Amelia Earhart

by Doris L. Rich

  The militant feminist also remained an uncompromising pacifist. The first woman to lecture at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1935, she returned in 1936, a few days before Armistice Day, when she told the midshipmen that traditional speeches and parades were “uncivilized,” and what was really needed was “education for peace.” It was an odd place for such a message but she never forgot the wounded in that Toronto hospital.

  G. P. was with her for that weekend when both were the guests of the academy’s superintendent, Adm. David Sellers. He was also with her on the Democrats’ “caravan” campaign and for another weekend in South Bend, Indiana, as a guest of Vincent Bendix, president of Bendix Aviation Corporation and donor of the Bendix prize. G. P. cultivated all their hosts. Amelia was present, but she did not enjoy these weekends as much as he. In much of the gossip about a pending divorce for the Putnams there were always rumors of another man. If Amelia had left G. P., it would not have been for another man, but to live alone. She was tired of G. P.—of his endless schemes, his demanding schedules, his hot temper, his pursuit of the powerful, and his apparent need to share the public attention she found increasingly distasteful.

  One of the first persons to know this was her old friend, Gene Vidal. Although Vidal maintained friendly relations with G. P., the help he gave to him on the world flight was really for Amelia’s sake. Vidal made a point of seeing her whenever they were in the same city. He was with her at the National Air Races in Los Angeles and he met her when she arrived at Purdue in September. On November 28, a week after she flew the Electra from Purdue to New York for inspection of its radio system, Vidal took her to the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia. He had refused an invitation from the West Point Society of Philadelphia so that he could escort her and his ten-year-old son, Gore, to the game.

  The boy was fascinated by Amelia. He thought her voice was beautiful and her “white” eyelashes very unusual. She wrote poetry and encouraged him to write. He was sure Amelia was in love with his father, who had been divorced for a year, but was even more certain his father’s affection for Amelia was platonic. He was probably right. Among Vidal’s papers at the University of Wyoming is a leather wallet with three passport pictures in it. One is of a motherly looking, white-haired woman, a Mrs. Scovill, manager of a Santa Monica hotel where Vidal lived while working for TAT in 1929 and whose advice he sought later in finding a good summer camp for Gore. A second picture is of Gore, and the third, Amelia. The collection is that of a family man, not a lover.

  On the train returning to New York, while curious fans peeked in the window of their compartment, Amelia talked with Vidal and his son about the world flight. When the boy asked her what worried her the most, she told him she feared being forced down in an African jungle. He said he thought the Pacific Ocean looked more dangerous. She replied that there were islands in the Pacific and that she would love to live on a desert island. Gene Vidal was not as enthusiastic as Amelia about life on a desert island but he was willing to discuss methods of extracting salt from sea water. He knew Amelia loved to discuss problems of that sort. Later, Gene told his son that Amelia disliked her husband and that she was tired of the constant attention resulting from his publicizing of her career. By 1936 she had made up her mind to find a figurative, if not a literal, desert island on which to live.

  That same November Amelia met a woman who became a second, intimate friend in whom she could confide, perhaps even more than she did in Gene Vidal. Jacqueline Cochran Odlum was also an aviator, confident, daring and eager to show the world what a woman pilot could do. Other than that, there was little the two women had in common. Cochran was eight years Amelia’s junior, the founder-owner of a cosmetics company who had recently married one of the country’s wealthiest financiers, Floyd Odlum. A tiny, shapely blonde who ordinarily preferred the company of men, she was intelligent but uneducated, a compulsive talker exuding a nervous, pent-up energy.

  Growing up in Atchison, eight-year-old Amelia had played at trapping the neighbors’ chickens; six-year-old Cochran trapped them for food in the camp for itinerant workers where she lived. At eight, this unwanted foster child of ignorant, often cruel guardians went to work in a cotton mill in Columbus, Georgia, on the twelve-hour night shift for six cents an hour. Cochran fled the schoolroom on her third day there, after the teacher hit her and she struck back. Although her formal education was infrequent and intermittent, it did not prevent her from speaking her mind. An oft-repeated, if apocryphal, story about Cochran claimed that when she was shown the relief tube in a military plane just before she took it up for a test flight, she said, “I never pee when I fly.”

