East to the Dawn (53 page)

But the autogiro in fact gave Amelia a lot more trouble than she admitted to the world.

She dumped the Beech-Nut autogiro at least three times. En route home, taking off from Abilene, Texas, she was suddenly engulfed in a windstorm, known locally as a “dust devil,” that dropped the air pressure underneath her, thus causing the autogiro to drop. Avoiding spectators, she managed to bring the autogiro down in a nearby parking lot, but not before she damaged it and several cars. Amelia stepped out unhurt; the
autogiro needed serious repairs. Not that she was anything but inconvenienced; before the day was out pilot Paul Lukens was taking off from the Pitcairn factory and winging west in a new autogiro for her; Pitcairn Aviation and the Beech-Nut Company thought too much of the publicity she generated for them to even think of her not flying.

Paul Collins and his sister witnessed the second accident. After a “rather erratic” autogiro flight she made after taking off from the airfield in Camden, New Jersey, she “finally landed on a fence. Amelia stepped out frustrated and furious, and announced, ‘I'll never get in one of those machines again. I couldn't handle it at all,' ” according to Helen Collins MacElwee.

The third was in September. Attempting a slow landing near the grandstand of the Michigan State Fair grounds, Amelia failed to level off soon enough, and the autogiro dropped twenty feet to the ground. The landing gear was demolished, a wing crumpled, and the plane ground looped, but she emerged unhurt and unruffled from the cloud of dust that surrounded the wrecked craft. “It was all my fault, and I'm not injured at all. I just didn't level off soon enough,” she told the waiting crowd, according to the newspapers. But writing to her mother, she had another explanation: the landing gear had given way “from a defect,” causing her to ground-loop. And when she was quoted as saying “it was all my fault,” she went on to say in her letter to Amy, she had been addressing George, who, while running to her side, somersaulted over a guy wire he didn't see and ended up in the hospital, much to his embarrassment. Pitcairn Aviation as usual came through with another machine, and within a few hours Amelia was on her way to Saginaw, Michigan, to fulfill her exhibition flying engagement there.

Other major drawbacks to the autogiro, besides its quirky landing characteristics, that Amelia made light of at the time effectively curbed her interest. One was its lack of range; on the round-trip flight to the coast, she had had to stop seventy-six times to refuel—at least once every two hours. The other was its lack of power—it cruised at only eighty miles an hour, and if there were headwinds, it was considerably slower. That meant that taking an autogiro on a long trip got you there only marginally faster than driving a car, and in fact one traveler tracked her in his automobile on a hundred-mile section in Nebraska and almost beat her.

By fall she and George had hatched the idea that it was time for her to write a second book. She still seemed seriously uninterested in entering the Lindbergh contest. She was concentrating on the book, writing to all her friends for information, for she wanted to mention the top fliers, what they were achieving, and how they were financing their plans. Over the
winter she wrote of Elinor Smith, “these days she has a fast Lockheed, such as Miss Nichols has used, and no one knows what is up her sleeve,” a not-particularly-sly reference to Elinor's plans to fly the Atlantic. By the time winter was over, Amelia had finished the book, which she dedicated to the Ninety-Nines, and had decided to beat Elinor to the punch.

All the while, she managed to take care of other deeds. Amelia's father had died in 1930 after a long bout with cancer. She had flown out to California to be with him, remained at his bedside until morphine rendered him unconscious, and later paid for all his bills and medical costs. At the end of March 1932, she wrote to her father's widow, Helen, to make sure Helen had enough money to pay the property taxes on the house she had lived in with Edwin. “I am much interested in what you do, who were so fond of ESE, and what becomes of the home he cared so much for.”

Life was particularly pleasant for Amelia just then because her secretary, Nora Alstulund, was leaving to go to Argentina, and she had prevailed on her cousin Lucy Challiss, who happened to be between jobs (she would shortly become schools editor of
Vogue)
to come up to Rye and take her place. Lucy had been a hard sell; Amelia had made the initial call to her to come to Rye, then both Amelia and George worked her over—it was a team effort to sell the job. Lucy had gone to George's office at five one evening, and he and she had walked to meet Amelia on Park Avenue, where she was attending a meeting of the Society of Woman Geographers, a select group of women with published works to their credit. The three of them drove to the country, dined, and talked by the fire. “Nora to leave—they ask me to come,” Lucy cryptically wrote in her diary, initially reluctant. She went home, thought it over for a few days, and then agreed. George called to check on her travel arrangements. She arrived in Rye two weeks later, on Saturday, April 16, 1932.

Once ensconced, she had a good look at Amelia's life and wrote down her impressions in her diary, day by day. The things that stand out in her account: that Amelia and George were very much a couple and planned most things out together; that Amelia looked and acted as if she hadn't a care in the world; that the house was always full of people, of whom one was often Eugene Vidal; and that through it all there was always a sense of order and tranquillity. Who was responsible for that feeling? Certainly the sense of order flowed from impeccable planning, and Amelia and George were both excellent planners, but the sense of tranquillity—that was Amelia's special gift. She was soon to get into her Vega and fly alone across the ocean, but it didn't show. Lucy didn't even know that it was thirty-two days to liftoff. Gardening and houseguests seemed to come first.

Sunday morning Lucy joined them at nine thirty for breakfast, after
which she lazily read the papers and went ouside to garden. Most Saturdays and Sundays for the next months were spent gardening or raking and burning leaves, even if the day was blowy or cold. And interestingly, aside from possible time spent on a rowing machine upstairs in the loggia, which Lucy mentions seeing but never mentions Amelia using, raking leaves was Amelia's only physical exercise.

