East to the Dawn (31 page)

Mabel Boll returned to the United States in October. “Queen of Diamonds Arrives with Gems” ran the headlines. In January 1928 she was at Mitchel Field, Long Island, with Charles Levine, talking of an April transatlantic flight. The press, whom she had notified, turned up at the field and obediently reported that she was wearing her two diamond rings,
a rope of pearls around her neck, and a diamond pin on her hat. She, in all her finery, and Levine went up for a spin in a Ford trimotor.

On March 5, when Charles and his pilot Wilmer Stultz made the first nonstop flight from New York to Havana, Cuba, in the
Columbia,
a 1,600-mile flight, Mabel Boll was with them. Never mind that she had to sit on an improvised seat in back of the main gas tank; never mind that the crowds at the Havana airport were disappointingly small—she was aboard a first flight, and this time her picture was on the front page of
The New York Times:
she was truly famous.

It was nine days later that Elsie Mackay and Walter Hinchcliffe disappeared. It would have been expected that the tragedy would dampen Mabel's enthusiasm for a transatlantic flight. It certainly dampened Charles Levine‘s—he abruptly withdrew his plane yet again from her enterprise.

But it turned out that Mabel was courageous as well as bold and was not about to abandon her quest. By the end of March, fourteen days after Elsie Mackay's ill-fated flight, she appeared finally to have a transatlantic trip within her grasp. If she had lost Charles Levine's plane, she had been successful in securing the services of his pilot—sort of. March 28, she and Wilmer Stultz held a joint interview at Curtiss field on Long Island, duly covered by
The New York Times.
Wilmer stated that although he was working with Charles Levine in his attempt to set a new endurance record, “there was an understanding that he would be her pilot if she wished to make the trip ... that he was negotiating for a larger plane in which to cross the Atlantic if Miss Mabel Boll agrees to his terms for the venture” (not less than $25,000). Mabel Boll, for her part, was more specific—they were “negotiating the purchase of a Fokker from Commander Byrd.” The flight would be in May.

Then suddenly everything changed. By the next week, Mabel Boll had lost both pilot and plane. Amy Guest, a very different kind of woman, had entered the lists. She had had enough of Mabel Boll; the Fokker and Wilmer Stultz were hers.

Amy Phipps Guest was, on the surface, an unlikely candidate for such an adventure. A Phipps from Pittsburgh, the daughter of Annie Shaffer Phipps and the enormously powerful steel multimillionaire Henry Phipps, Amy for years had moved in the stately world of wealth and privilege.

It was true that she was unusually competent; she made her mark in whatever she did. She was married to the Honorable Frederick E. Guest, first cousin and close friend of Winston S. Churchill. Her wedding, on June 29, 1905, in St. George's Church in Hanover Square, was one of the most splendid events of that London season. The guest list had included all the great titled names of English society, various European royals, the U.S.
ambassador and his wife (their daughter was one of the eight bridesmaids), plus a contingent of prominent Americans. More than a thousand people attended the reception at the house on Park Lane that the Phippses had taken for the season. Amy's marriage, according to a cousin, was not only grand but “launched the family into a society that was compatible with their growing fortune.”

But Amy was neither a passive heiress nor a passive wife. She was energetic, and, like her mother before her, who was an early admirer of Margaret Sanger as well as an early advocate of birth control, she was an independent thinker who never let wealth get in the way of doing anything she felt appropriate. Outwardly conventional, in fact Amy was anything but. In an age when wealthy women traditionally did nothing with their money but spend it, Amy wheeled and dealed. She built one of Manhattan's most luxurious and beautiful apartment houses, One Sutton Place South at Fifty-eighth Street, commanding a breathtaking view of the East River. According to family legend, as the building neared completion, she sold her brother what he thought was the penthouse, then built a floor above him for herself.

She was physically daring—although this was not unexpected in the family, raw courage being a much admired and common Phipps trait. Even those who married into the family conformed to the family mold: Amy's sister-in-law Margarita Phipps, taken on safari in India for her honeymoon by John Phipps, shot and killed a tiger.

