break out.
“Could I have the lights dimmed, please?” she asked, and they were.
Then, using a pointer but never turning her back to the crowd (a nice piece of public-speaking savvy), she guided them through a lively, personalized slide show of her Atlantic crossings and other record-setting adventures. Throughout she maintained an unaffected, friendly tone, rarely getting overly technical, and even then projecting so much enthusiasm about her subject, her audience never grew bored.
When the lights came up, she shifted subjects, with the startling statement, “Sex has been used too long as an excuse by incompetent women who like to make themselves and others believe that it is not their incompetence holding them back, but their womanhood.”
The crowd didn’t know what to make of that one, and I could spot a few frowns, though they seemed to be thought-induced. And the men were shifting in their seats, fidgeting; the word “sex” spoken in public, when a husband was seated next to his wife, was apparently unsettling. In Des Moines, anyway.
“Don’t take me wrong,” she said, and flashed that gap-toothed, just-one-of-the-girls, just-one-of-the-boys smile, “I’m no feminist. I merely indulge in modern thinking.”
And she spoke of science having cut back on household drudgery, that a woman could run a home and have a career, that husbands could and should share household and child-raising duties.
This all sounded pretty good, but when I plugged Amelia Earhart and her husband George Palmer Putnam into the equation, something didn’t add up—I couldn’t quite picture either one of them doing a dish or pushing a sweeper, and I figured both were too self-centered to ever have a kid.
But it made for a good, mildly controversial speech, which received a standing ovation, the Coliseum director returning to the microphone to let the crowd know that, shortly, Miss Earhart would be signing copies of her book in the lobby. Soon I was making change and dispensing full-price copies of a three-year-old volume that was available in a cheaper edition, but not here.
Amelia signed three hundred and some copies of her book, and spent time with every customer, shaking hands, laughing, listening, each treated as an individual, and if she felt any condescension for any of her public, her eyes did not betray it; she did the same with those who bought no book, merely came through the line with a program to sign.
With Amelia piloting her big, powerful, twelve-cylinder Franklin, we left the Coliseum shortly after ten o’clock and, following the practice that was a constant over our two weeks of appearances, set out immediately for the next stop on the schedule—Mason City, the easiest drive of the tour. We checked in at the Park Inn, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel, around midnight.
Usually we drove all night, checking into hotels at dawn, frequently granting the press an interview over a room-service breakfast prior to getting in a few hours of sleep before the next lecture. She gave the reporters more outspoken stuff than her lecture audiences.
“If women were drafted,” the dyed-in-the-wool pacifist modestly proposed to a gaggle of golfball-eyed Iowa scribes, “they would share the privilege with men of killing, suffering, maiming, wasting, paralyzing, impoverishing, and dying gloriously. There’d soon be an end to war.”
For the first several days and nights, she and I had said little, nothing beyond polite conversation; Amelia was cordial, if not quite friendly, and seemed distant, if not quite cold. I didn’t understand it, since I felt we’d hit it off pretty well at the Field’s opening and at the Palmer House dining room, after.
But driving through the night, in the Franklin, with her at the wheel more often than not (she loved that big car, loved to drive it, and I didn’t mind letting her, because it handled like a boat), we sat in silence. I didn’t take offense; hell, I just worked here.
Everywhere we went, it seemed, Amelia was claimed
as a native daughter—whether at a Women’s Christian Temperance Union meeting in Lawrence, Kansas (“What a pleasure to welcome home a Kansas girl”), a Zonta International tea at St. Louis, Missouri (“This outstanding woman grew up here and really took our ‘Show me’ state motto to heart!”), even an American Association of University Women lecture in Minneapolis (“Minnesota’s own!”).
She got $250 for each appearance—I was frequently handed the payment checks, as I was mistaken for her manager—and she earned her dough. Detroit was particularly grueling.
