Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (14 page)

Reprehensible son of a bitch that I was.

Press coverage was minimal when Amelia Earhart (and an all-male crew) lifted off in her twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E from the Oakland Airport on St. Patrick’s Day, 1937, on what was, technically at least, the first leg of her round-the-world flight. Heavy rains had caused numerous postponements, and many reporters—who, frankly, were probably a little bored with Amelia Earhart by now, anyway, finding her a relic of a quaint, earlier era of pioneering aviation—had bailed out. But one memorable photo—which appeared all over the country, including Chicago—caught the Electra, shortly after takeoff, poised above the almost-finished Golden Gate Bridge.

When they arrived at Honolulu fifteen hours and forty-seven minutes later (setting a record), Paul Mantz handled the landing, due to fatigue on Amy’s part. At least, this is what Mantz later told me, dispelling the official word that the twenty-four-hour delay before beginning the first true leg of the flight (and the most dangerous)—Honolulu to tiny Howland Island, more than 1,800 miles away—was due to shaky weather forecasts; in fact, it was to give Miss Earhart time to rest up for the physically demanding flight. Mantz, who was only along for the Oakland-Honolulu leg, took advantage of the delay and flew one last test flight of the Electra, to check out a few last-minute adjustments that had been made.

The papers were referring to the sleek, all-metal, silver Electra with its fifty-five-foot wing span as “the Flying Laboratory” (a G. P. Putnam touch, no doubt) and I knew the ship was a great source of pride to Amy.

April of the year before, back on the lecture circuit (interspersing speaking engagements with campaign appearances for President Roosevelt’s reelection), she had been glowing about it.

“They’ve put fifty thousand dollars into a research fund,” she said, “can you imagine?”

I knew all about huge sums of money; I figured I had at least six bucks (factoring in tip) invested in our tables d’hôte (filet of sole with Marguery sauce for her and filet mignon for me). The elegant oak-paneled Chez Louis on East Pearson Street near the Gold Coast was one of the handful of places in Chicago where a celebrity could dine unaccosted, though many eyes were on my tall, slim companion in her canary shirt, string of pearls and tailored gray slacks. Amy was the first woman I knew who chose slacks as evening wear.

“So they gave you fifty thousand clams,” I said matter-of-factly, carving myself a bite of rare filet. “Who is ‘they’?”

“Purdue University. Or anyway, Purdue’s ‘Amelia Earhart Research Foundation’…whatever that is. Probably some rich alumni whose arms G. P. twisted.”

“Why Purdue University?”

“Didn’t I tell you? Since last fall, I have two positions with Purdue: I’m their aeronautics advisor but I’m also a consultant in the Department for the Study of Careers for Women.”

“Is that what they’re calling Home Economics now?”

A wry smile dimpled an apple cheek. “You tread a thin line with me, sometimes, Nathan Heller…. I spend several weeks a semester there.”

“So it’s not just an honorary title, then?”

“No,” she said, touching her napkin to her lips, finished with her sole, “I live right in the dorms with the girls, eat in their cafeteria, sit elbow to elbow with them. I let these young women know they don’t have to settle for being nurses, they can be doctors; they don’t just have to be secretaries, they can be business executives.”

“That’s a swell sentiment, Amy, but do you think it’s realistic?”

Amy smiled at the colored busboy removing her plate. “Oh, I let them know they’ll be facing discrimination…both where the law is concerned, and good old-fashioned male stupidity.”

“It was probably good old-fashioned stupid males who ponied up your fifty grand…. You wouldn’t have your eye on a new plane, by any chance? That twin-engine job you’ve been craving?”

The waiter was delivering our desserts.

She licked her upper lip in anticipation of the delicious parfait before her; or she might have been thinking about her new plane. “Two motors, dual controls, capable of a twenty-seven-thousand-foot altitude. It’s an Electra.”

I had a parfait too and spooned a bite of the frozen confection. “Isn’t that a passenger plane?”

“Yes, seats up to ten. But Paul’s going to strip it for auxiliary fuel tanks; he says we’ll have a capability of four thousand five hundred nonstop air miles.”

“That’s a long time between pee breaks,” I said.

Famous for subsisting on nothing but tomato juice on her long-distance jaunts, Amy had once confided in me that she turned her nose up at the tubular gadget used by the military for urination (“I never tinkle on a flight”).