  This small, uneducated, and, some said, ruthless woman and tall, well-read, gentle Amelia liked each other from their first meeting. A few days later Amelia invited Cochran to accompany her in the Electra when she took it to the West Coast.

  The trip took a week. Held up by weather in St. Louis and Amarillo, the new friends talked. They discussed everything that interested either or both of them—politics, business, science, religion, aviation, and, surprisingly for Amelia, their own lives. The ebullient Cochran proved a sensitive listener. Although she flew for the love of it, she realized that her new friend was seeking in flight an elusive peace, one she had failed to find in college, nursing, social work, or any of her other earlier pursuits.

  During the trip Cochran told Amelia she had psychic powers. These were tested the first night in Indio, California, where Amelia was a guest at the Odlum ranch. After they heard that a Western Air Express plane was missing on a flight from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City, Amelia, who had always been a respecter of scientific verification, asked Cochran to locate the plane. Cochran gave Amelia a number of clues. Amelia called Paul Mantz in Los Angeles, who found the locality Cochran had indicated on his aerial maps. Amelia drove half the night to Los Angeles, where she took off with Mantz in the Electra on a search for the missing aircraft. They didn’t find it, but when the snows melted the following spring, Cochran claimed it was where she said it would be. On December 27 a United Airlines plane was lost outside of Burbank. Cochran again claimed she told Amelia where to look and Amelia found the plane but in their column on February 16, 1937, it was Amelia whom Drew Pearson and Robert Allen credited with psychic gifts in locating the wreckage as well as that of a second plane lost on January 12. Cochran, who would have been furious at anyone else upstaging her, made no protest.

  Cochran had invited Amelia to visit her at the Cochran-Odlum ranch, Indian Palms, as soon as they arrived in California. Before her marriage to Odlum, Cochran had built a small house on twenty acres in Indio. Odlum, a former utilities magnate who was president of Atlas Corporation and later took over Paramount Pictures, purchased another eight hundred adjacent acres and expanded the accommodations to a main house, six guest cottages, a golf course, stables, and a swimming pool. Amelia loved the place. Delighted, Cochran described her guest as “streaking across the desert on horseback with the joy of living mirrored in her face,” or “stretched out full length on the floor before the fireplace, studying maps, talking or … just watching the shooting flames.”

  Amelia spent the last few days of 1936 at Indian Palms. This time G. P. and Floyd Odlum were both there, along with Floyd’s thirteen-year-old son by a previous marriage. Amelia, who was fascinated by anything mechanical, charmed young Bruce Odlum by her interest in a twelve-dollar used car he had managed to put in running condition. She was obviously fond of both Cochran and Odlum who returned her affection. Odlum was cordial to G. P., but Cochran did not like him from the moment she met him after her solo flight in 1932. Always watchful of any woman who might challenge Amelia’s standing as the leader of the pack, G. P. had asked Cochran, “Well, little girl, what is your ambition in flying?” Cochran snapped back, “To put your wife in the shade.”

  Years later, she told a friend that Amelia might have been in love with Putnam early in their marriage but she had become suspicious of his motives and thought he was using her n
ame to further his own ambitions. Both Vidal and Cochran were convinced that Amelia no longer thought that her “reasonable partnership” with G. P. gave her the kind of support she wanted for the most ambitious and dangerous flight of her career. With just ten more weeks left to prepare for it, the Putnams’ duality of control was beginning to falter.

  * Air Commerce would supervise construction; the Works Progress Administration would provide the laborers from relief rolls; the Department of Interior, the food for all personnel; the Army and Navy, the equipment; and the Coast Guard, the transport.

  † One of the films he publicized was Go West Young Man, starring former burlesque queen Mae West. The reviews were bad but the film was a hit where it counted—at the box office.

