“Who is that?”
“Toni Lake. Ever hear of her?”
“No.”
“Well, she’s pulled off as many aviation feats as our girl Amelia, a real slew of altitude and endurance records in fact, and yet you’ve never heard of her. And that’s why she’s so royally pissed off, I’d guess.”
But something interesting was happening over at that side table. Toni Lake was standing and the two women were suddenly hugging, grinning, patting each other on the back. Amy had won her over.
Hand in hand, the two rival aviatrixes came over to the table and joined us. Amy made introductions (I was her “bodyguard and chief bottle washer”) and Toni Lake sat next to Mantz, across from Amy and me.
“Paul,” Amy said, “you’ve got to hear this... Toni, tell Paul what you told me.”
“Tellin’ you’s one thing, hon,” the woman said. “Spreadin’ it around, tellin’ tales outta school, makes me look like Miss Sour Grapes of 1935.”
To tell you the truth, with her scorched-tan, leathery complexion, Toni Lake didn’t look like Miss Anything; but she did have lovely brown eyes and lashes longer than some store-bought I’d seen.
“G. P.’s done Toni an awful injustice,” Amy said; she was pretty worked up about it.
“Go ahead, Toni,” Mantz said, sitting back. He was working on one of his trademark frosted martinis; this was lunch so he’d only had two. “Let me warn ya, though — nothing you tell me about Gippy Putnam’s gonna much surprise me.”
But it was Amy who began the story, blurting, “G. P. tried to hire Toni to an exclusive contract to fly with me in the Women’s Derby.”
The Powder Puff Derby, as Will Rogers had dubbed it.
“She was to pretend to be my ‘mechanic’ but do most of the flying,” Amy said, indignantly.
“He said you weren’t ‘physically strong enough,’” Lake said with a humorless smirk. “Her loving husband offered me a two-year seventy-five-bucks-a-week contract to co-pilot Amelia, only she had to seem to be doin’ all the flyin’. You know, I’m not some damn dilettante or socialite, I’m just a girl who likes to fly and was lucky enough to have an old man who’s a pilot and runs an airfield. Seventy-five bucks is big money to this little girl.”
Amy was shaking her head, mortified.
I asked, “How the hell did G. P. figure you could make it look like Amelia was doing all the flying?”
Lake shrugged. “When we made stops, I was supposed to either get out of the way of the photographers, or stand to the left so I came second in the captions.”
“You have to believe me, Toni,” Amy said, and she seemed close to tears, not a frequent state for her, “I knew nothing of this. I would never have stood for it. Oh my goodness, how he could even think—”
“That’s not the worst of it,” Toni said. “When I refused to sign the contract, he blew sky high, started swearin’ like a stevedore, said he’d ruin me and all. Said I’d never fly professionally again and even if he hasn’t quite managed that, he’s put all sorts of barriers in my path... officials causin’ me problems, sponsor contracts fallin’ through. And I can’t get press coverage to save my life, anymore. They used to cover me like a movie star. Now I could fly to the moon and they’d just report an eclipse.”
“Toni,” Amy said, “I couldn’t be more embarrassed. I promise you, I swear to you, I will take care of this.”
“Well, even if you can’t—”
“I can, and I will, Toni. Count on it.”
“Sweetie, I’m just glad to know you weren’t in on it. I mean, everybody knows that your husband works against the other women pilots—”
“I didn’t know.”
“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, Wings, Hell’s Angels, Airmail.
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 Sûreté 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—”