Amelia and Paul

Paul Mantz pilots his B-25 bomber/camera plane, with the author in the back window, over the Persian Gulf in 1954. The Cinerama camera was mounted in the nose.

It would have been a wonderful movie if Paul had been in it.

That was the thought I carried coming out of the theater after watching the film Amelia, a tepid love story about the woman who was lost trying to circle the globe back in the 30s. The Paul I had in mind was Paul Mantz, Amelia Earhart's technical guru.

Paul Mantz was the hotshot Hollywood stunt pilot who shared with Amelia Earhart a singular fatal conceit: "It can't happen to me."

In the two-year run up to her last flight, Mantz had been Amelia's business partner, flying buddy, and trainer on the hazards of long distance, twin-engine aviation. He was also a fun-loving rascal, entrepreneur, self-promoter, and the person who neglected to patent his invention of the vodka martini. He broke into motion picture airplane gymnastics by flying a biplane, with cameras rolling, headlong into one end of an open hangar zooming out the other side. He affected a pencil mustache in the style of his pal Clark Gable, giving him a knowing insolence and the bearing of a shrewd calculator of risk and reward. But he was, most of all, a very, very, naughty aviator. Trust me. I flew with him.

Hubris caught up with Amelia in 1937 and with Paul 28 years later.

As dawn broke over the igneous plains of Africa's Rift Valley on April 3, 1955, I feared that the same conceit might catch up with Paul and with me.

It did not, but it's a hell of a story.

It begins with the making of Seven Wonders of the World, a giant-screen spectacular in Cinerama, the movie system that burst onto the scene in the 1950s. Cinerama pictures were travelogues, yes, but they were thrilling, experiential travelogues plunging the audience into an exhilarating realism. However, Cinerama pictures were exhilarating only when the special 3-in-1 cameras taking the movie were travelling forward at breakneck speed to almost certain destruction. That was why the camera was mounted in the nose of a B-25 Mitchell bomber flown by daredevil Paul Mantz and why Paul was on the Cinerama payroll.

I was assistant director with a second Cinerama unit in India shooting more conventional sequences and Paul was in Rome when the urgent wires came to each of us from Hollywood directing us to rendezvous in the town of Usumbura (now Bujumbura) at the head of Lake Tanganyika in Burundi. Our orders were to pull the Cinerama camera from the airplane and shoot a single "pickup shot" of Mwambutsa IV, the king of Burundi.

I was first to arrive in Usumbura and watched intently as the wheels of the twin-tailed bomber slammed into the gravel of the rough jungle runway and rolled to a dusty stop. I'd last seen Paul and his crew five months earlier when our paths had crossed in Bahrain.

Always impatient, the first words out of Paul's mouth, "Where's the goddam king?"

It took a case of White Horse Scotch to induce his majesty to come by and stand for the 10-second scene, and with that out of the way I sensed that Paul and his crew of five were casting about for Usumbura's bright lights and dancing girls of which there were none. But he did pick up word about an exquisite Belgian restaurant open for fine dining on the edge of town.

Our party of six arrived at the restaurant, Paul cuddling a flagon of Dr. Smirnoff's finest elixir whilst seeking out the barman to make certain that protocols of martini assembly were carefully followed. Happily for Paul, the bartender and owner were the same, and took delight in assaying and sharing several variations on the Mantz formulation. Then the maps came out.

Because Paul had explained the mission of his crew and his aircraft to the restaurant man, and the restaurant man in turn told Paul of the existence of live volcanoes just a few hundred miles north of where at that precise moment said crew were getting very drunk. But not so drunk that Mantz failed to see the chance to bill Cinerama for 5 additional hours of camera flight time while at the same time picking up a tidy bonus for a hazard shot.

Back in the hotel lobby before staggering off to bed, Mantz pointed a quivering finger at me purring, "Two eggs over easy, crisp bacon, toast, and a gallon of hot coffee. Everybody up at 4. We take off at 5. Get it?"

"Sure Paul," I trembled, looking over at the Tutsi desk clerk, to whom would fall the task of seeing that these orders were properly executed. He'd heard Paul, and to make sure he knew we were serious I repeated the command, while pressing a twenty into his palm. Over centuries of colonial rule, African clerks had learned to accept gratuity, assent readily, and smile broadly with no intention of compliance.

Hours that seemed like a moment later, when Mantz and the crew, eyes ringed red, shuffled into the lobby seeking sustenance. I offered them a dozen green bananas found in an empty dining room.

By the light of our taxi's headlights, I joined the crew doing the preflight inspection. I was good at this, having been a B-24 Liberator mechanic in World War II. We pulled the props through by hand while co-pilot Frank Schwella dip-sticked the fuel cells, Paul grumbling about hunger, as he plugged wads of cotton in each ear. I dodged his wrath and climbed aboard hiding behind the bomb bay taking up station beside the rear gun port and pulled on headphones.

"Contact!" I heard Paul deliver the pilot's protocol yell out the cockpit window. The right engine starter whined, the engine coughed, again, and exploded to life. The old bomber shuddered and quivered as if anxious to get on with it. And here we were, six hungover men after 4 hours of sleep, with no breakfast in a surplus World War II bomber whose wing lights were feeling out into the darkness for the dirt runway that would launch us into the African dawn. We eased forward as Paul let off the brakes and rumbled towards the end of the runway, pausing for a final check. And then full throttle, the quivering old war bird growing ever-younger picking up speed, its wheels churning dirt, stones scattering, and finally leaving earth behind. Wheels up as the first rays of the African sun splayed over the rooftops of the capital of Burundi, a Belgian protectorate in the year 1955.

