Amelia Earhart

by Doris L. Rich

  Another shared interest, a new one to Amelia, was entertaining. Cousin Lucy Challis, who resented news stories that she thought “masculinized” Amelia, said that Amelia managed the Rye house perfectly and liked entertaining. Although she was reluctant to “make conversation,” she found no need to do so when entertaining with G. P. The guests, friends of G. P.’s as well as some she had met on her own, all had careers or professions that interested her.

  At the close of 1932, on the night before New Year’s Eve, Amelia and G. P. entertained at a gathering that G. P.’s columnist friend Walter Trumbull called “one of those famous parties given by George Palmer Putnam and Amelia Earhart.” The fifty or more guests included Roy Chapman Andrews, the naturalist just back from an expedition to Central Asia, Arctic explorers Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Sir Hubert Wilkins, African adventurers Martin and Osa Johnson, novelist Fannie Hurst, aviators Hilton Railey, Eugene Vidal, and Paul Collins, and the Elliott Roosevelts, Bernard Gimbels, and Ogden Reids.

  Their hostess was as famous as any of her guests. In a single year she had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, crosses of the Belgian Order of Leopold and French Legion of Honor, the Rumanian Order of Virtutea Aviation Medal, National Geographic medal and medals from the Comite France-Amerique, Le Lyceum Societé des Femmes de France at New York, the Columbia Broadcasting System, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the cities of Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. She also received awards from the Aero Club of France and the Aero Club Royal de Belgique.

  An article in U.S. Air Services magazine claimed that her solo crossing of the Atlantic had carried “Amelia Earhart Putnam … into the PLAN to RAYM volume of the next and all succeeding editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica.” As predicted, she was in succeeding editions of the Britannica, but not under “P” with the three Putnams—G. P., his grandfather George Palmer Putnam, and his uncle George Haven Putnam. Amelia was listed under “E” for “Earhart, Amelia, U.S. aviation pioneer,” a title she would both justify and exploit in the coming year.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Queen of the Air

  It’s a routine now, Bert. I make a record and then I lecture on it. That’s where the money comes from. Until it’s time to make another record.” Pilot Winfield Kinner, Jr., stood near the runway at Burbank, listening to Amelia and his father, Bert, on a February day in 1933. The two men had just left a plane to be inspected and licensed when Amelia saw them and stopped to talk. Twelve years before that day, back at Kinner Field, schoolboy “Win” Kinner had marveled at Amelia’s skill as a contortionist but thought she “was inclined to make sloppy landings.” The last time he had seen her was in 1929 when his mother cooked pork chops for her the night before she flew back east in the little Avro Avian she bought from Lady Heath.

  The “Queen of the Air” was reminiscing with Bert as if she were still twenty-three years old instead of thirty-five. Her grin was the same but her blue-grey eyes were older and the fair, smooth complexion Win recalled was tanned and marked with fine lines from sun and wind. Amelia wasn’t really complaining to Bert as much as explaining. In 1921, the rules of the game had been “No work, no pay. No pay, no fly.” The game was bigger now but the rules were the same.

  Amelia told Bert she had just sold her Vega and bought another. She was at Burbank to talk about the overhaul of her purchase made in January.*

  To buy the Vega she had to sell her “little red bug.” Except for the motor installed by Balchen and Gorski for the Atlantic flight, the plane was worth very little, unless it were bought as memorabilia, like Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis which the Smithsonian Institution had acquired. Amelia’s Philadelphia friend, Dorothy Leh, suggested the Franklin Institute’s museum might buy it. Amelia’s former employers, the Ludington brothers, had given one hundred thousand dollars to the Institute for a Hall of Aviation in 1930.

  Amelia followed Leh’s advice. “After some bickering,” she wrote Leh, “the Franklin Institute finally bought my plane.… Do I owe you a commission? I’m serious about this.” “No, darling,” Leh answered, “no commission,” adding her thanks for a free ride Amelia had given her to Cleveland.

