by Susan Butler
Gene and Amelia were undoubtedly lovers. Only two people knew the situation well enough to have an opinion, and they were very discreet. One, Katharine (Kit) Vidal thought so from the way he talked about her. The other was a child—and he thought so too: the child was Gore.
To touch your hand or see your face, today,
Is joy. Your casual presence in a room
Recalls the stars that watched us as we lay.
I mark you in the moving crowd
And see again those stars
A warm night lent us long ago.
We loved so then—we love so now.
George found this poem, one of the few Amelia wrote that was not destroyed by a smoke fire that destroyed much in their Rye house in the fall of 1934. If she had written the poem for him, George would have known about it. Of her passion there can be no doubt: Could the subject be other than Gene?
On the surface Gene and George continued to be friends.
Try as he might, George was sometimes only on the fringe of Amelia’s business interests, where Gene was central. Amelia was also a good friend of Paul Collins, a superb pilot, one of the few who flew the U.S. mail in the early years and lived to tell about it, who was also a close friend of Gene’s from the Ludington line days. Ernie Pyle described him as tall, well set up, with coal black hair, light skin, “great” eyes. Six years older than Amelia, like Amelia looking years younger than his age, and like her intelligent, he had made the transition into the business world and was perfectly at home behind a desk. He was a fine organizer, had been general superintendent of TAT and helped Gene set up the Ludington line. When Pan American Airways pulled out of New England, where they had been managing Boston-Maine Airways for the Boston and Maine Railroad and the Maine Central Railroads, railroad officials approached Paul to provide the management, equipment, and service in their place. Paul came to Rye to visit Amelia, Gene Vidal, and Sam Solomon, a very astute businessman involved with aviation who, among his other enterprises, managed Washington, D.C.’s, Hoover airport. The four of them sat on the floor (because, as Sam remembered, Amelia liked sitting on the floor) tossing around various business plans and finally decided that they would go into the airline business as equal investment partners. Each invested $2,500; that was sufficient financial muscle to form National Airways, Inc., their new corporate name for what was still called the Boston-Maine Airways, whose route was from Boston northward; it would eventually become Northeast Airlines. Paul was president, Amelia first vice-president, and Sam Solomon second vice-president. (Gene, already director of aeronautics, was a director but had no title.)
The first meeting with the railroad officials to hammer out details of the route and other organizational matters was held on Monday morning, July 24, 1933, Amelia’s thirty-sixth birthday. Paul and Amelia left Rye at four thirty A.M., and in a marathon meeting they settled on the general schedule: the railroad wanted to have plane service to Portland, Rockland, Bangor, and either Waterville or Augusta, Maine. With the meeting concluded, it remained for Paul and Amelia to physically survey the route, for as the railroad officials pointed out, “How do you know that you can fly from the towns we designate as stops on the line with safety?” Paul asked for a car and driver and twenty-four hours. Then he and Amelia took the train to Portland, where the driver picked them up, and drove the 80 miles to Rockland; they checked out the field, then drove the 63 miles to Bangor, checked its field, drove 55 miles to Waterville, then 20 miles to Augusta (which they found had too small a field), then 60 miles to the Scarborough field south of Portland, took the train back to Boston, and sat down with the railroad people as promised at two P.M. and settled the last detail: it would be Waterville. Then Paul raided Eastern for personnel—former Ludington workers unhappy at Eastern—Clarence Belinn, whom he put in charge of maintenance, and three pilots. On August 7 Paul took delivery from Eastern on two ten-passenger Stinson trimotors, which he had gotten for a very good price.
Amelia went to Boston periodically to work with Paul and tend to public relations and sales, her special responsibilities. She also helped him peg mileage tariffs, for which she had a good feel. By August 9, a sunny, cloudless day in Boston, everything was ready to roll. Sam Solomon and his wife Alma, Paul Collins, Amelia, the chief executive officer of the railroad, the general traffic manager, and three reporters stepped into the Stinson and flew to Portland, Rockland, Bangor, and Waterville. Advance notice had been given that Amelia was on the plane, and gratifyingly large crowds turned out at each airfield to see her and to hear her speak on the wonders of flight.