At the Hotel Statler (where we’d arrived at 2:00 A.M. the night before, Battle Creek being our previous stop), Amelia held a press conference in her suite over an omelet, six pieces of toast, a cantaloupe, and a pot of hot chocolate. A morning tour of the Hudson auto plant (where the Essex was made—the car she was currently endorsing, despite the Franklin she preferred, which was from a previous endorsement deal) was followed by a Women’s Advertising Club luncheon in the Detroit-Leland Hotel dining room, where she did not speak but received a warm ovation as guest of the Detroit Automobile Dealers Association. This made necessary a mid-afternoon tearoom stop with key members of the association, after a photo for their company publication was taken outside the three-story brownstone rooming house which a bronze tablet announced as the birthplace of Charles Lindbergh. Her lecture followed dinner for the auto dealers association at the Yacht Club and, finally, she made an appearance—but not a speech—at an auto show at Convention Hall, between Woodward and Cass Avenues, where an enthusiastic crowd turned ugly, pushing, shoving, trying to get a closer look at her, waving pens and pieces of paper, and hollering for autographs, pawing at her clothing, till it seemed they might tear themselves some souvenirs.
These were not the refined ladies in feathered hats and figured frocks we’d encountered at luncheons and lectures, nor the polite businessmen in suits and ties who made up the rest of her usual audience; these were real people. Blue-collar working stiffs, hard-working housewives, salt of the earth, backbone of America.
You know—goons.
“We got a problem here!” I said to the Hudson rep who was Amelia’s official escort. Arms outstretched like an umpire, I was doing my best to keep the clawing crowd away from an increasingly spooked Amelia; she was behind me, and we were backed up to a Hudson Eight on display there.
The Hudson rep was a little guy with George Raft’s hair, Clark Gable’s mustache and Stan Laurel’s face. “What do you suggest, Mr. Heller?”
Arms were flailing, hands pawing the air, like the crowd was drowning in its own tidal wave of bad breath and body odor.
“Where are the keys to that buggy?” I yelled, nodding to the Hudson.
He blinked. “Under the floor mat—why?”
A housewife who only slightly outweighed me was climbing on me like she wanted to procreate. I put my hand in her face, like Jimmy Cagney feeding Mae Clarke a grapefruit, and shoved her back. Then I straight-armed a ten-year-old kid and took Amelia by the arm, yanked open the driver’s-side door and said, “Get in.”
She gave me only a moment’s look, to determine whether or not I was crazy, saw that I was, and got in; so did I. She crawled over into the rider’s seat and we both rolled up the windows and locked ourselves in. I reached down and fumbled around under the mat and finally found the car keys. Wild eyes and yellow teeth and waving arms were the view out the windshield.
I started the engine but nobody seemed to notice; the hubbub out there was a dimwitted din a mere Hudson motor couldn’t hope to be heard over. Then I leaned into the Hudson’s horn and it bleated like a cow a tree fell on, and they heard that. In fact, it scared the hell right out of them, and gave them notice to get their asses out of my way.
Putting the Hudson in gear, I guided that streamlined baby right down the center aisle, through the convention hall, startled, pissed-off auto show attendees getting out of my way, bowling pins avoiding an oncoming ball. For people at an auto show, it was like they’d never seen a moving car before; hell, I was only doing five or ten miles an hour.
When I neared the exits—a row of doors clearly designed for people, not Hudsons—I braked, put the car in park, gave her a glance that told her what to do, and we hopped out on our respective sides, leaving the motor running, and she came around the front of the Hudson and took my hand.
A couple of uniformed cops near the exits were viewing this escapade with wide eyes and open mouths; one of the cops yelled, “Say! You can’t do that!”
We were halfway out the door, still hand in hand, when I nodded toward my partner and said, “But this is Amelia Earhart,” and the cop was thinking about that when we were gone, scampering like a couple of kids out the Convention Hall’s high arched entrance where we grabbed the first of a row of waiting cabs.
In the backseat of the cab, she threw back her headful of tousled curls and laughed and laughed. I wasn’t laughing, but I was smiling to where my cheeks might burst, and my heart was hammering. The excitement was like a drug rushing through my veins.
“Oh my goodness!” Tears of delight rolled down her apple cheeks. “You’re amazing, Nate! Simply amazing!”
“I just drove a damn car from one end of a convention hall to the other, is all,” I said. “It’s not like I flew across an ocean or anything.”