  However, seventy-five hundred dollars was not enough to pay for and update the Vega from 5B to the newer, faster 5C that Amelia needed if she were to break any records. While Lockheed worked on the plane, she would have to return to lecturing and cultivating the publicity that brought more bookings and bigger audiences.

  There were no holidays for Amelia. Even before she left for the West Coast and a lecture tour on January 27 she was working eighteen-hour days. In the first two weeks of 1933 she bought the new plane, received four medals (two in a single day) all requiring acceptance speeches, and wrote two dozen or more letters on behalf of the Ninety-Nines. She also gave a long interview to the Sarah Lawrence College newspaper and attended the opening of the new Roxy Theater in the Radio City complex. There she sat for Edward Steichen who photographed her in the women’s lounge before an engraved glass mural depicting her Atlantic flight. Vogue ran it with the caption, “The First Lady of the Sky.”

  On January 16 she went to Washington to testify before the Senate on the development of a Washington municipal airport. Three days before she had received a medal from the Rumanians, along with Charles Lindbergh. In her diary Anne Lindbergh wrote, “Amelia Earhart, a shaft of white coming out of a blue room.” About G. P. she added, “Amelia Earhart’s husband hovering.” G. P. hovered with a purpose. He was planning a dinner in honor of Auguste Piccard, the Belgian who had ascended in a balloon to a record height in the stratosphere. Before leaving Belgium for the United States, Piccard, an acknowledged authority on cosmic rays and radiation and currently studying stratospheric rocketry, told reporters that Earhart and Lindbergh were his American heroes. G. P. intended inviting a dozen or more aeronautical celebrities, including Lindbergh. Lindbergh refused the invitation. G. P. then suggested a small, private dinner at the house in Rye and Lindbergh accepted.

  There were only nine present—Amelia, G. P., the Lindberghs, David Putnam, explorer-naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews, William Beebe (designer of an undersea vehicle, the bathysphere, in which he had descended to a record depth in the sea), Piccard, and his business manager, Sylvestre Dorian. The next day the New York Times had a complete account of the conversation at dinner and a description of Piccard putting down knife and fork to take an enormous slide-rule from his waistcoat pocket to convert kilometers into miles for Amelia and Lindbergh. For the remainder of the dinner, the report said, Piccard used the rule as frequently as his knife and fork. Portions of Lindbergh’s conversation with the scientist were quoted directly, and twelve days later, the dinner was again described in an article in the New Yorker magazine. G. P. apologized to an angry Lindbergh, insisting that he was not the tale bearer, but that Dorian was and had done it for forty dollars offered by a reporter.

  Guilty or not, G. P. continued to take an active part in promoting Piccard’s visit. The Putnam touch is evident in plans to celebrate the Belgian’s birthday the following Saturday. Arrangements included a dirigible descending to the roof of the St. Moritz to take the professor and other guests for a flight over Manhattan. Amelia, who disliked these stunts as much as Lindbergh did, escaped this one, leaving the previous day on the Twentieth-Century Limited for Chicago. From there she flew as a guest of Northwest Airways to Minneapolis—St. Paul, then on to the West Coast.

  Her speaker’s agency, the Emerson Bureau, had booked a lecture tour, starting in Portland on February 1, but G. P. arranged the free flight with Northwest on a survey trip for a proposed northern route to Seattle. Amelia got a free ride and the airline good publicity because of her. There was a reception for her in Bismarck, North Dakota, on January 28, and at Helena, Montana, one thousand admirers came out to the airport for her arrival. She stayed in Helena overnight, and made a five-minute address the next day to a joint session of the Montana state legislature. Everywhere reporters clamored for interviews, quoting her
at length and describing her in great detail.

  When her flight was cut short at Spokane by a winter storm, one wrote that she “didn’t look like an aviatrix,” however they were supposed to look. He gushed:

  She was merely a lovely feminine-looking young woman who graciously accepted the greetings of the curious who approached her in the lobby [of the hotel].… There were no air trappings, no wings, no helmets. She stood there with her tousled hair, which had become her trademark, set off against the soft collar of her handsome coat [a full-length sable], a tall young woman … carrying a bouquet of pink sweet peas.