Two days later was the formal opening of the airline. One Stinson was at Logan airport in Boston, the other at Portland. Amelia, Gene, and eight first-time passengers flew the ninety miles to Portland and then went on to Bangor. The following weekend Paul and Gene were both with Amelia in Rye.
By October the line had added a feeder service through Burlington, Vermont, and by March 1934 the Burlington route was extended to Montreal. But it was hard for the airline—the first to continue service in that part of the world in winter. All the hangars, including the one the line used at Logan airport, were unheated. Every night the temperature dropped below 32 degrees, newspapers had to be stuffed into the engine exhaust stacks to block moisture and prevent freezing; the oil had to be drained out and stored in a heated office; and each engine had to be wrapped up. Each morning the procedure had to be reversed. The public was apprehensive, therefore business was slow. With public relations executive Herbert Baldwin, Amelia visited the cities, talked up air travel, and contacted civic groups. On Saturdays when only one plane flew (because of lack of business), the other was used to visit cities along the route and offer free ten-minute flights. But there were few takers—until Amelia began focusing on women’s groups, in the hope that if she could convince the wives that flying was safe the husbands would follow. It worked: the demonstrations became more popular. When the Bangor Chamber of Commerce held a Women’s Day, ten thousand women turned out; two hundred went up in the air. Nothing could quite beat having her, all dressed up in mink coat, chic boots, and hat, standing on the tarmac prior to one of the line’s pioneering flights. With Amelia standing next to the Stinson on a bitter cold icy day at the Portland airport, apprehensive fliers never even thought to question why there were automobile tire chains on the wheels—something of a necessity when plowing wasn’t possible and the runway was slick with ice. Because of her, Burlington, Vermont’s, number-one citizen, William Appleyard, sold $10,000 worth of tickets before the airline made its first flight there, on February 7, 1934.
Still later, intent on expanding, Paul and Amelia formulated a plan for Boston-Maine Airways to fly from LaGuardia airport, then called North Beach airport, to a racetrack eight miles from Boston that they knew they could easily convert into a field. That one the company didn’t buy.
Amelia’s business interests were prospering, but her home life was giving her a bit of trouble as 1934 drew to a close. That Christmas the card George and Amelia sent out had a somber note. Their ship was the “George and Amelia” and the text ran, “Although no models ourselves, at least we’re still afloat.”
16
Role Model
• • • • When Amelia started flying at the beginning of the air age, she and all the other women fliers wore modified semimilitary (U.S. Infantry version) riding clothes. Then in the late 1920s, as women pilots tried to show a timid world that flying was easy, effortless, and safe, they took to wearing normal street clothes to drive home the point. For that reason, when Amelia was the aviation editor of Cosmopolitan vagabonding west in 1928, she was often photographed in a light tan suit with conventional skirt and low-heeled two-tone oxfords. Then women’s flying clothes caught the eye of the fashion industry. The great Paris couturiers began including one or two flying suits in their collections, although usually tarting them up so badly, they were unwearable. English and American fliers looking for something to wear began designing their own. Louise Tha
den, winner of the 1929 Women’s Air Derby and vice-president of the Ninety-Nines under Amelia, designed a clever dress with a zippered jacket and front and back panels concealing a divided skirt; it was so attractive that golfers began snapping it up. Another pilot, Edith Folz, also veteran of the derby, designed a combination pilot and street outfit with a removable zippered skirt, the “Folz-up suit,” which won fourth place in the inventors’ meet at the Century of Progress the summer of 1933. By the 1930s flying outfits were available or could be special-ordered at many department stores. One-piece coveralls called monkey suits, usually made of gabardine, often trimmed with flannel, were also available.
