East to the Dawn (59 page)

As the summer progressed it became obvious even to President Roosevelt that an overall head was needed. Amelia had been championing Gene both to Franklin and to Eleanor since spring. She even had George pushing for the appointment.

But June turned to July, July to August, August to September and still no word, the president had a great deal on his mind, and he would not be rushed. It was not till late September that he finally made his decision. By that time the president was in Warm Springs, Georgia. He summoned Gene down and on September 20, 1933, with Gene at his elbow, called a press conference at which he announced that he was making Gene the new Director of the Aeronautics Branch. (The following year there was a name change and Gene found himself the Director of the Bureau of Air Commerce.) It was all very satisfying, and one of the nice perks that went with the job was the second-floor corner office, with its big windows shaded by a row of pillars looking down on Pennsylvania Avenue. Gene left Warm Springs later in the day, headed straight to Rye and Amelia to tell her all about it, and again spent the night. The next day Amelia drove him the two hours to Newark, New Jersey, turned around, and drove home.

Amelia watched over Gene's career like a mother hen. On November 5 she sent the president a newspaper clipping favorable to Gene, together with a note: “Because I ventured to urge upon you the desirability of
appointing Gene Vidal, I am naturally delighted to find a Republican paper giving such praise to what Vidal is already accomplishing.” The article had the desired effect on FDR. He wrote her back, “because it comes from the
Herald Tribune
it is high praise indeed.” Little did the president realize that the article was less a commentary on Gene's ability than a marker of Amelia's wide sphere of influence: the writer of the article, Carl Allen, was Amelia's old and close friend, whom she had consulted about the advisability of marrying George; further, Allen had been hired by the
Tribune
at least partly on Amelia's recommendation to the Reid family, the publishers.

Amelia and Nina Vidal remained on speaking terms. They even had lunch together early in January 1934 at the Hotel Seymour. Gene was nervous enough to stop by—Nina was unpredictable at the best of times and occasionally had a drinking problem.

By all accounts Gene Vidal did a very good job as director. Faced with a severely slashed Depression budget, he still managed to restore night operations to the country's lighted airways and continued other navigation aids slated to be discontinued; he also reorganized and streamlined department operations and simplified the regulations governing the licensing of private fliers. So well did he do that
Time
magazine made him the subject of a story and put his picture on the cover, a signal honor in those years, one that not even Amelia ever achieved. His was a highly visible job, and his photogenic face, in and out of an airplane—he flew himself everywhere in his small Stinson, having divested the department of its fleet of expensive planes—became almost as familiar in the newsreels as Amelia's and Charles Lindbergh's.

One of his department projects, his dream, was to develop a small, easily operated low-priced all-metal airplane that would sell for seven hundred dollars—the price of a car—and be as safe; at his request $500,000 was set aside by the Public Works Administration (PWA) for the project. It was launched with much fanfare. Amelia did her bit: she was photographed with various other well-known airminded people (all men except for her) to announce and publicize the PWA funding. However, it was not a popular project with certain members of Congress who felt that the government should not be funding such an undertaking—that private enterprise should—and various legislators pressured Gene to concentrate on more traditional civil aviation concerns and the smooth facilitation of departmental policy. Gene had another problem as well: when FDR had made him director, Carroll Cone and Rex Martin, the two men who had been co-chiefs with him, became assistant directors. It would have been better administratively if they had been transferred out, for both of them, and particularly Cone, spent their time trying to undermine Gene and secure the
top post for himself rather than doing their jobs. As Nick Komans reported in his book
Bonfires to Beacons,
which gives a blow-by-blow description of the bureau's growing pains, Vidal had two assistants, “but damn little assistance.”

Then a series of flying accidents—the last being an airline crash in May 1935 that claimed the life of Senator Bronson Cutting of New Mexico—focused the eyes of the nation and Congress on the airways. It became known that at the time of the accident, Cutting's pilot had been groping for the Kansas City airport in thick fog because the Kansas City radio beacon was turned off. The Senate formed a committee to investigate the general safety of the airways and specifically why the beam wasn't working.