  At the next stop in Portland, a reporter overheard a woman who saw Amelia at the train station say, “Why—she’s quite a beautiful person!” and another newsman wrote that her pictures, which suggested a “masculine nature,” were misleading. He also claimed, “She likes to keep long hours, she likes to meet people and she isn’t a tomboy.” Flying was just a hobby for her, he wrote, her real job was making a home for her husband. Amelia’s interviewer was so impressed by her femininity he could not hear the feminist speaking to him.

  The sum of her statements in Portland is a familiar one today: 1) modern science has cut back on household drudgery; 2) a woman could run a home and have a career; and 3) if she did, her husband should share household and child-raising duties. As for women doing the same work as men, perhaps they could. If they were made equal under the law and given the opportunity they would soon find out. There were still no women pilots on scheduled airlines, partly because of prejudice but also because they lacked experience, she said. Army and Navy training was not open to them; they had to pay for their instruction and flight time. They could not afford the hours of experience needed by the airlines to assure the safety of passengers.†

  At her next stop, in Seattle, Amelia added a new proposal to her program for the emancipation of women. “Draft women!” she declared, a strange proposition to be made by an avowed pacifist and one that is still controversial a half century later. “If women were drafted,” she claimed, “I think it would be an effective means of ending war. They would learn how horrible it is.”

  In Vancouver the next day she expounded on this theme. Individual aptitude, rather than sex, should determine the possibility of women becoming wartime flyers. In the event of casualties, “So far as sex is concerned, women are no more valuable than men.”

  Amelia gave these opinions in interviews but her lectures were limited to a description of her Atlantic crossing, the advantages of commercial aviation, and twenty-five hundred feet of newsreel film. For each lecture she was paid three hundred dollars, half the price of a new Buick. Between February 1 and 7 she gave a total of eight, in Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, earning twenty-four hundred dollars in a single week. G. P., who was Paramount Pictures’ New York chief story advisor, met her in Los Angeles and took her to lunch at Paramount Studios. The next day Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons published the “rumor” that Miss Earhart might act as adviser on a coming Paramount aviation film.

  The June edition of Screenland magazine carried a story on Amelia; she was photographed with Gary Cooper, allegedly going over reels from his latest film in which he played the role of a flight officer. It is doubtful Amelia did any advising. But G. P. saw to it that she was also pictured with Gene Raymond, Tallulah Bankhead, and Marlene Dietrich, and that the Putnams were described as “the world’s only regular airplane commuters between New York and Hollywood.” Soon after, Helen Weber, who was still helping Amelia with her correspondence, wrote to a mutual friend that Amelia “is getting a bit fed up, I think, of the constant travel, particularly when it must perforce be by train in this winter weather.” Amelia herself described the tour as “much more intense than I had planned, because the management [G. P.] kept trying to squeeze in more, and in these times, I thought I might as well do as much and get as much as I could.” She did.

  Amelia had already begun to proclaim in no uncertain terms the causes of feminism, pacifism, and the use of commercial aviation that she advocated on the lecture tour soon after her Atlantic flight. Three months after President Hoover presented her the National Geographic’s gold medal in June of 1932 she was back at the White House—this time with a petition for an equal rights amendment to the constitution. “I join with the National Women’s Party,” she told Hoover, “in hoping for the speedy passage of the Lucretia Mott Amendment which would write into the highest law of our land that men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States.”

  In addition to the equal rights amendment, Amelia suggested that the federal government take the lead in eliminating discrimination. As an example she cited the Department of Commerce’s recognition of legal equality for men and women in licensing pilots. If the actual treatment of women aviators was less than fair, the licensing was at least a starting point for further improvement.

  When Amelia called for equality she meant just that; she did not want affirmative action. Equal rights legislation would put a stop, she said, “to sentimental attitudes about protective legislation for women.… Wages should be based on work itself, not on sex.” Although she had joined the National Women’s Party, she regarded a separate political party for women as a necessary evil to be abandoned as soon as discriminatory legislation was eliminated.

