Why are we Still Fascinated by Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight?

“Sex, violent death and mystery. If your life has one of these things, people might be interested. If it has two, you’re into tabloid fodder. If it has three, you’re Amelia Earhart.”

Those are the opening words of The Aviator and the Showman and the Marriage that Made an American Icon. Thanks to Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s dual biography, I discovered that I barely knew the truths about the pioneer aviator and her marriage to publisher George Palmer Putnam.

Amelia Earhart encountered George in the spring of 1928. An heir to G.P. Putnam’s Sons publishing, George had just released We, the blockbuster account of Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 Atlantic flight.  George now wanted to create a new hero: The first woman to fly the Atlantic and a counterpoint to Lindbergh, then the world’s most famous man.

At the time Amelia was ushered into Putnam’s New York office, the 31-year-old Boston social worker was a budding flier, well-spoken with athletic good looks, toothy smile, a mess of blond curls and a gung-ho spirit. For George, it was love at first sight.

The eager publisher pressed Amelia to join a three-person crew on an attempted Atlantic flight he had organized and was promoting. On its successful (by no means assured) conclusion in 1928, Amelia was feted with ticker-tape parades and meetings with royals, political leaders, presidents, and fascists. No matter that she hadn’t actually piloted the plane. One British paper noted she’d done nothing more than if she’d been a sheep aboard the flight.

Nonetheless, George styled Amelia as “the Lady Lindy” and had her life-sized portrait painted. He had found his new meal ticket. He divorced Dorothy Binney Putnam, the heiress to the Crayola fortune, to marry and monetize Amelia. He was an aggressive competitor. He waged a relentless campaign against Elinor Smith, a young daredevil pilot of unimpeachable flying skills and a threat to Amelia as “Queen of the Air.”

Before George met Amelia, he forged a reputation as the “P. T. Barnum” of publishing: a shameless purveyor of lurid adventure tales. He racked up a body count. He often dispatched boy explorers on hazardous adventures, traversing alligator-infested rivers and braving frostbite. One died of snake bite; another drowned in a flood in Bolivia. Luckier boy wonders (including his son David Binney Putnam) produced partly ghost-written stories guaranteed to sell at Christmas.

Shapiro’s book, bolstered by newly discovered audio interviews, follows Amelia as she scores landmark achievements. She was the first female aviator to traverse the Atlantic Ocean, the first woman to fly solo from one American coast to the other, and the first to fly solo across the Pacific. She was impossibly brave, attempting many rash adventures, thanks mainly to the outrageous ambitions of her husband.

The story of Amelia’s decade-long marriage to George sheds light on the couple’s motivations. It also pulls back the veil on George’s mistreatment of Amelia sometimes. When it came to preparations for her round-the-world attempt, Amelia heard warnings from fellow flyers about inadequate safety and radio equipment aboard her Lockheed Electra. The veterans also worried about Amelia’s ability to locate the tiny Howland Island refueling spot in the vast ocean. Those misgivings were ignored. In addition, George inflicted on his wife a drunken navigator, Fred Noonan, merely because he came cheap.

As she faced that final journey, Amelia turned fatalistic. She asked one reporter, “Who wants to be 80 and have hundreds of wrinkles?” But just before departing, she atypically began to get cold feet. George callously admonished her to “get on with it.”

Shapiro’s book describes Amelia’s last moments on that final odyssey in page-turning detail. She last communicated by radio the morning of July 2, 1937. She informed the radioman aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, stationed at Howland Island, that she was 200 miles away and detailed her plan to whistle into the microphone, believing it might help the cutter determine her location. At 8:43 am the voice of Amelia –- unmistakenly tinged with fear — crackled through the ether once again: “We are on the line 157-337. We are running north and south. Listening on 6210 kilocycles.” It was her final signal.

After Amelia’s heartbreaking disappearance, George shamelessly hoped to profit handsomely off a posthumous book. In his last years, he married again, divorced for a second time, and staged his own bogus kidnapping before finding a fourth, understanding wife.

Meanwhile, Amelia’s enduring allure continued to spawn waves of conspiracy theories about her unknown fate. When Peg Putnam, George’s widow, was asked what George had concluded, she said he believed the Electra ran out of fuel, plummeting into the ocean, floating briefly and then sinking in a tragic end.

Reading Shapiro’s enthralling narrative, I came to appreciate that Amelia Earhart, a lifelong feminist, had soared beyond her era, charting a course for women where skills trump gender. I was left not with questions about Earhart’s reckless ambition but instead wondering if Putnam had essentially killed his wife.