East to the Dawn (55 page)

At two in the afternoon the American ambassador to France, accompanied by most of the staff of the U.S. embassy, arrived at Le Bourget to wait for Amelia.

Charles Lindbergh had had a twenty-five-mile-an-hour following wind pushing him along; but as the day progressed, Amelia did not. What had been a light southerly breeze turned into a strong southwest wind. And it was turning against her.

Again she came down to sea level, and this time saw a small fishing boat; she realized by its size that she was near land. Continuing, she saw two more boats. She had been flying a fixed-compass course all night—not the harder-to-plot-but-shorter great circle course—but because she had run into a storm and Kimball's weather reports had shown a storm to the south of her route, she worried that she, not the storm, was off course. The thought that she had drifted south was reinforced now when she saw by the waves that the wind had come around to the northwest. Concerned about the manifold, concerned about the defective fuel gauge, concerned that the engine was beginning to sound rough, and lastly uncertain about her exact location, she gave up hope of France and turned her thoughts to Ireland. She flew over a rocky island (probably one of the Aran Islands) and found herself over Ireland; started south but didn't like the look of the sky ahead; turned north, picked up a set of railroad tracks, followed them north away from the storm, and landed in a pasture. She had reached Culmore, outside of Londonderry, in northwestern Ireland. She had made landfall exactly on the course Bernt Balchen had set for her, a little north of the center of Ireland.

“Tell my friends in New York I am very glad to have come across successfully but I am sorry I didn't make France,” she said cheerfully in her first statement. Nobody really cared. They were just glad she was safe and sound.

She was the first person to cross the Atlantic twice in an airplane.

She had landed on James Gallagher's farm hard by his cottage at 1:46 P.M. British time. She explained who she was to the startled farmers, then went into Londonderry to telephone. She also called the airport at Croydon outside London, thinking she might fly there. But the Croydon officials advised against it.

So, refusing all offers of hospitality from the townspeople, she calmly returned to Gallagher's thatched cottage to be near her plane, accepted the Gallaghers' offer to spend the night with them, went to the room they gave her, and fell asleep.

The next day, after posing with the Vega, Paramount News flew her to London. The American ambassador, Andrew Mellon, was waiting in
the clubhouse at Hanworth air park in Middlesex in a thunderstorm. He brought her to London, and she spent the night at the U.S. embassy.

And the world lined up to sing her praises. She had become the most famous, most celebrated woman in the world. Wrote American columnist Walter Trumball, “So now Charles Lindbergh and you are the only two who have ever flown the ocean alone, and the championship, as John L. Sullivan would say, remains in America.” The English felt the same: “Her glory sheds its lustre on all womanhood,” trumpeted
The Sunday Express.
When she returned to America, she would learn that the new theater in Radio City, the glitziest new movie theater in Manhattan, had incorporated her feat in the glass mural they commissioned to decorate the lobby.

She did her best to defuse the adulation with humor. In her first radio speech she said that the rumors that she had killed a cow upon landing were false “unless one had died of fright.” A while later she remarked, “When there is a traffic jam on Fifth avenue men always comment, ‘Oh, it's a woman driving.' So I determined to show them.”

For fear of disturbing her preflight focus, Amelia had made no postflight plans. That left her alone in England to deal with all the consequences of the flight. It was too much; George was anxiously awaiting her request that he join her, in the interim keeping himself busy lining up lucrative deals. (He would bring a line of hats and sport clothes picked out by Lucy with him on the
Olympic
for Amelia to endorse—she said no to the hats.) Finally she asked him to join her; he sailed for Cherbourg on the twenty-seventh.

By that time much had happened to her. She had visited the Prince of Wales at St. James's Palace at his invitation, and they had gotten along so famously that the prince kept her an extra fifteen minutes past her scheduled time—a very unusual occurrence that caused much comment and later led to press stories (untrue) that she had danced with the Prince of Wales; and she had received a telegram of congratulations from his father, the king. Her plane was on display on the ground floor of Selfridge's department store in London, drawing thousands. She had been entertained at the House of Commons, taken by Lady Astor to Epson Downs to see the derby, been “towed” to meet George Bernard Shaw, and had given so many speeches that her voice was down to a whisper.

She was wearing clothes from Selfridge's at the urging of Gordon Selfridge, a pilot himself and the brother of Violette de Sibour. It was the easy way out; she had brought no change of clothes with her and was wearing a dress loaned to her by Ailsa Mellon, the daughter of the American ambassador. Still, she had been a hard sell; she wasn't in the mood,
according to Gordon Selfridge, even for the pleasure of having her plane displayed. She was uncomfortable with the quid pro quo of free clothes for free publicity for the department store. “My first impression of Amelia,” he recalled, “was a sort of comical paradox. She was determined she wouldn't select any clothes just to get herself, easily, on the front pages. But she submitted.”

By Wednesday she had finished the final chapter, “Across the Atlantic—Solo.” In a special pocket inside the back cover, George included a recording of her speech upon landing in John Gallagher's field; The Fun of It was on sale within weeks of her return to the United States.

Because her original destination had been Le Bourget and so many preparations had been made for her there, Amelia felt that it was only right that she visit France before returning home. She made the Channel crossing on aircraft manufacturer C. R. Fairey's yacht
Evadne,
met up with George in Cherbourg harbor, and then they both went to Paris. There the crowds were, if anything, more enthusiastic than in England. She was awarded the Cross of the Knight of the Legion of Honor by the minister of air, Paul Painlevé, who had awarded the same medal to Lindbergh five years before. “And now I have the honor to bestow this cross upon the Colonel's charming image,” he was quoted as saying, to which she replied dryly, “I can find no words to express my appreciation.” She was received by the French Senate and dined with Lady Mendl at her Villa Trianon, which had just been wired for sound by Douglas Fairbanks.

