Things were no better aboard the Roosevelt. Stultz was noticeably intoxicated for most of the voyage and Amelia feared he might endanger the continuation of what she perceived to be the Friendship’s mission. G. P. may have viewed the flight as a stunt in the creation of his new heroine-client but Amelia—saleswoman for Bert Kinner and part owner of Dennison Airport—was determined to use this opportunity to boost commercial aviation. After G. P. sent her his schedule of homecoming celebrations, Amelia confided her worries about Stultz to Harry Manning, the captain of the Roosevelt. “It’s bad enough in London where people are tolerant,” she told Manning, “but what will happen if I can’t keep him sober for these New York affairs?”
Her worries were well-founded. Stultz would continue to drink his way through the festivities and was often absent or late. Less than a year later, while stunting, he was killed along with his two passengers in a crash at Roosevelt Field. He was drunk, flying a plane declared unsuitable for aerobatics by a board of inquiry investigating the accident.
Amelia’s New York arrival was carefully choreographed by G. P. and directed by the city’s colorful meeter and greeter, Grover B. Whalen. On the morning of July 6, Amelia stood on the promenade of the Roosevelt looking down at the launch Macon as it drew alongside the big ship. Whalen, in top hat and cutaway, followed by Byrd and his aide in full dress uniform, bounded up the gangplank while strains of “Home, Sweet Home” played by the New York Fire Department band blared across the harbor. Amelia was wearing a blue crepe suit and cream silk blouse, her hair hidden by a hideous cloche of feathers which fortunately did not hide her handsome face and blue-grey eyes. Stultz stood at her right, the collar of his suit riding up over a crumpled shirt, his necktie askew, his greying hair blowing in the wind and his blunt-featured face puffy with dissipation. On her left was Gordon, tall, thin, grinning, as relaxed as Stultz was tense.
Aboard the Macon, Amelia was led by G. P. and his wife, Dorothy Binney Putnam, to a cabin where reporters surrounded her. One noted that she not only looked like Lindbergh but she spoke like him, gazing straight at the questioner, then “giving a little shake of the head and a long, drawn-out, ‘Well …’ ”
Among the women aviators invited aboard the Macon by G. P. was Ruth Nichols. Amelia recognized her from a newspaper photograph and immediately launched into an accolade for aviation country clubs, a project of Nichols’s. After G. P. retrieved Stultz from his mother and a delegation of hometown friends, Amelia directed the reporters’ queries to Stultz but his replies were cut short by an ear-splitting blast from the Macon’s siren. Fireboats pumped streams of water into the air, whistles blew and a crowd of five thousand clustered along the edge of Battery Park rushed toward Pier A where the Macon docked.
Amelia was seated between Stultz and Gordon on the backseat of an open car that made its way from the Battery up Broadway in a blizzard of tickertape and pages torn from telephone books and newspapers. Neither photographs nor newsreels can convey the emotions generated by a New York parade of the twenties or thirties. Like most Americans of the era, allegedly postwar disillusioned New Yorkers were actually fervent believers in vaguely defined concepts of “progress,” “science,” and “opportunity” (which only knocked once). They wanted heroes and heroines who expressed these mythical values. Amelia, whose earlier allusion to the “sideshow” was not amiss, was now in the center ring of an ebullient, electric circus of the street.
At City Hall, where the parade ended, Amelia’s assertion that “most of the credit should go to Mr. Stultz,” was greeted by a roar of approval. For the next fourteen hours, with time out for costume changes, Amelia was on display for her public. The closing event at midnight was an Olympic Fund benefit at the Palace Theater. When she offered a small flag carried on the Friendship for auction, Babe Ruth pushed the bids to three figures but auctioneer Charles Winninger, star of Showboat, secured the flag for $650, a sum equaling ten times that at present-day prices.
The sideshow continued for two more days with dawn to midnight appearances scheduled by G. P., who solved the problem of the elusive Stultz by insisting that all three of the Friendship’s crew stay at the Putnam house in Rye.
