A Longing For Home

CCXVIII

Though George rarely smiled in photographs he enjoyed being “Gyp” to his beloved “A.E.”

Although the British fulsomely invited Earhart and Noonan to spend more time exploring Sind, after just one non-flying day (one could hardly call it a “day off” given the intense maintenance work done on the Flying Laboratory, the Press conferences, and the official meet-and-greets with British and Indian officialdom), Amelia elected to lift off for Calcutta early on the morning of the seventeenth. 

Although most of her biographers take the pace of the Worldflight for granted, it makes some sense* to wonder why Earhart seemed ever so anxious to push on. Some of it, no doubt, may be due to the fact that the Putnams were in desperate financial straits after funding this second attempt at a Worldflight mainly out of pocket; the planned book and international speaking tour George had arranged for after her return were geared to making money while the sun shone on her endeavor. But surely, a few days here and there would not have made any difference to the tour; in fact, longer layovers in interesting foreign climes may have helped it by adding adventures to the travelogue that Amelia was creating in her mind. 

The driving pace may just have been inherent to Earhart’s nature. She certainly hadn’t slowed her pace of activities prior to setting out; instead, she had merely piled the preparations for the Worldflight atop them. This had led to a few, but critical, mistakes being made. Her unfamiliarity with the radio equipment on board the Electra has been well-documented and confirmed by those who knew her. She was weary before even setting out on her grueling 30,000 mile flight, and gave herself few chances for real rest while en route. She made mistakes difficult to fathom during the trip (her insistence on disregarding Noonan’s directions to Dakar, for one, her jettisoning of equipment like her life raft, flares, and parachutes, being another). 

Perhaps she simply wanted, as soon as possible, to get home to George. Certainly, the newly-remarried Fred Noonan wanted to get back to his bride, Bea. They were planning a family. 

Fred Noonan’s motives get very short shrift when it comes to the Worldflight. He flew the route with her. He was greeted by the same officials, and mobbed by the same aviation fans. Yet he is little mentioned in accounts of the Worldflight. He is there in every photograph, usually smiling, but seemingly inscrutable. No one ever writes books about Fred Noonan. No one collects his autographs. His reasons for taking the trip --- for staying with Amelia Earhart after Harry Manning and Paul Mantz left the flight crew --- are never the subject of speculation. What happened to him is never independently investigated. He is always assumed to be wherever she was and their fates are assumed to be intertwined. Yet no one really knows. He is treated as a footnote.

At best, Noonan is reduced to a tragicomic figure and often blamed for the loss of the Worldflight. According to his critics, Fred Noonan miscalculated the position of the Electra relative to Howland Island because he was badly intoxicated. There was more to the man, but the only element of the Noonan’s personality that seems to matter to most historians is his drinking. 

Fred Noonan was an alcoholic. He is usually assumed to have been drunk during the crucial hours when the Electra was winging between New Guinea and Howland Island. There is no evidence for this supposition at all. After the loss of the Worldflight, many witnesses came forward claiming to have seen Noonan drunk in one place or another, but most of these people have been debunked over the years, either because they weren’t where they claimed to be or because of discrepancies in their stories. The few legitimate tales of Noonan appearing drunk could just as easily be ascribed to physical exhaustion and sleepiness. 

Yet, the idea that Noonan was drinking during the Worldflight and may have gotten roaring drunk on occasion cannot be wholly dismissed. When he left Oakland he was on the wagon due to a solemn pledge to his wife. However, given the high rate of recidivism in alcoholism it’s likely the pledge didn’t hold him. He may have decided that “what happens in Timbuktu stays in Timbuktu,” and begun drinking once away from home. Liquor in various forms would have been available everywhere along the route --- rum in the Caribbean and South America, stocks of French wine in French West Africa, Italian wine in Italian East Africa, and beer, wine and spirits in British India. Much of the world that Noonan and Earhart overflew was Muslim land where alcohol is religiously banned, but that would have meant nothing to the Colonial Powers, and drinking --- especially among pilots --- was seen as proof of their masculinity.

Earhart never mentioned that Noonan was drunk at any time, and almost certainly if she had, George would have made note of it in after years. Historians deduce that Noonan was drinking because of a single cryptic note that Earhart sent home to George from the Dutch East Indies explaining an unscheduled layover: “Crew indisposition.” What this meant was never explained. Many of Amelia’s notes were personal shorthand, reminders of events to include in her planned memoir. Although this hastily-scribbled notation has been seized upon by Earhartologists to “prove” that Noonan was drinking himself blind, it should be recalled that she was not feeling entirely well during the Worldflight. It may have had something to do with the ground crew. Or it may have been as simple and prosaic as a case of touristas.

