Amelia Earhart (29 page)

She left again in early December for the Southwest. In Fort Worth she borrowed a car from a friend and drove to Amarillo, Wichita Falls, then Lubbock. On December 8 while she was in Lubbock a magazine of that date published an article on “Mrs. and ‘Mr.’ Earhart” in which G. P. was described as: “
a fellow who will get an idea at the dinner table, drop his fork and begin calling San Francisco, Chicago, Denver and all points.… The whole project may fizzle out before the coffee is cold, or it may net him a hundred thousand dollars in a week.”

G. P.’s newest project for Amelia would not net one hundred thousand dollars in a week. Amelia was to be a fashion designer. He may have had the idea for a year, ever since they entertained Elsa Schiaparelli, world-renowned designer, at a Sunday lunch the previous February. Already known as one of the best-dressed women in America, Amelia talked with Elsa about
functional clothing for what she defined as “active living.”

This newest project was pursued by G. P. with his customary vigor. Three days after the article on “Mr. Earhart” appeared Macy’s department store announced the presentation of a new line of women’s clothing designed by Amelia Earhart and to be sold exclusively by Macy’s in the New York area. Amelia, the announcement stated, was lecturing in Texas but she had already completed fifty outfits for outdoor, sports, travel, and spectator wear. The clothing would be sold under franchise by only one store in each metropolitan area, with thirty stores already under contract. Manufacturing rights were sold by G. P. to four
New York firms, with hats to be made by a fifth.
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This first announcement opened a country-wide sales blitz. With Amelia on tour much of the winter G. P. had already closed the house in Rye and moved into their suite at the Hotel Seymour on 45th Street. Between lectures Amelia worked on the clothing in the living room where one corner was occupied by a fitting dummy and a seamstress who worked at a sewing machine. G. P. issued an open invitation to the press to drop in and interview Amelia about her new career.

Associated Press feature writer Sigrid Arne was one of several who wrote just what G. P. wanted. The neophyte designer “uncurled from an armchair” to greet Arne, fastening the needle she held in the collar of her tailored lounging pajamas. The other chairs in the room were dr
aped with dresses and the sewing machine hummed in the corner. Her desk was piled high with swatches of silk and fan letters. Why, asked Arne, this new career? “I just don’t like shopping very much,” Amelia told her. The sewing machine, she added, was hers at Ogontz where she made most of her clothing. (There was never any mention of this in her letters to her mother.) Of course, she added, she would like to fly again. Her plane was parked only an hour’s drive from the hotel room but “some other girl should be breaking my records,” she added wistfully. “I don’t have the equipment and planes don’t grow on bushes.”

If bushes wouldn’t produce airplanes Amelia was willing to cultivate other sources created by G. P. During the first four months of 1934 articles with photographs of Amelia modeling clothing she had designed received nationwide news coverage. Her concept of style for function was emphasized, the clothing made of wrinkle-proof, washable materials with simple lines, broad shoulders, ample sleeves, and natural waistlines. Several of her ideas were revolutionary for 1934. One was making matching “
separates” in which sizes could be “scrambled” so that a woman could buy a size 12 blouse and a size 14 skirt or slacks. Another was a coat of Harris Tweed with a zip-in, washable lining.

G. P.’s clothing sales campaign got off to a good start by mid-December when a United Press dispatch affirmed Amelia’s title as “Queen of the Air” for another year. Four days later, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk flight, she gave the dedication speech at the opening of the new aviation hall at the
Franklin Institute Museum in Philadelphia. The red Vega she had sold, without its motor, to the Institute was also unveiled.
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A perfect example of the publicity G. P. sought appeared in a Boston newspaper announcing she would be the principal speaker at a
Rotary Club luncheon January 24. The picture was of Amelia modeling one of her suits, the caption stating she had designed a whole new line of clothing. The story said she was a vice-president of the Boston and
Maine’s National Airways and that her talk on modern aviation would be broadcast by NBC. Here he had a combination of Amelia’s interests as leading aviator, airline official, lecturer, and clothing designer.