“I may have to change my ways,” she admitted, dipping her spoon into the parfait glass. “Oh my goodness, Nathan, this Electra is my dream airy-plane. Paul’s fixing it up with all the latest gadgets: Sperry autogiro robot pilot, a fuel minimizer, wind deicers, blind-flying instruments…. There’ll be over a hundred dials and levels on the control panel.”

“But will you bother to learn how to use them?”

“Of course! We’re calling the plane our ‘Flying Laboratory.’…I mean, it’s a research project, after all.”

“Right. For the Amelia Earhart Research Foundation. You can study the bladder capacity of a woman nearing forty.”

Digging for the final far-down bite in the glass, she gave me a tight-lipped, chin-crinkled smile, then asked, “And what experiment are you conducting? How many smart-aleck remarks a man can make and still get invited up to an emancipated woman’s hotel suite?”

I licked the last bite of parfait off my spoon and innocently asked, “Have I mentioned lately how much I admire Eleanor Roosevelt?”

And of course I received (and accepted) my invitation to her hotel suite, though I was disheartened by all her “good news”: it meant G. P. Putnam still had his hooks into her. Through various machinations, he was going to deliver her a new “airy-plane”—and in fact he did, on July 24, her thirty-ninth birthday.

When she took off for Howland Island at dawn from Honolulu’s Luke Field near Pearl Harbor, Paul Mantz—just an advisor on this trip—stayed behind. He had slipped a paper-orchid lei over Amy’s head before she followed her co-pilot navigator Harry Manning and assistant navigator Fred Noonan aboard the Electra.

Manning was beside her in the co-pilot’s seat with Noonan in the rear at the chart table against a bulkhead by a window—the Electra’s cabin stripped of seats, replaced with fuel tanks—when Amy started the engines and motioned to the ground crew to remove her wheel chocks.

The Electra began to roll down the wet runway but it gave no sign of lifting off before it began to sway in the crosswind, its right wing dipping down; Amy corrected by reducing power to the left engine and the plane yawed to the left, out of control, its right wheel and undercarriage sheared away in a scream of metal on concrete, the silver bird sliding down the runway on its belly spewing sparks and spilling fuel.

When the plane finally skidded to a stop, the hatch cover popped open and a white-faced Amelia Earhart emerged, shouting, “Something went wrong!” She and Manning and Noonan were unscathed and sparks had never met fuel, so there was no exploding plane, no fire, though fire trucks and ambulances were racing their way as the crew stumbled from the plane to safety.

Amy quickly regained her composure and told reporters, “Of course the flight is still on!” The Lockheed would be shipped back to the Lockheed factory in Burbank for repairs.

One of G. P. Putnam’s first voiced concerns, I understand, was to make sure the 6,500 presold first-day-of-issue philatelic covers be recovered from the wreck.

Traveling by commercial airliner, Amy stopped in Chicago in April, on her way to New York; we spent an evening together, in my apartment on the twenty-third floor of the Morrison Hotel, where in the glow of a single table lamp, with a soft backdrop of the Dorsey Brothers playing on the radio, we enjoyed a middling room service meal and each other’s company.

But this was not the Amy I’d dined with at Chez Louis, a year before—not the bubbling, optimistic Amy almost giddy with anticipation of obtaining her dream “airy-plane.”

This was a thin, wan, middle-aged woman, her weariness reflected by the dark puffy patches under her clear blue-gray eyes and lines above and at the corners of her wide sensuous mouth. Still a handsome creature, she was curled up on my couch beside me in a white blouse and navy blue slacks and white cotton anklets, possessed of a slim leggy frame that a much younger woman might have envied.

Nestled under my arm, sipping a cup of cocoa, she had just told me her version of the Honolulu crackup, which laid the blame on a tire blowout, when she looked up with her eyes wide and guileless. “Aren’t you going to ask, ‘Are you going to try again’?”

“No,” I said. I was working on a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon. “And by the way, I hope you don’t.”

“Why? Don’t you want me to be rich and famous?”

“Aren’t you already?”

She made a clicking sound in one cheek. “Just halfway…I’m afraid we’re pretty darn near broke, Nathan.”

“Then how can you expect to repair your plane and try again?”

“Unless I find fifty thousand dollars, I can’t.”

“What about the Purdue Institute for Female Bladder Research?”

