by Susan Butler
She had entered a realm beyond stardom.
That summer Amelia wrote a piece for a magazine that probably came closest to expressing her feelings on the whys and wherefores of the flight:
Have you ever longed to go to the North Pole? or smell overripe apples in the sunshine? or coast down a steep, snow-covered hill to an unknown valley? or take a job behind a counter selling ribbons, and show people how to sell ribbons as ribbons have never been sold before? or take a friend by the arm and say, “Forget it—I’m with you forever?” or, just before a thunderstorm, to turn ten somersaults on the lawn?
The year before, the American Woman’s Association had given its first annual award to Margaret Sanger as the woman who had made the most outstanding contribution to society. Now, in the fall of 1932, at a dinner arranged by the Women’s Press Club in which forty women’s organizations took part, Amelia became the second recipient. The award was made by Dr. Lillian Gilbreth, the industrial psychologist whose picture, sitting in the huge touring car surrounded by her husband and their eleven children, was one of those Amelia had neatly pasted in her scrapbook of women achievers all those years before. Now she had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Gilbreth say, “Miss Earhart has shown us that all God’s chillun got wings.”
15
Having Her Cake
• • • • Up until she took off on her transatlantic solo flight, Amelia seems to have been content and happy with George. When not traveling, their routine was to spend the work week in New York City at the Seymour Hotel and go to the country on weekends. There were usually people around, but Amelia and George enjoyed puttering around their home alone together. Lucy’s diary chronicles plenty of quiet times, hours spent together working in the garden, relaxing, and working over flight plans.
But after the Atlantic solo there was a change in Amelia. She began looking beyond George.
Literally the moment he received word she had safely landed in Ireland, George went to work setting up licensing deals for clothes manufacturers to cash in on her fame—he gave a lunch for clothes manufacturers, visited clothes designers, and had Lucy picking out hats at Farrington and Evans, visiting an agent for sports clothes, and trying on jodhpurs prior to choosing a maker. He and Lucy were very busy on the project, which Amelia must have agreed to before she took off, and he was also negotiating a very important deal for himself at Paramount Studios. And then Amelia asked him to drop everything and come to Europe and help her deal with the world. He did. Lucy helped him pack, and he was off by boat to France on May 27. “I thought I couldn’t face coming home alone,” Amelia wrote her mother. Several weeks later they returned on the Ile de France; while they were on the high seas George’s appointment as chairman of the editorial board of Paramount Pictures was announced. He had managed to fit everything together—his life and hers.
He was so proud to be with her. He later recounted how he had given Amelia a twenty-dollar bill at Teterboro just before she, Bernt, and Eddie took off for Newfoundland. “Generous allowance for a trip to Europe,” she had teased him. She used it to pay for the telegram she sent upon landing in Londonderry. Then she went to the trouble of retrieving the bill, which necessitated borrowing English pounds from someone with which to replace it. She signed the retrieved twenty-dollar bill and gave it back to George. It became one of George’s “most treasured” souvenirs. It is hard to reconcile this gesture of Amelia’s with anything that went before. By retrieving it, Amelia shows she knew how epochal her flight was, how significant and valuable that twenty-dollar bill was, or she wouldn’t have thought of doing it—and then signing it.
No one realized more than Amelia that her piloting skills had not been proven by the Friendship flight and that her celebrity status was based not on achievement but on the lucky accident of having been in the right place at the right time. Now she had changed all that. She had earned her spurs. Now she knew she would go into the record books—knew that she was a celebrity.
She was on such a high because she had learned something: she had a gift. She didn’t get sleepy on long-distance flights; she had incredible built-in endurance. Realizing her gift, she now concentrated on breaking long-distance records. She began right away; she decided to try to be the first woman to fly nonstop across America. Because she neither smoked nor drank, the parties and social life, the constant round of people, had not tired her: she was as ready as ever.