Nevertheless, Amelia was not willing to do everything G. P. asked. On a day she lunched at the Biltmore with him and Hilton Railey, he displayed a hat he had ordered, a
cheap article with a silk band bearing a facsimile of her signature. She took it from him and examined it, eyes narrowing in disapproval. It would not do, she said. They were already being made up, he told her. “Tell them to
unmake
them. Now,” she said, pointing to a teleph
one at the table. He held out until she threatened to sue him.

The phenomenal endurance she displayed in pursuit of a flight record or a cause she believed in gave out selling clothing. By the end of January she was bedridden with laryngitis and forced to postpone a lecture tour. Her mother claimed that designing and promoting the clothing was “one of the hardest strains she ever went through, because she was doing so much at the time.”

Amy was probably right, but after a few days in bed Amelia was off again, driving alone to Atlanta. Arriving on a Saturday, she gave a long interview to the press, flew a Bellanca monoplane for its owner and his guests, and met four members of the Ninety-Nines’ Georgia chapter at Candler Field so that they could get their picture in the papers along with a description of the organization. On Sunday she gave her lecture. From Atlanta she drove to Rome to visit a school for handicapped children, then to Tuscaloosa and Birmingham for more lectures before returning home via Chattanooga and Washington. She did it all in one week.

In March H. Gordon Selfridge, Jr., amateur pilot and manager of Selfridge’s Provincial Stores, Ltd., of England, met her in Boston where he interviewed her.
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She talked about what really interested her—the value of the National Recovery Act in forcing businessmen to discuss and solve problems affecting the whole community; the need to abolish discrimination against women in transportation; and the need for a
secretary of transportation with cabinet rank. Asked what powers the secretary
should have, Amelia said that
he
(even she could not imagine a woman as secretary) should control all commercial transportation to eliminate confusion and loss of efficiency. She denied this would lead to government ownership, insisting the government could supervise without ownership.

She was not always a proponent of sweet reason and graceful tact. Her obsessive commitment to public acceptance of commercial aviation made her intolerant of inefficiency. The day after she talked to Selfridge she gave a cold, insensitive assessment of the Army’s brief and tragic attempt to fly the mails in which a dozen pilots had already been killed or injured.
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Although the Army was not fit to fly mail at present, she said, no doubt its pilots would receive instruction in the future in instrument flying. “
As a result,” she said, “the next war—and I hope there will be no next war—will not be called off on account of rain as far as the Air Service is concerned.”

Four days later she was in Washington where she testified before a Congressional Post Office committee, asserting that the airmail subsidy system was outmoded. “
Airlines,” she claimed, “should stand on their own two feet,” and payment to them for carrying mail should be only slightly more than the actual postage. She again recommended the establishment of a department of transportation, opposing Lindbergh and Rickenbacker, both of whom wanted an independent agency to control air travel, divorced from any supervision over rail or other means of transport.

In July, after she had worked continuously through the spring and early summer, G. P. took her to Carl Dundrud’s Double Dee ranch, sixty-eight miles south of Cody, Wyoming, for a two-week vacation, their longest together since their marriage three and a half years earlier. Dundrud was an old friend of G. P.’s. They had met on a packing trail in 1916 and ten years later G. P. asked Dundrud to accompany him on his expedition to Baffin Island. A man of few words—all of them blunt—Dundrud’s few on Amelia were surprisingly complimentary: “
She was just one of the gang in camp and for a woman, let me tell you she’s a great mechanic. If you want to know about things she does you have to ask her. Then she
answers what you want to know. She doesn’t try to cut you off or make a long story of it.”

Accompanied by Dundrud, Amelia and G. P. went fly-fishing in mountain streams, rode along steep trails, their gear on pack horses, slept in tents, and cooked over campfires. Over one campfire Amelia anticipated environmentalists’ concerns by forty years, challenging Carl and G. P. to justify the killing of wildlife for sport: “
I held out, as always, against killing for killing’s sake. To acquire food, to protect property or livestock, or to provide museums with specimens for scientific purposes seem to me to be the only possible justification for slaughter. Even those … should be controlled … lest animals face extinction.”

While they were at the ranch G. P. and Amelia made plans to build a cabin near the deserted town of Kerwin, seventy miles from a railroad. “
We’ll have to pack in the last nine miles,” she told reporters in Cheyenne on her way back, adding with a wide smile, “We’ll even be safe from reporters.” Even there she was not safe from G. P.’s compelling need to use their experiences for profit. She wrote a magazine article on the vacation, published with pictures of her, including one of Dundrud cutting her hair. G. P. took the pictures.

