Straight on Till Morning (31 page)

Sadly, in early July, the world learned that Earhart and Noonan were lost in the Pacific Ocean between British New Guinea and Howland Island. Amelia had always known that the leg from Lae in New Guinea was the most difficult of the flight. Howland was flat and only two miles long by half a mile wide, and therefore difficult to find, unless navigation was totally accurate. The Electra would be out of radio range for most of the flight and she would have no way of checking her position for 1800 miles. By the time the couple left Lae on 2 July they had flown 22,000 miles and made twenty-two landings. Now as they journeyed eastward their remaining ports of call were Howland, Honolulu and home by Independence Day – 4 July. Their last message was relayed by Amelia. She was clearly disturbed at having been unable to make a previously arranged radio contact with a US naval ship and her voice was uncharacteristically anxious as she said: ‘We are on a line of position 157 dash 337. Will repeat this message on 6210 kilocycles. We are running north and south.' They were never heard from again.
²⁶

In an unlikely manner, Beryl found herself in the middle of the press hysteria surrounding Amelia's disappearance, for when the news came through she was staying at the home of Jacqueline Cochran, another blonde aviatrix who broke numerous records. Much later, in May 1953, Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier in a North American F-86 Sabre jet.
²⁷

Like Beryl, Jackie Cochran had had an unconventional childhood. The adopted daughter of a poor family, she had been dressed in sacking and left to run wild and barefoot around the Southern saw-mill towns, without any education, while her adoptive parents searched endlessly for work. Like Beryl she had the reputation for single-minded determination to achieve: ‘When Jackie Cochran put her mind to do something she was a damned Sherman tank at full speed,' said a friend. When she grew up she went to work in the beauty business. She worked hard, earned a lot of money and learned to fly. Eventually, having already achieved great wealth by her own efforts, she married a wealthy friend and despite a series of hazardous, largely unsuccessful early record attempts, she eventually became one of the most respected women pilots in the United States.
²⁸

At the time Beryl visited her, Jackie and her husband lived in sybaritic luxury on a thousand-acre ranch with an olympic-sized swimming pool, private golf course, stables of thoroughbred horses and an army of servants. In addition to the other facets of her overwhelming personality Jacqueline Cochran claimed to possess extrasensory powers. There was some evidence for this, well known among their friends, who knew that Jackie was often able to tell them precisely what her husband Floyd was doing at a given time, even though he may have been hundreds of miles away.
²⁹

After Amelia disappeared an immense search for her by the US Navy, authorized personally by President Roosevelt, was instigated. Jackie was simultaneously contacted by George Putnam (Amelia's publisher husband) in a desperate hope that her clairvoyant powers could assist the search for her missing friend. The press clustered around Coachella Ranch like flies around a honey pot while its chatelaine willingly provided what help she could.

The aircraft had come down in the water and was still afloat, she said. Both Amelia and Fred Noonan were still alive, though Fred had suffered a fractured skull and had been unconscious since the accident. She mentioned the US Coastguard cutter
Itasca
and a Japanese fishing boat, both of which were in the search area. She even provided a precise position for the wreck, though the navy were not able to find anything when they eventually reached the spot. For two days Jacqueline claimed to ‘know' that Amelia was alive, and gave details of the aeroplane's drift on the water. Then she sensed her friend was dead.
³⁰
Since the aeroplane was never traced these claims could not be proved, but Jackie was so shaken by the experience that she never again publicly used her clairvoyant ability.

One person who would not have been surprised by this performance was Beryl. She was in the habit of consulting clairvoyants from time to time, having absorbed the African's belief in magic during her upbringing. When the reporters, who only gradually drifted away from the ranch, realized that Beryl was a guest, she too was interviewed. She told them that she was very distressed at the news, but more determined than ever to continue her own aviation career. ‘I've always wanted to meet Amelia Earhart,' she said, ‘this time I'd hoped to see her in Los Angeles on her return. Miss Earhart's loss is all aviation's.' Asked what she would have done, had she been in Amelia's position in the South Seas, she replied, ‘I'd have probably tried to land in the water with the wheels folded into the wings. The plane would stand more chance that way than on a jagged reef. Then I'd have taken to my emergency lifeboat.'
³¹

Beryl remained in the United States for five months. She made many friends and travelled extensively in the west. Because the motion picture offer from Columbia was still open, she inevitably visited the studios and as a result she made contact with people who were part of the movie scene. She was often taken to the sets of films and on one occasion she was taken by the prominent screenwriter Anita Loos
³²
to the set of the movie
Conquest
, where she was introduced to the star Greta Garbo who was playing Marie Waleska to Charles Boyer's Napoleon.