Transcontinental record flights at that time originated on the West Coast because of the prevailing winds: that meant she had to start out from Los Angeles. She wanted to do it as soon as possible. It was July 1, and even though she had been traveling and partying for a month, and had returned home only on June 20, she was in top form. And since everyone wanted to do what she wanted, everyone changed their plans: George rearranged his schedule so he could go west with her; Lucy, about to go to Ohio to visit Katch and Bill Pollock, instead prevailed upon them to come and stay and keep her company at Locust Avenue to deal with all the things happening there. Ten days after her return to America, on July 1, Amelia, George, and his son David flew to Los Angeles. She hoped to beat Frank Hawks’s record of 17 hours 38 minutes, coast to coast.
On July 10 she took off from Los Angeles, had good following winds, and was making very good speed, but she then had fuel feed trouble and was forced to land in Columbus, Ohio. She was on the ground for an hour and a quarter before it was fixed, but still she landed in Newark 19 hours, 14 minutes after she started. The time was good enough to establish a new women’s transcontinental speed record—she beat Ruth Nichols’s record by almost ten hours, and since her flight time was 17 hours 59 minutes, she had flown almost as fast as Hawks. She went home to Rye disappointed.
Because Amelia was scheduled to be back out in L.A. later in July for the opening of the Olympic games, where she would be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by Vice President Charles Curtis, George decided to stay on the West Coast until she returned and begin his new job at Paramount. It was a serious error, as it would turn out.
It was a fact of their life that Amelia was constantly surrounded by men. George was used to it. She had a particular ability to make men take her seriously without making them feel threatened. And that attracted them. She didn’t divide the world up by sex, as most women did in the 1930s, treating women friends one way and men friends another. She took and gave advice and help where she found it. Thus she had gone to men—Carl Allen and Deacon Lyman—for an opinion on her impending marriage.
As she became involved with men in joint ventures, they became her friends—which meant, perforce, they became George’s friends, too. But one case was different: her deepening relationship with Gene Vidal, the handsome son-in-law of the powerful blind senator from Tennessee, Thomas Gore. Gene was special. He had everything: looks—blue eyes, a handsome face, a powerful spare build, abundant dark hair, a winsome smile—plus intelligence, character, and incredible athletic ability. He had gone to the University of South Dakota on an athletic scholarship, earned varsity letters in football, baseball, basketball, and track, and still managed to graduate first in his class with a degree in civil engineering. At West Point his athletic prowess was the stuff of legend: he was captain of the football team, drop-kicked a forty-seven-yard field goal to win a fiercely contested game against Notre Dame, made the winning touchdown against Navy in 1916, was the star of the basketball team, and won the award for being the best all-around athlete—coming in first in the discus, high jump, broad jump, and hammer throw. Following graduation, Gene served in the Corps of Engineers, then in the Air Service, and then became West Point’s first flying instructor. While in the army he was named to the 1920 U.S. Olympic team, placed both in the pentathlon and the decathlon, played on the rugby team as well, then went on to coach the U.S. pentathlon team in 1924. He was by far the brightest star of his era.
Gene’s marriage to Nina Gore in 1922 had been a glittering affair attended by most of official and social Washington. In 1925 their son, Gore, was
born, but before the 1920s were over, their marriage was on the rocks. The Vidals lived with the Gores in their large Rock Creek house. Living with one’s in-laws is never a menu for happiness, and it wasn’t in this case, although the circumstances were unusual—it was Nina rather than Gene who disliked it most. The senator and his wife began to share the parenting of Gore with Gene, for their daughter was a fun-loving, party-going socialite who drank too much and, as even her parents could not help observing, was a neglectful mother at best. Gene, bright and charming, was not interested in the endless round of parties, nor particularly interested in making money. He was in love with flying and wanted to be with people who, like himself, were in love with flying. That left arguably the most attractive man in Washington free to go where he pleased, and where he pleased was where Amelia was. He would appear alone or with Gore in Rye on countless weekends: the Putnam house in Rye became his home away from home. Nina divorced him in 1935. (By that time they had drifted so far apart that he learned from reporters that she was on her way to Reno.) Her attentions had shifted to Hugh D. Auchincloss, who possessed an abundance of money and a love of parties; they would marry that same year. Gene was, if anything, relieved.