Paul Mantz set a course to the north having heard on not very good authority that a live volcano was smoldering a few hours flying time away. If he found the fiery mountain and came back with stunning pictures he would add to his fame. If the mountain could not be found, he could still charge for 5 hours of flying time. That's how he made his living.

I watched the bomber's living shadow ripple over clustered huts of African villages, dance above rivers, and sandy waste, and was startled when Paul's voice barked through the headphone

"Rescher, you got that camera ready? I don't want to waste time up there."

And Rescher barked back, "You fly the goddam plane, Paul, and I'll shoot the pictures."

Droning engines set adrift random thoughts about this old bomber, and Mantz, and the evolution of a stunt pilot and the co-evolution of the airplane.

But of course! They were both born at the same year. 1903. The airplane in Kitty Hawk and Paul in Redwood, Calif. Born for each other. The airplane designed to defy the law of gravity, born to fly. Mantz was born to flout that same immutable law.

As when Paul, up at dawn before Athens is awake, skimming above Athenian rooftops to steal, to capture, to make off with the golden glisten of the Parthenon at sunrise. Or skirting above New York's East River stealing under all four bridges before heading out to sea and out of sight of the NYPD.

Or how about that other Mantz? The one that purred. The one that padded in quietly, suddenly appearing in the screening room the first time I saw him. Watching his work on the giant screen and purring with satisfaction, and padding quietly into the shadows and out of the room.

Or the dinner party on the night before we took off flying around the world to film this movie. That vivid moment went unnoticed by the gents and ladies buoyed by bourbon and good cheer. And the names Amelia Earhart and Paul Mantz came up in the same context.

And I said to Paul, "Oh? Did you know her?" And he purred condescendingly, "Yes, I did." That pause and defiant stare. "I'll explain some other time." Spoken as a waiter slipped a menu into his paws. And then, with his right hand and without ceremony, Paul reached into his breast pocket and brought forth a delicate pair of pince-nez to which was attached a black silk ribbon about his neck. He pinched the tiny levers on the glasses and gently and unobtrusively leaned into the yawning pincers letting go, and bringing his big square heard straight up. A commanding presence came over him. After scanning the menu, and without flourish, he unpinched the glasses and tucked them away, smiling with feline satisfaction. My own father, born in the 19th century, had set aside his pince-nez when he saw FDR wearing the same thing. And here it was, the year 1954, and this hotshot Hollywood stunt pilot was affecting the style and manner of Woodrow Wilson at Versailles.

Go figure, as engines throb.

Years later, when reading his biography, I learned just how well Paul knew Amelia and her husband, George Putnam. For a month they were houseguests of Paul and his first wife during the time the families were developing a partnership.

And a bit later, Rescher cuts in, "I think I see it."

Paul barking, "Yah. Off to the right. That might be it. Another 5 minutes. Get ready to roll."

Rescher cutting in, "I want cross light, Paul. Lit from the front it doesn't mean anything." They're up front looking at a smoking volcano, and all I can see from my side window in back of the plane is grassland that looks like the Florida panhandle. And I hear Paul change propeller pitch and the engines rev up, banking this way and that.

Paul cutting in," I'm coming in from north east. Good for you?"

"Swell."

And from my perch, suddenly, over the edge of the left engine through the spinning prop a yawning crater comes into view, spewing blue smoke, the plane banking, plunging into the gaping wound, and staring down is roiling lava fire staring back, coming ever closer, sulfur fumes filling the cabin. Seconds pass as Paul pulls the ship into an aching, tight, knee-buckling turn and I can no longer force my head to look down. Against gravity's pull I peer upwards and see blue sky above the rim, and cough, and an engine coughs in reply. Terror. Yet, in that instant, I am comforted by the certain knowledge that though I have but one breathing system to sustain life, the airplane has two, yes two engines. But the coughing engine and my choking lungs recover, lift us, groaning up, up, and just over the rim into sunshine and life, and gratitude. Amen.

Over the headphones Rescher barked, "I'd like a couple more takes Paul, just to make sure."

Which brought forth a headphone stream of jocular salt, and ribald laughter, as the plane leveled off and nosed for home.

Sometime later I ran into Paul on the West Coast and we talked about the smog in Burbank and the smell of the leather in his new Cadillac. No mention of that dawn flight into the African volcano. To him, that was just another day at the office. I never saw Paul again.

So, what is the legacy of Amelia and Paul and that host of intrepid pathfinders who taunted gravity? Perhaps they left behind a treasure of intuition and discernment. It may be that the ghost of the stunt pilot who'd flown his biplane through the hangar was close by and imparting a secret wisdom to Captain Chesley Burnett Sullenberger III that cold morning in 2009 as the Airbus came to a smooth landing in the icy Hudson River. Perhaps Sully was not alone at the controls of the airliner that day. No matter. It was a historic episode and a reminder of just how far airplanes and their pilots have evolved since their beginnings in the early part of the 20th century.