At the time, Garbo was just about to enter upon her much-publicized love affair with Leopold Stokowski, the brilliant and flamboyant conductor who was later to become a great friend of Beryl's. Anita Loos, author of the best-selling
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, seems to have been a busy hostess, for she introduced Garbo to Stokowski at a dinner party and claimed that ‘Stokie' had decided in advance of their meeting that he was going to have an affair with Garbo. According to other guests at the dinner, Stokowski turned on such mesmerizing charm that Garbo was hypnotized by the man with the hawk-like face.
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At first the gossip columns merely noted that the pair were often seen together; however they discounted a romance since it was known that Stokowski motored a hundred miles north every Friday evening to spend the weekend with his wife and children at their Santa Barbara home. All through that autumn the press continued to hound the pair, who both shunned publicity. It was not until the following spring that the real storm broke when they spent a holiday together in Europe. Later Beryl, who was very much a part of the circle of people in which they moved, was to say of Garbo that the star's avoidance of publicity was no pose. ‘She is a very timid person who sincerely shrinks from meeting crowds of strange people.'
³⁴

Beryl spent some time looking at the powerful new aeroplane engines developed by Al Menasco Incorporated for the Ryan Aircraft Company specifically for air-racing. She even discussed the possibility of purchasing a Ryan STA, but the matter was left in abeyance pending a meeting with her backers. Undoubtedly her main reason for making the trip to California was to take up the offer from Columbia to make a motion picture of her transatlantic flight, with Beryl in the starring role. But within weeks of her departure from California Beryl told a woman reporter that ‘the bargain with Columbia had been declared off'.
³⁵
For a while she let it be thought that the studios had lost interest in the story because so much time had elapsed since the time of her flight that public interest had waned. But much later she told friends the real reason. She had not photographed well in the screen tests.
³⁶
She was bitterly disappointed. In December she sailed for Africa.

1937–1941

Beryl spent Christmas on the ship she had boarded in San Diego. On 27 December she arrived at Sydney in New South Wales where she stayed for a week before boarding the
Mariposa
, bound for Melbourne. Interviewed there for the newspaper
Truth
she was described effusively as ‘Pretty as a talkie star, and utterly feminine, from her aureole of golden hair to her lacquered toenails. Her eyes are clear china blue. She has a flawless complexion and is as slender as a willow wand.' She was surprised by her noisy welcome at the little port of Balmain, she said.

The reader also learned that Beryl's favourite colour was blue, that she disliked green. That she was not superstitious. That she was not a teetotaller though she disliked cocktail parties. That she never gambled and unless it was unavoidable never played bridge. ‘Tea is her favourite drink.' Beryl must have been playing with the lady journalist. The article went on to divulge that horses were Beryl's favourite animals:

On 17 February aboard an Interocean Lines cargo boat which had left Perth three weeks earlier, Beryl returned to Africa, and was reunited with her father who was living in Durban. She stayed with him for only part of the three months she spent in South Africa. Her relationship with Emma Orchardson was still difficult and it was impossible for Beryl to spend any length of time there, no matter how pleased father and daughter were to see each other. During these few weeks, however, Beryl happily slipped back into the daily routine of a top-class racing stable; but her purpose in visiting South Africa was not solely to see her father. She also had meetings with potential backers, a syndicate headed by Schlesinger.

A record flight of some kind was still very much in her mind and she was able to provide details of the latest advances in civilian aircraft in the United States. The only information Beryl ever gave to journalists regarding these discussions was that ‘it was the only major flight not yet done'. Although it was never confirmed, the newspapers who wrote about Beryl were almost certainly correct in their assumptions that she had a ‘round-the-world' attempt, or possibly a stratosphere night, in mind.
²

In May she boarded an Imperial Airways flying boat and headed for England by way of Kenya. Her discussions with the potential sponsors had been inconclusive, and, interviewed in Mombasa where she broke her journey, she informed the journalist that ‘any future attempts at records are in the lap of the gods. I have no settled plans in the meantime, but I long to be back in Kenya,' she continued, ‘I have such happy memories.' The
East African Standard
concluded that her journey to Britain was in connection with another record-breaking flight.
³

Here something of a mystery occurs. The stamps in her passport reveal a fast journey (21 April, Sudan; 22 April, Yugoslavia; 23 April, Brindisi and Bracciano; 24 April, Lyon and Paris), and one would assume from this that she flew to London by the scheduled airliner. But Beryl stated to me that she flew with Blix to Europe on that occasion and suffered some apprehension during the flight: ‘Europe was a rather dangerous place to be just then…' Initially I was inclined to assume that Beryl had merely confused the dates with the flight that she had made with Blix in the spring of 1936. However a further piece of information revealed that her memory might not have been at fault.

