Amelia Earhart (30 page)

At four o’clock in the morning of November 27, two days before Thanksgiving,
fire broke out at the house in Rye. G. P. had gone to the city on Sunday night. Although he had designed the house himself back in 1925, without Amelia there he no longer liked staying in it, retreating to his suite at the Hotel Seymour or staying with his mother in Connecticut. The houseman, who had been left in charge, forgot to turn off the heater under an empty boiler. In less than an hour one wing of the sixteen-room, six-bath Spanish mission–style structure had been destroyed. The dining room was a shell, the stairway and banister of imported wood blackened, the blue tiling brought back from China by G. P.’s explorer friend Andrews for the front hall cracked and buckling.

Although Amelia disliked the East Coast—Boston with its dark, cold winters and its staid conservatism, and New York with its frantic adulation for money and fame—she loved the house at Rye. She liked the full book shelves in every room, the half-dozen bedrooms for houseguests, the living room where she often stood gazing out the round view window at one end or curled up on a long, low bench at the other, reading poetry in front of the open hearth with its blazing logs. She liked the garden where she dug and weeded, often helped by G. P., away from the din of New York and her desk piled high with drafts of unfinished magazine
articles and unanswered fan letters. After her 1932 flight she had written to a friend that her life had resumed some sense of the normalcy she needed, offering as an example, “I dug in the garden yesterday and uncovered crocuses.”

Damage was estimated at thirty thousand dollars in addition to irreplaceable articles including early paintings by Norman Rockwell and Amelia’s aeronautical memorabilia. Saved was a case filled with her awards and medals that G. P. had seen her open only once, for a fourteen-year-old boy who asked to see them. “The old lady shows her medals!” she hooted.

For Amelia the greatest loss was her papers and a small wooden box in which she kept a score of poems written over her lifetime. When G. P. called to tell her, she took a plane for New York the next day, but missed her connection in Chicago because of the winter’s first snowstorm. With four lectures scheduled for Friday and Saturday in Minneapolis, she could not get back to Rye. On Sunday she took another plane to Los Angeles, to the refurbished Vega and her preparations for a new venture, a gamble for even higher stakes than she had ever played before. The house at Rye would be
restored and Amelia would return to it now and then but neither was the same again.

S
he lived on the west coast and he lived on the east. He couldn’t manage her so he married her and then he couldn’t manage her.” When
Amelia Earhart rented a house in California in the fall of 1934 this comment by a colleague was not entirely off the mark. The move indicated the end of one phase in Amelia’s partnership with George Palmer Putnam. The young woman G. P. had both managed and manipulated back in 1928—with her knowledge and consent—had needed him more than he needed her. During the six years that followed, more than three of which she was married to him, Amelia had changed. The Boston social worker Putnam made a celebrity was now more skillful than he in handling the press and certainly more popular. Reporters were frequently irritated by him, a manager who seemed to promote himself as much as his client. They called him “the lens louse,” because he wanted to be in every photograph taken of Amelia. But they seldom found fault with her.

Nevertheless, G. P. remained her manager and she continued, for the most part, to follow the agenda he set for her, signing the contracts and making the appearances he wanted, working at the frenzied pace he set. She refused only those propositions and schemes she considered too impractical, tawdry, or insulting to the public and press.

On October 3, 1934, while she was still living at Rye, two conflicting
reports of her plans for another long-distance flight appeared in the press. The first claimed she would attempt a solo flight across the South Atlantic from
Natal, Brazil to the African coast. The second said she would fly from
San Francisco to Honolulu for a prize of ten thousand dollars offered by a group of Hawaiian business men. She denied both stories after a ten-day cross-country drive alone. When she arrived in Los Angeles on November 6, she told reporters her plane had been sent on ahead but when they asked which flight she would attempt she said, “Neither.” She was “
on vacation” for a month.

In one sense she was. She was back in the place she loved, the land of hot sun and blue skies that had first enchanted her as a determined, impetuous, and often foolhardy twenty-four-year-old student pilot. At thirty-six, she checked her fuel gauge before a flight and resisted the impulse to fly between high voltage wires just to shorten a landing. But, if less impetuous, she was even more determined to make a flight no person had ever made before—not a woman’s record but a world record. Her denial to the press of either plan was truthful. She intended to reverse one of the predicted courses, flying from
Honolulu to San Francisco, because, she told G. P., it was “easier to hit a continent than an island.”

The plan suited them both. He could make commitments for advertising endorsements, lectures, and articles and be certain of an initial ten thousand dollars to finance the flight. She could attempt to become the first person, man or woman, to fly alone over the twenty-four hundred miles of open water in a single-engine plane. The night she arrived in Los Angeles she went to a dinner given for Sir Charles
Kingsford-Smith, who had crossed the Pacific in 1928 while she was waiting at Trepassey for the flight of the
Friendship
to London, and who had just flown from Sydney to Los Angeles. She would be repeating the Honolulu leg of his flight but he had been accompanied by a navigator and she would make it alone. She told no one at the dinner of her plans.