Amelia Earhart had a complicated relationship with alcohol. Her beloved father lost his lucrative law practice, much of what he owned, his marriage, and ultimately his life, to drinking. Drink had rendered Amelia, her mother, and her sister homeless and all but penniless (fortunately Amy Earhart’s parents were relatively wealthy, and so the three were not left without any resources at all).  In the face of Fred Noonan’s being drunk, Amelia Earhart may have remained silent much as she had in the face of her father’s drinking as she was growing up.

There was another element to it, as well: Fred, nagged for partaking, could have easily abandoned the Worldflight (and her) in some remote corner of the earth. Although she is usually seen as the intrepid explorer, Earhart needed Noonan more than Noonan needed Earhart. With his maritime background, he could have easily taken a crew berth on a steamer out of Karachi (or elsewhere) and made his way home by sea, while she would have been effectively grounded and forced to abandon the Electra without hope of ever reclaiming it if they as much as quarreled. With his unparalleled navigational skills, Noonan’s presence was  absolutely indispensable to her, particularly over the Pacific hop. 

So perhaps Amelia’s constant insistence upon “gassing and going” time after time was a way of minimizing without argument Fred’s ability to seek out local watering holes in places as far apart as Caripito and Calcutta. Or perhaps not.

One speculative reason given for the speed of the Worldflight appeared in print during her mid-June “disappearance.” The columnist Walter Winchell claimed that she was planning to divorce George upon her return so she could marry Paul Mantz. **

It isn’t likely at all. Although Mantz was still an official technical consultant on the Worldflight, their relationship, whatever it had been, had cooled considerably since she had been named a co-respondent in his recent divorce. She and Mantz had not seen one another since she had left Oakland without telling him on May 20^th, and he was reportedly “crazy” about his new, young wife. 

Another speculation is that she was planning on divorcing George and marrying Gene Vidal, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s chief adviser on civil aviation, and father of the later-famous novelist and social commentator Gore Vidal. Gore Vidal bruited this idea about as an adult, but added that his father had no interest in marrying Earhart. Why she would be rushing back to an uncommitted relationship is something the son never bothered to explain. *** 

There may have been another reason, and it is spotted throughout Earhart’s private notes and letters relating to both Worldflights: She may have been pregnant. Although she never explicitly used the words, she had obliquely remarked to Albert Bresnik, her personal photographer, that upon her return she would focus on her family and be “just a woman.” One notable clue was Amelia’s repetitive logging of bouts of early morning nausea during the Worldflight; given her lazy logbook habits, these comments may be significant. ****

Even if Amelia wasn’t pregnant she may have believed she was, and this belief may have compelled her to want to end her long journey as quickly as possible and go home. The safety of the child she may have been carrying most likely would have been uppermost in her mind. 

In any event, amidst the Worldflight there seemed to be a longing for home.*****

*To this blogger

**George Palmer Putnam followed up on this article with an explosive phone call to Winchell, followed by a similar phone call to Winchell by Mantz. Winchell refused to retract the story.

***A complex man, Vidal fils was later famous for his patrician demeanor and his articulate intellectualism, but he was also known as a singular assassin of public character. During his lifetime he intimated that Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt had been sexually involved. He claimed to have fathered a child with the actress Diana Lynn (something she denied) and Anais Nin, the famed diarist, claimed to have an affair with Vidal (something he denied). He later claimed to be bisexual but averred that he and his male partner of 53 years “never” had sex.  

****Then again, they may not be. She had made remarks about abdominal pain and illness around the time of the first attempted Worldflight, and no child had been born out of that episode. The reality was that the Electra was a flying gas tank and constant exposure to aviation gasoline fumes may have made her feel sick --- even made her vomit regularly. Her remark to Bresnik and other similar indeterminate statements in letters to her family may just have been her way of not-quite announcing her retirement from public life.

*****Rapidly changing conditions during her travels may have affected her menstrual cycle. Gore Vidal (again) later asserted that she was experiencing menopause (at age 39) but how the teenaged boy would have known this at the time is not clear. As seems to be the case with anything related to “A.E.” even her reproductive history is obscure. There is some indication that she may have had a child while unmarried in 1924.