East to the Dawn

by Susan Butler

  And indeed, involved as he had been in the Friendship flight during April, May, and June—coordinating the various aspects with Amy Guest, David Layman, Richard Byrd, the flight crew, the press, and Hilton Railey; rushing back and forth from Boston to New York, dazzled by his newfound Galatea—he still found time to talk his new friend David Layman into bankrolling a trip to hunt big game in Africa for three fifteen-year-old Boy Scouts, which would result, when the Scouts returned in September, in another book for Putnam’s to publish. He even had another “first flight” project going at the same time he was organizing the Friendship—the Australian Hubert Wilkins, also under contract to Putnam’s, on April 15 began the first west-to-east crossing of the Arctic. Wilkin’s saga, the story of the 2,200-mile flight, would also come out in the fall of 1928. And these two other projects were not all; George was also writing the occasional article as roving correspondent for The New York Times. This level of activity was, for him, nothing unusual; as he admitted, “My interests are usually plural.”

  So that by the time the Friendship was airborne, the validity of being called Simpkin (as well as the affection implied in the tease) was so firmly stuck in George’s mind that he signed some of the cables he sent to Trepassey “Simpkin.”

  In New York in November, George gave a dinner for Amelia at the Heigh Ho, a fashionable East Side restaurant. It was a classic George guest list: mostly famous adventurers. Present were the explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, back from the Gobi Desert; pilot Clarence Chamberlin and his wife; the Connecticut senator-elect; and balloonist William Beebe and his wife. And of course George’s own wife, Dorothy.

  George wrote a promotional article of his publishing triumphs for Putnam’s entitled, “An Intimate Review of Aviation’s Best Sellers,” that appeared in the July 1929 Sportsman Pilot. Although he mentioned Lindbergh, Byrd, Clarence Chamberlin, and Sir Hubert Wilkins, among others, he devoted the most words and by far his most effusive prose to Amelia’s recent slim effort: “the most dramatically interesting bit of manuscript that has passed over my desk was written under unique circumstances. To date it is in a class all by itself—and likely will remain so for some time to come. This particular manuscript was written in a plane as it winged its way over the Atlantic.... That author, of course, is Amelia Earhart.... It’s a humorful, modest volume, set down with unusual literary skill.” And so on.

  The summer of 1929, in an effort to impress Amelia, George decided to try a “first flight” of his own—to Bermuda. Superb organizer that he was, he hired the best of the best to assist him. In addition to a state-of-the-art plane and an excellent pilot, he signed on as navigator world-acclaimed Lieutenant Commander Harry Lyon, who had guided the flight of the Southern Cross on its epochal transpacific flight the previous summer. But in spite of all George’s excellent preparations, just about the only thing that went according to plan was their takeoff, from an airfield on Long Island. The trip was a disaster. He later confessed, “In the end I nearly broke my neck. Even so, it was something to have seen A.E. staying on the ground, while I flew.... Our undertaking lost no time in becoming a comedy of errors. Midway along the Jersey Coast the engine conked and we squashed into a gummy mass of mud. Rescued from that we finally made Atlantic City, after a spanking descent on the hillside of a heavy wave that bounced us back into the air a hundred feet or so and nearly broke the plane in pieces.... Between Atlantic City and Norfolk, believe it if you can, Lyon got lost and ... the thought did just cross my mind that something was being mixed with the navigation which was not water.”

  George had discussed the proposed flight with Amelia and had kept her apprised of the flight’s nonprogress. She saw him off and it was she and not Dorothy who met him when he returned, by train, to New York City. When she met him at Pennsylvania Station, she was very gracious, according to George. “She never once said: I told you so. She had, and I should have listened.”

