The Sound of Wings
By Mary S. Lovell
St. Martin`s, 420 pages, $22.95
Amelia Earhart: A Biography
By Doris L. Rich
Smithsonian Institution Press, 322 pages, $19.95
In many ways, it was merely business as usual when Amelia Earhart set out from Miami Airport in her twin-engined Lockheed Electra on June 1, 1937, on her second attempt at a record-breaking around-the-world flight. At age 39, Earhart had been setting records for more than a decade; thanks to the tireless promotional efforts of her husband, publicist and publisher George Putnam, her fame as a flier was second only to that enjoyed by Charles Lindbergh. That the ”lady Lindy” was going for another aviation record was no longer front page news compared to other events of the day, among them the marriage of abdicated King Edward VIII of England to Baltimore divorcee Wallis Simpson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt`s continued attempts to ”pack”
the Supreme Court.
But a little over one month later, 22,000 miles into the flight, Earhart was once again in the headlines when her mysterious disappearance-somewhere in the vicinity of tiny Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean-triggered a $4 million search, the largest mass rescue operation ever launched for a single plane. Finally, on July 19, the Navy suspended attempts to locate the pilot and her navigator, Fred Noonan, and announced that the search for Amelia Earhart was officially over. But as Doris Rich notes in ”Amelia Earhart,”
one of two noteworthy new biographies on the vanished female aviation pioneer, the legend was just beginning.
The last 50 years have seen scores of books and articles published about Earhart and her ill-fated flight, with a number of writers speculating on her ultimate fate. Did she and Noonan run out of fuel and simply ditch and drown in the menacing waters of the Pacific? Did she die of dysentery in a Japanese prison camp? Was she really on a secret spy mission for the U.S., as at least one author contended? (Probably not, subsequent research has indicated.)
Mary Lovell acknowledges and discusses the best-known of the disappearance theories in an appendix to her Earhart biography, ”The Sound of Wings,” but, like Rich, chooses to concentrate on the person rather than the legend. In both books, Earhart emerges as a complex, controversial and fascinating flesh-and-blood woman of many facets. She was, among other things, a pilot whose occasionally reckless determination sometimes outweighed her abilities; a resolute feminist; a tireless cheerleader for the infant airline industry of the 1920s and `30s; an independent woman wary of conventional marriage and its shackles but a wife nevertheless; an often-exasperated and sometimes patronizing benefactor who supported her difficult mother and perpetually needy sister; and a workaholic who arguably was becoming impatient with Putnam`s publicity ploys but remained consumed by her career for most of her life.
Although the circumstances of her death apparently are destined to remain forever a mystery, there never has been a paucity of documented information on Earhart`s life and career. Both Lovell and Rich have drawn on many of the same letters, documents and logbooks in their well-researched and intelligently written accounts, which explore Earhart`s growing-up years in Kansas as the tomboy daughter of an alcoholic, her ”loner” image as a teenager and young adult, her desire to fly and her serendipitous involvement in the Putnam publicity stunt that catapulted her to fame as the first woman to ”fly” the Atlantic in 1928. (Although nominally in command of the aircraft, the lanky Earhart-chosen for the flight in large part because of her striking resemblance to Lindbergh-was only a passenger in the plane during her first Atlantic crossing, not the pilot.)
Both books do a good job of putting Earhart`s life into the wider contexts of pioneering female aviation efforts and women`s relatively restricted role in the social fabric of the times. But Lovell offers more detail and fascinating new insights into Earhart`s relationship with Putnam, whom she wed in 1931 after he had divorced his first wife, and the part he played in both her rise to fame and her continuing place in history. (After Earhart`s disappearance, Putnam, 10 years her senior, remarried twice before his death in 1950.)
Lovell, who chronicled the life and times of another female aviation pioneer, Beryl Markham, in the bestseller ”Straight On Till Morning,”
acknowledges that Putnam undoubtedly could be difficult but maintains that he was often unfairly maligned. He was well-known for his explosive temper, his
”killer instinct” in business matters and his perpetual publicity-mongering; newspaper photographers, Rich reports, nicknamed Putnam the
”lens louse” because of his penchant for pushing his way into publicity photos. He exploited his wife`s dreams, but he also aided and abetted them immeasurably; it was Putnam who lined up the lecture tours, endorsements and assorted entrepreneureal enterprises (including a short-lived line of Amelia Earhart clothing) that fed the family coffers.
Remaining a saleable commodity on the lecture circuit of course required that Earhart stay in the public eye by continuing to break aviation records for Putnam to promote. Toward the end, her appetite for endurance flights-and perhaps for Putnam himself-seemed to be ebbing.
According to Rich, Earhart`s old friend Gene Vidal ”told his son (who grew up to be author Gore Vidal) that Amelia disliked her husband and that she was tired of the constant attention resulting from his publicizing of her career. By 1936 she had made up her mind to find a figurative, if not a literal, desert island on which to live.” Gore Vidal, adds Rich, always believed that Earhart was in love with his divorced father but that his father`s feeling for her was platonic.
Still, maintains Lovell, Putnam served Amelia well as the ”springboard” for her activities. She quotes one of the couple`s friends, Robert Lee, whose reminiscences included the belief that Earhart ”had to conquer George almost as Lindbergh had to conquer the Atlantic, yet it was (Putnam`s) hell-fire determination that provided design for these adventures of hers, and pulled them off. I wonder if the slim, frail girl-in-slacks would have startled the world without the explosive, pragmatic apostle of the impossible to goad her on.”
What would have become of Earhart and Putnam`s relationship had she returned safely? That, like Earhart`s fate, remains a mystery. Her
dissatisfaction with Putnam may have been temporary. There also is speculation that her repeated bouts of nausea during the flight may have been signs of the early stages of pregnancy rather than the result of inhaling gas fumes. Even if the Earhart-Putnam marriage had ended up on the rocks, Lovell argues that the marital merger had served both parties well.
”What George and Amelia each brought to their relationship was exactly what was required to stimulate the unique talents of the other person,”
writes Lovell. ”The combination of their individual abilities enhanced the regard they had for each other and deepened into love. It was an unusual love, at times, but a deep and genuine one, and it played an important part in the story of Amelia Earhart.”