The question was raised as to whether the director was wasting his time and energy on extraneous projects such as the “poor man's airplane” rather than tending to the overall needs of flying in the United States. Senator Copeland of New York, who directed the investigation, wondered whether Gene was “too amiable” for the job. Inevitably, there were calls for Gene's resignation, which came to naught, but which were worrisome.

Amelia was the most important nonrelative in Gore Vidal's young world. He preferred her to his own mother. He remembers his first night in the “jungle” guest room in Rye as petrifying—the foreboding greens and dark browns, the monkeys, strange birds painted on the walls; he had been put to bed in the dark and woke up screaming. And he remembers that the next morning, when he told Amelia how frightened he had been, she thought it very funny. He remembers walking with her on the boardwalk in Atlantic City and being gawked at by thousands. He remembers her visiting him when he was sick and, while talking, taking some modeling clay and modeling a head in the hour or so she was there—doing “an awfully good job.” He loved her “beautifully modulated” speaking voice and remembers how much she loved poetry. She would read poetry with Gore—hers, his, and others'. She encouraged his poetry-writing efforts and tried to steer him toward Amy Lowell and away from Edgar Allan Poe. (“I was in the Edgar Allan Poe stage at the moment,” he recalls.) He remembers Gene telling him that she wore men's underwear when she flew, and that although George thought it was his boxer shorts she wore, Gene boasted to his son that she had actually been wearing his new jockey shorts for several years. Some years after her last flight, it was reported that a Russian sailor had seen a white woman signaling from a small island dressed in jockey shorts. George told Gene that the outfit was wrong—it couldn't
be Amelia, because “she always wore my shorts when she flew, but I wore boxer shorts.” Gene thought that was very funny. Katharine (Kit) Vidal, whom Gene married in 1939, would corroborate that Amelia wore Gene's shorts. “Gene used to buy them for her. She was too embarrassed to buy them herself.” “She adored my father,” Gore recalls, and “Gene's affection for Amelia was not equal to her love for him.” He, of course, had his own childhood crush on her. He thought she would make a perfect mother—in fact, he proposed for his father, so anxious was he for Gene and Amelia to be married. When he blurted this out, he remembered, Amelia was delighted; his father blushed. To his disappointment and Amelia's, nothing came of the suggestion.

Gene was an excellent pilot and made his way around the country in his Stinson monoplane, often with Gore in tow. One unexpected result was that Gore logged so many hours in the air accompanying his father that by the age of ten, he had learned how to fly, with his father's blessing. Gore was such an apt student that Gene put him behind the controls of his prototype Hammond flivver plane—the one that, at seven hundred dollars would be within the reach of the working man—to show the press that it was so “foolproof,” even a child could handle it. (Since Gore was too young to solo legally, and the director couldn't be seen to be breaking the law, Gene installed a nonflying adult in the rear seat.) Gore took the Hammond up, circled the field, and landed without incident. Amelia, too, flew the Hammond, giving it more much-needed publicity.

During this period of his life Gene carried three pictures in his wallet: one was of the kindly landlady who helped advise him about Gore; one was of Gore; the third was of Amelia.

Part of Gene's job was to foster the development of equipment that would make flying safer. To that end, in 1935, he enlisted Amelia as a dollar-a-year technical consultant, announcing that she, along with Captain Albert Hegenberger, on loan from the army to the department, would be testing the new Lear radio directional-finding compass.

