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.”