  ‡ At present-day prices the Electra would cost approximately $1.5 million. The bill of sale, signed by McLeod, described the plane as “one Electra monoplane complete, being manufacturer’s serial number 1055, Department of Commerce Number NR-16020.” The Commerce license number was applied for by Lockheed on July 19, but not officially approved until August 21, 1936.

  § Amelia was lucky to bring home the Electra intact. Some of the country’s best fliers had ruined their ships. Before the race Roscoe Turner crashed on his way to New York and Jacqueline Cochran, newest star on the women’s circuit, cracked up on a test flight. During the race Joe Jacobson’s Northrop Gamma exploded over Stafford, Kansas, blasting him into the sky. Jacobson managed to open his parachute in time. The favorites, Ben Howard and his copilot wife, Maxine, crashed at a lonely spot in New Mexico where they lay pinned in the wreckage for four hours before help reached them. Both of Maxine Howard’s legs were fractured and Ben’s heel was severed, necessitating the amputation of his foot.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Crackup

  By the beginning of 1937 Amelia’s fate was locked into the world flight. Her old friend, Hilton Railey, described her as being “caught up in the ‘hero stream’ of fliers, compelled to strive for bigger and braver feats necessary to the maintenance of her position as the foremost woman pilot in the world.” She was going to make this most dangerous flight of her life in her first two-engine plane, a powerful, complicated aircraft loaded with special equipment, in which she had had very little flight experience. Yet in the ten weeks remaining she spent most of her time earthbound.

  Her lack of flight time worried Paul Mantz. When he suggested she make a quick trip with him to New York and back in the Electra, she refused. Instead she made a series of short trips out of Burbank with Mantz demonstrating procedures to her, but he was not the best of teachers for an emancipated woman. Mantz used expressions like “Listen to Papa,” and he once called Amelia a good pilot but “a woman’s pilot,” who tended, like many old-timer women pilots, to “jockey the throttles.”

  In late February she had a second instructor, Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the Electra’s designer. While Mantz tended to patronize her, Johnson taught her as he would any new Electra pilot. He accompanied her as flight engineer rather than copilot while they flew the big plane at various weights, altitudes, and engine power settings. He also taught her how to use the Cambridge analyzer, setting the fuel mixture control for maximum mileage. Johnson thought she was a good pilot—sensible, studious, and attentive.

  However, Amelia was a part-time student distracted by too many extracurricular activities, some obligatory, many voluntary. There were details for the flight route that G. P. could not clean up. When he told her that work on the runway at Howland Island had not begun because the Bureau of the Budget would not authorize funds for it, Amelia wired Franklin Roosevelt for help. Three days after this second request for FDR’s assistance, she was notified by his aide, Marvin McIntyre, that the money had been allocated to the WPA by order of the president.

  There was the new house in Hollywood. With G. P. in New York Amelia was left to supervise work on it. Built on two lots alongside the Toluca Lake golf course, it incorporated the original small bungalow and a new, larger addition with a double study, master bedroom, guest room, and staff quarters.

  Amelia hired a staff for it, including a houseman and gardener, Fred Tomas, a housekeeper, Mrs. DeCarie, and a secretary, DeCarie’s daughter, Margot. Young and inexperienced when Amelia hired her, Margot DeCarie worshipped her employer. “I was spoiled working for A. E.,” she said. “She … thought I could conquer the world and I felt I could too.” Amelia was her hero-saint, a woman who spoke often and freely about anyone she liked but said nothing at all about those she did not. At first G. P. was approved of by DeCarie simply because Amelia, who never made a mistake, married him. Later DeCarie changed her mind, calling him “egotistical and selfish,” a publicity-seeker with no regard for others.

  The house at Toluca Lake was where Amelia intended to live on her return. If she gave an interview in February about another—the one in Rye—to Better Homes and Gardens, it was for G. P.’s sake, perhaps to help him find a renter when they needed money so desperately. The California house was also where she intended her mother to live, in a special room designed to accommodate Amy’s favorite pieces of furniture, a place in which she would be neither underfoot nor isolated.

  When the new wing neared completion in late February, Amelia told her mother to find a temporary room in Boston and send on all but her necessary belongings. She was not, Amelia said, to keep Muriel’s children with her. This admonition resulted from Muriel’s decision to divorce Albert Morrissey, a move that received Amelia’s wholehearted support.