The next day she was at Burbank, ready to work with Paul
Mantz, the man she had chosen to overhaul her Vega at United Airport in Burbank, now the Glendale-Pasadena-Burbank Airport. Stunt pilot, engineer, businessman, speed-record contender, and president of the Motion Picture Pilots’ Association, Mantz was six years younger and no taller than Amelia, a dapper, well-built, compact man with a pencil-line moustache and hair slicked back from a high forehead. Assertive and articulate, he enjoyed telling stories about the motion picture celebrities he flew on
his charter service, United Services, Ltd.
Mantz owned six planes, two of them Lockheeds, and was a pioneer in filming combat scenes in the air. On one occasion he cut a hole in the side of a plane and
mounted a camera there to photograph simulated combat from close range. He was as meticulous as he was imaginative in his preparations. “
I am not a stunt pilot,” he told a business partner. “I am a precision flier.”

In spite of the business-like image he cherished, the thirty-one-year old flier was not as staid as he claimed. He was cashiered from the
Army’s Air Service the day before graduation for “buzzing” a train. A month before he started
work on Amelia’s Vega he was cited by the Bureau of Air Commerce for diving within a few feet of the rooftops of Redwood City, in a salute to his bedridden mother. Soon after, while testflying Amelia’s Vega, Mantz buzzed the ranch of Western screen star
William S. Hart. He “damned near shook the bricks out of the chimney,” Hart complained. The Department of Commerce traced the plane to Amelia, who went with Mantz to apologize.

Nevertheless, Mantz could be a perfectionist and a hard taskmaster. One associate said, “
He wanted someone to back him up, not second-guess him. Too many pilots … assert their ideas, telling other pilots how to fly. You didn’t do that with Paul.”
^*
Amelia didn’t. She was an eager, attentive pupil. Although six years Mantz’s senior, she had not learned to fly until she was twenty-three. All of her training was haphazard, taken between jobs and, later, between public appearances. Mantz, who learned at sixteen, had flown for fifteen years. Amelia gave him the respect he demanded.

For the flight, Mantz stripped the Vega of its ten seats and installed fuel tanks, increasing fuel capacity to 470 gallons of gasoline and 56 gallons of oil. In the cockpit he installed and checked magnetic and aperiodic compasses, a directional bank and turn indicator, an ice-warning thermometer, fuel and temperature gauges, a tachometer, and a supercharger pressure gauge. The engine, the same Pratt & Whitney S
₁
D
₁
Amelia had used to cross the Atlantic, was overhauled by Mantz’s chief mechanic, Ernest Tissot.

With the plane in good hands, Amelia juggled a half-dozen other preflight tasks. While she looked for a house to rent, she stayed with Jack
Maddux, most of her time there spent in a one-room building behind the main house, poring over maps with Maddux and Clarence Williams, a retired Navy lieutenant commander who was
charting her course for her. On November 21, a permit for a radio was issued her in Washington, one that could be used “only for communication with ships and coastal stations when in flight over the sea.” In New York, G. P. denied to reporters that she was planning an overseas trip, saying she wanted it for
experimental radio work. A month later Amelia was licensed as a
third-class operator of a radio telephone, hardly the degree of expertise warranting experimental radio work.

After Amelia moved into the house she had rented at 10515 Valley Spring Road in the Toluca Lake district of Hollywood, she sent for her mother to come and stay with her. G. P. joined them in mid-December. Amelia spent most of her time at United Airport in or near Mantz’s shop, watching him work on the Vega and listening to his detailed instructions, but was relaxed enough to enjoy the company of other pilots at the field, among them
Bobbi Trout. Trout introduced Amelia to the joys of motorcycle riding, and they raced up and down the airstrip on two Indian Pony bikes.

In early December Amelia was in Oakland, where she had her picture taken with Flight Lt. Charles
T. P. Ulm, who intended to fly from Oakland to Australia.
^†
He took off for Honolulu on December 3 but didn’t make it. Forty-eight hours later an extensive search near the Hawaiian Islands began for Ulm and his two companions. They were never found. The news did not change Amelia’s plans, which were still supposed to be very secret.

It was a strangely kept secret. On December 22 Amelia boarded the Matson Line’s luxury liner,
Lurline
, for Honolulu.
^‡
With her were G. P., Paul Mantz and his wife, Myrtle, mechanic Ernest Tissot, and the Lockheed Vega, NR965Y, lashed to the aft tennis deck.

On the day after Christmas Amelia wrote a long letter to her mother.
It began with an
apology for the formula Christmas greeting cabled her, one sent to a long list of people and signed “Amelia and George.” Amy was number seventeen on the list. Amelia also apologized for what was obviously a miserable evening for everyone the night before her departure. “My indisposition of the night before leaving wrecked everything the last hours.” Before every long flight Amelia was always tense in the company of close friends or family members, yet among strangers able to sleep. She had slept in a hotel room in Boston before the 1928 flight but with Amy in the house this time she could not. So deaf that she could not take part in a normal conversation and shunned by many, Amy was querulous and stubborn, an unhappy, frustrated woman with a younger daughter who needed her too much and an older one who didn’t need her at all. In her letter Amelia told her, “Please try to have a good time. You have had so many squashed years, I know its hard to throw them off. But it can be done. I’d like you to take this trip and I am going to plan to that end.” G. P., Amelia wrote, “said you were an awfully good sport to stay alone in the little house. I said I had known that a long time.”