Amy, too, would go big game hunting, flying in a seven-seater Bellanca from London to Nairobi with Frederick and their children. The Guest safari on the Serengeti plain, under the direction of white hunter Bror Blixen, was as lavish as any of the day, but it was also—in spite of all precautions—dangerous. Africa was still teeming with game, with herds of wildebeest, zebra, gazelles, eland, and buffalo. Parents and children shot their fill, and since the great trophy in those years, the ultimate sport trophy, was a lion, lion became their quarry. For days they camped in lion country, and for days they were surrounded by prides of lions. One day thirty-eight of the beasts treed Frederick and two of the children. One evening three lions were observed in the moonlight drinking the bath water out of the tub. By the end of the safari, every member of the family had shot a lion, shooting their quarry high in the shoulder as Bror Blixen taught them. Amy, sighting from eighty yards away across open terrain, shot hers a little too far behind the shoulder. Bror had had to finish it off.

In her youth Amy had been an avid tennis player. She was as well a superb rider who fox-hunted wherever she lived—on Long Island, in Virginia, in Leicestershire, England. To her cousin Peggy Phipps Boegner,
who saw her once force a borrowed horse over an “enormous” fence riding sidesaddle, she was “absolutely fearless.” “Brave as a lion” was how her daughter-in-law appraised her.

But Amy was now stout and matronly, the mother of three children : Winston, twenty-two, at Columbia Law School; Raymond, twenty, at McGill College; and Diana, a teenager at the Shipley School in Philadelphia. And to top off Amy's unsuitableness, she was fifty-five years old. By any standard, flying the Atlantic would be a new level of danger for her. Still, the Duchess of Bedford, the mistress of Woburn Abbey, easily as socially prominent as Amy and as well regarded, had flown for the first time at sixty-two, at which time, in spite of her age, she had fallen in love with flying. Over her husband's objections, the duchess had hired a pilot, bought several planes, and now regularly flew off on exotic long-distance trips—she had just returned from Persia. Amy also knew that the first woman to die in the transatlantic quest, Princess Anne Lowenstein-Wertheim, also an Englishwoman, had been older than she. So there was precedent. Amy had had a great deal of exposure to flying because her husband, Frederick, had served as British secretary of state for air.

From Amy's point of view, Mabel was the quintessential adventuress and as such unassailably loathsome. The prospect of the publicity-hungry “Diamond Queen” becoming the most famous female in the world was simply more than she could stand. Mabel Boll was exactly the kind of person upon whom Guest was determined the mantle of fame would not fall. It “just wouldn't do,” as Guest would later tell her daughter Diana, trying to explain her actions: she would go herself.

Amy had to be in London in early June anyway, for her daughter Diana was scheduled to be presented at Court. She would simply arrive by different, more dramatic means.

She told no one, least of all her husband, what she was planning to do, and proceeding with extraordinary speed, she summoned David T. Layman, the Phipps family lawyer, and told him to enter into negotiations with Commander Byrd, whom she knew well, for the use of his plane and as well to enlist his aid in the enterprise. David Layman immediately and efficiently went to work; within a week of the “Diamond Queen's” announcement, the plane was Amy Guest's and so, thanks to the further efforts of Byrd, was her pilot. Then Guest and Byrd began planning the flight. It is worth noting that Amy Guest had to convince Commander Byrd that she was emotionally and physically strong enough to undergo an ordeal in which a great many people had lost their lives. That was apparently no problem. Everything proceeded at a great clip. By the ninth of April, pilot Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon, the mechanic-copilot he
chose, were picking up
her
Fokker in Detroit. They flew it, as instructed by Byrd, to the new airport in East Boston that lay in an area of newly cindered-over mudflats, away from prying eyes but close to where Byrd lived.

The next week Byrd was visiting Amy Guest at Templeton, her country estate in Roslyn, Long Island; they were deep into organizing the voyage, unhindered by Frederick Guest, who was in England. Amy told no one else except her younger brother Howard, and she swore him to secrecy.

