East to the Dawn (61 page)

Her seeming casualness was deceptive. The functional slacks she had worn when she was in her twenties were now custom made, often gabardine, perfectly tailored; the windbreaker was now usually soft suede; and the shirt was often parachute silk, which she favored because it was light, very strong, and could be laundered with impunity.

George had presented her with business deals in the past, but they were his, not hers. This time she would be totally in control. Now a deal was struck with several New York garment manufacturers to make an Amelia Earhart line; one department store would be given the exclusive in each city; in New York it was Macy's, in Chicago Marshall Field's. In all, thirty department stores scattered from coast to coast carried the line. Marshall Field's set up a special Amelia Earhart shop with pretty young mannequins in aeronautical outfits in charge, filled their prime State Street windows full of Amelia's clothes, and gave her a tea to which they invited all Ninety-Nine members as well as other pilots.

She passed on every detail. She installed a dressmaker's dummy in the apartment at the Hotel Seymour, pored over swatches of material and, working with a seamstress, created outfits using her old sewing machine. The line included good, wearable sport dresses, separates, and coats, as well as flying clothes. She used scaled-down screws and bolts and miniature oil cups for buttons, belt buckles made of ball bearings, and belts that closed with cotter pins and parachute clasps. Amelia took parachute silk—gossamer thin, pale of color, incredibly strong—and turned it into blouses
and shirts, adding tails to the shirts—at that time a feature exclusive to men's shirts—explaining, “I made up my mind that if the wearers of the shirts I designed took time out for any reason to stand on their heads, there would be enough shirt
still
to stay tucked in.” She insisted that her clothes be comfortable and branched out into simple silk dress and jacket combinations. She sent Lucy off to plumb Elizabeth Hawes, a fashionable designer of expensive clothes, for information. The most interesting of the women's magazines of the era,
Woman's Home Companion,
which gave a page to Eleanor Roosevelt in each issue and published Edna Ferber and other top novelists, did several spreads on her, one showing her looking particularly chic in a silk print dress. In another issue, featuring designs by the leading French and American couturiers such as Mainbocher and Lanvin, Amelia was given equal editorial space. The magazine, referring to her as “Amelia Earhart, Designer,” showed her dressed in another of her two-piece dresses, the signature silk scarf she wore flying casually tossed around her neck, caught into an elegant soft bow. Her designs had now been made into patterns that the reader could buy through the magazine.

She even designed hats, to everyone's amusement, even though by that time she had stopped wearing them and her tousled mop of curly hair was famous. Then she started a Ninety-Nine “Hat Contest,” the purpose of which was to recognize something important accomplished each month by a Ninety-Nine member and award the winner with one of her hats. It was decided that landing in strange airports was good practice, and a point system was worked out that was announced in the
The 99 News:
“For each airport, 1 point; for an honest to goodness forced landing without damage (verified by Department of Commerce inspector), 2 points; if cows in pasture, 3 points. (If cows eat fabric before rescued, damage not counted as resulting from crackup.)”

Amelia specified how the contest would run:

But the clothing enterprise ran into a problem: Amelia spent too much time working on it, without pulling back on either her lecturing or her flying. She wore herself down getting everything just right. Given her life, she couldn't be a full-time clothes designer, and temperamentally she was couldn't do it part time. The strain began to show: before she knew it, she was losing weight, beginning to look gaunt, and had to add fat to her diet—eating waffles “just soaked in butter,” to get back some of the weight, according to Amy, who loved having something she could finally scold Amelia about. (Amelia would write her, in irritation, “I have been drinking cream and gained ten pounds, so that's that.”) She gave it all up after a year.

“It's a routine now,” she once said. “I make a record and then I lecture on it.” That was certainly true—lecturing paid the expenses, made the records possible, took most of her time, and were best attended when she had just done something newsworthy.

But when she walked out onto a lecture stage, audience members often reacted with disbelief. The woman that everyone had in their mind's eye and expected to see was the woman they saw in the newsreels and newspapers—the aviatrix emerging from her plane after a record-breaking flight: drawn face, disheveled hair, slightly grimy, dressed in wrinkled workaday blouse and pants. The Amelia who stood in front of them looked totally different: slender, pretty, fashionably dressed (more often than not in shades of brown), wearing high-heeled shoes, fragile. Altogether taller, slimmer, more beautifully groomed—more feminine—than they had expected. Right away it gave her an edge, put her in the good graces of her audience, that she looked so charmingly normal and had such a disarming appearance.