  Amelia was in demand all over the United States. George was her agent, her manager, and her publicist. He set up her schedules, contacted the newspapers, organized her speeches, and sent her endless suggestions as to how to make them better. “You are apt to take less time than you think you will take. Have plenty of spare ammunition on cards to fill in the gaps. To this end I suggest your mapping out your talk on the small cards I am having handed you together with your films. Remember you will be working with a pointer (get a pointer!) with the slides. You will have a tendency to turn your back on the audience. This is a difficult trick. You really have to remember always to talk into the microphone; walk over to the slide, point out what you want to, and then return to the microphone and explain.” As a good coach, he pointed out her weak points. “Remember too your tendency is to let your voice drop at the end of sentences. And perhaps the most vital of all is the necessity of ending matters crisply and definitely.” Sometimes he was pompous, as when he told her, “Many a good speech, like a railroad, is ruined by lack of adequate terminal facilities.”

  In December 1929, in Reno, Nevada, Dorothy divorced George. The divorce was amicable as divorces go; Dorothy had a beau of her own. Still, Amelia was certainly a large factor. It was during a party at which Amelia was one of the guests that Dorothy packed up her trunk and left the Rye house for good. Dorothy, like George, was drawn to adventurers—she married Captain Frank Upton, the hero of a North Atlantic steamship rescue, less than a month after her divorce. The fact that the end of the Putnam marriage had been mutually desired by both partners and that by the terms of the divorce George set up a joint trust to provide for Dorothy and the children went a long way toward enhancing George’s image in Amelia’s eyes.

  She had lunch with Marian Stabler shortly after the divorce became final. “Of course everyone wants to know if I’m going to marry George,” Amelia burst out, at which point Marian asked, “Are you?” “NO,” replied Amelia, giving as the reason that she liked Dorothy Putnam and thought the divorce “was a shame.”

  Then George’s life took an unexpected turn. In February 1930 his uncle, George Haven Putnam, the respected head of G.P Putnam’s Sons, Civil War veteran, author of thirteen books, champion of international copyright agreements, died at the age of eighty-five. George, who had been working at Putnam’s since 1919, fully expected to buy out his uncle’s holdings and become president, particularly since that had been George Haven Putnam’s wish as well as his own, and his uncle had drawn up a contract establishing the basis for George’s purchase of his holdings after his death. But, unexpectedly, George Haven’s son Palmer Putnam, a mining engineer, returned from Africa and decided he wanted to run Putnam‘s, in spite of the fact that he had no background in publishing. He bought out George’s interest, put himself in charge and George out to pasture. Within a short time Palmer was bankrupt and Putnam’s, spiralling downward, had been taken over by Walter Minton and Earl Balch—all of which left George out of a job.

  By summer George had joined Brewer and Warren, a new publishing house, with the particular charge of developing an adventure and travel list. No matter how much he liked his new partners or how well he got along with them—and the firm shortly thereafter became Brewer, Warren and Putnam—it would have been a traumatic, uncertain time for George. Even given his highly vaunted ability to juggle countless balls in the air at the same time, it probably was this distraction, as much as Amelia’s foot-dragging, that kept him single for a year after his divorce.

  On the other hand, there is certainly no doubt that Amelia did not rush into marriage. She was in the full flush of an incredible career. She had been catapulted onto center stage, and for herself and American womanhood she dearly wanted to stay there. Her instinct was that marriage, even to George, would throw her off balance. But George was persistent. By his own admission, he proposed and was turned down “twice, at least.” Never one to give up, he kept on trying and began to wear her down. She was still struggling, as she wrote to a friend, long after George’s divorce had come through.

  I am still unsold on ma
rriage. I don’t want anything, all the time.... A den.... Do you remember in “If Winter Comes” how Mabel was always trying to get her husband a “den” and how he hated it? He said he wasn’t a bear. A den is stuffy. I’d rather live in a tree....

  I think I may not ever be able to see marriage except as a cage until I am unfit to work or fly or be active—and of course I wouldn’t be desirable then.

  But before the year was out, she changed her mind. She had, after all, been listening to George and following his advice for over a year. She knew he knew what he was doing. She respected him. The press sensed the coming nuptials and pursued George for information. “To marry Miss Amelia Earhart would be swell,” George said to one interviewer, then went on to inject a note of caution: “But nothing in this vale of tears is certain.”

