1. Wealth and Independence
The accident of sex made Amelia Earhart front-page news. After her arrival in New York, she received thousands of letters, telegrams, and invitations. They grew in piles about her feet. Some of the letters hailed her as a “gallant pioneer”; others called her a “foolhardy nitwit.” Those that began, “The presence of your company” had to be accepted or refused.
Thirty-two cities asked the three fliers to visit them. Overnight Amelia became the native daughter of Boston, Kansas City, Chicago, Des Moines, Los Angeles, but she still claimed the place where she was born, Atchison, Kansas, as her native city. Taking the advice of Hilton Railey, GP, and others, the heroes of the hour decided to accept the invitations of New York, Boston, and Chicago.
The receptions were wild, frantic, tumultuous. The American people gave the fliers the same thunderous acclaim they had given Charles Lindbergh one year before. The two men and their woman passenger were showered with ticker tape and torn telephone books, and they were given the keys to each city in turn.
The festivities over, Amelia sought to retire into peaceful seclusion, but she soon realized that she had become, undeniably and perhaps irrevocably, a public figure. Opportunities were offered to her which could not be ignored. G. P. Putnam presented her with a contract to publish her account of the historic flight, manufacturers wanted her to endorse their products, and an offer for the syndicated rights to her story promised her $10,000. Amelia quietly made her decisions, and within a few months she had earned more than $50,000.
Never had she even dreamed of making so much money. She was now financially independent, and this new freedom meant that she could act and do exactly as she pleased. Yet the new wealth plagued Amelia’s conscience. If, as she painfully realized, she did not deserve the fame for having crossed the Atlantic, how could she accept the fortune that came with it?
New feelings of guilt compounded with the old. She would have to regain her self-respect by someday flying solo across the Atlantic, or die in the attempt. She could not live with the nickname “Lady Lindy” for simply having been a passenger; she, too, would have to be a “lone eagle.”
For the writing of her book Amelia accepted the hospitality of George Palmer Putnam and his wife at their home in Rye, New York. There, with the solicitous guidance of her publisher, AE studied her log of the flight and her many notes; then, slowly and carefully, she began to join one word to another. The job of writing, she discovered, took much longer than she had planned, much longer than the actual time of the flight, which was twenty hours and forty minutes. She dedicated the book, aptly called 20 Hrs., 40 Min., to her hostess, Dorothy Binney Putnam.
Amelia had often been warned about GP; mutual friends had told her that he would not hesitate to divorce his wife if he thought AE would capitulate to his charms. But in 1928 Amelia did not seem particularly interested in any man, although she had become the center of a triangle of men that included GP, Hilton Railey, and Samuel Chapman.
Samuel Chapman, according to some sources, was supposed to have been her fiancé, even at the time of the Friendship flight; yet such a commitment was denied by her, most emphatically, when she was approached on the subject by a reporter in Boston. “No,” she said to him, “I am not going to announce my engagement. I have seen Samuel Chapman since I have been here, but I have seen a great many other people also.” GP, who had been acting as a buffer between AE and the press, clearly indicated that the subject was closed.