East to the Dawn (45 page)

The following day, none the worst for wear, Amelia went to Salt Lake City and assumed her public relations persona—George Putnam had booked her into various speaking and social engagements. She talked to three high school groups, led a discussion on social work and social problems at a meeting of the board of the Salt Lake Community Chest, spoke before the Ladies' Literary Club, was taken on a tour of a copper mine, visited a settlement house, and was guest of honor at a dinner.

It was not until Tuesday, October 9, nine days later, that she finally climbed into the cockpit of the Avian and took off over the Wasatch Mountains for Cheyenne and points east. She had indeed learned about mountain air—how it thinned and reduced engine power and affected the carburetor, how it sucked up and down and switched directions and suddenly turned to fog. This time she threaded her way through the high peaks of the Rockies without incident.

In the 1920s
Cosmopolitan
was a magazine for forward-thinking “modern” young women but it had a general audience as well. It published topical articles and fiction reflecting the fashionable currents of the day. At that time it was a fabulously successful magazine, publishing Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Emil Ludwig, and Damon Runyan, among others. When Calvin Coolidge decided to explain himself, his article, “Why I Did Not Choose to Run,” appeared in the May 1929 issue. Amelia was signed on because she was a “hot” commodity doing the most exciting thing a woman could do: fly. Ray Long was just jumping on the bandwagon; flying was arguably “the” hot media topic—newspapers were creating aviation sections, radio stations were scheduling aviation hours in prime evening time. Now, with Amelia,
Cosmo
had the first aviation editor.

She was presented as daring, ultrafashionable, chic, beautifully dressed, and apparently wealthy. Photos of her in that first issue show her dressed for riding, flying, and tennis, and with a fur draped about her shoulders dressed for a ball; every outfit is beautifully fitted, her hair is perfectly coiffed, she is wearing makeup, and a bemused smile plays about her lips.
If Ray Long's object was to present her as the most glamorous woman of the moment—the Cosmopolitan girl to end all Cosmopolitan girls—he succeeded. He turned her into the Renaissance woman.

In the 1920s the boyishly slender figure had become the object of every woman's ambition, and nowhere was that more evident than in the pages of
Cosmo.
Amelia was exactly what he wanted the Cosmo girl to become. She was tall, slender, with gray eyes and short, apparently curly hair, a nice little round nose with freckles, the Harres family high forehead, white teeth, pale complexion, quick flashing smile. She looked the perfect heroine of the age; she had the perfect figure. She had long legs and walked with a long-legged, loose-jointed stride, usually wearing slacks, an exciting new fashion statement that
Cosmo
wanted its readers to note.

No one knew that Amelia wore pants to hide her thick ankles. Not even becoming the most famous and most photographed woman in the world assuaged her self-consciousness about her legs—she had hated her legs as a child, and fame made absolutely no difference to the adult woman, she still hated her legs. But such was her charisma that even though she wore her trademark pants from sheer vanity, to hide her ankles, as the world's newest fashion plate, with her innate sense of style, she turned pants into a fashion alternative.

As the chic, glamourous aviation editor, Amelia, of course, was limited to writing about flying. In the first articles she wrote about how she had gotten into flying, how much she enjoyed it, the planes she had owned. The thrust of all her articles was that flying was safer as well as easier than the general public believed it to be. She answered readers' questions, published their poetry, and described her trip vagabonding about the country. She told how to go about getting a license, how to make sure of getting a good instructor, how much it all cost. She stressed the safety factor always. She urged women to let their daughters learn to fly and proclaimed that “the year of 1929 is ushering in the Flying Generation.” She wrote about Anne Lindbergh, who was a pilot, and about Amy Earhart, whom she had taken flying so many times that she was bored and now always took a book with her, usually a mystery story.

But
Cosmopolitan
was not the right place for articles urging women to be pioneers, to open up new fields of endeavor to other women, or to further the cause of aviation for all by forming aviation country clubs, Amelia's new interest. A gentle prod not to be scared was about all that
Cosmopolitan
could handle.
Cosmo
was for playgirls—it was about image rather than accomplishment. If Amelia was perfect for
Cosmo,
it was not perfect for her—its subject matter was too limited.

Although Amelia had made the decision to become a member of
the staff of
Cosmopolitan
and live in New York, in her own mind she still thought of herself as a social worker—perhaps one temporarily on assignment, but a social worker for all that. Indeed, years later, when a reporter asked her if she missed social work, she replied that she had never left it. Actually, from the first day, she had been a bit self-conscious about working for such a high-profile magazine as
Cosmopolitan.
In early December, in a letter to a social worker she had known in Boston before the
Friendship
flight, she admitted as much. She had spoken at a New York State dinner for social workers, she informed her friend: “I talked at the Better Times dinner the day before yesterday in order to pay, if I could, the debt I feel I owe to social workers. I know it was not adequate, but it seemed as much as I could do.”