  On the eighth of November 1930 they applied for and were granted a marriage license in a Connecticut town near where George’s mother lived. Two more months would go by. She was filled with misgivings.

  George pressed his case. Amelia’s mind began to wander. She became interested in a newfangled airplane, the autogiro—possibly dangerous, certainly distracting. Invented by a Spaniard a few years before, the first American production model, made under license at the Pitcairn plant in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, made its first test flight just the week before they applied for the marriage license. Within several weeks Amelia was up in the PCA-2 to see what all the fuss was about, liked what she found, and soloed. The strange craft, which had the fuselage of a conventional plane but had four large rotor blades mounted on a mast above it, could take off in a short distance—and land on a dime. Never mind that it was slow and awkward, and that on landing it settled down awkwardly like an old hen, as Anne Lindbergh observed; it didn’t need a landing field. The possibilities seemed endless. Thomas Edison called it “the greatest advance that could have been made in aviation.”

  Before too long the smitten George evinced an interest in autogiros, and the next time she drove out to Willow Grove to fly a Pitcairn giro, on the Friday before Christmas, he was with her. He spent most of the day hanging around waiting for her. She took off and landed so many times, a watching observer lost count. As the afternoon wore on George decided he might as well go up himself Amelia kept at it, piloting the PCA-2, experimenting to see how stable it was—until darkness forced her to call it quits. George’s reward was to spend the weekend with her at her boss’s house—at C. T. Ludington‘s, head of the Ludington line, in Philadelphia. No doubt he was fitting in with her plans. No doubt they were traveling together in the most open manner; even The New York Times knew they were both spending the weekend at the Ludingtons’.

  By January Amelia was entertaining thoughts of backing out of the marriage—and in an uncharacteristically frantic action, she was driven to ask her male friends their opinion. She called up her good chum Carl Allen, aviation editor of The New York World Telegram, and asked him to round up their mutual friend Deacon Lyman of The New York Times and meet her. “I need advice badly and I need it today if possible,” she said to Allen. Allen was one of her great admirers. The two men dropped everything and within twenty minutes were knocking at her door. According to Allen, she was vacillating about the marriage—she was afraid it would wreck her glittering career. The meeting was awkward, the men stunned. As Allen remembers it, he said to her, “In my opinion, Mr. Putnam excels in and relishes this essential role from which you instinctively shrink; he basks in the reflected public glorification which you receive, telling himself, truthfully, his role helped create this acclaim and can do much to give it still greater dimensions. And he is probably right. It may be that you need him as much or more than he needs you.”

  Amelia had always cherished her freedom, always held a deep-seated ambivalence toward marriage. Swinburne’s Atalanta could have still been speaking for her.

  “... a maiden clean,

  Pure iron, fashioned for a sword; and man

  she loves not; what should one such do with love?”

  “wherefore all ye stand up on my side,

  If I be pure and all ye righteous gods,

  Lest one revile me, a woman, yet no wife,

  That bear a spear for spindle, and this bow strung for a web woven.”

  Should she or shouldn’t she? It was a difficult decision.

  Being a wife and mother and pursuing a career would involve trade-offs and sacrifices, particularly in those times when the labor-saving devices now taken for granted were just a promise for the future: fulfilling the duties of mother and wife was a full-time job. Running a home and working (we are talking here of the upper-middle-class home) was like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. A contemporary Radcliffe study of wives who worked would conclude that it was almost impossible. The WEIU did a study of Simmons College graduates in the first quarter of the twentieth century: of the 1,102 who had married, a grand total of 93 were gainfully employed. Even of this small number, eleven were widows and two divorced, which meant that of the more than one thousand married Simmons graduates, only fifty-three managed to work while living with a husband. Even in 1989 historian William O’Neill, in Feminism in America: A History, looking at it from a different perspective, would conclude that “it seems evident that the institutions of marriage and family, as presently conceived, are among the chief obstacles to feminine equality.”