  In a letter to the editor of the New York Sun she complimented the paper on its editorial disapproval of a special minimum wage law for women. “It is true that in all too many instances conditions and wages [for women] are deplorable,” she wrote. “However, civilization’s duty is to men as well as women and any sincere welfare program must see them safeguarded also. The right to earn a living belongs to all persons.”

  On her first lecture tour of 1933 Amelia had said whatever she pleased, but she went wherever G. P. sent her. If she expected a rest after her return to Rye on February 7 she was disappointed. A few days later she flew to Chicago for a wedding in which G. P. was best man. He must have insisted because she resented having to go. “I loathe the formal kind [of wedding],” she wrote to her mother, “and have never attended any since Pidge got me inside a church for hers. (I don’t mean only church weddings are awful, of course.)” What she seemed to mean was that all weddings were “awful,” and that she remained as critical of marriage as she had been before her own. Whether she told G. P. this or he sensed it, he treated her to a brief vacation as soon as they returned to Rye, a drive south with David. On the way they stopped overnight at Aberdeen, North Carolina, where she played golf the next morning.

  The vacation was for three days, ending on February 24 when she was back in New York for a nationwide broadcast, “The Inside Story,” which combined a dramatization of her life with an interview conducted by Edwin C. Hill, the most popular radio commentator of the time. Amelia repeated her feminist views—she did not believe a woman should be a prisoner of her home; her husband “would no more interfere with my work than I would with his”; and her reason for flying the Atlantic solo was to demonstrate that “women like to do such things, and can.”

  On March 4, 1933, Amelia and G. P. went to Washington for the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the invitation of Eleanor. Eleanor and Amelia were already friends. Just two weeks after Roosevelt was elected the previous November Eleanor gave the introductory remarks for one of Amelia’s lectures, at Poughkeepsie, New York. Before the lecture Amelia and G. P. were guests at an informal dinner at Hyde Park for the Roosevelts’ houseguest, Lady Nancy Astor. The only other guests were Mrs. Henry Morganthau and her son Henry, Jr. Lady Astor also spoke at Amelia’s lecture, prompting the local newspaper to exclaim that “three of the world’s outstanding women” were all on stage at the local high school—the first woman to fly the Atlantic, the first American woman elected to Parliament, and the next First Lady of the United States. Amelia did not hesitate to petition the new president in her role as pacifist. She signed a request from the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom to
cut military and naval expenditures and to use the money for unemployment relief. She signed a second from the American Women’s committee for the Recognition of Soviet Russia.

  A week after the inauguration Amelia had lunch at the White House and a month later she returned with G. P. for dinner and an overnight stay before her lecture to the Daughters of the American Revolution on April 21. On that first night Amelia took Eleanor, who was an enthusiastic booster of commercial aviation, for an airplane ride, a stunt arranged by G. P. After dinner Amelia and Eleanor, still in formal dress and long white gloves, were taken to the airport to board one of Eastern Air Transport’s new two-motored Curtiss Condors, flown by two of the airline’s regular pilots. A half-dozen women reporters were invited but men were banned except for one male photographer, Eleanor’s brother Hall, G. P., and Eugene Vidal. On the round trip to Baltimore Amelia took the controls long enough to be photographed at them wearing long, white evening gloves, before G. P. suggested that Eleanor take a turn in the cockpit while the captain demonstrated the controls to her. “It was like being on top of the world,” she told one of the reporters aboard. When another asked if she felt safe, “knowing a girl may be flying this ship,” Eleanor said she did and added, “I’d give anything to do it myself!” She meant it. Three months earlier she had discussed learning to fly with Amelia. Amelia sent her to her physician for the physical examination needed by student pilots. Eleanor passed it but when she asked Franklin for his approval he told her he thought it would be a waste of time because she could not afford a plane. Eleanor sent the student pilot’s permit she had obtained to Amelia.