Gene and Amelia had worked together at TAT, and then when Gene organized the Ludington line, he had persuaded her to become vice-president. There, thrown together even more, she had a chance to see the hard-working, resourceful, and efficient Gene in action. He and Paul Collins, shouldering most of the administrative duties, and Amelia, capably performing hers, made it almost immediately the most efficient and popular airline in the country, with the result that in the first year of operation, it showed a profit of over $8,000—something unheard of in the industry. The Ludington line was so efficient, it flew passengers for twenty-five cents a mile, while it cost Eastern Air Transport, which also flew the lucrative Washington—New York route, eighty-nine cents a mile. Nevertheless Postmaster General Brown, the czar in such matters, operating on the idea that competition was bad rather than good, awarded Eastern Air Transport the U.S. mail contract for the route, knowing that without the contract, Ludington could not survive. Their backs to the wall, the Ludington brothers sold out to Eastern in February 1933. But a small victory for Amelia, Gene Vidal, and Paul Collins, all of whom quit, as well as for the Ludingtons, was that the ensuing outcry against Brown triggered a government investigation of his high-handed, arbitrary policies, which resulted in Brown’s public disgrace and resignation. The battle created a bond between Amelia, Paul, and Gene.
Gene and Amelia were powerfully attracted to each other. Gene was a fine pilot and a fine athlete; he possessed superb hand-eye coordination, and excellent reflexes—qualities particularly necessary for pilots of the early planes: “When you see a pilot dance you can tell if he or she is a good pilot. A good pilot will betray the rhythmic coordination of the good dancer, that unconscious balance and freedom of motion,” Amelia and other good fliers discovered. George was a rugged outdoorsman but not well coordinated, not a natural athlete.
Now Gene would visit Rye whether George was present or not, and when Amelia returned east alone after her transcontinental solo, she immediately invited Jack Gillies, a pilot friend, and Gene to Rye. She was glowing, so transformed from the Amelia of old that her cousin Katch, companionably house-sitting with Lucy, was “perfectly astonished” at the change in her. She had blossomed, saw Katch; “she looked so lovely, tall, and slender, in shiny silk pants and long jacket.” On Sunday after Jack Gillies left, she and Gene drove off by themselves to a dinner party, leaving her cousins behind.
Gene was due back the following afternoon. There was Ninety-Nines business to attend to, and no matter what her personal activities, Amelia always kept on top of it, so that Saturday morning, July 23, 1932, she had her secretary come over and she wrote all the governors to remind them that they had to have their membership lists up-to-date and correct. That done, she tended to Gene. He was no ordinary guest, to arrive by train and be picked up at the station—Amelia drove into New York City to pick him up.
Soon afterward Amelia was due out in Los Angeles again, where George and David were patiently waiting for her. This time Lucy and Gene were flying out too. By the time they arrived, Lucy had a crush on the dashing Gene, and after he took her to the Brown Derby for dinner, then for a drive to Santa Monica where they sat by the sea, Lucy was in love. Soon she was huddled by the phone waiting for his call: the waiting went on for days. Finally Lucy “found Gene who explained last night poorly.” When she “found Gene,” he was with Amelia, and he departed with Amelia for the Olympic stadium, leaving Lucy behind stamping letters. Lucy did not confide any further anguish to her diary—it was not her style—but it seems obvious that although Gene was Amelia’s, they had been so circumspect that it took Lucy a bit of time to get the message. It was all very civilized, and nothing broke the mirror surface of Lucy’s friendship with Amelia, then or ever. Like Amelia, Lucy was emotionally strong. Her diary from then on is an unbroken impersonal record of events.
After a few weeks of watching the Olympics from Douglas Fairbanks’s box, hobnobbing with Hollywood celebrities, and being squired around by Gene as well as by George, all dutifully noted by Lucy, Amelia, undeterred by all the distractions, was ready to span the continent again.