People flowed through the house in a steady trickle, growing heavier on weekends: business associates, writers, celebrities, explorers, neighbors, fliers—all found a cordial welcome at Locust Avenue. It was an unusual weekend that didn't find houseguests in residence. George likened the house to a hotel, noting that “the roster in any month might include aviator, actor, arctic explorer, big game hunter, balloonist, cowboy, correspondent—and so on pretty well through the alphabet.”

Amelia, acting as if nothing major were about to happen, carried on a variety of activities. She spent Monday afternoon going over the final galleys of her book
The Fun of It,
by that time complete except for the hook—the final chapter. To guarantee maximum sales, George had arranged for Amelia to dash off the last chapter, “Across The Atlantic—Solo,” after she landed and for the book to go on sale throughout the United States within weeks of her return.

She filled Lucy in on her job, which was primarily to keep Amelia organized and run interference for her. She didn't expect Lucy to write letters for her as Nora had done; someone else came in to do that. Lucy's first task was to unpack and arrange the family books, still in boxes, that Amy had sent down at Amelia's request. Books were put everywhere, particularly in each guestroom; even George occasionally pitched in and helped.

Lucy was in the house a full week before Amelia told her about the proposed flight. Late Friday evening, while she was eating a grapefruit, Amelia told her her plan. Lucy watched for the pace of life to change, to quicken, but it didn't. The next morning Amelia went off to Teterboro, New Jersey, to fly while Lucy raked and burned leaves; she was back in time for lunch. Several people came for dinner; several stayed overnight. Sunday morning Amelia and George burned leaves. At teatime Amelia's friend,
World Telegram
reporter Carl Allen arrived with his wife.

Amelia spent Monday and Wednesday at Teterboro, flying the Vega, but she returned well before dinner. The other days she spent in New York and at her desk working over her Ninety-Nines list with Lucy. (The organization now numbered more than 275 members.) There was no hanging around the airport for her.

Amelia did fly on Saturday, but on Sunday, May 1, a gray, rainy day,
she went with George and Lucy to dig up plants at “the old Day garden” for later replanting in their own garden.

Amelia appeared so carefree both because she and George had already made all the plans with great care and intelligence and because she was a naturally tranquil, calm person. The seeming inattention and lack of focus was a screen; the flight was being planned down to the last detail. The key to the master plan, the most important part of the puzzle, was to choose the right adviser.

Amelia and George chose well when they chose the laconic Norwegian Bernt Balchen. In 1928, when Charles Levine had hired Clarence Chamberlin to pilot his Bellanca to Germany (the flight that made Chamberlin famous; it was the second plane to span the Atlantic after Lindbergh), Clarence had turned to Bernt to prepare his charts and flight plan. Bernt was also a pilot—it was he who had bellyflopped Byrd's America in the sea off the coast of France so superbly that no one had been injured.

Bernt was not only a fine flier and a seasoned navigator but an engineer as well. The modifications he made to Amelia's Vega were basic, well thought out, and effective. He took no shortcuts, made no unnecessary changes, and didn't shave the safety margin too close, as Chamberlin had done when, to save weight, he installed the too-fragile landing gear that contributed to Ruth Nichols's crash. To increase the Vega's range, he and Eddie Gorski, chief mechanic and former maintenance supervisor for Fokker, who lived near the field where he had worked before, ran braces from one side of the fuselage to the other to strengthen it, replaced the upholstered wicker passenger seats in the cabin with fuel tanks, and added smaller fuel tanks in the wings. In its original configuration, the Vega had two wing tanks and could carry a total of a hundred gallons. When the retrofitting was complete, the Vega had eight gas tanks that could hold a total of 420 gallons—enough to give it a cruising range of 3,200 miles—and a new 500-horsepower supercharged Pratt and Whitney Wasp D engine S/n 3812, ordered from the East Hartford plant. Bernt added a drift indicator, an aperiodic compass, a magnetic compass, and a directional gyro. Then the tests began. Bernt and Eddie would load the plane with sandbags to simulate the weight of the fuel Amelia would be carrying, then fly around over the Meadowlands, checking out the plane “for hours on end,” recalled Eddie. Then, because they could not land with all that weight, Bernt would fly around in circles while Eddie pushed the bags out. “People thought we were dropping bombs,” remembered Eddie.

Bernt, consulting with Major Edwin Aldrin, another flier at Teterboro, decided that Stanavo gasoline and oil should be used, so Stanavo fuel was sent to up to New Brunswick, where the plane would land first, and to Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, Amelia's jumping-offpoint for the transatlantic flight. There would be a landing in New Brunswick because Eddie Gorski and Bernt would be traveling with Amelia, but with their added weight the Vega couldn't carry enough gasoline to make Newfoundland: Eddie was going along to make sure the plane was perfectly serviced, thereby lessening the chances of a mechanical problem over the ocean; Bernt's mission was to pilot the plane to Harbor Grace so that Amelia could rest and be fresh when she started, but also to help deal with an emergency, if one arose.

Bernt and Eddie both lived near Teterboro, so the long hours were easy for them. Bernt was also a friend—the person who had set George on the trail that led to Amelia in the first place—set George in motion as it were, for it was he who had told George about the
Friendship
on that epochal day they had both ridden the Staten Island ferry.

The second consideration was to keep Amelia's life as normal as possible so that she would not be subjected to the intolerable pressures that inevitably fractured concentration and drained energy. That meant total secrecy—no one, not even family, not even her mother was to be told, as had been true as well of the
Friendship
flight. That part was easy—Amelia simply wrote Amy a chatty letter and enclosed pictures of the house and the garden, as it looked then. But making sure there were no reporters hanging around pushing her for details about flight plans; no photographers running over fuel lines and bothering her, as there had been for Ruth Nichols, who had been besieged by the press at the Jersey City airport and overwhelmed with a spate of fan mail; no questions about when and why and what for to disturb her thinking or trouble her sleep—that part was harder.