She was in fact very relaxed when she spoke. She spoke without notes, and it was second nature for her to joke about her notoriety, exhort women to stand up for themselves, and thrill them with her adventures. By the mid-1930s she was a professional—she could capture an audience and hold them riveted. Joan Thomas, who wrote for
Popular Aviation,
held her to be the equal of the great diva Madame Ernestine Schumann-Heink—both spellbinders, in a class by themselves. She talked as casually of her historic solo Atlantic and Pacific flights, wrote another correspondent, “as though they had been the imaginative flights of troubled sleep.” A reporter watched her talk for over an hour and ten minutes in late 1935, “without a sound coming from the audience except that of laughter and applause.” She had learned, as well, to be dryly humorous.

As she described the sensation of flight, which she always did rather
poetically, she raised her arms and curled her long tapering fingers toward each other, as though she were holding a globe. Then as she stood and talked to her audience, if she was relaxed and everything was going well, and it invariably was, she would drop her hands and clasp her fingers together in what looked like the overlapping grip of a golfer.

Her appearance—so unthreatening, so much like their own—was an effective tool. Like everything else to do with Amelia, it was not left to chance but was the result of planning. She made it a point to dress conservatively and yet with style—to look like the very “best” of her audience, to appear as one whom the men and women listening would accept as “their” social equal, someone with “their” values. For then they might suspend preconceived ideas and listen to what she had to say about women and flying. For evening lectures she usually got quite dressed up, as was the custom of the time. “Smartly tailored evening ensemble” wrote a reporter of her attire in one southern town, while another noted her jacketed dinner gown of purple taffeta “relieved only by a broad white collar and bow of taffeta,” and another wrote of her charming semiformal brown satin dress. She thought that donning traditional attire made the radical things she was saying go down more easily—seem less radical—and she was right.

Like a politician, she gave the same speech over and over, merely changing nuances, altering details. She generally started by brushing away her fame. A favorite opener was the story of the young boy who took her for Lindbergh's mother. Having broken the ice, she next usually asked how many in the audience had ever been in a plane.

Another subject she always touched upon was the importance of allowing and making arrangements for children to go up in a plane: “If you forbid your children to fly they'll get a bootleg ride, and a cheap ride is seldom safe.”

Somewhere along the line she usually asserted that flying was safer than driving, particularly at speeds above forty miles per hour, and threw in some statistics. Sometimes she threw in her “transportation sermon,” the gist of which was that periodic physical examinations for those who drove automobiles would cut car accidents by fifty percent.

And then if she were speaking to a women's group, she would get to the guts of her speech: that women had to stand up for themselves. She would go into the career possibilities for women in the fledgling air industry and urge women to consider trying to break in—in any capacity, hostess, pilot, navigator, factory worker, public relations—wherever they saw an opening. Usually she was quite sanguine about the possibilities, but
sometimes she was not: “In aviation as a whole, women are outnumbered forty to one, but I feel that more will gain admittance as a greater number knock at the door. If and when you knock at the door,
it might be well to bring an ax along; you may have to chop your way through,”
she told one group in 1934.

She would urge women of all ages to break out of their “platitudinous sphere” (one of her favorite phrases), asserting that unlike the prisoner at the bar who is innocent until proven guilty, the woman is guilty until she proves that she can do the things men do. Or she might say that machines were too much man-made—made for men, as she did to one YWCA.

Naturally, when she was talking to a mixed audience, such as the Chicago Geographic Society, or a branch of the national Civic Federation, or a men's group, such as the Men's Club of Temple Israel in Paducah, Kentucky (October 19, 1933), she discussed the possibilities that the future held for flying rather than dwelling upon women's concerns. One of the ideas she threw out was for the government to experiment with midocean sea dromes that could gather weather information, with the possibility that if they worked, a chain of them could also be landing places for transoceanic air service—giant stepping-stones across the sea, which had been the dream of many for years. A usual charge to attend a lecture was $1.50—more than a moving picture but not an inordinate amount for the day. Sometimes the speech was sponsored by the local women's city club and more often than not was held in the local high school auditorium. There would be introductory remarks by the mayor, the head of the city club, and the head of the local Zonta chapter. Sometimes Amelia would have a movie camera set up and show her exploits and those of other fliers: after her transatlantic flight she showed pictures of the receptions given her in London, Paris, and Rome as well.