My mother’s respect for her mother seemed to increase as she  got older.  As an adult, starting a fledgling writing career  in her forties, my mother had been looking for a notable American woman WHOSE BIOGRAPHY SHE MIGHT WRITE . My grandmother Grace suggested HER CONTEMPORARY Amelia Earhart, the flier.  My grandmother was also a pilot in the 30’s, when there were few fliers, let alone women FLIERS, and you had to climb into an open cockpit.  Bathrooms were unheard of.  Of course, women fliers wore pants.

 

My mother had heard intriguing stories about Earhart growing up and had read Earhart’s autobiography “For The Fun of It.” She thought Earhart a good choice for a biography because no definitive one had been written yet.  For ten years, my mother worked on her biography EAST TO THE DAWN.  Almost a decade after the book’s publication in 1999 it was optioned as a movie.

 

            Last summer my mother and I flew to Nova Scotia to the set of Amelia, the Mira Nair, Hillary Swank filmed based in part on EAST TO THE DAWN.   On the way to Nova Scotia, we spent the night at my cousin David’s in Boston, and at dinner, his little girl Isabelle pelted my mother with questions.  Had Amelia really sledded right through the legs of a carriage horse when she was a girl? What was the connection to our family? My mother answered her questions patiently, intrigued that our little cousin knew so much about Earhart.  In the morning, we left for our flight to Nova Scotia.

My mother’s relations with her daughters, including me, had been fraught.  A competitive woman with matinee idol looks my mother competed with everyone including us.  She also expected us to do as she wanted because she BELONGED TO that generation that demanded a certain kind of respect from their children. “You’re not coming for Christmas?” she’d say aghast. My mother  never got behind a career I’d chosen as an actress because she wanted me to be a writer like her.  Although I’d freelanced as a writer for different publications, I ALWAYS FELT THAT ACTING was the real adventure and had taken me on trips to Seattle, Vermont, LA, Santa Fe.  My mother disapproved.

               But for us, this was a reprieve, a fun adventure: flying up to a movie set. When we got to Nova Scotia the wind and rain whipped up the sea and tugged at the thin cotton clothes on the extras. It was a miracle the cloche hats and fedoras  stayed in place. A platoon of people were gathered on the beach.  My mother nodded approvingly at the plane, which was a reproduction of the one that first took Earhart across the Atlantic. Earhart was the first woman to fly The Atlantic as a passenger and then the first woman to fly solo across that ocean.  When she died, in flight at 39, she was attempting to be the first woman to fly around the world.  Somewhat vain, she had admitted if she didn't come back, it would be all right.  She wasn't sure she wanted to grow older.

 

          Although the biography came into being because of my grandmother Grace, as a child, my mother adored her father. My grandfather Wally was a tall, dark handsome man.  My mother, his only daughter, looked a lot like him. Wally liked fishing, adventures and parties.  He was a divorce lawyer and when he left Grace for one of his clients, my grandmother fell apart. My mother was 13.  My mother said Wally never really respected her mother’s opinions.  Wally was the one who spoiled my mother emotionally, and made much of her, rather than her mother, whom Wally HAD ALWAYS treated so cavalierly.  Laughing, my mother said “Wally was afraid of heights and Grace was a pilot.  No wonder they got divorced.” Wally wouldn’t let the children go up with their mother in the plane.

           When she died, at 85, Grace was an accomplished woman [ECHO OF ABOVE]with an obit in The New York Times. The obit records that in 1950, she founded the “Know-How” Workshop to teach women how to fix things at home, like lamps so that women were able to do maintenance and repair work whether or not a man was available.  Like Earhart, my grandmother flew a plane in the thirties and was a member of the Ninety-Nines, a woman’s flying organization founded in part, by Earhart HERSELF.  The two knew each other slightly.  Like Earhart, my grandmother found flying liberating.

  My mother’s relationship with her mother improved as they got older.  Then it underwent another metamorphosis when she married a man, unlike my father,  who really genuinely enjoyed Grace.  Grace reminded my stepfather of my mother. My stepfather Allan had himself been a great athlete. He was a skier, a sailor and like Grace, something of a daredevil. He loved taking Grace to lunch along with my mother and ME and getting her to tell stories over and over of her flying days.  He’d take her out to some swanky New York restaurant, Tavern on The Green, The River Café, or Brook, his men’s club.  He liked to hear how once Grace’s plane had flipped over but she and the pilot were unhurt.The next time up, THE pilot insisted Grace take over the controls.  Otherwise, he said, they’d crash.  She did and flew and landed the plane safely. As she explained it, she couldn’t afford to be scared.

 At my grandmother’s apartment she had a little model airplane, a replica of her Waco biplane.  That was all that remained of her flying days, besides memories.  By the time I knew my grandmother that model plane with the open cockpit sat in the bar near the silver ice bucket in her spacious apartment at the corner of 72^nd and Fifth. My grandmother had stopped flying after her divorce, when she remarried and her life changed.  My own relationship with her took root  every Tuesday after school, when as a little girl, I’d visit grandmother on on my way home.  We’d sit in the living room as if I were a grown up. She’d serve me brownies and ginger ale.  And every evening about five, she’d say, “I think I’ll have a little drink,”   as if it was the first time that it occurred to her.”  About an hour later, she’d say, “I think I’ll have another.  A chain smoking scotch drinker, she had a low COMMA memorable voice and when she told stories, I listened.

     Though Grace no longer flew, she told stories of planning flights, of how she liked figuring out the wind and where it was coming from.  She enjoyed charting trip and also doing spontaneous things, like flying under bridges.  She hated tests and as a kid growing up and would often fail them.  But she wasn’t afraid to fly.  She was a woman of contradictions, only five feet tall and a hundred pounds, but she had an out-sized curiosity about the world.  She took calculus when she was in her seventies because she liked math, and in her eighties, she went to China.

         After I read EAST TO THE DAWN, my mother and I talked about how excited Grace would have been about the biography and the film.  My grandmother didn’t live to see the book published, but it was dedicated to her and I liked to think it was a tribute.  Traveling north with my mother,. remembering Grace drew us closer. Like Amelia, Grace loved beautiful things: planes, cars and clothes.  She was always put together, lipstick, hair done and often wore severe,  STERN??? well-tailored suits. She had style. So did my mother I thought, as I looked at her on the movie set, standing quietly alert in her red rain parka, drinking in everything around her, with feet in topsiders firmly planted on the rocky beach.  For an older woman, my mother, with dark short hair whipping around her face, looked good.  The years that rightly or wrongly, my mother felt she put her own life on hold for her DOESN’T GO WITH WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT HER BEING COMPETITIVE daughters, the years she felt we had more opportunities than she did, were gone.  My mother had come in to her own as a writer and her dream of affecting little girls in America to want to grow up and be brave, strong independent women had come true, partly due to her own mother Grace. It was nice to know my mother appreciated her mother, as they both got older.  I have done the same and though people seeing the film Amelia will think of  Amelia,  I will think of my grandmother and of my mother, both women who aged well beyond 39 and in some ways, had the best part of their lives ahead of them.   But  that is another story.