At some point before she flew west, Amelia had written to Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch—head of Greenwich House, a settlement house in Greenwich Village, who had come to the July settlement house reception given Amelia—asking if she could become a member of the Greenwich House staff, explaining that it wasn't feasible for her to go back to Denison House. Mary recalled that Amelia had had it in her mind to maintain an association with social work, “as active as her altered way of life would permit.” Simkhovitch, knowing Amelia's reputation as one of the most promising and respected of the younger social workers, undoubtedly aware of the dilemma Amelia found herself in, said that Greenwich House would consider itself privileged to make a place for her there, that she could be a resident. This situation allowed her to maintain as active an association with social work as her altered way of life would permit and be a member of the staff. So for the rest of 1928 and most of 1929, Amelia made her home in the handsome six-story brick Georgian house designed for Mary by Delano and Aldrich at 27 Barrow Street in the East Village.

Mary was an exceptionally capable as well as charming woman. A member of one of the Boston Brahmin families, which had been pillars of the church, public servants, and part of the literary establishment of the city for generations, she had graduated from Boston University (refusing to be shut up in a women's college), studied at Radcliffe, then had gone to Berlin for further training. While in Germany, she met her future husband, Vladimir Simkhovitch, and Denison House founder Emily Balch. Mary, a contemporary of Emily and Vida Scudder, founded Greenwich House at roughly the same time as they founded Denison House. In the 1920s it was the most dynamic settlement house in New York. It reflected Mary's vision of an unstratified society, a vision that extended even to the board, which was composed of workers and neighbors as well as the traditional wealthy upper-class donors that usually comprised all board members.

Amelia was a very unusual resident, the only person permitted by Mary Simkhovitch to use Greenwich House somewhat as a hotel. It provided her with the constant challenge of interesting company, the comforting presence of a world she knew, and perhaps more important, it shielded her from an overly curious world.

The needy and the interested, the sick and the well, literally in the thousands each week, came to the settlement house. Children flocked to Greenwich House to attend the public school Mary ran on the premises, then stayed to be part of the after-school clubs; the elderly came to be taken care of and to have their health checked by the nurses; the able came to acquire skills in the shops; all came to listen to Mary. Under her stewardship the house became such a catalyst for change that the movers and shakers of society were irresistibly drawn to its side and contributed funds. She had just launched a campaign to raise $150,000 for the Greenwich House Music School, and before she started, she already had $27,000 in hand from generous benefactors. The long arm of Mary Simkhovitch even extended to protect the illegal Patsy's Barn, two blocks away, where behind a green door lived a horse, a goat, and chickens, which the settlement house children loved to visit.

Mary achieved a high degree of competence in all projects. She prevailed on the dean of American education, John Dewey, to set up the education department and be its first head; it remained affiliated with Columbia University and Teachers College, with four representatives on the Greenwich House board. The workshop-apprentice programs that Mary set up, based on those she had seen in Florence, flourished. The pottery workshop was so successful, it became self-supporting, selling wares at its own store on Madison Avenue—its pots were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum for its permanent collection as well as by J.P. Morgan. There was an equally professional stone-cutting shop. The music school students held recitals, and their choral groups competed successfully in city-wide songfests. The children's theater gave Christmas performances on Broadway.

When Amelia moved in, the workshops were operating out of their own buildings down the street, as did the music school. What she encountered at 27 Barrow Street were the core residents: basically the administrators, headworker Mary, whose life was seamlessly intertwined with her work, her husband Vladimir, their children, and the staff. But leading social thinkers of the day from all over the world also came, to exchange ideas and see the life of an American city, or to attend a conference. They stayed for dinner or for several days or several weeks, which meant that Amelia would as likely as not end up talking to a leader of the
British labor movement, a social worker from Japan or Russia, or a Russian revolutionary or Frances Perkins, then New York State commissioner of labor down from Albany for a lecture, or Emily Balch—any and all of whom might drop in for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It was all quite civilized; nor did the extra guests cause the slightest ripple, since as was traditional in settlement houses, meals were cooked by a cook and served by a butler who both took great pride in the settlement house.

Amelia felt at home and fitted in. Her impact on the children and adults alike was incalculable; she inspired them all and continually “got involved,” causing Mary to comment approvingly that she had “a very tender heart” and was “sensitive to injustice.” She was, however, a slow, careful writer who “sweated out her sentences,” observed Mary, herself a prolific writer, author of several books, who routinely dashed off perfect letters and statements to newspapers in record time.

Amelia found companionship not just with Mary but with Vladimir, a professor at Columbia who had a fine collection of ancient art. She could drop her defenses and relax with him. He was fascinated by her—and worried about her future. He admired her sincerity, honesty and gaiety of spirit; but he thought she gave too much of herself to the public side of her career and wanted her to concentrate on social work. He wasn't sure she was tough enough, that she had the emotional fortitude to endure the notoriety that her new high-profile life demanded. “I felt scared for her, watching her lose her priority in herself. She seemed to have no plan for self-protection,” he told Janet Mabie; life on the outside would be very different. He was aware of how complex Amelia was, aware that she was driving herself to become a top pilot, the spokesperson for her generation of women, and at the same time had a great need to make money and it made him apprehensive. If she had stayed in social work, he mused, “she wouldn't have made so much money, but then, a lot of it never did her any good anyway.” But the world was almost sucking her out of social work; she would move on.