  Since childhood, Amelia and Lucy and Katch Challiss had been lukewarm toward the notion of marrying: they were afraid a man would stand in the way of their careers, interfere with their lives. It was of course not an idle fear: men often did. Aversion to marriage seemed to be a common thread running through the women in Amelia’s family in her generation. From childhood on, Amelia, Lucy, and Katch had dreamed grand dreams of exciting careers, not exciting marriages. As teenagers they didn’t think the two matched up—but on the other hand they liked men, the unsolvable dilemma. It was Katch who had formulated the most specific career plan: she decided she was going to be a newspaper reporter and live in Paris. Both she and Lucy went to college to prepare for their careers, Katch to Kansas State where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Lucy to Wheaton. Lucy, pursued by suitors, had gone off to Paris after graduation and found a job teaching at the American School in Neuilly. There she had a social whirl and taught many children of note, including Prince Phillip of Greece. Lucy, great fun, loved by everybody who “lit up a room,” it was said—so close to Amelia and so attractive—couldn’t bring herself to marry, but she also had great trouble saying no to her suitors. Four times Lucy became engaged—twice sending out wedding invitations—and four times she backed out. She took a variety of jobs throughout her life, and she enjoyed an incredibly busy social life—breakfasts, lunches, teas, cocktails, dancing evenings—to the hilt. Extremely competent, at one point in the 1930s she became head of Vogue’s school directory department. When World War II came, she enlisted in the Red Cross, went to Italy as an ambulance driver, and ended up organizing and running USOs (servicemen’s clubs). After the war she worked for a textile design firm in New York City. Her life was still a constant round of activity; she was always on the go, and because she was so charming and entertaining, she was always busy. And always single.

  Katch, it was true, had married in 1929, but only after a considerable struggle, and under duress as it were. On the boat to Paris to join Lucy and become a teacher at the American School, Katch had met Bill Pollock, a tall, handsome, wealthy, kind, intelligent student at Yale University who fell head over heels in love with her and proposed. On her way to France to live out her dream, then, she had had the bad luck to meet her dream man. She stalwartly refused him, and he returned to college, but for three summers running Bill returned to Paris to be with her and try and make her change her mind. The fourth summer, when he said he was going to marry someone else if she turned him down again, she had grudgingly accepted. But all her life Katch was doubtful about the rightness of her choice of committing to marriage, never sure the role o
f wife and mother was right for her. Her large house, situated in the rolling farm country of eastern Ohio, became a showplace for that part of the world: there she lived out her life as the gracious hostess, the conscientious mother of one daughter, an active participant in all the community philanthropic activities. But in her bones she felt was missing something, stuck out there in Ohio while her sister and cousin went gallivanting around the world, and it made her fretful. Her daughter Patricia could feel it as she was growing up.

  Amelia wasn’t all that sure that she would have the strength of character to continue her career, as her friend Louise de Schweinitz had done. There was always the possibility that she would gradually succumb to the demands of marriage and throw in the towel, as her smart Phi Beta Kappa cousin Katch had done.

  “A woman’s best protection is the right man,” says a character in Clare Booth Luce’s play The Women; perhaps that, in the end, was the overriding reason that decided Amelia.

  On February 6 George and Amelia telephoned George’s mother Frances Putnam at her house in Noank, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound and told her that they were driving up and would spend the night, and that the ceremony would be the next day at her home. On Saturday, February 7, acceding to Amelia’s wishes that there be an absolute minimum of fuss and trappings, they were married in Frances Putnam’s cream-colored two-story house—Square House, as it was called. George’s description of his bride: “She wore something as simple and forthright as herself, and not new, bought for the occasion. A brown suit, I think, and a casual crepe blouse with a turndown collar and, as I remember it, brown lizard shoes. No hat, of course.” He even adored her matter-of-factness.