On the fourth day Amelia moved on to Boston. Waiting there was Amy, who had experienced a gamut of conflicting emotions—surprise, humiliation, worry, and, finally, pride. Although she was used to Amelia’s penchant for sudden, secret decisions, when she was told that her daughter was on her way to Newfoundland in an attempt to cross the Atlantic by air, Amy had snapped, “I thought she had too much sense to try it.”
Later she told Amelia her unfortunate comment was the result of learning the news from a reporter before Sam Chapman could deliver Amelia’s explanation that “it was an experiment for me and it was better to spare you the worry until I started.” When first informed of Amelia’s safe arrival in Wales, Muriel was reported near collapse but Amy, “rigidly erect of carriage, determinedly unmoved in feature,” showed no outward signs of the strain she must have been under. “Well,” she said, “now that it’s all over I’ll have a chance to catch up on my mending.”
While Amy, who had not seen her daughter in six weeks, waited in an office at the airport, Amelia was delayed on the field, first by the reception committee, then by Stultz and Gordon who had wandered off into the crowd as soon as they arrived in a second plane. Amelia, her arms filled with flowers, was taken at last to Amy, who rushed to embrace both daughter and flowers. “Amelia!” she cried. “Darling!” Amelia murmured before the door was closed, leaving them alone. This intense, if brief, display of affection would be the most overt Amelia ever gave anyone in public.
After leaving Amy, Amelia had only a moment in which to greet Muriel and Marion Perkins before she was hustled into the official car. Although her mother, her sister, and her friend attended all the events of that day, there was never time for any real conversation. At the end of the day Amelia drove Amy and Muriel back to Medford in the yellow Kissel Kar but returned immediately to the Ritz Carlton in Boston. The young NAA secretary, Bernard Wiesman, was one of the friends who went to call on her there late that night. “She was just the same,” Wiesman said, “hadn’t changed at all.”
Wiesman was wrong. Amelia was just the same to all those who shared her interest in aviation. But the flight with its ensuing opportunities and obligations left her with less time for and different interests than those of her family and friends at Denison House. The next day in Medford she told Amy and Muriel that she could not resume her social work until she finished the book for G. P., who also assured her that she could make money giving lectures. The money was important to Amelia. She wanted it to maintain a plane, to buy books and clothes, to send Amy a monthly allowance, to live comfortably with bills paid and money in the bank.
Also relegated to the status of old friend—one to be seen infrequently in the future—was Sam Chapman. Before Amelia left Boston she spent an hour with him in her hotel room in what one reporter called “a secret tryst.” It was no such thing. From that time on, Chapman was never again referred to as Amelia’s sweetheart or fiancé.
After forty-eight hours in Boston, Amelia returned to New York to make a nationwide broadcast on NBC from Madison Square Garden. A week later she was on the road again for official welcomes from Altoona and Williamsburg, Pennsylvania, on her way to Chicago and Toledo, and Pittsburgh on the way back. In Chicago, Stultz disappeared again, just before the parade was to begin. Gordon was sent to look for him but failed to return. Amelia was so angry that she refused to ride along in the open touring car until G. P. solved the problem by sitting in for Stultz, blithely signing Stultz’s name for autograph seekers. Maj. Reed Landis, World War I ace and former classmate of Amelia’s at Hyde Park High, took Gordon’s place. The deception went unnoticed. The crowd was there to see Amelia.
In every city she visited, Amelia’s schedule permitted almost no rest or privacy. By the time she reached Pittsburgh, one observer noticed that although she smiled at the cheering
crowds she seemed “daunted by the sea of faces,” and acted as if she wanted to escape. She was exhausted. She hated the mindless adulation of strangers and shrank from their touch. Nevertheless, she finished the tour like the professional G. P. wanted her to be. The sideshow seemed the only solution to the old problem of “no pay—no fly” and Amelia wanted to fly. If George Palmer Putnam piped the right tune, she was willing to dance.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Hustler’s Apprentice
In the fall of 1928 Charles LeBoutillier, who was living in New York City’s Greenwich Village, saw Amelia Earhart peering under the open hood of a car parked near Greenwich House on Barrow Street. “It was a beautiful car—looked like a Stutz Bearcat—and she took care of it herself,” he said.
