Amelia Earhart (12 page)

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.

I
n 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 Bailey 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.

At her next stop, in Omaha, after a play she went backstage to talk to the stars, Lou Tellegen and Eve Casanova. She asked Casanova how she kept such a beautiful
complexion and said hers was so sunburned and weatherbeaten that she was ashamed of it. Although she soon stopped talking about it in public, Amelia did think her skin was unattractive and that her figure was ruined by thighs that were too heavy. Slacks or floor-length evening gowns would hide the latter defect, but flying left her no escape from exposure to sun and wind. Her face was frequently sunburned, freckled, and sometimes peeling.

In Omaha she gave her only display of temper on the trip, after she discovered that there were no attendants at the airfield, her plane had not been serviced, and someone had folded back the wings the wrong way. Instead of criticizing the airfield attendants, she turned her ire on souvenir hunters. “
Why they even cut pieces of the fabric from the wings of your machine,” she complained, “and then ask you to autograph them! Some day a souvenir hound will carry off a vital part and there will be a crash,” she told a reporter.

The flying vacation ended on October 13 in New York when G. P. presented her with a schedule of future engagements designed to boost sales of her book,
Twenty Hours Forty Minutes: Our Flight in the “Friendship
,” released a month earlier. In spite of brisk sales and generally flattering reviews, the book was not very interesting. Other than entries from Amelia’s diary, it was a dull summary of the problems of commercial aviation and a plea for more support from the government and the public. The last chapter did show a flair for self-deprecating humor, a talent Amelia was already using to great advantage in speeches and interviews. In one account of her difficulties with photographers, she described a visit to Hyde Park High School where a cameraman, trying to include a group of students in the picture with her, asked her to step forward onto a grand piano that was level with the stage. In a note to her, a friend who saw the picture asked, “
How
did you get on the piano?” Amelia was certain her friend had pictured her making “
scandalizing progress through the west, leaping from piano to piano.”

Amelia did not complain about the heavy schedule of engagements made for her by G. P. He had financed the Avian for her, her first plane since she was forced to sell the Kinner Airster four years earlier. She had already collected other rewards. For appearing on the NBC broadcast in an auto show at Madison Square Garden, she had been presented with a blue
Chrysler roadster. For her endorsement of a fur-lined, leather “Amelia Earhart
Flying Suit,” a Fifth Avenue department store gave her one. She had no intention of “wearing it up and down Fifth Avenue,” as the advertisement claimed, but she had learned from G. P. that there could be considerable gain in enduring such foolishness.