Amelia’s interest in designing clothes began with flying clothes for the Ninety-Nines. She had become the first president in 1932, at which time she was promoting the adoption of a members’ coverall that was both good-looking and rugged. She sent a sample suit around the country to be voted upon by the regional governors. She hoped that when adopted, it would be a consciousness-raising tool for the members as well as a moneymaker for the organization, for Flying Field, the trademarked material of which it was made—Vogue obligingly described it as “sturdy and gabardine-like” —would, if it sold well, give the Ninety-Nines a nice revenue stream. But the Ninety-Nines were a democratic, decentralized organization, and there was endless debate instead of decision making; the goal of adopting one version began to fade. Vogue did a two-page photo spread on the “First Lady of the Sky” in January 1933 showing, on one page, Amelia posing in the original flying suit. It sported loose trousers, a zipper top, and big pockets, with the material nipped in at the wrists and ankles, but since it hadn’t been adopted by the Ninety-Nines, it wasn’t identified as “theirs,” much to Amelia’s frustration. The facing page shows Amelia in a brown jersey sports suit, suitable, according to the text, for traveling in a closed-cockpit plane (as opposed to a sporty open-cockpit model or other mode of “conventional” transportation).
Nothing came of the Ninety-Nine coverall, but Amelia decided to pick up the ball and design her own line of clothes “for the woman who lives actively.” Contrary to what many thought, Amelia was very interested in style and fashion. When she was a little girl, according to Amy, she used to pester her grandmother to give her scraps of material to sew into new dresses for her dolls—indeed, Amy hadn’t been sure whether Amelia enjoyed playing with dolls as much as making them new clothes. In St. Paul as a teenager, when her family was short of money, she had taken some drapes down from the attic and created hobble skirts, the fashion of the day, so that she and Muriel would have new clothes to wear for Easter.
She had bought her first fur coat in her Denison House days on her social worker’s salary, and she now owned a becoming mink coat and a beaver coat as well. She had learned from Ray Long and Cosmopolitan how to dress, and how important it was. People accustomed to seeing her in flying clothes were continually surprised at how elegant she looked in “normal” clothes. Mary Welch, the Time magazine reporter who later married Ernest Hemingway, would remember seeing Amelia sweeping elegantly through the Chicago airport wearing a beige suit with a matching fox fur thrown about her shoulders. Well-cut silk lounging pajamas, of which she had a closetful, were her clothes of choice for the evening. Christian Science Monitor reporter Janet Mabie was struck by her fashionable ice-blue-satin evening pajamas. A Purdue student at a graduation banquet thought unforgettable Amelia’s sleeveless midnight blue evening dress “covered with silver stars as if the gods had sprinkled them on her,” set off by “a cloudlike collar” of white mink.
She worked at her image. Just as her hair seemed artless, so her clothes, her look, presented a consistent image of understatement and casualness that was deliberate. She often wore colorless nail polish. She liked facials and found them soothing; she liked “health afternoons”—spending time in a steam room, followed by a cold hosing down, followed by a massage, particularly when Lucy Challiss would do it with her. She was very conscious of the image she projected. Even when she had been stuck in Trepassey, Newfoundland—anxiously, fretfully waiting to take off in the Friendship—even then she had taken the trouble to painstakingly heat up a curling iron and curl her hair.
Her seeming casualness was deceptive. The functional slacks she had worn when she was in her twenties were now custom made, often gabardine, perfectly tailored; the windbreaker was now usually soft suede; and the shirt was often parachute silk, which she favored because it was light, very strong, and could be laundered with impunity.
George had presented her with business deals in the past, but they were his, not hers. This time she would be totally in control. Now a deal was struck with several New York garment manufacturers to make an Amelia Earhart line; one department store would be given the exclusive in each city; in New York it was Macy’s, in Chicago Marshall Field’s. In all, thirty department stores scattered from coast to coast carried the line. Marshall Field’s set up a special Amelia Earhart shop with pretty young mannequins in aeronautical outfits in charge, filled their prime State Street windows full of Amelia’s clothes, and gave her a tea to which they invited all Ninety-Nine members as well as other pilots.