“I knew who she was,” added LeBoutillier, a friend and former Harvard classmate of Boston NAA secretary Bernard Wiesman. “I’d seen her at the Boston airport after her Atlantic flight with her arms full of flowers. She was living in an apartment in the Village that fall, in that settlement house. I think most of the people in the neighborhood knew who she was but nobody took much notice. She ate in a cafe with a courtyard—one a lot of us went to—and someone said she liked to talk about Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry. She didn’t seem different from us—just an ordinary person.” The relative anonymity Amelia was enjoying would not last much longer. George Palmer Putnam’s campaign to make her one of America’s most famous women was already in its fifth month.
On July 24—her thirty-first birthday—when Amelia returned to New York from her five-city homecoming tour, G. P. brought her directly from Grand Central to the Putnam house in Rye, where he put her to work on the book she had promised to write. Even before she left Boston on the Friendship, he had decided that, if she survived, Amelia’s story might prove as popular as Lindbergh’s and Byrd’s had been for G. P. Putnam’s Sons. While she was still at Trepassey he had wired: “For occupation might write skeleton thousand word story thus far Halifax Trepassey with names details to enlarge here after you underway.”
By Putnam employing all the names and details he had collected from Amelia, with a good deal of editorial direction on his part, the book was finished in three weeks—in time for the shrewd Putnam to take advantage of the free publicity generated by the flight and subsequent homecoming hoopla. Amelia worked in the library of the sixteen-room, six-bath, Spanish mission-style house, which had been designed by G. P. and built in 1925. She dedicated the book to her hostess Dorothy Binney Putnam, “under whose roof-tree this book was written.”
G. P.’s wife was an attractive, intelligent woman, the daughter of a Pittsburgh millionaire,* who had met her husband at a Sierra Club outing in New England soon after her graduation from Vassar College. They married in 1911 in Bend, Oregon. The twenty-four-year-old bridegroom, editor of the town’s newspaper, was elected mayor of Bend a year later. They remained in Oregon until G. P. was commissioned a lieutenant in the Army in 1917. After the war he joined the family firm and by 1925 had moved into the house in Rye with Dorothy and their two sons, David Binney and George Palmer, Jr.
Dorothy Putnam was a popular hostess whose guests included opera stars, authors, artists, and explorers. During their seventeen-year marriage, her wide-ranging interests were frequently not shared by G. P., who had been known to come home late and stomp upstairs to bed without speaking to her guests. However, G. P.’s latest protégée and his wife liked each other. Dorothy described Amelia as “an educated and cultivated person with a fine, healthy sense of humor.”
As soon as the book was finished, Amelia told G. P. she wanted to fly the Avro Avian she had purchased from Lady Heath to the West Coast and back. Although G. P. had paid for the plane and it was registered in his name, Amelia knew it was an investment made to convince the public and the press that she was a genuine aviator with a plane of her own. She also knew that he expected to decide when and where she flew it. She was asking him for permission to fly as she pleased and without any scheduled appearances en route. G. P. agreed because he had already learned that, although she followed his instructions most of the time, when she did set a goal of her own it was almost impossible to make her abandon it. He was also confident that by this time, wherever she went, she would be recognized and pursued by reporters. To make certain she was, two days before she left, he broke his promise to keep her trip a secret.
As secretive as always, Amelia wrote to Marian Stabler that she would be at the Putnams’ in Rye until the first of September, when she actually intended to leave a week earlier. During a brief visit to her mother in Boston, she said to Amy that she might fly to the West Coast but gave her no date. The vague announcement was made to save Amy from the embarrassment she had suffered over not knowing about the Atlantic flight until reporters told her. Amy immediately told Muriel. Amelia then scolded her mother for telling Muriel. “I don’t want her to spread the news,” she wrote, “and I fear she will.” In the same letter she suggested that Amy refer reporters to her or G. P., but added that Amy could tell them she knew her daughter’s plans but did not want to reveal them.