As soon as she returned to New York Amelia resumed her work for the Boston and Maine, more recently the Boston, Maine, and Central Vermont air service. The week the airline celebrated its first anniversary she was the main attraction in a “
Woman’s Day” promotion, backed by local chambers of commerce and women’s clubs in the cities of Bangor, Waterville, and Augusta. During three days she accompanied 659 women on sample flights, nine to each flight on one of the company’s ten-passenger Stinsons. She walked the aisle, answered questions, and gave autographs.

She arrived in Bangor on Saturday, August 11, with chief pilot Milton Anderson, railroad publicist Herbert Baldwin, and Sam and Mrs. Solomon, just in time for “
Amelia Earhart Night” at the Lucerne-in-Maine, a seaside resort hotel. The next morning state and local police were out in force to control the crowd of ten thousand gathered at Godfrey Airport for a glimpse of Amelia. Two hundred women held free tickets for twenty-seven flights over the city that day. Amelia went on twenty-five of them.

On the sixth flight when she asked passenger Sally Miller what she enjoyed most about the flight, “Sally,” who was the local amateur entertainer
Ralph Mills, leaped up, pulled off “her” hat and a wig, and shouted,
“You cannot keep men away from such attractive
women!” During the explosion of laughter from the passengers, Amelia leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. That night she drove to the Lakeside Theater in Skowhegan where
Groucho Marx shared the stage with her between the first and second acts of a comedy in which he was the lead. They brought down the house. For two more days she was “
a gracious hostess who talks to each and every one” who bought an airline ticket, until she took a train to Washington “to get some sleep” before an airline conference the next day.

On August 4 her friend Frances Harrell
Marsalis was killed in an accident at the Women’s National Air Races in Dayton.
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Amelia was not there nor was she at the National Air Races in Cleveland a month later, her
boycott part of her struggle for the right of women to compete on an equal basis with men. Even after she gained the approval of the NAA contest committee, Cliff Henderson barred women from NAA-sanctioned races in New Orleans early in 1934. Henderson said women pilots failed to enter any except women’s events. The one exception, Florence Klingensmith, was killed in the 1933 races at Chicago. Her death influenced his decision, he admitted. He also eliminated even the women’s events from the National Air Races of 1934. When he asked Amelia to pilot Mary
Pickford from Chicago to Cleveland for the opening ceremonies, she refused.

Amelia’s views were aired at length by her old friend Carl
Allen in a series of articles he wrote about aviation’s “most dependable reoccurring feud—the row over women participating in air
meets.” Allen was by then aviation editor of the
Herald Tribune
, a job Amelia got for him. When Helen Reid asked Amelia what she thought of the paper’s aviation coverage, Amelia told her that the best aviation reporter in New York was the
World-Telegram
’s man Carl Allen. Amelia then went to Allen and told him to ask Reid for the position. Early in 1934 he did, and got it.

Amelia continued her defense of women in aviation at the
Herald Tribune
’s annual two-day forum in September. Reid’s friend, Eleanor Roosevelt, opened the forum and FDR closed it with a broadcast from Washington to the three thousand ticket holders at the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel. Amelia spoke on the lack of opportunities for women in aviation. She said New York University’s
School of Aeronautics would not admit qualified women and that in the industry itself women, who were paid less than men for the same work, were outnumbered forty to one. Dr. Edwin C. Elliott, president of
Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, who had preceded her as a speaker, was impressed. He invited her and G. P. to lunch with him the next day and asked her to come to Purdue to counsel the five hundred women students there on possible careers. Amelia accepted, rearranging her October lecture tour to include a stop at Purdue.

The prospect of working at Purdue was interesting but the rest of the fall tour was not. Amelia was tired—of lecture tours, of designing clothing, of the politics of feminism, of G. P.’s promotional schemes and, most of all—of being grounded. She wanted to fly. In October when she started west she kept right on going, all the way to the Coast and
Burbank, where her Vega had been moved. Telling the press she was on vacation, she rented a house for the winter, a modest place but in a fashionable area of North Hollywood, near Toluca Lake.