THE AVIATOR AND THE SHOWMAN: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon, by Laurie Gwen Shapiro
In June of this year, The New Yorker posted an Instagram image promoting the magazine’s excerpt from Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s new biography, “The Aviator and the Showman.” The headline — “Was Amelia Earhart’s Career a Publicity Stunt?” — was obvious clickbait: Of course Earhart’s career wasn’t a stunt. In her book, Shapiro, a journalist, lists at length Earhart’s many landmark accomplishments, all of which required immense courage.
She was the first female aviator to traverse the Atlantic Ocean. The first woman to fly nonstop solo from one North American coast to the other. And the first person to fly solo across the Pacific.
That said, Shapiro reveals in painstaking detail that Earhart’s storied career did indeed involve many reckless and publicity-seeking adventures, largely thanks to the near-depraved ambitions of her husband and Pygmalion-like manager, the publisher George P. Putnam.
For many readers, the burning question isn’t whether Earhart was a fraud, but whether Putnam essentially killed his wife, who disappeared in 1937 during an effort to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.
Putnam hailed from a redoubtable publishing family: In 1838, his grandfather founded the company that would later become G.P. Putnam’s Sons, which released Charles Lindbergh’s blockbuster book “We,” about his pioneering 1927 flight across the Atlantic.
Putnam, however, was far from redoubtable; he was seen by many as “the publishing world’s P.T. Barnum,” a shameless purveyor of lurid adventure novels.
Even before he met Earhart, Putnam’s schemes racked up a body count. Often dispatching “boy explorer” authors on “increasingly harrowing” quests to drum up publicity, Putnam reaped profits after his adventurers traversed alligator-infested rivers or braved frostbite and lived to write the tale. One died from a snakebite; another drowned in a flood in Bolivia. But if the result was “jaw-dropping, all true” stories that guaranteed major Christmas book sales, he could apparently live with the costs.
By the late 1920s, daredevil aviation stories offered a new frontier of profit. Amelia Earhart — a determined, budding flier with nothing to lose — could be a great asset, Putnam felt; he saw currency in her gung-ho spirit, endearing toothy smile and mess of blond curls.
After giving his new asset a hasty makeover, Putnam set her to work with a P.R. team to “pound out a colorful sketch of her life.” Even though Earhart reportedly protested that she didn’t know how to make herself interesting, she “would do almost anything” Putnam asked, writes Shapiro.
When Earhart joined a three-person crew on a successful 1928 trans-Atlantic flight that Putnam had organized and promoted (the book and film tie-in deals were inked before the plane took off), she became the first female pilot to achieve that feat — and among the most famous women in the world.
There were ticker-tape parades; meetings with royals, fascist leaders and presidents. Not all press was rhapsodic; one British newspaper pointed out that Earhart had not actually piloted the plane, adding that her presence “added no more to the achievement than if the passenger had been a sheep.”
Regardless, Putnam had found his new meal ticket; he divorced Dorothy Binney (an heiress to the Crayola fortune) to marry and further monetize Earhart. He was, asserts Shapiro, a true monster of his times: a “Machiavellian careerist,” a “gentleman racist” and a pathological competitor. She details Putnam’s relentless campaign of “sick and twisted intimidation” against Elinor Smith, a young, daredevil pilot with unimpeachable flying skills, whom he viewed as a threat to Earhart’s title of “Queen of the Air.”
Shameless even after Earhart’s disappearance, Putnam hoped to profit handsomely off a posthumous book about her disastrous final odyssey, and even contributed to conspiracy theories about his wife’s fate, some of which persist today.
Then, when his funds grew thin, Putnam staged his own kidnapping by fascist aggressors, ostensibly to create fodder for yet another sensational book and film. But by this time, Putnam had run out of luck — and exploitable assets. No one bought the stunt and he became, Shapiro says, a laughingstock.
Shapiro concludes that Earhart “was no innocent bystander” as Putnam conjured up ever more dangerous feats for her. No matter how underprepared she might be; it almost seems a miracle that she lasted as long as she did.
In Putnam she’d seen an ally to further her own ambitions, says Shapiro, although she also cites witnesses who testified to Putnam’s cruel bullying of his wife — especially when it came to the fatal flight, a “catastrophe of their own making.” Putnam had foisted a known drunkard on Earhart as a navigator because the man was “the cheapest option”; also thanks to Putnam’s cost-cutting, Earhart’s plane was woefully understocked with necessary safety and radio equipment. One journalist recalled being “disgusted” by her lack of essential gear; another aviator pal of Earhart’s deemed the flight suicidal.
When Earhart got last-minute jitters on the eve of her departure from Miami, Putnam told her to get on with it. He would never see his wife again.
Many aviators of this era had fatalistic attitudes, Shapiro notes, and Earhart was no exception; death, she joked, was just “growing pains.” “Who wants to be 80 and have hardened arteries?” she quipped to one reporter.
Whether Earhart was driven by genuine fearlessness — or a fear of losing her painfully achieved status — remains unclear. Despite Shapiro’s deep dive into this complicated heroine, certain aspects of her psychology remain elusive. And perhaps it’s this very mystery that guarantees Earhart’s enduring allure, despite her many foibles — and her terrible taste in men.
THE AVIATOR AND THE SHOWMAN: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon | By Laurie Gwen Shapiro | Viking | 496 pp. | $35
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