On August 24, at 12:26 P.M., with a minimum of fuss, after downing a bowl of soup, and packing away hard-boiled eggs, cocoa prepared by Lucy, and some tomato juice, her old standby, after posing for the waiting Paramount photographers, after getting the green light from Standard Oil that the tanks were topped off, Amelia took off from the Los Angeles municipal airport. She set down in Newark, New Jersey, 19 hours, 7 minutes, and 56 seconds later, with another record under her belt: first woman to fly nonstop coast to coast. She also broke the two-thousand-mile long-distance record that Ruth Nichols had set flying between Oakland, California, and Louisville, Kentucky.
“Perfect flight, no stops,” she shouted to the mechanic, who climbed up to the cockpit and was the first person to greet her in Newark. Her gray eyes looked strained, naturally, but other than that she looked remarkably well and remarkably well dressed. Her hair blew in the breeze above a bronze and yellow silk scarf draped around her neck; her short-sleeved tan silk jersey shirt matched the color of her jodhpurs; she was smiling. No, she wasn’t particularly tired, she said, just hot and thirsty.
This flight had been totally without incident, as stress free as such a journey could be, and only two minutes off the time she had estimated it would take. However, it wasn’t particularly fast, which Amelia said was due to the lack of favoring winds. “If I’d had as good weather as I had before, I’d have broken all the records,” she said. “But you might have to wait a thousand years for that.” It was, in fact only seven minutes less than she had taken the first time, and 1 hour and 27 minutes longer than Frank Hawks had taken in his Vega. Realistically, she admitted that she didn’t think she could better Hawks’s time, “not in this plane.” It wasn’t her style to compete directly—to pursue head-to-head competition with men in any case. She had achieved her main goal, so she hung up her spurs knowing that the number of male pilots who had flown the country nonstop was few and that she had joined their number. It was just nine years since two army pilots, Lieutenant John A. Macready and Oakley G. Kelley, had spanned it nonstop for the first time, stunning the world and leading Major Henry “Hap” Arnold to say, “The impossible had happened.” Now Amelia had done the impossible, too.
In mid-October 1932, back in Rye, Gene was visiting again. Paul Collins was also there (Amelia appeared Saturday, October 15, with both of them in tow), and Lucy notes, they had a grand old time, playing cards after dinner late into the night. The next day Lucy drove Paul and Gene to the train, and she noted in her diary, “George low.” It was certainly understandable. It was also understandable that Lucy decided to throw in the towel: she quit and on October 19 sailed for Europe on the RMS Berengaria. Helen Weber, who had been performing many of
the secretarial duties—while Lucy concentrated on flowers, Amelia’s clothes, and the books—moved in to fill her place. It would be several months before Lucy returned.
Amelia and Eleanor Roosevelt had first met at a curiously low point in the latter’s life, the end of November 1932. The euphoria of Franklin Roosevelt’s election to the presidency earlier that month had worn off, for Eleanor, within a matter of days, whereupon she fell into an acute state of depression, notes the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, sure that her life would soon shrink to arranging and attending endless teas, luncheons, and receptions—that she would be, finally, trapped within the ceremonial side of government. Lorena Hickok, her closest friend, called the book she wrote about Eleanor The Reluctant First Lady because the last thing Eleanor wanted to do was perform the ceremonial duties required of a president’s wife. She couldn’t bear the thought of being just his appendage. She wanted to be out and active and accomplishing things, as she had always been, whether it was making speeches for Franklin while he recovered from polio, organizing the Women’s Division of the Democratic Party with Mary Dewson, or teaching literature, drama, and American history to girls at the Todhunter School in New York as the governor’s wife. She had always sought out and was happiest in the company of women who worked: she was not a social animal. “I think that every woman has a right to ‘a life of her own,’ ” she started out an article for Cosmopolitan written just after Franklin was elected. Her closest friend was Lorena Hickok, arguably the brightest and certainly the most widely known female journalist in America. Her other women friends were also successful in their own right—gainfully occupied. Running a beautiful house, even if it was the White House, was Eleanor’s idea of a nightmare. She was looking—desperately—for a role she could play that wouldn’t be at cross-purposes either with her own beliefs and inclinations or with the demands of her husband.