In Bror Blixen's
Letters from Africa
he too wrote of their flight to Europe. He mentions no dates but, despite small differences, the flight he describes is clearly that which Beryl also writes about in her memoir. In
West with the Night
she states that the date of that flight was 1936; however, Bror ends his version with the following passage:

The trio drove together to the Ritz. Both men were unwashed and Hemingway had a week's growth of beard. Beryl left them to have dinner with a friend ‘…some duchess or other', Blix wrote. Blix records that the trio spent the following morning enjoying the sights of Paris, particularly ‘the chestnuts in blossom' before continuing to London.
⁵
This raises intriguing questions, for Ernest Hemingway never left the USA in 1936 but he was known to be in Paris on the very day in 1938 that Beryl's passport reveals was the day she arrived there. The flight that both Beryl and Blix describe, with its delays and tribulations, could not have been made in 1938 for – as Beryl's passport reveals – that journey took her only days from Kenya. Undoubtedly the meeting in Paris between Blix, Beryl and Hemingway took place. Perhaps it was Blix who telescoped several events into one. He arrived at the Ritz Hotel in Paris on a number of occasions unwashed and unshaven. On one of these he was accompanied by Sir Charles Markham and both men were dirty and dishevelled, having had their luggage stolen. An angry commissionaire tried to evict them from the hotel steps as undesirables until Bror's wife Cockie came to their rescue by explaining that one of the ‘tramps' was her husband.
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Beryl found a different London from the one she had left a year earlier. Now the talk everywhere was of war, though there was a brief respite in September after Chamberlain's return from Munich declaring ‘peace in our time'. For a month or so there was almost a return to the old carefree days as relief flooded through the country, but soon came the first news of Hitler's persecution of the Jews and the murmurings in Europe refused to be stilled. Before long fears of war were again uppermost in people's minds. It seemed a long winter, mitigated by parties drenched in enforced gaiety. Sensitive to atmosphere, Beryl became unhappy and restless. She did some riding and hunting, renewed some old friendships, and spent most of her time in aviation circles. In the spring, lonely and depressed, she was named in the papers as the respondent in a divorce case.

Mansfield had been pressing Beryl for a divorce for some years because he wanted to remarry, but she had always refused. In February 1938 at roughly the same time as she arrived in Natal, she had been mistakenly named by the British press in a divorce case with a co-respondent she had never met, a Mr Geddes. Later an apology was printed – the Mrs Markham in question was Sir Charles Markham's wife.
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But Mansfield did file for divorce in the spring of 1939, naming Captain Hubert S. Broad as co-respondent. Mrs Broad also filed naming Beryl as co-respondent.
⁸

Hubert Broad, whom Beryl had met through Tom many years earlier, had been chief test pilot to De Havilland for a number of years and was a well-known and universally respected figure in British aviation. In 1925 he had been second in the Schneider Trophy and in 1926 he won the King's Cup Air Race in one of the very first Gipsy Moths. Clearly a certain amount of evidence must have been available – the pair had spent a lot of time together that winter, according to witnesses but the case was defended strenuously by both Beryl and Broad, and no divorce resulted.

The court case with its attendant unwelcome publicity, lack of money and, more importantly, lack of any real love and support made Beryl very depressed. In addition her son Gervase, always inclined to delicate health, contracted meningitis that winter and was very ill. She saw him several times, and she worried about him, but of course she was virtually a stranger to the child.
⁹
She was thirty-seven and felt that her life was leading nowhere. She had tried for some time, unsuccessfully, to get news of
arap
Ruta and in April she wrote to Roddy Hurt, an old friend, asking him if he had heard anything of Ruta, requesting news of Kenya gossip and pouring out her troubles. Roddy's lengthy reply mirrors Beryl's feelings at the time she wrote to him, as well as his obvious affection for her.

With the divorce case out of the way Beryl's spirits lifted, but now she was bored with London. Her friends had only one topic of conversation. Was there going to be a war? No one was interested in anything but the possibility of war. Record-breaking flights had already become a thing of the past, frivolous amidst the earnest military preparations. Beryl could raise no interest from anyone for her proposals. Many of her friends, anxious to secure their positions in the forthcoming fracas, were already wearing Royal Air Force blue. After a year she had still not found a job which offered fulfilment, creditors were pressing and her allowance from Prince Henry was already pitifully inadequate to support her lifestyle. She did not feel part of the groundswell of nationalistic pride and she hated the idea of war. As soon as she could get on to a ship, she booked a single passage to New York. Interviewed on her departure for the United States aboard the SS
Manhattan
she was still telling reporters that her journey was to look for an aeroplane in which to make an attempt on one of the big aviation records.