For a variety of reasons, Byrd had decided that the Fokker, a land plane, should be converted to a seaplane, which opened up the dramatic possibility that if all went according to plan, the plane could land in the Thames River, as an airplane had done once previously, and come to a stop right in front of the Houses of Parliament. In anticipation of this event, Amy settled on the name
Friendship
to symbolize the relationship between the two countries.

By that time it was Shipley School spring vacation, and Amy's teenage daughter Diana arrived home for her spring break to find Byrd in residence.

“When the Gods fashioned Dick Byrd,” wrote Hilton Railey, who would get to know him better than anybody, “they endowed him, experimentally, with greater charm, better looks, greater shrewdness, better luck than most of his fellows.” Not surprisingly, he dazzled Diana—she thought him charming and handsome, as did so many other women and men. That vacation indelibly printed itself in her memory. She would never forget the commander or the many conversations about flying and adventuring—or the fact that at the end of spring break, she went back to Shipley totally in the dark about her mother's plans.

Then, according to Phipps family history, as the days passed and the flight drew nearer, Howard became increasingly worried, and since Amy wouldn't do it herself, he finally told her eldest son what was about to occur. Winston, as he called himself after his Churchillian cousin, having dropped his father's name Frederick, hit the roof. Pointing out to his mother that the trip would be at the same time he would be taking his law school exams, he demanded that she withdraw; he couldn't, he said, possibly study for, much less pass his exams, if she were involved in such an enterprise—she would make him fail. Others in the family were drawn in—undoubtedly Amy's mother, who lived nearby in Westbury, her brother John, and perhaps Frederick. All lined up against her. Against their assembled will, Amy backed down.

But even though she acceded to family pressure, common sense, and quite possibly second thoughts, since death or a ditching at sea had been
the fate of every single female transatlantic flyer, she neither retired from the scene nor sold the plane, which the family was also pressuring her to do. Her overriding desire was to make sure that that first woman, who would literally as well as figuratively be flying into the vortex of international acclaim (whether or not she lived to enjoy it), whose name would go down in history, would be a credit to her sex. She was still in charge.

“Keep my ship,” she now instructed Layman. “I am determined an American shall be the first woman to fly across to England. Find me someone. Someone nice who will do us proud. I shall pay the bills.” She went into detail about what she required in the woman who would be chosen: that she be a lady, educated, and if possible a flier.

“Is that all?” he remembered answering.

Shortly thereafter George Palmer Putnam, the brilliantly successful publisher who had snared Charles Lindbergh and just about every other adventurer of the day for Putnam's, was on his way by ferry to Miller field on Staten Island. Also traveling on the ferry was Bernt Balchen, the Norwegian pilot who had piloted the America so brilliantly, who still worked for Byrd, and who had placed his order for a Fokker that past July in Holland. During the ride the two fell into conversation. Putnam, persuasively loquacious, was always on the lookout for new adventures and new stories to publish. By the time the ferry reached Staten Island, Balchen had told him that Byrd had just secretly sold his Fokker to some wealthy woman who was planning a long dangerous flight and that the plane was at the East Boston airport, where it was being fitted out with pontoons.

George Putnam, as he put it, “instantly” saw the possibilities. “And here I had stumbled on an adventure-in-the-making which, once completed, certainly should provide a book.”

He went back to his office in Manhattan later that same day and, as it happened, his friend Hilton Railey, a Boston public relations specialist and fund-raiser for philanthropic causes, on his way to catch the five o'clock train back home, dropped in to see him. On such small occurrences are deeds set on course. The expansive publisher told Railey the exciting news he had just heard, and since the Fokker was being fitted out in Boston-supposedly for Byrd—he charged him with the task of checking out the plane and finding out everything he could. (According to Railey, who in his book
Touch'd With Madness
exhibited an irresistible habit of putting words—any words—into people's mouths, George Putnam said, “Pull your chair over. I heard something today that might be of interest to you.”)