She passed on every detail. She installed a dressmaker’s dummy in the apartment at the Hotel Seymour, pored over swatches of material and, working with a seamstress, created outfits using her old sewing machine. The line included good, wearable sport dresses, separates, and coats, as well as flying clothes. She used scaled-down screws and bolts and miniature oil cups for buttons, belt buckles made of ball bearings, and belts that closed with cotter pins and parachute clasps. Amelia took parachute silk—gossamer thin, pale of color, incredibly strong—and turned it into blouses and shirts, adding tails to the shirts—at that time a feature exclusive to men’s shirts—explaining, “I made up my mind that if the wearers of the shirts I designed took time out for any reason to stand on their heads, there would be enough shirt still to stay tucked in.” She insisted that her clothes be comfortable and branched out into simple silk dress and jacket combinations. She sent Lucy off to plumb Elizabeth Hawes, a fashionable designer of expensive clothes, for information. The most interesting of the women’s magazines of the era, Woman’s Home Companion, which gave a page to Eleanor Roosevelt in each issue and published Edna Ferber and other top novelists, did several spreads on her, one showing her looking particularly chic in a silk print dress. In another issue, featuring designs by the leading French and American couturiers such as Mainbocher and Lanvin, Amelia was given equal editorial space. The magazine, referring to her as “Amelia Earhart, Designer,” showed her dressed in another of her two-piece dresses, the signature silk scarf she wore flying casually tossed around her neck, caught into an elegant soft bow. Her designs had now been made into patterns that the reader could buy through the magazine.
She even designed hats, to everyone’s amusement, even though by that time she had stopped wearing them and her tousled mop of curly hair was famous. Then she started a Ninety-Nine “Hat Contest,” the purpose of which was to recognize something important accomplished each month by a Ninety-Nine member and award the winner with one of her hats. It was decided that landing in strange airports was good practice, and a point system was worked out that was announced in the The 99 News: “For each airport, 1 point; for an honest to goodness forced landing without damage (verified by Department of Commerce inspector), 2 points; if cows in pasture, 3 points. (If cows eat fabric before rescued, damage not counted as resulting from crackup.)”
Amelia specified how the contest would run:
1. Candidate must furnish proof of landing by having signature of airport-manager or some other responsible person to verify the landing. 2. The report forms must be sent to the sectional governor by the last day of the month. The governor will check and select the highest ranking hat-chaser in her section within five days, sign and send her report slip to Clara Studer, editor of the 99’er, who will send it on to Amelia to be countersigned. Slip in hand, the winner will then go t
o the nearest store carrying the Amelia Earhart line and select her hat.
But the clothing enterprise ran into a problem: Amelia spent too much time working on it, without pulling back on either her lecturing or her flying. She wore herself down getting everything just right. Given her life, she couldn’t be a full-time clothes designer, and temperamentally she was couldn’t do it part time. The strain began to show: before she knew it, she was losing weight, beginning to look gaunt, and had to add fat to her diet—eating waffles “just soaked in butter,” to get back some of the weight, according to Amy, who loved having something she could finally scold Amelia about. (Amelia would write her, in irritation, “I have been drinking cream and gained ten pounds, so that’s that.”) She gave it all up after a year.
“It’s a routine now,” she once said. “I make a record and then I lecture on it.” That was certainly true—lecturing paid the expenses, made the records possible, took most of her time, and were best attended when she had just done something newsworthy.
But when she walked out onto a lecture stage, audience members often reacted with disbelief. The woman that everyone had in their mind’s eye and expected to see was the woman they saw in the newsreels and newspapers—the aviatrix emerging from her plane after a record-breaking flight: drawn face, disheveled hair, slightly grimy, dressed in wrinkled workaday blouse and pants. The Amelia who stood in front of them looked totally different: slender, pretty, fashionably dressed (more often than not in shades of brown), wearing high-heeled shoes, fragile. Altogether taller, slimmer, more beautifully groomed—more feminine—than they had expected. Right away it gave her an edge, put her in the good graces of her audience, that she looked so charmingly normal and had such a disarming appearance.