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THIRTY-TWO

Those who flew in the early years of the twentieth century were unlike, in many ways, those who did not. Of course most did not live to any great age—they crashed. My youth was filled with family friends wearing neck braces; there were also many premature funerals. My own father was one of the original Army Air Corps pilots trained in 1917. He married the daughter of Senator Gore of Oklahoma and became the first instructor in aeronautics at West Point where I was born in the Cadet Hospital. Bored with peacetime army life, he helped found two small airlines: TAT which metamorphosed into TWA, and the Ludington Line which became Eastern Airlines.

In the mid-thirties he and his friend Amelia Earhart started Northeast Airlines in conjunction with the Boston and Maine Railroad. When Amelia was lost somewhere in the Pacific my father, who had been director of air commerce under FDR, was put by the president in charge of the search. FDR was almost as fond of her as was his wife, Eleanor. A great cloud of conspiracy theories have since surrounded Amelia’s disappearance. Thirty years after her disappearance I asked Mrs. Roosevelt whether there was any truth to the stories that Amelia—her friend—had been sent to spy on the Japanese preparations for war in the Pacific and that they had either shot her down or she crash-landed and was made captive.

The veins in Mrs. Roosevelt’s left temple often throbbed when she was suddenly moved by emotion recollected. “When the war ended,” she said, “I made my own small investigation. As you might suspect. I harassed everyone connected with the flight and the search. Certainly, there was nothing of a spying nature about her flight. She simply lost her way trying to find—where was it? Howland Island?”

The last time I saw Amelia we were on the way back from West Point where my father had taken us to see a football game. On the way back to New York City we sat in a compartment of the train as passersby peered through the corridor windows. Amelia was perhaps the world’s most famous woman. I asked her what would be the worst part of the trip. The answer was quick. “Africa. If you get forced down in all that jungle with so few cities they could never find you.” When I said that the Pacific Ocean looked pretty big to me, she was offhand: “But there are all those islands where you can land. And all those ships passing by.” Lately, I’ve been reading an account of her flight and of how, for the most part, she had routed her flight over land not sea. She had obviously changed her mind about the relative beneficence of overseas flight.

There have been a number of truly imaginative—not to mention dreadful—books about Amelia. One of them was the work of a woman who had convinced herself that Amelia was a nobody invented by a man of genius, her husband, the publicist and publisher George Palmer Putnam. Amelia’s marriage to G.P. was a wretched one. He kept her constantly on tour, on view. At one point, she wanted to marry Gene. But he was not romantically inclined and saw her only as a friend, a comrade.

My father, Gene Vidal, director of air commerce, being congratulated by Amelia Earhart for his successful parachute jump; she had preceded him in this game of chicken.

My father’s widow, Kit, told me that she had come across a letter Amelia had written Gene after she had had an accident in California. While her Lockheed Electra plane was being repaired, she’d written an anguished letter all about some sort of emotional problem that she was having. I asked if a name had been mentioned. “Oh, it was so long ago, I forget.” I asked Kit if the problem was with a man or a woman. My conventional stepmother frowned at this impropriety. “A man, of course.” “So what did you do with the letter?” “I tore it up, naturally. After all, it was no one’s business but hers.” So there was the final mystery that might have explained what happened. Gene had often speculated that she had deliberately crashed the plane. “She was going through a bad time with G.P.; she was also undergoing some sort of premature menopause.” He also said: “The last time I saw her she said she had put me in her will, leaving me this small house she owned because she could trust me to give it to her mother if anything happened to her. So why not, I asked her, just leave it directly to your mother? ‘Because,’ she said, ‘G.P., as widower, would try to get it.’ ”

I have mentioned how different the early fliers were from other people. There was Lindbergh whose final years were preoccupied with poets like Lao Tse as well as new sorts of procedures to keep hearts alive. I always found the early fliers a bit like a secret society, impatient with us earthbound folk who could never see as much as they saw from their special vertiginous height. Anne Morrow, Lindbergh’s wife, wrote highly poetical prose while her passion for the French pilot-writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, produced quantities of mystical prose on both sides until he crashed at sea in the war. Although Gene himself had no mystical or poetic side he was forever a restless inventor-putterer like Lindbergh. Gene’s not so secret ambition was to be the Henry Ford of aviation. As director of air commerce he supported any number of prototypes for “flivver” planes to do for flight what Ford’s Model T had done for land and at the same affordable price. That’s why I took off and landed the Hammond plane at the age of ten in 1936 and was duly immortalized in a Pathé newsreel. Although Gene enjoyed inventing airlines and crisscrossing the country as director, marking out landing fields, he never lost sight of his true goal: the cheap plane that anyone could own. Since the main expense in airplane manufacture was the aluminum fuselage, Gene began to experiment with molded plywood (Vidal Weldwood it was known as); later he tried laminated fiberglass. He never got to make a cheap plane but his molded fiberglass ended up as a mildly lucrative line of trays for a bread company as well as a few thousand dinghies that made occupants itch from the glass.

Lindbergh’s daughter has written amusingly of her father’s ongoing rage at the poor design of nearly everything, especially flashlights. To be useful, a flashlight must have at least four sides so that it would not, in response to gravity—the flier’s nemesis—roll off whatever surface it was resting on. Much of Lindbergh’s dialogue on such subjects was very like Gene’s, irritation at the compulsive bad design of simple objects and how easy it would be to improve them. A compulsion to improve the utility of everyday objects led to each man’s putterings and inventions. Politically, it did not lead much of anywhere except in Lindbergh’s case. He was the son of a Swedish American congressman from the Midwest. Like his father, Lindbergh was an isolationist. But he was hardly a pacifist. FDR, who had always been jealous of the “Lone Eagle’s” fame, consulted with my father about the uses that could be made of his rival’s fame. This is before the America First isolationist movement made it possible to smear such worthy Americans as Norman Thomas, Burton Wheeler, and, not least, Lindbergh as Nazis. Luckily, Gene was apolitical: his only foray into international politics came when, as director of air commerce, he had been invited to Germany for the Olympic Games (he had been a pentathlon silver medalist in the 1920 Olympics at Antwerp). The German airmen were also curious about American air power. But since Gene was a member of the federal government FDR thought, rightly, that his attendance would look like some sort of endorsement of the Nazi regime. So in the end it was Lindbergh who was sent to report on Nazi air power. He was openly shocked by German air superiority over Britain and France and, privately, over the flawed American effort, such as it was. Much was made of the Iron Cross Göring had slipped him before Lindbergh returned to warn Roosevelt that the Luftwaffe was even more formidable than anyone had suspected and that we would be at a singular disadvantage if we did not begin a buildup in military air power. Lindbergh was busy pushing the B-17 bomber, the so-called Flying Fortress. FDR, despite the malice he bore Lindbergh, knew good advice when he heard it and so, thanks to the Lindbergh reports, in the end it was our air power that won us the war. Meanwhile, politically, FDR could not resist smearing Lindbergh and the other America Firsters as Nazi sympathizers.