“I
“Just ask anybody. Ask Lady Heath, ask Elinor Smith, ask ‘Chubby’ Miller….”
“I will,” Amy said, her mortification giving way to resolve. Suddenly I almost felt sorry for old G. P. “In the meantime, join us for a nice lunch. On me.”
That afternoon, to Mantz’s displeasure, Amy abandoned her flight preparations for the company of Toni Lake, who owned a pair of Indian Pony motorbikes. The aviatrixes spent hours racing up and down the runways on the bikes, flight helmets and goggles on, like a couple of schoolgirls having the time of their lives playing hooky. Chasing small planes, cutting figure eights, pursuing each other like cowboys and Indians, they attracted something of a crowd, when word got out one of the two naughty children was Amelia Earhart.
During part of this gleeful exhibition, I retreated to the office of Paul Mantz, who had requested a word with me.
The glassed-in office was in the left rear corner of the hangar, a good-size area with light tan walls that went up forever, with more signed celebrity photos than the Brown Derby—James Cagney, Joan Crawford, Pat O’Brien, Wallace Beery, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Eleanor Roosevelt. Occasionally Mantz was in the photos, and there were shots of Amy and Lindbergh and pilots I didn’t recognize, as well as a sprinkling of aerial stills from movies he’d worked on,
What was most impressive, however, was how straight all those framed photos were hanging. Mantz’s office had a neatness that approached unreality, or lunacy. His big maple desk with the glass top was fastidiously arranged, blotter, ashtray, framed photo of his wife, desk lamp, several flying trophies topped with metal model planes. Papers were stacked neatly. Stapler, phone, perfectly arranged. Squared up. Symmetrical. It was a desk not in life, but in a movie.
And Mantz, in his natty sportcoat and tie and swivel chair, was like an actor playing a big shot, and a slightly miscast one. He was a pretend big shot in a pretend office.
“I expected to see your wife around today,” I said. Compared to Mantz I was underdressed in the spiffy summer clothes I’d brought for my California jaunt, rust-color rayon sportshirt and sandstone tan worsted slacks. “Isn’t she flying out to Dallas?”
“Red doesn’t like to fly. She took the train.”
“Ah. What did you want to talk about, Paul?”
“I wanted to talk about why G. P. really hired you,” he said, leaning back as he lighted up a cigarette selected from a wooden box with a carved airplane on its lid.
I thought perhaps he was on to me, but I played it out, asking, “As security on the lecture tour, why else?”
“The lecture tour’s over.”
“But the Mexican trip’s coming up.”
“So what? We’ve never taken on extra security before any of the other flights.”
“Has Amelia mentioned the threatening notes?”
He frowned, sat forward. “What threatening notes?”
I filled him in.
He thought about what I’d told him; flicked some ash into a round metal tray. “Well, I can see a celebrity like her attracting envy, all right,” he said. “And or cuckoo birds. But something about this sounds a little too familiar.”
“How so?”
“Let me ask you somethin’, Nate—what do you make of Gippy?”
“He’s a fine human being, as long as he pays me in full and on time.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Fuck him.”
That made Mantz laugh—one of the few times I heard him laugh at anything but his own jokes.
“Let me tell you something, Nate,” he said, stubbing out the cigarette. “Gippy Putnam’s one of the vilest bastards on the face of this sweet earth.”
“Who’s married to one of the sweetest angels on the face of this vile earth,” I said.
“Couldn’t agree more.” And he was rocking in his swivel chair now, looking past me, summoning memories to share. “But let me spin ya a little bedtime story about Gippy. Back when he was still in the publishing business, not long after the Crash, when he was in need of dough, he put out this book by the nephew of the Italian premier that Mussolini deposed. This character was the first guy to escape from some fascist penal colony or somethin’. Anyway, the book spoke out against Mussolini, and Gippy was in Paris, doin’ advance publicity on the thing, when he went to the Surete and showed them an anonymous letter he got, threatening his life if he went ahead and published this book. He had a press conference and puffed up his chest and said nobody was gonna frighten Gippy Putnam outta publishing an important book. Then he went to London, for more advance promotion, and took two more of these threatening notes to Scotland Yard—”
“What did these notes look like?”
“Pasted-up letters cut out from newspapers and magazines. ‘Pig—you will never reach New York alive.’ Stuff about blowin’ up the Putnam publishing offices in both London and New York. He had another press conference, same bullshit; but this time he gets round-the-clock police protection, till he sails home on board the S. S.
“You know, this is jogging my memory—”
He was waving out a match, having lighted up a fresh cigarette. “It should. It got lots of play in the papers, both here and abroad. The book was a big bestseller; it pulled the Putnam publishing nuts outta the fire.”
