Her husband made her an icon, but Amelia Earhart was real
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Why did this accomplished and self-confident woman marry such a repugnant scammer, disliked almost universally by her friends and colleagues? She almost didn't, it turns out. The first part of their relationship was conducted while he was still wedded to another woman, Crayola heiress Dorothy Binney, whose money kept him in the marriage even as he began pitching proposals to Amelia. Amelia's reservations are expressed in a moving letter to 'Gyp,' as she called Putnam, which Shapiro includes in its entirety. 'You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work which mean most to me.' After one botched wedding day — Amelia broke down in sobs at the point of taking her vows — she did manage to go through with the ceremony a second time.
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'BREAK NEWS GENTLY TO MOTHER,' she wired her sister.
Amelia's feminism, her pacifism, and her progressive politics come through loud and clear in Shapiro's account, refreshing in contrast to the right-wing proclivities of her fellow iconic flier, Charles Lindbergh. Her first career as a social worker grew out of genuine compassion for people in need and young people in particular; she was an involved and loving stepmother to Putnam's son from his first marriage, David. But along with the important and interesting points Shapiro makes about Amelia Earhart, she includes many digressions of questionable importance, and her writing style is distractingly quirky. Lindbergh is 'an Icarian daredevil,' Putnam a 'Janus-faced' 'stinkard.' After Putnam sells her plane to the Smithsonian for $7,000, Shapiro wonders 'Did he gently grasp her delicate hands as he shared the thrilling news of the museum solidifying their marriage and place in aviation history?'
How the museum solidified their marriage was not clear to me, but frilly speculations like this are frequent, and usually not phrased as questions.
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In a description of Earhart's visit to Paramount Studios in Hollywood, Shapiro writes that 'even Cary Grant, Jeanette MacDonald, and Harpo Marx found themselves goose-pimply with excitement, eagerly lining up to be photographed with her.' I found the idea of a goose-pimply Cary Grant to be so odd that I consulted the Notes section at the end of the book to learn what this assertion was based on. It was not sourced, and this became the first of many times I checked back there to no avail. At the beginning of these Notes, Shapiro says 'For space considerations, I have added notes where there is information that may not have been seen before or lies off radar of all but the most avid Earhart enthusiasts.' I would argue that, in a serious work of nonfiction, the importance of backing up one's speculations outweighs 'space considerations.'
On the other hand, I would have very much liked to have seen space considerations taken into account in the text itself. For example, a blow-by-blow description of a press conference given by Amelia and her 21-year-old stepson David on the occasion of his taking a job with her fledging company, Boston-Maine Airways, includes David telling a story about a 'deceased tarantula,' followed by this head-scratcher:
'Amelia matched David's adventurous spirit with her own humorously amped-up anecdotes of homelife, including one engaging and funny tale revolving around enigmatic bite marks appearing on every piece of fruit at her Rye house, with the stupendous riddle only solved after everyone in the home amusingly posed as furniture, unveiling a chipmunk as the true culprit.'
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That was one stupendous riddle, I'd say.
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:
Despite the weaknesses of the presentation, the Amelia Earhart Shapiro introduces us to in these pages is well worth getting to know, and her mysterious fate is less of a mystery once you have. After all, this is a woman who, when asked whether she ever experienced fear while flying, said, 'Never!' and then went on to say, 'Who wants to be eighty and have hardened arteries?'
Not she.
THE AVIATOR AND THE SHOWMAN: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon
By Laurie Gwen Shapiro
Viking, 512 pages, $35
Marion Winik is the author of '
' and '
,' and the host of the NPR podcast, The Weekly Reader.
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