In 1928, Amelia Earhart became an international celebrity for being the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an airplane. But Earhart was strictly a passenger during that flight, which was operated by a male pilot and co-pilot. “I’m just baggage,” she said.
Still, the press dubbed her Queen of the Air, and Earhart, who had begun taking flying lessons seven years earlier, was determined to sharpen her piloting skills in order to merit her reputation. In 1932, she became the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic, and she set several other records before she disappeared in 1937 while attempting to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the world.
Earhart has remained an object of fascination for nearly a century, and the broad outlines of her biography are familiar. Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s vivid, sprawling new book, “The Aviator and the Showman” focuses on a less well-known aspect of Earhart’s life: her marriage to the ambitious publisher and promoter George Palmer Putnam. Putnam had selected her for the 1928 flight and subsequently served as her manager and agent.
Why We Wrote This
Amelia Earhart has drawn the public’s fascination for almost a century. Her private life, however, is less well known than her aviation exploits. She married a scion of the G.P. Putnam’s Sons publishing company, who sent her on lecture tours and hired ghost writers to produce articles in her name. Their relationship “was a complex mix of love, tension, and mutual ambition,” according to author Laurie Gwen Shapiro.
Putnam was a scion of the storied G.P. Putnam’s Sons publishing company. Shapiro calls him “an idea addict.” Among his successes, he secured the rights to aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 memoir, “We,” and he conceived of the popular Boys’ Books by Boys series. The first entry, “David Goes Voyaging,” published in 1925, featured Putnam’s own son David, who at age 11 joined an expedition to the Galápagos Islands. Ghostwriters then turned his adventure into a bestseller.
Putnam’s ease in using his son to advance his own career presaged his relationship with Earhart. When he met the young aviator, Putnam was unhappily married to the wealthy Dorothy Binney, whose father invented the Crayola crayon. Binney was aware of her husband’s intense interest in Earhart, and she was involved in extramarital affairs of her own. After the couple divorced, the free-spirited Earhart reluctantly agreed to marry Putnam. (“I must exact a cruel promise and that is you will let me go in a year if we find no happiness together,” she wrote him on the eve of their 1931 wedding.) From then on, as one friend of the couple said, “She was his meal ticket.”
Shapiro’s depiction of Putnam is roundly unflattering. The author portrays him as obnoxious, vindictive, and obsessed with money and fame. Another accomplished female aviator of the era, Elinor Smith, claimed that Putnam attempted to reject other women pilots to ensure that the spotlight remained squarely on his famous wife. “While Amelia captured the public’s imagination with her daring flights,” the author writes, “George skillfully capitalized on these achievements for financial gain.”
Putnam arranged lecture tours for Earhart and published ghostwritten books and articles in her name. (Some of these, including the posthumous volume “Last Flight,” were written by Christian Science Monitor reporter Janet Mabie.) In 1934, he developed Amelia Earhart Fashions, a clothing line for female pilots and other sporting women; Shapiro suggests that he stole that idea from Lindbergh’s wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who had described a similar concept to Putnam and Earhart a year earlier.
Earhart comes off as a more complicated figure in the narrative. Her bravery is unquestionable, but some of her actions were reckless. Putnam encouraged her to embark on her final journey, which they saw as key to guaranteeing their financial security. But Shapiro observes that Earhart was “tragically unprepared” for the trip’s most challenging leg, during which she was to land her plane on the small Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean. Neither she nor her navigator, Fred Noonan, were skilled in Morse code, and they lacked important radio equipment.
Shapiro’s recounting of this story is compelling but overly detailed. The very long book features distracting asides and unnecessary information, from the specifics of various publicity events Earhart attended to the names of the horses she and Putnam rode during a vacation on a Wyoming ranch.
The question that haunts “The Aviator and the Showman” is why the fiercely independent Earhart went along with her husband’s schemes. Shapiro concludes that Earhart and Putnam’s relationship “was a complex mix of love, tension, and mutual ambition,” but the true nature of their marriage remains elusive, as does Earhart herself. As one of her friends wrote in a letter, chastising her for embarking on overly risky flights, “When it comes down to brass tacks, I don’t know you at all – I doubt anyone does.”