“What wonderful fun. You do have a reckless streak, don’t you?”
“I’ve been accused of that.”
And that night—though she’d just endured fourteen hours of public scrutiny and abuse—we set out in the Franklin for the next stop on our itinerary, Fort Wayne. Not that she didn’t show some of the wear and tear of the long day; she looked frail, wan, the lovely blue-gray eyes surrounded by not so lovely puffiness. For a change, she allowed me—in fact, implored me—to do the driving. She curled up in her seat, like a cat, in a blouse and chino slacks, the curve of her back to me as she slept, and her rather nice backside….
“Those threatening notes are quite real,” Putnam had told me, back in the Palmer House dining room. “The bodyguard aspect of your job is every bit the way I explained it to you.”
“Then what’s the idea of asking me,” I said, “do I want to know the ‘real’ reason I was hired?”
He drew on the Havana cigar, leaning back in his chair, a man of means, about to discuss his prized possession. “My wife’s an attractive woman, wouldn’t you say?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say, but now that you mention it, sure. She’s a peach. You’re a lucky guy.”
“Perhaps.” He sat forward now and those unblinking eyes revealed something new, something besides self-absorption and mild lunacy: sorrow. “I believe my wife is having an affair.”
This was not the first time I had heard a male client say this of his spouse; normally, it was news about as shocking as the sun coming up. But this I hadn’t seen coming. Perhaps it was in part the setting, the fancy dining room with its background sound of a string quartet and the clink of fine china and occasional clunk of silverware and polite conversation with laughter mingled in. The waiter was delivering our drinks and I grabbed and sipped my rum and Coke, rolling the liquid around in my mouth as I rolled Putnam’s words around in my brain.
Quietly, I spelled it out: “You mean, this is a divorce job? You want me to get the goods on your wife, so you can sue for divorce?”
Savoring a sip of his Manhattan, he shook his head, no. “Nate, I’m hoping that if I can confront my wife with proof of her…indiscretions…she will abandon this…this fling…and return to my arms.”
Those arms were folded, right now, and he seemed about as loving—and concerned—as a broker discussing stock options; still, the sadness in the glazed eyes behind the scholarly round-rimmed glasses could not be denied.
“How sure are you that she’s dallying?” I asked.
“Fairly sure. Quite sure.”
“Which is it? There’s a big difference between fairly and quite.”
“His name is Paul Mantz.” He too
k another sip of his Manhattan; in fact, he took two sips. “He’s a pilot, a stunt pilot in the movies. Cocky little pipsqueak, six years younger than A. E. Fast-talking, glib son of a bitch, full of himself.”
That latter could have been a description of Putnam.
“I brought him into the fold myself,” Putnam said, a twitch of disgust flicking in one corner of his mouth. “Met him when I was publicist on the picture Wings, where he put together a small team of pilots to stage the dogfights. I thought he’d be the ideal man to help A. E. prepare for the Honolulu-Oakland flight.”
“Why a stunt pilot for that job?”
Putnam shrugged. “To give the devil his due, Mantz is more than just a stunt pilot. He’s an engineer, set his own share of speed records, he’s president of the Motion Picture Pilots Association. Successful businessman, too, with a charter service, maybe you heard of it—the Honeymoon Express?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“It’s for Hollywood bigwigs and stars. You know—quickie Reno weddings and divorces. Las Vegas, too. Or just for celebrities to take weekend getaways, in Arizona and so on. After all, somebody in Hollywood is always fucking somebody else’s wife.”
I was swirling my drink in its glass, studying the dark liquid, as if looking for moral guidance; perhaps not the best place to look for it. “I don’t know about this, Mr. Putnam.”
“It’s ‘G. P.,’ and what the hell is there to feel uncomfortable about? You do divorce work, don’t you?”
“All the time…. But this is kind of a shady business, leading your wife to believe I’ve been hired for one thing, getting me into her confidence, when actually I’m working against her.”
He gestured with an open hand, reasonably. “As I said, the threatening notes are very real. She may well be in danger from a deranged fan or some jealous competitor…most of these women fliers are dykes, you know, and are by nature frustrated.”
Flying Blind Page 5