From Paris they went to Rome upon the invitation of Mussolini, and then to Brussels, where the king and queen of Belgium asked them to dine. (The queen pulled out a camera and snapped her picture; King Albert awarded Amelia the Cross of the Chevalier of the Order of Leopold.) They sailed for home on June 15 on the
Ile de France.

The United States continued the unprecedented shower of honors. The National Geographic Society awarded her the special gold medal they had given Charles Lindbergh five years earlier. The award, made in Constitution Hall, the auditorium of the Daughters of the American Revolution, by President Hoover, was the first the society had ever bestowed on a woman. More than ten thousand requests for tickets to the 3,800-seat auditorium were received. If a bomb had gone off, the government of the United States would have ground to a halt, for present was the president; the chief justice of the Supreme Court and his wife; the secretaries of state, treasury, and commerce; the attorney general; the postmaster general; enough members of Congress to form a quorum of each House; high officers of the army, navy and marines; and diplomats from twenty-two countries. The president of the society spoke, followed by the president of
the United States, followed by Amelia. She limited herself to an account of the flight, straying only to say in closing that although her flight had added nothing to aviation, still she hoped that the flight had meant something to the women in aviation. “If it has, I shall feel it was justified.”

She had entered a realm beyond stardom.

That summer Amelia wrote a piece for a magazine that probably came closest to expressing her feelings on the whys and wherefores of the flight:

The year before, the American Woman's Association had given its first annual award to Margaret Sanger as the woman who had made the most outstanding contribution to society. Now, in the fall of 1932, at a dinner arranged by the Women's Press Club in which forty women's organizations took part, Amelia became the second recipient. The award was made by Dr. Lillian Gilbreth, the industrial psychologist whose picture, sitting in the huge touring car surrounded by her husband and their eleven children, was one of those Amelia had neatly pasted in her scrapbook of women achievers all those years before. Now she had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Gilbreth say, “Miss Earhart has shown us that all God's chillun got wings.”

15

Having Her Cake

• • • • Up until she took off on her transatlantic solo flight, Amelia seems to have been content and happy with George. When not traveling, their routine was to spend the work week in New York City at the Seymour Hotel and go to the country on weekends. There were usually people around, but Amelia and George enjoyed puttering around their home alone together. Lucy's diary chronicles plenty of quiet times, hours spent together working in the garden, relaxing, and working over flight plans.

But after the Atlantic solo there was a change in Amelia. She began looking beyond George.

Literally the moment he received word she had safely landed in Ireland, George went to work setting up licensing deals for clothes manufacturers to cash in on her fame—he gave a lunch for clothes manufacturers, visited clothes designers, and had Lucy picking out hats at Farrington and Evans, visiting an agent for sports clothes, and trying on jodhpurs prior to choosing a maker. He and Lucy were very busy on the project, which Amelia must have agreed to before she took off, and he was also negotiating a very important deal for himself at Paramount Studios. And then Amelia asked him to drop everything and come to Europe and help her deal with
the world. He did. Lucy helped him pack, and he was off by boat to France on May 27. “I thought I couldn't face coming home alone,” Amelia wrote her mother. Several weeks later they returned on the
Ile de France;
while they were on the high seas George's appointment as chairman of the editorial board of Paramount Pictures was announced. He had managed to fit everything together—his life and hers.

He was so proud to be with her. He later recounted how he had given Amelia a twenty-dollar bill at Teterboro just before she, Bernt, and Eddie took off for Newfoundland. “Generous allowance for a trip to Europe,” she had teased him. She used it to pay for the telegram she sent upon landing in Londonderry. Then she went to the trouble of retrieving the bill, which necessitated borrowing English pounds from someone with which to replace it. She signed the retrieved twenty-dollar bill and gave it back to George. It became one of George's “most treasured” souvenirs. It is hard to reconcile this gesture of Amelia's with anything that went before. By retrieving it, Amelia shows she knew how epochal her flight was, how significant and valuable that twenty-dollar bill was, or she wouldn't have thought of doing it—and then signing it.

No one realized more than Amelia that her piloting skills had not been proven by the
Friendship
flight and that her celebrity status was based not on achievement but on the lucky accident of having been in the right place at the right time. Now she had changed all that. She had earned her spurs. Now she knew she would go into the record books—knew that she was a celebrity.

She was on such a high because she had learned something: she had a gift. She didn't get sleepy on long-distance flights; she had incredible built-in endurance. Realizing her gift, she now concentrated on breaking long-distance records. She began right away; she decided to try to be the first woman to fly nonstop across America. Because she neither smoked nor drank, the parties and social life, the constant round of people, had not tired her: she was as ready as ever.

Transcontinental record flights at that time originated on the West Coast because of the prevailing winds: that meant she had to start out from Los Angeles. She wanted to do it as soon as possible. It was July 1, and even though she had been traveling and partying for a month, and had returned home only on June 20, she was in top form. And since everyone wanted to do what she wanted, everyone changed their plans: George rearranged his schedule so he could go west with her; Lucy, about to go to Ohio to visit Katch and Bill Pollock, instead prevailed upon them to come and stay and keep her company at Locust Avenue to deal with all the things happening there. Ten days after her return to America, on July 1, Amelia, George,
and his son David flew to Los Angeles. She hoped to beat Frank Hawks's record of 17 hours 38 minutes, coast to coast.