She elbowed me, then sipped her cocoa and said, “They ended up kicking in eighty thousand in the first place,” she said. “That’s what the Electra and all its bells and whistles cost…. Now I need another thirty grand for repairs, and twenty for incidentals.”

“What’s that? Your cans of tomato juice?”

“Flight arrangements are expensive, permissions from countries and lining up airstrips, having mechanics ready, and fuel waiting….”

“Why can’t you just plug into what you had set up before?”

“Before I was flying east to west; this time we’re going west to east.”

I frowned. “Why?”

“Changing weather conditions, G. P. says.”

“What does he know about it?”

She gave me a stern look. “He’s the one who’s finding that extra fifty thousand dollars.”

“That makes him an expert?”

“Would you do me a favor, Nathan?” She gestured to her head, then her neck. “I have one of my sinus headaches. I could really use a neck rub.”

Soon the nearly empty cup of cocoa was on the nearby coffee table, which had been pushed aside, so that she could sit on the carpet, Indian-style, her back to me, between my legs, as I worked the muscles of her upper back and neck.

“If G. P. doesn’t put this together,” she said, “I’m all washed up.”

“Don’t be silly. You have money.”

“Not much. I can’t even afford to support my family anymore…. I couldn’t afford the upkeep on my mother’s house and we’ve taken her in with us…. Did I tell you we bought a house in Toluca Lake, just down the street from Paul’s old place? Muriel I had to cut off entirely and now…oh yes, right there…she’s out peddling interviews about me to the press.”

“That’s a shame.”

“We had to shut down the fashion line…we were barely breaking even. I’ve invested in several business ventures with Paul but it’s too early to see how that’s going to come out…oh yes, yes, there….”

“Is that what this New York trip’s about? Raising cash?”

She nodded her hanging head. “Whatever’s necessary.

I’ve mortgaged my future on this one…but what are futures for? Did you hear me on
The Kraft Music Hour
?”

“Can’t say I did. What’s Bing Crosby like?”

She threw me a smile over her shoulder as I worked my thumbs in it. “Funny. Nice. But can you imagine how scared I was? How much I hated that?”

“Yeah.” I thought back to the lectures she endured, those necessary evils to pay the freight; sitting backstage paralyzed with fright, puking her guts out, then going on with a smile and poise a princess might have coveted.

“And in New York,” she said, “I’ll be appearing in the Gimbel’s eleventh-floor restaurant to personally help sell an additional one thousand first-day covers.”

More stamps, yet.

“What happened to the batch from your first try?”

“G. P. had them imprinted with the words: ‘Held over in Honolulu following takeoff accident,’ or some such. These new ones will be marked in some special way…. Ouch!”

“Too hard?”

“Yes…just rub in circles for a while, then maybe you can go after that knot again…. I’m signing a new book contract. That’s the major reason for the trip.”

“What’s the book about?”

“The flight, silly. I’ll keep a diary along the way and when I get back spend a week or, two polishing it up, and, presto…”

“Another instant book.”

“We’re pulling out all the stops this time.”

“Sounds like you and G. P. are quite a team.”

She turned and looked up at me. “Are you jealous?”

“Of your husband? I don’t know why I would be. I mean, it’s not like you sleep in the same bed or anything.”

“Actually, we do…but it’s not like that between us, anymore. I think he has a sense that…well, he knows this partnership is winding down…. Uh, that’s enough, that was wonderful, thank you…. Listen…I have something for you….”

She scooted her butt around and, still seated before me, dug in her breast pocket. She withdrew something the size of a folded-up handkerchief, which she pressed into my hand.

I unfolded it and it became a small silk American flag. “What’s this for?”

She had an impish smile. “Just a lucky keepsake. I took it along on all my long-distance flights.”

“Don’t you think you should take it on this one, too?”

“No, no, I…I want you to have it now.”

I held it out to her. “Give it to me when you get back.”

She shook her head, no. “Better take it now.”

I frowned at her. “What? You have some kind of premonition…?”

Her eyes popped open. “No! No. It’s just…a feeling.”

“If you have that kind of feeling, Amy, for Christ’s sake, don’t go!”

She crawled up on the couch and nestled in next to me, again. “Nathan, as far as I know, I only have one real fear—a small and probably female fear of growing old. I won’t feel so completely cheated, if I fail to come back.”