Gene knew her well. “She used to practice flying all the time and I think never really reached the self-set top of what she considered proficiency,” he told Amelia's biographer, Janet Mabie. He noticed that she began to shy away from shaking hands. She just wouldn't do it whether from hygienic considerations or not he didn't know, if she could avoid doing so without seeming rude. Particularly with understanding friends would she avoid it. Gene was also one of the few people who could tease Amelia and get away with it. The tight-fistedness that her years of poverty had fostered never left her, and it amused him. Once, he remembered, they were eating at an airport counter and she ordered the seventy-five-cent lunch. He knew she wanted ice cream and, teasing her, asked her why she didn't order it.
“Because it isn't on the seventy-five cent lunch,” she answered, frostily. Jack Gillies, another of Amelia's friends, put it differently. “She was a cheap little girl to feed. You could keep her happy quite a long time, just supplying her with apples.” But both knew that frugality was only one side of her personality, and that she was also generous to a fault. In 1930, when she could ill afford it, she had given Jack's brother and new bride Betty Huyler, a Ninety-Niner, a dozen sterling-silver demitasse spoons as a wedding present.

In spite of Amelia's attraction for Gene, she never fell into the trap of letting him set the direction of their relationship. She was always in control. Indeed, he didn't even dare hire air-marking pilots, those women whose job it was to have signs painted on top of buildings so pilots could identify towns from the air, without first getting Amelia's approval. Shortly after agreeing to take the dollar-a-year job as technical consultant, she resigned “personally” to the director. It seems to have been a matter of discretion and served to delink their names in the public eye. In her straightforward manner she issued a press release: “I wish to be free to pursue my commercial activities without any possibility of embarrassment or misunderstanding which might arise from this official connection, informal and insignificant as it is.”

George didn't have any choice except to put up with Amelia's conduct, if he wanted to stay married to her. He had, after all, agreed to it. And throughout the years he and Amelia definitely maintained a closeness. Helen Weber, who came on the scene in the fall of 1932 after Lucy left, looking out a window of the house in Rye one day, saw Amelia sitting in a wheelbarrow, roaring with laughter and squealing with delight as George careened her back and forth across the lawn. At one point George devised a way to have Amelia all to himself, at least for a little while, on a dream vacation. His old friend Carl Dunrud, the Yellowstone ranger who had accompanied him to Greenland to lasso northern specimen wildlife (he successfully roped two polar bears and a walrus, which eventually ended up in the Bronx Zoo), had settled down in northwest Wyoming with his wife and children and ran a dude ranch, the Double Dee. In the summer of 1934 George arranged for himself and Amelia to spend time there, to motor out in Amelia's little black Franklin: a nice long vacation just for the two of them. It would be the first time in a long while they would be alone, unaccompanied by friends and business acquaintances, and he would be in control.

They spent five days at the Double Dee, a three-thousand-acre spread just east of the Rockies, and then Carl (thirty-two-year-old Vera was six months pregnant with her third child), with the help of his Minnesota cousin and a young boy wrangling at the ranch for the summer who later became a pilot, loaded up eight packhorses with tents, duffels, a stove,
fishing gear, bedding, clothes, and food, and they rode into the Absaroka Mountains for two weeks of riding, fishing, and hiking. Amelia loved it as much as George hoped she would. “She talked of the joy of living in the stillness, the quiet beauty of the mountains. She spent hours with field glasses, watching young lambs of mountain sheep romp and play on distant mountain tops,” he wrote. Fully at home on the ranch, comfortable with the Dunruds (Vera remembered her as a very nice, modest, retiring, “very lovely” person), full of plans for the future, she filed a claim on some land she fell in love with on the pack trip, a site in a steep valley between Mount Crosby and Mount Sniffel, a stone's throw from a waterfall on the Wood River, near the Double Dee but a mile higher. She promised the Dunrud children, Richard and James, that she would be back. She asked the Dunruds to do discovery work on the claim and arranged for Carl to build her a four-room log cabin. For each of the two summers following, she and George made plans to return to the ranch, but the next summer Amelia's sinuses kicked up and she landed in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, then got pleurisy, and the summer after that her amazing new plane swallowed up the time. By 1937 the cabin, still unseen by Amelia, was four logs high.