On August 29, the first day of her trip, Amelia cracked up the Avian at Pittsburgh. She was taxiing across Rogers Field when the wheels of the little biplane dropped into an unmarked ditch, throwing it on its side in a ground-loop, which damaged the propeller, lower wing, and landing gear. She reacted to this crackup just as she had all those in the past and those she would have in the future. She was annoyed when questioned about it, unimpressed that she had been spared injury or death, and acted as if the incident might be obliterated if people would stop talking about it. When one newsman asked her about it a week later she said that in her ten years of flying she had never been in an accident like the one he described: “All they had to do was pull mine [her plane] out and it was ready to take up,” she told him.
The plane was not ready to take up. G. P., who had accompanied her to Pittsburgh, returned to New York to make certain a second Avro Avian was flown to Pittsburgh to provide spare parts for the damaged machine. She was delayed for forty-eight hours.
By September 3, Amelia reached Scott Field near St. Louis, where she was recognized by a young woman who immediately commandeered her as a houseguest and insisted she attend a country club dance that night. Amelia, who had very little money and liked to dance, accepted. The local hotel cost more and offered even less privacy. Her next hostess was Mrs. John Hay, a young Army wife in Muskogee, Missouri, who thought herself “the luckiest woman in all the universe” to have Amelia for a guest. Mrs. Hay said that Amelia sent a wire to her mother and “to some man, too, but of course I didn’t listen to find out who he was.” Although G. P. had broken his promise to keep the trip a secret, Amelia kept hers to notify him of her whereabouts at every stop on the way.
Her hostess admired Amelia’s luggage, given her in England, and her clothes—all wrinkleproof and “just darling”—but she was ambiguous about Amelia’s appearance. “She was really sort of homely, but she was nice to look at and I imagine she’d be pretty if she weren’t so brown.” In midwestern America, suntans were not yet fashionable, being more an indication of life on the farm than a winter in Miami.
Misfortune dogged Amelia for the remainder of the flight. She was forced down at Lovington, New Mexico, and again at Pecos, Texas, where she made an emergency landing on the main street after the plane developed valve trouble. She waited five days in Pecos for spare parts, then was forced down at an isolated ranch outside Douglas, Arizona, after the climb over the mountains overheated the engine. At Yuma, eager volunteers who offered to push her plane to the end of the field for takeoff upended the aircraft, bending the propeller. Amelia removed it, hammered it back into shape, reinstalled it, and left for Glendale, California, where she arrived on September 13.
The National Air Exhibition at Mines Field in Los Angeles was in its fifth day when Amelia showed up after a night’s sleep at the Biltmore Hotel. This annual event was aviation’s “Barnum and Bai
ley Show of Shows” with crowds of fifty to seventy-five thousand attending daily to watch the world’s best aviators perform. When Amelia was introduced from the announcers’ stand, she received a standing ovation. Two days later, Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons wrote that a movie company filming the aviation show failed to attract the attention of spectators who were more interested in getting “a glimpse of Colonel Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart.”
While she waited for the Avian to be overhauled in Los Angeles, Amelia called on Bert and Cora Kinner. Cora, who had never forgotten “how she treated that old man,” was still not impressed by Amelia. After Amelia told her she was tired of banquet hall chicken and longed for some of Cora’s delicious pork chops, Cora fixed them, but grumbled later, “I didn’t want to bother with her, but she had her pork chops all right.”
That same week Amelia flew as a passenger to San Francisco, where she paid a visit to the Army’s 381st Aero Squadron at Cressey Field. The squadron made her an honorary major and presented her with the silver pilot’s wings of the U.S. Air Service. She obviously prized this gift more than any other she had received and wore the wings frequently for the rest of her life—even on formal gowns.
On the return flight east the Avian’s motor died on her one hundred miles south of Salt Lake City. Making a dead-stick landing in a rutted field, she nosed the little plane over. This time, replacement parts required a ten-day wait in Salt Lake City. While she was there she gave speeches to the high school girls’ assembly and the directors of the Community Chest, was taken to see copper mines and canyons, and was entertained by more than a dozen eager hosts. In an interview at the home of her principal hosts, the P. C. Schramms, she said she would gladly break another propeller to lengthen her visit to Utah. Wherever she stopped, she assured the residents that their town or city was a wonderful place in which she would like to stay longer. If her compliments were good copy for the local paper, they were also basically truthful. Amelia was an inquisitive, undemanding, and tireless tourist.
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