  In a long letter dated January 31, Amelia gave Muriel specific advice. She was to transfer one thousand dollars in stock, given her by Amy and held by G. P. but in Albert’s name, to G. P. She was to ask Albert for the five hundred dollars Muriel had given him in a separate transaction. A week later Amelia wired her mother that she was leaving for New York on February 8 and would see Muriel while she was there. Fearing a crisis in which Muriel would not have the address of the lawyer she had recommended, Amelia said to get it from G. P. A legal separation would be necessary, she thought, to insure an income for the children, and Muriel might have to remain in Boston until it was arranged. Under no circumstances, Amelia told Amy, was Muriel to leave the house before Albert.*

  The apparently happily married woman who knew so much about divorce proceedings had already missed celebrating her sixth wedding anniversary on February 7. She was further delayed by mechanical difficulties with the Electra but arrived in New York on February 11, in time for the press reception G. P. had arranged at the Barclay Hotel to publicize the world flight. G. P. did not get the news coverage he wanted. Reporters were tired of G. P.’s promotional schemes. Typical of the stories appearing the next day was one in the New York Times, less than a half column on page 25.

  Never discouraged for long, G. P. followed up five days later when New York’s feisty mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, appeared with Amelia on the steps of City Hall to wish her bon voyage. In his speech La Guardia insisted her flight would be “in no sense a stunt,” a declaration G. P. might well have written for him. When he accompanied Amelia on her flight back to the coast, G. P. staged one more incident that did receive national coverage by the wire services. Amelia had landed the Electra at Blackwell, Oklahoma, after a propeller went out of synchronization. While it was being repaired she borrowed a car from a local dealer and drove G. P., McKneely, and Harry Manning, who had taken leave to be her navigator on the world flight, to Ponca City for lunch. Before they left, G. P. contrived to have her arrested by a local policeman who did so when she drove back through Blackwell. In court Amelia pleaded guilty, telling the judge that she hadn’t seen any signs but supposed she might have been going too fast. The judge, who knew nothing about the joke, regarded her with suspicion. She was from New York but said she was driving a borrowed car. “All the way from New York?” he asked. “No,” she said, “I came in an airplane.” He ruled a fine of $1.00 and $2.50 in costs before the mayor arrived, embarrassed because a famous aviator had been treat
ed so badly in Blackwell. After G. P.’s prank was explained to Amelia, the judge, and the mayor, a banquet was arranged for that evening when a ten-foot key to the city was given to Amelia. In the afternoon three thousand fans turned up at her hotel, where she signed autograph books in the lobby for more than an hour before retreating to her room with the promise that if the remaining books were left at the desk she would sign as many as she could before leaving at five o’clock the next morning.

  G. P. added even more commitments to Amelia’s schedule. Faced with a paucity of preflight coverage and a growing need for cash, he reneged on his original promise to Lockheed that news of the flight would be free and available to all. Instead, he made a deal with the New York Herald Tribune. Amelia would write her own account of the trip, sending a dispatch from each major stop along the way, stories that G. P. could later compile for a book to be published after her return. The Herald Tribune’s syndicated feature service could sell Amelia’s stories to any client newspaper and Amelia’s friend, Carl Allen, would do extensive preflight features as part of the series.

  If G. P. thought Amelia’s friendship with Helen Reid would permit him any advantage in the agreement he was wrong. Amelia was told by a Herald Tribune editor to “forget God ever gave her a tongue” until each of her stories was written and dispatched. She was not to carry any photographs for any agency nor to help any organization except the Herald Tribune and its representatives, and only after they proved their identity. Reid herself added that only Tribune representatives should be granted interviews. G. P. replied that if Amelia refused to talk to newsmen she would look ridiculous. Where possible, he wrote, she would not answer questions until she had dispatched her own story, but he could not stop the Navy and Coast Guard from permitting reporters aboard the three ships assisting in the Pacific flight. The Herald Tribune settled for G. P.’s terms.